Music Matters, Especially On-Line
Monday, April 12th, 2010
Music matters, especially online
Established services such as Spotify and We7, and newcomers such as mflow, are music sites built for the needs of web users A new campaign, Music Matters, launched this week to remind people of the power of music and to encourage them “to consume music in an ethical way”. Backed by artists, retailers, record labels and others from the music industry, the campaign will provide a Music Matters Trustmark to websites that offer legal music.
If the attempt to combat illegal downloading of copyrighted music and illicit filesharing is taking a “carrot and stick” approach, then the Trustmark is the carrot. The stick will be provided by the Digital Economy Bill, which is likely to be rushed through Parliament before the election. The Bill proposes powers to disconnect people from the internet for persistent filesharing and to close down sites that are offering copyrighted material illegally.
The limited opportunity for a Commons debate on the Bill has angered many, including some internet service providers and several consumer groups. The Open Rights Group says that more than 10,000 people have written to their MPs to complain about the disconnection plans, which they say are disproportionate and open to misuse.
The music industry says nobody would be disconnected without several warnings and the right to appeal and dismisses such concerns as “scaremongering”. The fight against music piracy has been going on for more than a decade with limited success. The pirates had the web to themselves at first because the music industry was slow to wake up to the potential of the internet and hampered by the need to clear legal services with a huge range of rights holders. It took Apple to drive legitimate internet music into the mainstream. By combining the massively popular iPod, the iTunes music store and some tough negotiating with record labels, Apple built an online music service that still dominates the market today.
However, it’s a service that simply replicates the offline world. iTunes is a music shop: you pay, you receive, you own – just like buying a CD at the shops. More recently a range of music services have started that use the internet for more than just delivering files. Streaming services, such as Spotify and We7, remove the need for you to own and store the music.
The music is stored on a server – in ‘the cloud’ – and users can stream it to their computer without charge in return for having their listening broken up by adverts. Subscribers can turn the ads off and access their music from a mobile phone. Demand for Spotify is so great that Daniel Ek, its founder and CEO, says “on certain days we are consuming more internet capacity than Sweden as a country”. Spotify deals with this by using peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer services don’t require all of the data to be streamed from a central server but instead spread the load to other users on the network. It’s an approach that has been taken by illicit filesharing sites, in part because it makes it harder to track down filesharers.
The use of the word ’sharing’ is important because that’s an intrinsic part of the appeal. People naturally want to share things that they find interesting and that includes music. Instinctively the music industry wanted to prevent that at first. If your business model is based on selling songs then you need to ensure that everyone who wants your song has to come to you to get it. Daniel Ek says that the new version of Spotify, which is due for release some time in the next few months, will make sharing much more integral to the experience. Next month a new service, mflow, will be launched that puts sharing at the heart of the service. Without its community element mflow is just like the iTunes music store. You can search for tracks, listen to 30-second snippets and then pay to download them.
However, the service has a Twitter-like element that allows you to follow people and for them to follow you back. You can “flow” music to your followers, which allows them to hear the entire song – not just the 30-second snippet. If they buy it you get 20 per cent of the price, which you can use to buy more music. Once you begin following a few people on mflow your in-box soon fills up with shared tracks, each accompanied by a short message – of 140 characters, like Twitter – from the person who shared it. Pretty soon you have your own personal radio station, programmed by your friends. It’s the first internet music service I’ve come across that has no real offline equivalent.
The key will be getting enough people on board to make it work. Legal online music services are now clearly better than their illicit competitors. However, many in the industry are concerned that streaming services cannot attract the numbers of listeners required to replace lost revenue from retail. Most people would agree that ‘music matters’. The industry is about to find out just how much.
