A Year of Music

Oh, you guys:

Qtrax—the free, ad-supported, “legal” P2P service that launched at MIDEM today—apparently isn’t as ready for prime time as it claims. The company claimed it had licensing agreements with all four major record labels, when in fact it has none.

and

The inconsistencies with its music licensing status is just one of several missteps that may make Qtrax one of most bungled service launches in the history of digital music. The company’s press release and pre-briefings with reporters all pointed to the “live” launch of the Qtrax service. But on Monday the site shows it is only a beta launch, something the company didn’t mention in its press build-up.

also:

Allan Klepfisz, Qtrax’s CEO, says the service will go ahead and launch with the four majors’ catalogs. When asked if he is worried about a lawsuit, Klepfisz replied, “The answer is nobody has threatened us with a thing.”

Meanwhile, back in reality (this article also discusses last.fm’s new service):

Despite a stable of early ad clients signed on for the untested site, Mr. Kent still was uncertain about what the market’s ad model would look like. “I don’t think any music sites can make money on impressions alone,” he said. “You’ve got to get out there to make the advertisers notice you. You have to stand for something and be a brand. Ad money is going to follow a brand over a long period of time.”

Thanks to Nick, I now know that Fucked Up and Xiu Xiu (two bands who should never be mentioned in the same sentence) are suing Camel, Rolling Stone, and (potentially; see the sidebar) Rhapsody for, well, being asshats (more summary here):

Indie rock bands Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up today filed a class action lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (the parent company of Camel cigarettes) and Wenner Media (the publisher of Rolling Stone) alleging the unauthorized use of artists’ names, unauthorized use of artist names for commercial advantage (right of publicity), and unfair business practices, all in regards to the ‘Indie Rock Universe’ multipage advertising section that appeared in the 40th Anniversary issue of the magazine published on November 15. The class action, which was instigated by Xiu Xiu and Fucked Up but filed on behalf of 186 bands and artists featured in the pull out spread, accuses both the cigarette company and the magazine of engaging in “despicable conduct” that was “illegal under settled, unambiguous California statutory and common law.” The lawsuit demands Rolling Stone publish an admission that the artists’ names were used without consent in a spread equal in size to the original ad, as well as seeking actual and punitive financial damages. (Under California law, this could conceptually amount to $750 per issue of Rolling Stone, per band, or a whopping $195.3 billion.

Everybody’s favorite bit of that story is this line:

The 18-page complaint filed today reads partially like a Pitchfork review written by a music-nerd attorney.

but they actually back it up with

Xiu Xiu’s work is described as “often thematically dark, marked by non-narrative, evocative lyrics delivered in small fragments, and is varied in instrumentation, which can include koto, digital sound samples, and whistles, as well as bass, keyboards, percussion and guitar – or some combination of some or all or more.” Fucked Up’s work is described as “direct, sonically violent at times, and often characterized as hardcore punk, with the sometimes acknowledged influence of Spanish Civil War-variety anarchism, Viennese Actionism and the Situationist International.”

The attorney on the case, Christopher J. Hunt, is either really good at reading band bios, has a remarkable ear, has a well-developed sense of humor, or some combination of all of the above. Those are as accurate descriptions of either band’s sound as I’ve ever heard.

I’ve been trying to tell everyone how great Fucked Up are for a while now; I strongly feel that Hidden World is an outstanding achievement: fierce, loud, lyrically sophisticated, politically and metaphysically engaged, and immaculately recorded. Also, they have a totally hilarious name (check out the hoops Kelefa Sanneh has to jump through to get his review of their live show into the New York Times), and the members’ pseudonyms (10,000 Marbles, Pink Eyes, Mustard Gas, Concentration Camp, Guinea Beat) are overblown and dorky-offensive in the best punk rock tradition. I’d say they’re the best punk rock band from Toronto, but there’s actually an awful lot of really great punk and hardcore bands from Toronto.

I won’t rehash the details of the case, because there’s more than enough links up above, but I will say that I think the bands have a pretty good shot at a settlement. I find the type of advertorial shenanigans Rolling Stone and Camel engaged in distasteful (“advertorial” is, of course, a portmanteau word combining “advertising”, “total horseshit” and “editorial”). Somebody there should have known this was going over the line. I’d be pissed if I were either Fucked Up or Xiu Xiu too: Rolling Stone has as much to do with real independent music in 2007 as Rupert Murdoch does with decency or truth, and the cheesy “Indie Rock Universe” spread Rolling Stone published makes the bands mentioned look uncool just by association. I find the idea of Rolling Stone being forced to run a 4-page pullout saying “WE FUCKED OVER FUCKED UP” in gigantic type quite satisfying.

In the meantime, Fucked Up have put out a bunch of singles over the last year, all of them great (and some of them not at all what you’d expect from a Black Flag-style hardcore band), and have a pretty crowded slate of new releases coming out this year. And their latest blog post linked to a pretty good disco-house single from Hercules & Love Affair, featuring the vocals of the amazing Antony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons), which shows they’re nice guys – I mean, they’re looking out for my interests and all.

so yesterday i was all lastfm is giving away music for free and u were all no wai and i was all un hunh their dooin it and u were all their dum and watevr and then like today yahoo is all like hai guyz were dooin it 2 come look at our kool adz and ur all like wtf evar dood who cares im downloadin all that shit off pirat bay n e wayz an im like piracy is killin the music bizness and u r all \/\/ and really who cares cuz nobodys makin no $ on it n e wayz

About seven years ago, the Atlantic Monthly published a long, detailed article about the future of copyright and the implications of cheap and easy filesharing. Recently the Atlantic decided to open their formerly pay-only archives up for free access, and so we can read this article and all get bummed out when we realize that essentially nothing has changed in the interim, except that Ross and Bram Cohen came along and invented BitTorrent and basically made it so hard to selectively filter filesharing traffic that Comcast and AT&T are bringing down the ban hammer on their own paying customers in some weird, totalitarian effort to befriend the weird, totalitarian RIAA.

Some choice excerpts:

Within the music industry it is widely believed that much of the physical infrastructure of music – compact discs, automobile cassette-tape players, shopping-mall megastores – is rapidly being replaced by the Internet and a new generation of devices with no moving parts. By 2003, according to the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Investment Research Group, listeners will rarely if ever drive to Tower Records for their music. Instead they will tap into a vast cloud of music on the Net. This heavenly jukebox, as it is sometimes called, will hold the contents of every record store in the world, all of it instantly accessible from any desktop.

1. Rob Glaser, the CEO of Real Networks and one of the driving forces behind Rhapsody, frequently makes reference to the “heavenly jukebox”.
2. I sure do miss Tower.

Technophiles claim that the major labels, profitable concerns today, will rapidly cease to exist, because the Internet makes copying and distributing recorded music so fast, cheap, and easy that charging for it will effectively become impossible. Adding to the labels’ fears, a horde of dot-coms, rising from the bogs of San Francisco like so many stinging insects, is trying to hasten their demise.

That’s a fabulous line. I wish I’d worked for one of the cool stinging-insect dotcoms back in the day.

Last year the worldwide sales of all 600 or so members of the Recording Industry Association of America totaled $14.5 billion – a bit less than, say, the annual revenues of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance.

I love the brutal way this puts everything into perspective, especially because it’s likely that number is significantly smaller now.

After the show I asked [Chuck Cleaver of Ass Ponys] if he was concerned about the fate of the music industry in the Internet age. “You must be kidding,” he said. With some resignation he recounted the sneaky methods by which three record labels had ripped off the band or consigned its music to oblivion, a subject to which he has devoted several chapters of an unpublished autobiography he offered to send me. (He had nicer things to say about his current label, Checkered Past.) Later I asked one of the music critics if Cleaver’s tales of corporate malfeasance were true. More than true, I was told – they were typical. Not only is the total income from music copyright small, but individual musicians receive even less of the total than one would imagine. “It’s relatively mild,” Cleaver said later, “the screwing by Napster compared with the regular screwing.”

This is the essential problem with which the major labels have never dealt, and maybe never can resolve. They’re trying to get new artists to sign “360 contracts”, where the labels get a cut of touring and merchandise revenue in addition to whatever income comes from selling the artists’ albums, and it takes a pretty naïve (or, perhaps paradoxically, ambitious) artist to think that’s a good idea. Musicians have many reasons to distrust and detest the major labels, and ever-fewer reasons to rely on them.

Last year, according to the survey firm Soundscan, just eighty-eight recordings – only .03 percent of the compact discs on the market-accounted for a quarter of all record sales.

The only difference between then and now is that the number of discs sold is likely to be significantly lower. For all the talk of the long tail, the fat, thin end of the tail is still making the major labels an awful lot of money.

Anyway, the whole thing, while being the usual insanely long Atlantic Monthly / New Yorker ramble, is worthwhile, as it provides tons of historical context for the still-intractable situation in which we all find ourselves. The really sobering conclusion I draw from the article is that we’re no closer to resolving the copyright problem than we were at the turn of the century, and if anything, the big corporate interests have taken even more control.

EMI, the smallest of the four major labels, got bought out by a private equity group last year. The new owners have now decided on a massive restructuring that’s going to cut 2,000 jobs and “realize new efficiencies”, which basically means everybody who’s left is going to have to work twice as hard for the same pay, feel stressed out, and probably still not make any money because the major-label end of the music business is in freefall.

“But Forrest,” you say, “why so cynical?”

It’s simple, my good sophont:

But Guy Hands, founder of the Terra Firma venture capital group that bought EMI for £3.2bn last year, vowed to further clip the wings of unprofitable artists by offering them a day rate or salary rather than shelling out huge advances.

leads naturally to this:

…[S]horn of the big advances and trappings of a major label, many artists may prefer to sign with rival independents or put new material out themselves.

Without fat advances and major-label marketing budgets, why would anybody stay on a major label in 2008? Hands’ plans are going to last a year and end in embarrassment followed by another restructuring. Either that or EMI will simply implode. I’d almost bet money on it.

While I was trying to find a decent link for A Sunny Day In Glasgow, I spied on their MySpace page the news that they put out a new EP, TOUT NEW AGE, sometime last summer, and that it was mostly available online, at a bunch of places.

iTunes is getting much better about making indie artists’ music available DRM-free, and AAC is technically a higher-quality codec, but the vast majority of my music is encoded with LAME, and I’ve come to trust LAME-encoded MP3s more than any other lossy format. Insound wants $10.49 for a downloaded EP. Ha. eMusic does have a download store, I think, but they really want you to subscribe to their service, and their interface confuses me. Other Music Digital it is! $5.99 and no hassle!

Other Music is a boutique record store in New York. I’ve always thought of them as being an east coast counterpart to my beloved Aquarius Records, but they’re clearly trying to differentiate themselves through their eminently competent digital download store. They even have their own download manager, a cute and unobtrusive application (for both Windows and OS X) that takes a lot of the sting out of downloading multiple purchased tracks from a web site (Beatport, by contrast, has an elaborate Flash interface that cossets and constrains you right up to the point where you need to download your purchases, where it forces you to download every track one at a time, and since it’s in Flash you can’t even use an in-browser download accelerator like FlashGot).

Total time from discovering TOUT NEW AGE’s existence to having it on my computer: 20 minutes. Nice.

From an article in the current Economist:

By mid-2007, when the majors realised that digital downloads were not growing as quickly as they had hoped, they landed on a more adventurous digital strategy. They now want to move beyond Apple’s iTunes and its paid-for downloads. The direction of most of their recent digital deals, such as with Imeem, a social network that offers advertising-supported streamed music, is to offer music free at the point of delivery to consumers. Perhaps the most important experiment of all is a deal Universal struck in December with Nokia, the biggest mobile-phone maker, to supply its music for new handsets that will go on sale later this year. These “Comes With Music” phones will allow customers to download all the music they want to their phones and PCs and keep it—even if they change handsets when their year’s subscription ends. Instead of charging consumers directly, Universal will take a cut of the price of each phone. The other majors are expected to strike similar deals.

“‘Comes with Music’ is a recognition that music has to be given away for free, or close to free, on the internet,” says Mr Mulligan. Paid-for download services will continue and ad-supported music will become more widespread, but subsidised services where people do not pay directly for music will become by far the most popular, he says. For the recorded-music industry this is a leap into the unknown. Universal and its fellow majors may never earn anything like as much from partnership with device-makers as they did from physical formats. Some among their number, indeed, may not survive.

The whole thing’s worth reading, and not very cheering.