A Chunk of History: The Medieval Roots of Digital Publishing

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One of the wonderful paradoxes of the digital era of media is its retrograde quality. We tend to think of inventions like the internet and peer-to-peer digital networks as apotheoses of modern communication, but their economic impact on many media industries has been to unravel their modern industrial structures and to resurrect many of their pre-industrial, folk foundations.

Nowhere has that been more true than in the case of music. MP3 files, P2P networks, and now streaming have blown up the multi-song bundle we called the album — and the profit margins that came with it — and restored the single to prominence, as it was in the days before the invention of the long-playing record (LP).

The much-derided phenomenon of unlicensed “sharing” of music over P2P networks also carries echoes of music’s past. Until the Gramophone and the Phonograph made private performances of music practical, music was almost always shared, in the sense that it was usually experienced as part of a public performance. While the industrial technologies of recording and playback made private performances lucrative the instinct to share music never really went away. Read More »

Autumn Of The A&R Man

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The International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) this week released its biannual Investing in Music report and the numbers raised quite a few eyebrows. According to the report, record labels worldwide invested U.S. $4.5 billion last year in A&R ($2.8 billion) and marketing, ($1.7 billion), representing 27 percent of their total revenue, more than the pharmaceutical, aerospace, or technology industry spends on R&D in percentage terms.

His_Master's_VoiceThat represents an increase of 12 percent and 6 percent, respectively, over 2013.

Particularly eye-opening was the report’s claim that it costs a label anywhere from $500,00 to $2 million to “break” a new artist in a major market like the U.S. or U.K., factoring in the “upfront” costs of artist advances, recording, music video production, tour support, and marketing and promotion.

The report is clearly meant to bolster the case for the continued relevance of traditional record companies amid the simmering industry debate over whether artists still need a label deal, given the availability of cheap, DIY recording technology and the myriad independent distributors, aggregators, marketers and other service providers offering to help artists bring their music to market. Read More »

Video: RightsTech Summit Keynote Conversation With Benji Rogers

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RT Summit 3PledgeMusic CEO and founder of the DotBlockchainMusic project Benji Rogers was interviewed by Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride” and a former executive editor at Billboard, during a keynote conversation at the inaugural RightsTech Summit on July 26 in New York. Among the topics they discussed was the potential for blockchain technology to create an immutable but endlessly updatable ledger of “digital truth” regarding the ownership and priority of sound recordings and musical compositions.

Co-produced by Concurrent Media Strategies and Digital Media Wire, the RightsTech Summit brought together over 100 senior media and technology executives, thought-leaders, entrepreneurs, and artists from across multiple media and entertainment industries for a wide-ranging discussion of technology innovation around the registration, management and licensing of media rights on digital platforms. The next RightsTech event will be held in New York in September in conjunction with Digital Media Wire’s New York Media Festival.

Video of Benji Roger’s keynote is available here. We’ll have audio from several other sessions from last week’s Summit up shortly.

(Video courtesy of SlidesLive).

Data And The DMCA

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A group of 18 music industry organizations, representing songwriters, publishers and musicians, filed comments last week with the U.S. Copyright Office in response to the office’s congressionally ordered inquiry into the operation and effectiveness of Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, otherwise known as the “safe harbor” provisions of the law. And to make a long filing short: they don’t think it’s working very well at all.

As discussed in a previous post here, people in the copyright industries have been pining for years for a do-over of the safe harbors and notice-and-takedown procedures, which they claim have amounted to a get-out-of-jail-free card for online infringement, and the music groups came prepared. Their 70-page filing (including appendices) is chock full of colorful charts and graphs, footnoted legal arguments, and research findings, all purporting to demonstrate conclusively that the Section 512 bargain, which was intended to provide a limit on the liability of online technology providers for infringement by their uses while creating legal tools for copyright owners to get infringing content removed from the web, has been rendered null and void by advances in web technology and overly narrow interpretations of the law by the courts.

“Several factors have contributed to the failure of the DMCA to fulfill its purpose,” the groups said in their filing. “To start, Congress enacted the DMCA in 1998 when dial-up Internet speeds and static web sites predominated. Soon thereafter, individuals could be worldwide publishers of content on peer-to-peer networks and service providers began to distribute massive amounts of Read More »

The Fault In Our Stars: Lessons From The 2015 Box Office

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Economists have long recognized that the sports and entertainment industries exhibit elements of what University of Chicago economics Sherwin Rosen called the economics of superstars in his classic 1981 study, in which small differences in talent or popularity can lead to outsize differences in returns. Anyone who reaches the NBA, for instance, is by definition an elite athlete. But Star-Wars-Force-Awakens1if the superior skills of a LeBron James or Kobe Bryant added a mere 2 points per game on average to his team’s total, in a league where the average point differential per game is 0.06, over the course of a season they could easily add a half a dozen or more wins to the team’s record, making the difference between first place and missing the playoffs. Given the financial payoff for the team’s owners of reaching the playoffs, James and Bryant are worth almost any price, as in fact their salaries reflect.

Similarly, there are many talented performers in the entertainment industries. But people tend to prefer to listen to the same music and see the same movies as their friends. So if their friends start to listen to Adele or Taylor Swift more than other artists, even by a small amount, that difference in popularity is quickly amplified through network effects to where Adele and Swift tower over others in the charts and can command almost any price for their concerts. Read More »