state51

Category: markets

  • Spotify Royalties: More Expectations and Numbers in Digital Music

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    Spotify has released some very helpful information about what it expects to pay music owners for albums in different parts of the sales curve over a typical month. It’s being widely discussed. Less than helpfully, while we have a fair idea about the top end (what they call a ‘Global Hit Album’), it is far…

  • Record Companies Should Give Up a Hard Won Right. Here’s Why.

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    When the recording industry was young there was a genuine concern that it might be strangled at birth by owners of popular songs, who might naturally wish to protect their sheet music sales and public performance fees from competition from the new no-effort and high quality music experience offered by the phonogram. As it was,…

  • Perverse Incentives for Music Producers

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    Digital music could be a world of opportunity for many talented creators and producers who were squeezed out of the old world of manufacture and inventory limitations. One click to listen, one click to buy, and any number of new ways to connect creators and their market mean discovery, information, and transactions are virtually costless.…

  • Music Industry Grasps Wrong End of Carrot

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    A UK Parliamentary report is out today, 26 September 2013, that represents a fierce fight back by the creative industries, led by music, against a rogues gallery of pirates, ISPs, and technology and digital advertising and media companies. No doubt it will be greeted with a few cheers, and a pint or two in the…

  • Copyright, Human Rights, Development, Privilege

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    Two things in particular I have been enjoying surprising people with recently. The first is that copyright is part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All right it is near the end, so fewer people will have had the stamina to read through and find it. But it’s clear and unambiguous at Article 27.…

  • Collectives versus Pools in Pursuit of Copyright Efficiency

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    YouTube’s generous approach to on-demand video streaming, while historically the cause of some friction with copyright owners, is also this year a great blessing to anyone interested in the regulation of copyright business. For it has provided a platform to view and review a length discussion between some of the key figures about Europe’s policy…

  • Yet Another Private Internet

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    Lobbyists sometimes try to simplify issues, for policy makers and for grassroots and other supporters, and one of the most potent ideas surrounding Internet policy is that what you don’t like will ‘break the Internet’. Here’s John Naughton neatly encapsulating this approach for the UK’s Guardian newspaper in a comment on SOPA/PIPA early in 2012:…

  • Leapfrog or Lag? Music Tech in Developing Markets

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    We have been conditioned to think that developing nations are somehow privileged to have the opportunity to skip whole generations of technologies, moving straight to what we in developed economies are embracing because of its promise for the future. Here’s the Economist, writing in 2008: The mobile phone is also a wonderful example of a…

  • Networks or Services – Who is Music’s Better Partner?

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    When I formed the idea for a new business bundling broadband with music, in 2003, my thinking was guided by two simple principles. The first was that customers already saw music and broadband as a natural bundle. And the second was that making ISP networks able to manage and account for music services was a…

  • Floating on a Sea of Demand for Music

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    Tin Cheuk Leung at the Chinese University of Hong Kong published in 2009 a paper entitled, ‘Should the Music Industry Sue Its Own Customers? Impacts of Music Piracy and Policy Suggestions.’ The updated version is available here. Parts of Leung’s paper need special training to understand (which I do not have) but some of it is…