Category: technology
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To Get Paid We Should Set Music Free
Digital music, having started out as a tied product with iTunes and Windows Media locking the files to devices and software players, achieved a certain freedom as DRM came off, but is now migrating fast back to proprietary encrypted formats. These locks benefit only their owners and operators. Switching from Spotify to Rdio, or Rdio…
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Downloads versus Access? Follow the Science AND the Money!
One of the big debates in music is whether the download is dead, killed by ubiquitous connectivity and streaming services. Certainly the expensive (>$0.5) download seems to have plateaued, and streaming revenue is growing strongly tempting new entrants who bring with them investment in better consumer experiences. The end game, goes the argument, is that…
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What the Future Used to Look Like, in 2006
A new feature in iOS 7 reminded me that the sky, which was supposed to be falling eight years ago, has remained inexplicably buoyant. The feature is called the ‘Multipeer Connectivity Framework’ and it provides a simple way for devices to connect to each other over bluetooth in order to exchange files or messages. Eight…
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Preserving the Open Internet the Easy Way
No regulation is easy of course, so to start, here’s an apology for the misleading title. Sorry. But it need not be as difficult as it might seem to make the few small adjustments needed to ensure that the next decade does not see the effective end of the open and public internet which promises…
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Netflix Explains Why The Internet Is Not Good Enough For Them
The migration of new digital services off the public internet is an established pattern. Driven by economics, and with real money at stake, it is not likely to slow down any time soon. To recap, large content providers such as Google (with YouTube), Facebook, Amazon (mostly driven by its Web Services division), and Netflix, among…
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The Internet is No Longer a Duck
It waddles and quacks, but is the Internet still a duck? The Guardian published on March 28th 2013 an article by Cory Doctorow with the headline ‘Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet’. His argument is simple and persuasive – that the Internet has become too important to our civil, cultural, and personal…
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Yet Another Private Internet
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:…
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Leapfrog or Lag? Music Tech in Developing Markets
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…
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Networks or Services – Who is Music’s Better Partner?
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…
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Floating on a Sea of Demand for Music
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…