A Copyfighter’s Musings

Not sure if I missed it or this has just been poorly publicized, but have a look at Wippit’s new model.  Parts of their website are so out of date (e.g., they no longer use P2P), that the service has often confused me.  At the least, I think they’ve licensed much more music than when Wippit 2.0 came out.

Here’s the pitch from the press release I received via email: for a $90 year-long subscription, you can download 60,000 MP3s - that’s about 667 songs per dollar, with no DRM.  Apparently, this catalog doesn’t grow in number, but it does change in composition - some songs will be added that are available to subscribers, but other songs will be subtracted so that the catalog is never more than 60,000.  At least, that’s what the FAQ suggests.  Still, if you download all 60k when you sign up, and then download all new additions, the catalog grows in effect.  Wippit also does offer DRM-wrapped songs for purchase to subscribers at a discount from the price offered to non-subscribers.

One might expect that Wippit would have no major or even significant independent content.  After all, the high license fees for this sort of service killed the original eMusic.  So one would expect this to be more like Garageband.com, with all niche or amateur content.

Not so, at least from my cursory observations.  You’re not going to get 60,000 of the most popular current content.  But I bet many (though not everyone) could find 9 albums that they otherwise would have been interested in getting. And as long as there are 90 bucks worth of albums worth getting, why not buy them through Wippit and acquire another ~59.9k tracks basically for free? While it doesn’t have the latest Britney album, Wippit does have the newest Franz Ferdinand and Interpol albums, for instance.  Popular independents like Dizzee Rascal and Royksopp are available, as are songs by independent artists I haven’t been able to find through Rhapsody or iTunes, like Soulwax and Rex the Dog.

This value-proposition would be a lot better if Wippit’s website were not such a phenomenal disaster.  The search tool is slow and clunky, and some songs are mislabelled (labelled as MP3 but actually only available as DRM-wrapped WMA).  There’s no recommendation system to help you figure out what else of the 60k you might like.

You could use other recommendation systems, though, to make some determinations.  In particular, people might use software like MoodLogic’s to sort through their music.

I report all this cautiously, since Wippit’s website can sometimes be quite confusing.  But the email they sent suggests that my assessment is accurate.

Filed by Derek Slater at 11:29 am under General news
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Today, I will be publishing a paper entitled, “Consumer Taste Sharing is Driving The Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture,” which I co-authored with Gartner researcher and Berkman Center collaborator Mike McGuire. The paper was originally published in slightly different form by Gartner. I will also be giving a talk about the paper at the Berkman Center, which will be webcast here.

For frequent readers of this blog, the main thrust of this paper may be familiar. New tools enable consumers to share their musical tastes. Sometimes this means simply sharing the names of artists or songs they like (e.g., playlist sharing) while other forms involve sharing the music itself (e.g., music podcasting). Data suggests that enabling new forms of taste-sharing may have significant business benefits, promoting artists and driving online music transactions. The tools might also unleash cultural benefits. Most significantly, consumers can play DJ, becoming creators in their own right, and diminish or reshape the power traditional tastemakers like radio and TV have had. In so doing, these tools might help expose people to a greater diversity of music and facilitate the formation of taste-based communities.

Of course, people will use some tools, like podcasting, in ways that infringe copyright, and, like P2P, people will use podcasts to acquire copyrighted content for free without permission. The potential harm of this infringement is not something I take up in this paper. For too long, I think the issues raised by infringing downloading have distracted rights holders and policymakers alike from the benefits of enabling individuals to act as content distributors.

Regardless of what one thinks of infringing downloading, enabling licensed or otherwise lawful forms of sharing would have significant benefits. Finding ways to make music sharing flourish is thus worth pursuing independent of the industry’s need to “compete with free.” Mike and I do argue that enabling sharing can help the music industry compete with free, and that should add to the impetus to support it. But even if infringing downloading simply went away, enabling consumers to be content sharers would still be valuable. It is a win-win proposition, benefiting rights holders, consumers, tech companies, and our culture as a whole.

In the future, I hope to take up some of the ways the industry can support music podcasters and others who want to share copyrighted works. In this paper, though, we simply try to lay out the potential benefits of sharing tools.

Filed by Derek Slater at 9:27 pm under General news
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Sandwich board suit strikes again.

Filed by Derek Slater at 1:53 am under General news
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