[My darling Mrs. Toad, fresh from administering the Evil Stare of Doom to miscreants at parties, has taken time out from her busy schedule of reducing the world's financial systems to dust to pen this article about Guy Hands' misadventures with EMI for our edification.]

It’s not often I get the chance to write on a topic fitting for this blog. Given that I am a peon of the reviled financial system with nary an artistic bone in my body, my world rarely intersects with the ethereal world of Toad. After all, to most people the world of finance is about as pleasant as a piss-stained Glaswegian tramp and just as incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, as recent events have proved, it is apparently equally incomprehensible to many of those who are paid ridiculous sums to practice it.

Some financier fuck-ups, though, are more spectacular than others, not least the 2007 purchase of EMI by financier Guy Hands through his company Terra Firma for £4.2bn.

This week Hands is in the US Courts whining that he wouldn’t have paid as much for EMI if his banker, David Wormsley of Citigroup (aka “the Worm”) hadn’t told him someone else wanted to buy it for a similarly stupid amount (presumably £4.1bn). Hands has apparently decided, three years and a full credit crunch later, that he should actually have paid only £2bn to secure EMI.

Now, leaving aside what the Worm did or didn’t say, the whole point of being a financier is to buy high and sell low. Nope, I’ve got that wrong, a bit like this guy.  And indeed Guy Hands. Whoops. Read the rest of this entry »

Music companies still don’t like people discussing music, it seems, and Google are a very dangerous company to give control of your information because they cannot be trusted.

Google have recently been deleting, wholesale, entire music blogs, representing years of work for no profit by people who are in some cases explicity operating one hundred percent within the law, and in other cases with the tacit approval of the music companies whose nuisance complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have actually caused what tweeters are calling #musicblogocide2k10.

About six months ago, if you remember, the music companies started abusing the DMCA, using it in a frivolous, scattershot manner to harrass music blogs as a nuisance technique for disrupting independent music conversations.  Effectively, they would make copyright complaints to blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger service under the DMCA, which pretty much obliges Blogger to delete the post in question, irrespective of the legality of the post in question.

After the resulting outcry amongst bloggers (whose writing is their intellectual property, remember) Google backed off slightly, insisting that they would simply revert accused posts to draft rather than delete them, and that they would start notifying bloggers when they removed their posts rather than simply deleting them and hoping writers would never notice.  It still remained on record as a Terms of Service violation however, and now the inevitable has happened: some blogs with multiple complaints to their name have been dubbed repeat offenders and simply deleted.

Put that way it all sounds pretty tame, doesn’t it.  It’s pretty clear that mp3 blogs operate in something of a legal grey area – some of the tracks we post are shared with the blessing, and even encouragement, of the copyright holders, some with their tacit if unwritten approval, and some directly against their wishes.  Some offer downloads of full albums for free, and are completely illegal as well as being, as most bloggers would agree, very damaging to artists, labels and even bloggers themselves.  Why is it an issue, then, after a legal complaint about an illegal act and with a record of repeatedly flaunting the law, if a writer is simply shut down?  It’s not an issue, actually, for me, when put like that, but that is an almost totally inaccurate portrayal of the reality of the situation. Read the rest of this entry »

Well because of the intervention of Homegame this post has been somewhat delayed, so apologies for that, so here we go.

Firstly a brief description of the circumstances.  A little while ago, London-based Winston’s Zen was the victim of another of those DMCA take-down hits.  Due to connections he was able to actually get through to the label at the source, Columbia Records, part of Sony BMG, and they invited him in to talk to them and suggested he bring along a couple of other bloggers and make something of a meeting out of it.  So last Thursday myself, Winston himself, Jamila from Fucking Dance and Tim from The Blue Walrus went along, the Sony people booked a table in a pub and we talked about stuff and drank ourselves into a stupour.

And what did we achieve?  Well honestly, I’d say not an awful lot, really.  We chatted, but I am not sure either side had much of a concrete idea of what we wanted to get out of the meeting, so it was little more than a start, I’d say.  Some thoughts, though: Read the rest of this entry »

Someone here just isn’t thinking.

I was just sent a promotional email by someone acting on behalf of Sony BMG, one of the most clueless and technologically retarded megacorps that the world has ever seen. I have never know any marketing department be more stupid than Sony’s, and their tentative little tippy-toes into the world of online viral publicity show they have lost none of their flair for Gold Medal levels of bone-headed and almost comically obtuse attempts to deal with the evolving nature of communication. Bless ‘em, it’s hilarious:

If you should encounter any difficulties or have any questions regarding this download, please feel free to contact your RCA Label Group Representative and we will be happy to assist you further. Please find attached a hypertext link to a digitally encoded file of the above-referenced music, which you may reproduce for the sole purpose of publically performing such music on your radio station. Any other use, including, without limitation, the reproduction, distribution, modification, display or transmission of the music or file without the prior written consent of Sony Music is strictly prohibited. It is our understanding that you will delete the digital file in its entirety from your computer hard drive or such other storage medium employed by you within thirty days of the date stamp of this electronic mail. Digital song distribution is not intended to replace current physical music deliveries you may receive now. Its simply another option available to you for convenient access to our music. If you are currently on our radio promotion mailing list, you will also be mailed a physical copy of this material.

What the fuck are they on about? I don’t even have a radio station for fuck’s sake.

So, I assume they’ve clued onto the fact that blogs are a major way to share music, generate word of mouth and generally publicise emerging artists, because we have built up quite large networks and we share and talk about things we like. Cool. So they’ve sent some blogs some stuff so that they can have some of that word of mouth thing that we give them, because that sounds like a Good Thing. But The Internet is also where all these Bad Things happen, right? Like sharing, and stuff, and terrorism and other definitely Bad Things. So we’d better make sure these internet guys don’t share our music because that’s like Bad, as we’ve already proved with charts and graphs, so we’d better tell ‘em we’re not taking any shit on that one. Can’t have these guys sharing our music for free because that stops people buying it, and when they buy it, it’s Good, right?

So we generate word of mouth because we share and we encourage and we talk, so they want some of our action. But we’re also bad because we share, and we can’t have that. “Gnnnn… *Sony person’s head explodes* would someone please tell me what this internet thing is because I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!1!”

Brilliant.

David Thomas Broughton – Circle is Never Complete
Fiona Apple – Never is a Promise

[Disclaimer: Before anyone asks, this is not directed at the PR person who had to send this shit out. They didn't write anything themselves, so I am guessing they knew as well as anyone that this email was just getting deleted immediately without any attempt to even listen to the song. I've learned my lesson on that one, so stop laughing, this is entirely dedicated to the lawyers at Sony BMG and the marketing department who holds their collective leash. Brilliantly remedial lunacy. So stupid I almost sprained something just reading it.]

Sony amaze me. Ever since the Walkman they have consistently designed really nice physical products, but their marketing department has shown a surreal determination to completely ruin them by saddling every nice object with comically stupid systems and interaction strategies so ill-conceived that not even an mp3 player born of a lesbian mating between Jessica Alba and Diane Lane could survive their buffoonery.

Remember the disastrously poor Sonicstage software that crippled their excellent mp3 players? Well we are only just shot of that monster at long last. And remember their idiotic obsession on the ATRAC file format for these players? ATRAC was a good format, but insisting on their players using it meant that anything transferred to them had to first be converted, which took hours. Just insanity, when their players were very, very superior products indeed. The engineers must have wanted to roast the marketing department over a slow flame.

Now take their latest. As DRM is being abandoned the world over, Warner, Universal and EMI, three of the big four, of which Sony is the fourth, have all to some extent committed to making their music available DRM-free; on Amazon in the case of the first two and iTunes in the case of EMI. So Sony have decided to follow suit and jump into the DRMlessness but have a look at how they’ve decided to do it, and swallow that mouthful of coffee before you read:

Quoting from Wired:

Sony BMG announced it will release a mishmash of 37 albums in the unrestricted MP3 format, confirming last week’s report that the label would ditch DRM. Under Sony’s new plan, consumers would purchase a credit-card-like ticket from Best Buy, Target, Fred’s, Winn-Dixie or other outlets. The cards will have a number that must be entered into the MusicPass site, where the full album can be downloaded.

“The MP3 files delivered through MusicPass play on computers, as well as on all MP3 players, including iPods,” said Thomas Hesse, a Sony BMG sales president. “This makes them a simple, easy-to-use solution that will appeal to fans who already access their music on the internet, as well as to consumers who are just getting into the digital realm.”

I keep re-reading it to try and see where the part of of this plan that isn’t a hilarious disaster might be hiding. There are two potential fragments of sense in there, pointed out by this character on the Slashdot forums: firstly, this scheme would be open to children who would not need a credit card to access digital music; and secondly given the lack of necessary shelf-space, they could be available in a far wider variety of shops. So far so moderately sensible, although they are not unbundling the albums into individual tracks, which may not endear them to the children who might be their only really viable market.

The other thing worth bearing in mind is that somewhere like Walmart, where these things would be sold, is now just about the largest single distributor of CDs in the States. I don’t know if this is just amongst bricks and mortar retailers, but I read on Billboard that they have a massive 22% of the physical CD market, and big box retailers as a whole have a collosal 65% of the entire musical retail market in the States according to the Wall Street Journal – digital and physical. Basically, this deal smacks of an unholy amount of arm-twisting by physical retailers with an awful lot of clout, who would not be happy at being so neatly snipped out of the music purchase process. So I can see how it might have come about.

But the scheme itself? Pure, hilarious lunacy. Possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever seen. One of the biggest reasons for the continued popularity of illegal downloading is that there has never ever once been a single viable alternative of similar quality offered by a legitimate source. If there was a reasonably priced, legitimate source for high-quality, DRM-free mp3s with a suitably extensive back catalogue, then my bet is it would make a significant dent in illegal downloads, because people just are less comfortable doing illegal things. But anything that falls short of that quality of service is simply pointless – given the ineffectiveness of legislation, what is the incentive supposed to be? An inferior product for more money.

In this case, instead of just going to one of dozens of torrent sites and downloading the whole lot for bollocks all, you are expected to go to the shop and instead of just buying the CD for the same price and ripping it yourself in whatever format or quality you choose, you buy the card for $12, go home, go to their site, scratch the card, fill in the code, and then download the music as a 192 Kbps mp3 file. On other words, the worst of both worlds: you still have to go to a shop, and then also have access to an internet connection, and the quality of the final listening experience is inferior.

I have worked for plenty of big companies as a consultant and I know just how these decisions come about. Instead of taking fifty steps towards a sensible goal they take fifty steps, each of which is knocked subtly off target by toadying to the whim of a director, or vocal retards in important meetings, or the inability to achieve consensus amongst large groups of people, or the impossibility of getting every single stakeholder to take part in every important decision for logistical reasons. The result: you are still fifty steps on, but you haven’t ended up at a goal, you’ve just ended up wherever these random fifty steps took you, and after all the meetings and all the investment you end up releasing the product because, well, what do you do, start again? This despite the fact that you have created something that does absolutely everything no better than reasonably, and nothing at all Very Well Indeed.

And then it fails, and you make an announcement that consumers aren’t ready for DRM-free mp3s because you’ve tried to make them available and the market clearly just isn’t there.

That is why it will not be a big company that solves the problem of making money in the digital era, it will be a small label or an individual artist or a small entrepreneurial enterprise or an artists’ collective. It may then be bought or hastily adopted by Sony, but will Sony solve the problem themselves? Absolutely, categorically no.

Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind (Original NYC Recording – see below)
The Detroit Cobras – Stupidity

And of the best songs ever, from one of my favourite albums of all time, and most appropriate as it happens:
Grandaddy – He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot