Oklahoma: “The Life is Short” State

To be fair, I don’t know the complete business model for digital music well enough to say whether music publishers are or are not getting screwed.  I do know if these folks are going to get paid more, it’s coming out of our pockets, and as the article points out, the outcry is just now starting to settle from Apple’s move a few months ago to implement the first iTunes Music Store price increase.

The kicker to me is that they want to come after other music “sources” in iTunes as well.  These include music in movies and TV shows, streaming radio, and even the 30-second previews for songs in the the store.  This just seems a bit greedy to me.

“In the U.S. while we do get paid a mechanical (licensing fee) from ITunes [sic], we are not getting any performance income from Apple yet,” David Renzer, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group, said in interview late last month with entertainment-industry publication, Encore. “(On iTunes) you can stream radio, and you can preview (tracks), things that we should be getting paid performance income for.

“Also, if you download a film or TV show,” Renzer continued, “there’s no performance (payment) and typically there’s no mechanical (payment) either.”  (from cnet)

It might be true that they don’t get paid for these things, but I really don’t think they should come digging around the digital consumer for money.  Talk to the studios about the movie and TV show issue.  Talk to the radio stations about streaming radio.  As for the 30-second previews, just give it up.  We are already paying up to $1.29 per track.  Keep pushing this agenda and a lot of people will fall back on much cheaper ways to acquire music, TV shows, and movies, which result in zero royalties.

Oh, and they are so upset that they are going to ask congress to intercede.  Good thing congress doesn’t have anything on its plate right now.

I hate to see this because I’ve always enjoyed indie record stores (despite the fact that I haven’t lived around one in a long time).  Is this the death knell for indie record stores, or more likely, the first major sign of the death of the compact disc as a music medium?

In order to keep providing the best radio service on the web, we need to ask our listeners from countries other than USA, UK and Germany to subscribe for €3.00 per month. In return you’ll get unlimited access to Last.fm Radio, and a promise that we’ll be hard at work improving the service for years to come.

This isn’t a huge surprise considering the ridiculous royalties charged to Internet radio providers. As Mashable points out, Last.fm competitor Pandora simply cutoff International users. While I think that people generally overreact to a company charging for something it once gave away, I fear this is the nature of the beast when it comes to dealing with music copyright holders. The thing with Last.fm is that they offer so many other ways to discover music that are beyond simple streaming.

I really like Last.fm and think that they bring a really interesting approach to music discovery.  Since more users means more data means better discovery, I hope that this added exposure increases their userbase.

“The toothpaste is out of the tube and a whole generation of people is accustomed to music being that way. There’s a perception that you don’t pay for music when you hear it on the radio or MySpace.,” he said.

One idea he has is an ISP music tax, whereby everyone pays around $5 extra and all music on the Web is free. If it’s an optional tax, like taxes of gasoline or cigarettes, I don’t think its a bad idea. However, I have a real problem with forcing a tax on people who “legally” acquire most, if not all, of their music collection.

Read the full article here.

Last.fm is all based around “scrobbling” the songs you play in iTunes, on your iPod, or however you listen to digital music. Scrobbling reports song plays to a Web server. Last.fm was born out of AudioScobbler, but where Last.fm takes off is in connection of it’s users based on play history. They’ve branched out recently to provide nice Flash-based playlists (see right column) and player. Anyway, their approach to social networking is especially cool.

Anyway, with CBS acquiring Last.fm, it will be interesting to see what direction they go. Congrats to the Last.fm team.

As predicted late last week, the iPhone family was finally released today. One thing was missing though, Apple. Instead Cisco, through its sub-brand Linksys, released a series of home VoIP phones under the “iPhone” moniker.

What is funny about all of this is that throughout all the speculation and rumor mongering, the term iPhone was supposed to be a given. This assurance was based on the fact that the domain name “iPhone.org” was supposedly registered to Apple. In fact, as of my typing, it redirected to Apple’s front page. Despite the fact that anyone could drop $10 to register that domain as Apple and point it to Apple.com, this trivial fact seemed to cover up the trademark that Cisco has held on the term “iPhone.”

It’s clear now that Apple’s branding will go a different direction. It seems to me (and my 6 hours of college marketing credits) that pushing the iPod name might be the way they’re are leaning. “iPod Mobile” or something to that affect seems much more likely. Why not ride the iPod branding as long as you can. Then again, those who try to predict Apple’s next move, let alone how they will brand and market it, deal with more misses than hits.

Update: It has been pointed out to me that Apple has indeed sought to register the brand “iPhone” in a number of other countries, despite not holding the mark in the U.S. So maybe an iPhone isn’t completely out of Apple’s plans.