heute:pop:blog.  

This is an article I recently wrote for the transmitNOW blog.

Over the last year or so, I noticed a worrying trend among corporate decision makers – as well as legislators around the world – who are trying to monitor internet traffic in order to prohibit unlicensed usage of copyrighted material (also referred to as ‘piracy’).  The part that concerns me most is the fact that not more people are outraged about this potential threat to our freedom of information.

Needless to say, digital files and connected computers have changed the economy around creative content and continues to do so. Companies and individuals that monetize media and entertainment content are all affected by the changes of distribution, consumption and discovery that come with digital technologies. Many of those organisations have reacted defensively to those new developments and have not fully embraced new technologies to try and develop new business models.

File sharing is often seen as one of the biggest reasons for declining revenues and there have been various strategies to stop people from sharing digital content via the internet; legal action against music downloaders has been a widely popular method with disastrous PR consequences for the RIAA and its member labels. Threats of the legal repercussion are often used in the movie business, too (“Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted..”).

More recently (and potentially because of the ineffectiveness of the methods above) we have seen the trend where content owners, or their representatives, attempt to monitor internet traffic of individuals to see if any unlicensed content is being shared. One popular variation is that there should not be any legal action; instead, internet connection may be compromised after a certain amount of ‘offenses’. This variation has been discussed in Ireland (but was not blocked by the High Court) and was implemented in France. It has been widely discussed within the music industry.

In a letter to Google, various music industry organisations encouraged “ISPs and other intermediaries to take measures to deter unlawful activity”. While they have not been more specific what those measures could be, it is obvious that the industry is looking at the internet providers to take more responsibility in this matter. As a side note, the fact that those music industry organisations compared copyright infringement to child pornography in this letter is not only out of context in this discussion, but distasteful and misleading. I believe ‘disgusting’ was the term someone used in a conversation with me some weeks ago.

Unfortunately, there is a broad lack of understanding what monitoring internet traffic means for us: content accessed through the net is highly sensitive and personal, and privacy has to be guaranteed at all times in a society that praises freedom of information as one of the main pillars of democracy. While this sounds exaggerated, it is now that we all have to agree to a important principle: do we give digital communication and information the same status as we give towards more traditional counterparts?

Imagine a law, which would allow (or even force) your mailman to open all your letters and packages to see if there is any copyright infringing material sent to you, being passed. By the third time you received a pirated copy of ‘Brokeback Mountain’ you will not receive any more letters. Needless to say that this would be unconstitutional in most Western countries. Even opening a letter without the recipients permission is a crime in many countries.

In this context, Cory Doctorow has recently warned of “embedding control, surveillance and censorship into the very fabric of the information society’s infrastructure” and refers to the French HADOPI “three strikes” rule: “they’re sending out 10,000 legal threats a week now, and have promised 150,000 a week in short order. After three unsubstantiated accusations of infringement, your whole family is disconnected from the internet – from work, education, civic engagement, distant relatives, health information, community.”

There are two other big concerns I have with monitoring internet traffic to combat file sharing:

1. Often it is unclear to the consumer that files downloaded, or shared, are unlicensed. With the amount of free files on the net it’s easy to end up with content that has not been cleared with the rights-owners. Granted, common sense often helps navigation through those issues, especially for more popular content (eg. downloading all albums by ‘The Beatles’ for free on a Chinese website has probably not been signed off by EMI). But there are countless sources for amazing free independent music such as mp3 blogs and it’s often not clear what the rights situation is on those sites.

2. It seems that execution of any three-strikes policy is currently in the hand of the rights owner as well as the ISPs. I have not yet seen an independent agency that would set up a policy and deal with disputes. Giving the accusers the right to police themselves leaves far too much room for mistakes and even misuse.

To be clear: we need to deal with, and combat, illegal activity on the internet. And if this means having to wire-tap internet connections (of course with a court order) in order to prevent crimes then I’m fully supportive. The net should not be a law-free space; but a ‘guilty until innocent’ approach is not only limiting my civil liberties but also not practical in the process of building new business models for creative industries.

I recently went to Brisbane, Australia to attend the wonderful Big Sound conference. Other than speaking on a panel about the future of the music industry, I met some great people, saw very good bands and did a few interviews about how I see the recording industry develop at the moment. This is one of the videos:

One of my first tasks when I moved to Canada was to get an overview of digital music services in this country. I also wanted to figure out which of the big international services have launched in Canada and how well they are performing. Disappointingly I realized that other than a few players such as 7digital, Slacker and of course iTunes there aren’t many local digital music companies for a country that strongly supports its music industry: grants are a common way for indie labels to stay afloat and radio stations have to play a certain amount of Canadian artists.

Just like there is no lack of music fans in Canada there is no shortage of talented programmers and entrepreneurs – other digital businesses (e.g. games, advertising, movies) seem to be quite healthy. Companies like Pandora, Spotify, MOG and Rhapsody however have never launched their service in Canada and others like Last.fm only have a limited service in the second largest country in the world. Also, looking at the new players that have seen some hype recently (such as mFlow, Thumbplay and rdio) have not announced any plans for a Canadian launch.

After speaking to a range of people about the lack of access to legal digital music in Canada there seem to be different explanations:

1. Licensing difficulties (1) – it is complex and expensive to license content from record labels for Canada

I find that hard to believe. When licensing reordings from labels or aggregators you will often strike multi-territory deals so there is not a lot of additional work needed when including Canada as a territory as part of a launch (for example) in the US. However, depending on the label, you might not be able to license content for all of North America under one deal but you have to go through two offices. There might be one department dealing with the US and one with the Rest of World.

Nevertheless, when launching an international music service it shouldn’t be too hard to include Canada as a territory from a label licensing point of view.

2. Licensing difficulties (2) – getting publishing rights is a nightmare

Yes it is. But it is everywhere. At least in Canada there is only one collection society dealing with the rights of the music composers whereby in the US you have to go to a bunch. In Europe you will (normally) still have to deal with a different organization in each country which is slowly changing so pan-European licensing should be easily possible at some point.

3. Canadian copyright law is in limbo

Whereby this is true it shouldn’t stop anyone from launching a music service in Canada. Without wanting to go in too much detail this is the deal: many people say that the Canadian copyright  law is outdated and needs modernisation. This was suppose to happen for years but whenever there is a new government the proposed changes are being put ‘on hold’ (read: ‘thrown away’).

The international music community is actually quite upset about the lack of movement in Canadian copyright law calling it a “major source of the world’s [music] piracy problem” (IFPI). Ouch.

Again, this should not stop anyone to launch a digital music company in Canada since the changes in copyright law are unlikely to affect consumer facing music delivery services.

4. Canada is too small to make an investment like starting a music service worth-while

This is probably the excuse I hear most often: It seems that companies feel their investment will not be returned because the music market in Canada is too small. And starting a music service is a rather big investment with the largest cost being music licensing.

I think this is a fair argument but doesn’t explain why services are being launched in the smaller countries in Europe (just one example here). So starting up a service in an English speaking country that has a similar music taste to its big neighbour shouldn’t be so hard then, right? After all, Canada is the seventh biggest music market in the world (2005).

‘Big neighbour’ are two very important words here. It’s a psychological issue that the US (population: 309m) is so big and suddenly makes Canada (population 34m)seem so small. Living here now for a few months I can see that Canada has a complex about being the ‘small neighbour’ and everything has to be compared with the US. And of course everyone has to agree that when it comes to starting any business, given the choice, one would have to go to the US as the market is simply larger.

But this is not what it’s about: Canada needs digital music companies that have already proven success in other big territories to launch locally or alternatively a new breed of Canadian companies that can move music fans away from unlicensed music usage.

Photo: EliB

Assuming there will be no more ash cloud problems I will be over in Newcastle next week to speak at ‘The Know How‘ event. The panel is called Transmission and focuses on the changes in regional broadcasting and music consumption in general.

The event is organized by Generator and Evolution 2010 and I will be joined on stage by Ben Perreau (Global Radio/Gigulate) and Paul Campell (Amazing Radio) on the 24th May.

When I was on the phone today with our moderator Russ Conway I was reminded again of the gap in our terminology: we keep using the word ‘radio’ when we speak of services such as Last.fm and Pandora. The truth is that they have very little to do with the original ‘one-to-many’ broadcasting service called radio but we don’t seem to have a better term. ‘Personalized Streaming Music Service’ just doen’t sound very neat.

And something became clear today: I’ll probably have to get used to the fact that people will call me a ‘former Last.fm-er’. I noticed that’s the case with many of the guys that left Last.fm and I now often catch myself introducing myself as the former Head of Music. It just makes it easier for other people to understand what I’m all about even though we are more than the name of our old employer.

Following last nights great OpenMusicMedia event in Toronto I’m very much looking forward to our nest session in London on the 26th May. I will be back in town that week and hope to see you there. Below my post for the OpenMusicMedia blog with all the details:

After years of proclaiming the ‘death of the physical format’ we’re still celebrating the traditional independent record shops. While big chains are disappearing or changing their inventory from music to other entertainment products the local record store still seems to have an important role in music discovery and delivery.

In our next OpenMusicMedia session on the 26th May we will be joined by Stephen Godfroy who is the Director of Rough Trade Retail to discuss some of the following issues:

• What is the current and future role of independent record shops?
• What is the state of the physical record business?
• With digital music becoming ubiquitous, what does that mean for physical formats?
• What role do record shops provide for a local music scene?
• Will record shops continue to act as a ‘filter’ for music recommendation or are they mainly a point of distribution?

We will meet again in the William IV in East London, a short walk from Old Street station. Sticking to the OpenMusicMedia formula this will be an open conversation and we’re looking forward to everyone’s contribution. All OpenMusicMedia events are free but we appreciate you RSVPing on our facebook event. To get in touch please leave a comment below or send us a message on Twitter. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Wednesday, 26th May 2010 6:00 PM

at the William IV

7 Shepherdess Walk
London, N1 7QE
(Google Maps)

I’ve been in Vancouver just over two weeks and someone warned me that I will have to go over to Toronto before I realize it. It only took me this long.

As a co-founder of OpenMusicMedia I certainly wanted to see what the guys in Toronto are doing with the idea since I knew they had some good events last year. What I didn’t expect is that they would invited me to lead the conversation is the next OpenMusicMedia Toronto event which will take place on the 12th May.

Our conversation will focus on location based music services and we’ll discuss if those are necessary for the industry as well as music fans. The idea started with me thinking that 15 years ago a lot of the music discovery and consumption happened on a local level: we would find new music on local radio station, in the local record shops or through friends we hang out and go to gigs with. With the Internet things became very global and now we can explore music from all over the world and we are not bound to our local areas.

More recently we see the success of services and websites that are focusing on your area (Foursquare being just one example) and in our next OpenMusicMedia session in Toronto we want to discuss what this means for the music industry. Do we need more ‘local music services’? What role will local radio stations have in the future? After the closure of many local record store around the world will we they see their comeback over the next few years?

As always with OpenMusicMedia, I will not answer those questions but only act as a moderator for a big discussion in an informal setting. If you’re around it’d be great to see you there.

Holidays. And not just sitting by the beach for a week but really getting away from life’s routine, seeing other places and getting to know new people. That’s what I’m doing right now.

I haven’t had an iPhone/Blackberry for four months and of course haven’t been working. But I also haven’t produced a radio show (in fact have hardly listened to any new music), haven’t been involved with the new OpenMusicMedia events and haven’t even been blogging.

I spent the last four months in South America with Raila and feel truely relaxed – in fact I’m surprised how easy it was to disconnect from my life in London. We are moving to Canada soon so I have been ‘homeless’ since we left and all my belongings boil down to a 15kg Deuter backpack. I have two pairs of trousers and two jumpers.

Nevertheless (or perhaps because of all this) I look forward to getting back into something you can call a ‘normal routine’. And for me this routine will start with something fun:

I’m moderating a panel at SXSW in Austin this year, the topic of our discussion is ‘how will we listen to music in 2020‘. I will be joined on stage on the 17th March by Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Ben Perreau (Gigulate) and Steve Savoca (Domino). With such speakers this should be an intersting talk, if there is anything specifically you want to see discussed, feel free to post a comment here.

If you are at SXSW as well please let me know, would be good to meet you there: jonas(at)jonaswoost(dot)com.

PS: if you’re more intersted in my time off rather than SXSW you can find some pictures here and you can follow me on twitter here.