Paul Glazowski has a great article over at Mashable on how attempts to suspend BitTorrent trackers in an effort to counter file sharing are only the last gasp of a myopic old media.

For more on all things file sharing and the emergence of compelling business models in this space, please do check out TorrentFreak.

‘So it bears repeating, even if it entails beating the dead horse deader still, that action against users of BitTorrent is not any way to make progress in the media distribution industry. Instead, employing the protocol to try to play the game better than the non-legal crowd is the way make a qualitative, and thus quantitative impact. Otherwise the market will go nowhere.’

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Er yeah it does, some London scientificos working for Canadians say so:

‘The two researchers at the University of London that conducted the study for the Canadian Government estimated that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is actually an increase in music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per year.’ (via Mashable)

0.44 of a CD = Less than half a Radiohead album, all of the Westlife catalogue and a night in a Dublin Hotel, 3 of Girl’s Aloud (any 3) a Hummer limo and a lingerie photo shoot or Lily Allen and a packet of Marlboro Lights.

I recently got talking to one of the founders of a popular music site, who shall remain nameless. They have an all you can eat monthly subscription business model, part of which is a royalty divided amongst the music publishers they have deals with according to the volume of sales. It works, it’s successful and though occasionally unlicensed music will creep into the inventory, Read the rest of this entry »

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You gotta be dead drumming genius John Bonham not to have noticed the audible death throws of the the music majors this past week. Radiohead were not the first to release their album in a ‘pay what you think‘ format, The Charlatans got in a week before and no doubt others before that, but it takes a major player to get everyone to sit up and listen. Now it’s reported Oasis and Jamiroquai are to follow suit and Madonna is to expose her disco rear to Warner Brothers and sign a $120m deal for 10 years with concert promoters Live Nation.

The economics of music are shifting. The artefact, ie the vinyl record or CD no longer matter in the digital age. Now the artefact is a loyal fan, a concert ticket, a t-shirt. Given the cost of replication of any MP3 is zero, charging for a single is going to become a very difficult model to sustain, whilst the album can adapt and thrive in the new ‘pay what you think’ format. Read the rest of this entry »

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Continuing David’s music theme I urge people to read Stephen Dubner’s article for the New York Times: What’s The Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum.

In the article he poses the question: So what really happened to the music industry, and what will it look like in five or ten years? to five people with more up tempo brains than us and it makes for an intriguing thesis, herewith some choice samples:

‘Putting profitability aside for now, what is the explanation for the sales reduction that has occurred? The most obvious culprit is illicit file-sharing on networks such as Napster, KaZaA, eDonkey, and BitTorrent. While linking the two seems tantalizing — file sharing rose to prominence at roughly the same time that record sales started to fall — there is surprisingly little evidence to support the claim that file sharing has significantly hurt record sales. Read the rest of this entry »

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