I apparently had better things to do this weekend than hear the latest self-righteous, all music is free, the Web changes the fabric of reality post about the music business, this time from Michael Arrington of Techcrunch. The title is intended to get a rise out of people. (”These Crazy Musicians Still Think They Should Get Paid For Recorded Music.” Uh … thanks?) But tracking through links, I came upon this quote:

Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. Websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor. In fact, they’re doing them a favor that they should (and will) be paid for.

Now, regular readers know CDM is all about new business models for music, all about ditching DRM, not at all about archaic royalty schemes. And certainly I can’t think of a good argument for the prompt for Arrington’s piece, which was that Billy Bragg thinks artists are owed money retroactively by a site to which they’ve already uploaded their own music.

Here’s my answer to that:

Recorded music has value to consumers.

Artist/producer Morgan King writes us to say a couple of electronic music outlets are evidently no more. For his part, Morgan is working on getting more music available in his own project, Accidental Music — more on that soon. (And some of you may know Morgan from projects like Clubland, or the fact that he won a Swedish Grammy — they’re tasty with lingonberries, believe me.) React Music / Resist Music was a label close to him personally. He writes:

I am sad to report on the demise of Resist Music, who I have personally had dealings with for the last thirteen years!

Resist Music actually started out in 1990 known then as React Music and they came to prominence with the release of the first three volumes of the seminal “Café Del Mar” Compilation, Mrs Wood and the Reactivate series to name a few.

In 2004 React Music was forced into voluntary administration following the closure of the Beechwood Music group which owed React in excess of £1.000.000 and it was at this point they bounced back in the guise of Resist Music the same year!

In November this year (2007) I was waiting for my royalty payment and in the past Resist we’re always prompt at making payments, so it came as a surprise to me when after an enquiry about monies due to me I had no response and when I tried to call the phone had been disconnected.

A few days’ later I emailed an employee who I knew personally and this was the response:

Hi Morgan

Very bad news I’m afraid.  I was made redundant last Friday which is what it says in the letter I received this morning, apparently at that time Resist went into Liquidation.

The Liquidators are David Rubin & Partners, Pearl Assurance House, 319 Ballards Lane, London N12 8LY.

I know that Music Industry sales have really been suffering at the hands of modern technology so I’m afraid it hasn’t come as a surprise.

At the time of writing this I am waiting for the liquidators to get back to me and the Resist Website still seems to be in operation although every other activity of the company has ceased!

In the following week I heard that 3Beat Digital and Amato distribution had also folded: 3beat Digital

I wish James and Melissa all the best in the future and would like to say a personal thanks for the years of hard work they put in to the Music Business.

3Beat Digital is notable in that they, like dancetracksdigital, offered pre-warped Ableton Live-ready tracks; they were more or less the UK-based alternative. (I wrote about the two services for Computer Music a while ago.) This leaves DTD, from what I can tell; 3Beat has only a dance blog where the store had been. Any other distributors MIA, let us know.

Universal CEO Doug Morris makes an easy target for the blogosphere. This is the old-school record industry executive who called iPod owners thieves and wanted broad legal enforcement against piracy — enforcement that, in the end, seems to pale in comparison to the revenue generated by actually offering online sales. So, now that Morris has gone up against Wired, the blogosphere can easily see him as a dinosaur.

Universal’s CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He’s Giving Songs Away. [Wired News]

But as artists, all of us face a fundamental problem: how do you put value on something that’s ephemeral? It’s an age-old issue that has faced musicians explaining to their parents why they don’t want a real job, and artists to their patrons when affixing a price tag. (And as we’ve seen from veteran software developers and the BanPiracy debate, software “artists” face the same challenge.) Sure, people love to talk piracy, because it’s easier to talk in those terms. Piracy is theft, theft is crime, and crime is bad — including making a mix tape for a friend. Or all music should be free, and never mind that artists need health insurance and rent money. They’re black and white extremes, entirely couched in moral/philosophical terms, neither of which contend with how to solve the actual real-world problem (at least, not if you stop there).

And then I came across this quote from Morris in the interview:

“Really, an album that someone worked on for two years — is that worth only $9, $10, when people pay two bucks for coffee in Starbucks?” Morris sighs. “People never really understand what’s happening to the artists … If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go,” he says. “That’s what happened to the record business.”

Wait a minute… a liquid that comes out of your faucet for free, but is also sold, in bottles, at retail. How much would you be willing to pay? Hmmm… this sounds familiar.

It’s called water.

And how much are people willing to pay for the privilege of packaging, control over subtle variations of taste, and mobility? Quite a lot, as it happens. More than Coke.

The Web holds huge potential for music sharing and music discovery, but figuring out how to make that potential work — and how to navigate copyright and licensing laws in the process - has been a major challenge. This week, the creators of the website Mixaloo promised to “bring mix tapes into the digital age.” Whether you buy into that concept or not, or their particular implementation, the site does demonstrate both some of the opportunities and legal hurdles in Web sharing. They also inherit the closed model supported by labels (no full streams, previews only, DRM), but already that’s changing (MP3, and the promise, hopefully, of full-length tracks soon). It’s like a microcosm of the whole business at the moment.

Mixaloo.com

I spoke to the founders shortly before launch, and they described how their approach differs from the online radio model, which is constrained in part by the law:

There’s the streaming radio camp … you have a minimum of forty tracks, you can’t have the same artist twice in a row, and then you get into the whole mess of royalties. Then there’s the way we’re going — user-generated albums. And we like that because it’s personalized.”

The basic model:

• 10 or more tracks on the “mix tape”
• Mix your album from 3.5 million + tracks.
• Majors and indie music — the founders say they have “deals with all the major labels” but also “a ton of independent aggregators like CD Baby, The Orchard, and Iota
• Embed players and market mixes on Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc.
• Sell tracks via any of your players and earn a 50% commission
• For now, 30-second previews — but hopefully that will change? (more in a moment)

It was inevitable. With the likes of Radiohead doing “donationware”, DRM-free MP3 downloads, someone was bound to follow. (And, in fairness, Radiohead were by no means the first — this is something various artists have been talking about or doing for years. Updated: for some examples of other free albums through music history, see comments below. And as the trend grows, expect a lot more artist-to-listener downloads, or even small label-to-listener or small online store-to-listener, soon.)

The latest is Saul Williams, with the album “The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!” So, what has he got that Radiohead hasn’t got?

The writing’s on the wall: DRM for music downloads is deader than the eight track. Okay, actually, that’s not fair: the eight track was relatively good technology.

Just two weeks after Amazon launched their own DRM-free music store, Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon. DRM won’t be gone completely from the Zune store, but there will be hundreds of thousands of DRM-free tracks going live, apparently in November with the release of a new store and new players. That’s a major departure, given that Microsoft built its Zune and PlaysForSure platforms around DRM, and introduced significant new DRM features in Vista. Normally, I don’t like to quote press releases, but I’ll give my friends at the Digital Freedom Campaign a chance for some deserved gloating:

“The industry standard has shifted in the past six months and the tide has turned in favor of consumers,” Maura Corbett, a spokesperson for the Digital Freedom Campaign said. “The number of digital music retailers offering DRM-free music will soon out number those that do not, and consumers will soon live in a world where they can listen to legally purchased music when, how, and where they want. We congratulate Microsoft for joining the growing number of retailers and labels that have realized the best way to increase the sales of digital music, is to listen to their customers.”

Actually, I’ll argue one point. The number of digital music retailers offering DRM-free music already outnumbers those that don’t.

Splice, a site for remixing songs, can now do something no Web browser app has successfully done before: pass for a dedicated audio app.

It’s no [Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, insert app here], but Splice’s online editor is a basic, functional audio sequencer with real-time arrangement, instruments, sync, and audio effects, all built in Adobe Flash CS3 / ActionScript 3. Sure, Flash has been able to do basic audio playback and mixing for some time. But Splice actually does things that dedicated audio applications normally do exclusively, such as sophisticated audio effects. There’s still quite a lot it doesn’t do, and since many of those things (live multitrack audio recording, hardware connections, and so on) aren’t currently possible in the browser, Web apps are unlikely to usurp dedicated music creation software any time in the forseeable future. But maybe that’s not the point: musicians can keep using the tools they love for music creation, then throw up a track and let a friend mash-up a new beat, or let fans create remixes. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine dedicated apps having similar online counterparts, or hooking seamlessly into such services.

And it’s what Splice does on the Web that makes it interesting. Not only are the tracks actively remixable, even by a casual listener new to the software who just wants to mess around, but sound sources are shared, too. You can pull up open freely-licensed samples from the Freesound Project, a collaborative database of sounds recorded around the world.

Little wonder then, that the lead developer of the new Splice has already made a name founding the sample project and sharing unusual software plug-ins (the traditional, offline type) for free. Bram de Jong, CTO and lead developer of the new Splice, is known to plug-in devotees for his involvement in Smartelectronix, a collective of developers releasing powerful and sometimes downright bizarre plugs for free. I got to talk to Bram about his new day job. He shares what Splice is about, what people are using it for, and how the heck they got Flash doing real audio.

Apple’s GarageBand is a powerful tool for recording MIDI and audio and arranging loops. It can be puzzling to songwriters, though, because it doesn’t really understand chord changes. Sure, you can transpose MIDI loops or (more problematically) audio, but that process is a bit clunky and rarely sounds right. Many beginner-level GarageBand songs (especially by students) simply stay in one big, long I chord for an entire piece, which, by astounding coincidence, is what I sound like playing guitar. (Come on, I went to the trouble of getting my fingers on these frets — now you want me to move them? Where’s a piano? I’m through.)

Enter ChordStudio, an entirely Web-based tool that takes the opposite approach. Running entirely in a browser, the free Web app presents a blank score and lets you construct song structures with chords. Behind the scenes, 30,000 loops seamlessly render those chords into something that actually sounds like music. You can control the mix with common instruments, including electric guitars, bass, drums, piano, and electric piano.

The results are very simple, but I can see them being very useful. Aside from making it fun for a beginner with limited computer and/or music skills to put together basic song structures, it’s not hard to imagine someone using this as a quickie web tool on the road to get an idea down. It’s no GarageBand killer, of course — it’s just a simple Web interface — but if you like the loops, you can purchase them as a US$99 DVD and use them with GarageBand or your favorite looping app of choice.

ChordStudio.com

Web applications are unlikely ever to replace dedicated, standalone music and audio applications, because these applications by definition require an intimate relationship with your computer’s hardware. But that doesn’t mean the Web won’t be a place for some simple, useful ideas to complement standalone apps. Previously:

Tune Your Guitar Via the Web, with Free Tuner and Instructions

Music itself may be ephemeral, but it’s deeply connected to the spaces in which it’s performed and heard. You’ll notice that space all the more readily if it’s, say, a giant, cavernous grain silo, and you can access the space not only in person but over the Internet. And, really, you can’t call yourself an audiophile if you don’t have a grain silo handy for listening.

JollyRogered writes with this gem from the Audiooddities list. It’s a chance to hear an online performance of the digitally-connected grain silo, the Silophone:

Announcing a special online performance by Lee Rosevere, scheduled for July 16, 2007 at 9:30pm EST.

The performance will be an exclusive live internet event, where Lee will perform new original material from his home studio and stream it to the Silophone.

The Silo #5 is an abandoned grain storage facility in the port of Montréal. From the website:

MixDepot.net, a file-hosting service for DJs and musicians, will soon be no more (thanks, David, for the heads-up!):

Effective May 1, 2007, mixdepot.net will be shutting down. I’ve suspended billing so there won’t be a charge for the final month of service.

Thanks for your support, and I wish you the best of luck in all your DJ pursuits!

In case you haven’t heard of the service, here’s an explanation from the about page:

MixDepot.net was created in early 2005 to solve a problem frequently encountered by electronic music artists and DJs on the Internet. These artists host large files and would like to offer them to as many people as possible. With a traditional web hosting service, they may have plenty of disk space, but eat through their monthly bandwidth allocation within several days. They are then forced to purchase more bandwidth or jump to another host to keep their mixes available.

At MixDepot.net, download bandwidth is unmetered and we only charge our artists for disk space. We also provide automatic BitTorrent support during the first several days when a mix is the most popular to allow the greatest number of people to download the file.

Web services often don’t have the longest shelf life, but it’s still said when things go away. Of course, this brings me to my next question: where you like to host your files?