Here’s a different take on soundware business models: offer your stuff for free, then depend on donations. That’s the tack at Togeo Studios, who have an impressive collection of packs. Wave Attack I, for instance, includes single-cycle waveforms with arpeggiated sequences and leads. Their work is available on BitTorrent, too, which could help defray bandwidth costs. (Well, single-cycle waveforms don’t take up much, but perhaps larger packs might.)

I have to admit, I’m skeptical of the donationware model. The issue is, it seems like a lot of folks just aren’t going to donate – not necessarily for any sinister reasons, but simply because they don’t “get around to it.” Heck, just selling soundware is hard enough. And the brilliant, open source Ardour DAW has struggled to cobble together even a few licenses’ worth of income monthly, despite very reasonable subscription fees and powerful features.

I’m skeptical, but I’m also intrigued. Donationware or freemium models once powered the PC shareware industry and launched the now-massive game company Epic Games (of Unreal fame). Challenging as it might be, these models could open new tools to musicians and would be particularly powerful with open source. It’s something that could help us start new projects here on CDM, while paying our rent / electric bills. So what do you think of Togeo’s work? And that specific example aside, would you be willing to “donate” to software, soundware, and learning materials the way that you do American public radio and TV?

Togeo Studios
Wave Attack 1 Live Pack – mininova [Torrent page]

Music DRM may be a thing of the past, online sales may be growing, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. record industry has missed a beat in its ongoing legal and lobbying campaign against music piracy online.

The latest battle starts today in Rhode Island federal court. The difference this time: the RIAA and record companies will have to face a Harvard Law prof and his students. Prof. Charles Nesson and his team allege the industry is abusing the court system, unfairly making “examples” out of the people they’re suing, and invading privacy.

Whatever your feelings about the righteousness of litigation as a deterrent to piracy, the case in particular gets pretty strange. Rhode Island residents Arthur and Judie Tenenbaum face having their home computer seized as evidence, despite the fact that even the industry legal team doesn’t contend this particular computer was used for the alleged downloading. The couple’s son faces a stunning $1 million+ in possible damages, but only allegedly shared seven songs on Kazaa – and the couple didn’t even own the computer when their son lived with them.

The team will be up for interviews, so I’ll try to follow up – let us know if you have questions for them. More here:

RIAA v. Joel Tenenbaum @ the blog CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion [Harvard Law]

Updated: Early word is that the hearing has been rescheduled, Prof. Nesson isn’t admitted to argue in a Rhode Island court, and the judge (rightfully) denied the RIAA motion to look at Joel Tenenbaum’s parents’ computer, since it wasn’t involved. More official details forthcoming.

In other news, Jim Griffin of Warner Music Group continues to push a plan to offer a blanket license to campuses to avoid litigation by allowing students to pay a voluntary monthly fee to download music from file sharing services. It’s not entirely clear to me why this scheme continues to attack such ire online. Ars Technica rightfully says hold the kneejerk responses and wait for the details. There’s certainly a precedent: clubs, bars, concert venues, and the like already pay blanket license fees for performance rights, and the revenue is ultimately distributed to the people who own the work (think publishers and writers). That’s not to say the plan isn’t rife with potential problems, and it seems to me could even endanger efforts to encourage things like Creative Commons licensing. But without more details, it’s tough to criticize the idea without taking into account both its pitfalls and potential.

One thing everyone ought to be able to agree on, perhaps even some of the beleaguered record labels: ongoing litigation has been ugly and unproductive, and still doesn’t solve the underlying problem. With broad wireless Internet access on the horizon, even if I were to play devil’s advocate and assume I was an RIAA member wanting to stop campus sharing, it seems just scaring campuses into blocking these services isn’t really a solution.

And as artists, our primary concern ought to be that these responses aren’t doing what we most desperately need: establishing a real business model and promotional possibilities for emerging distribution online.

Could meshes of data help the creation of new, international radio broadcasting and receiving mechanisms – even in rural areas? Artist Juan Esteban Rios proposes a design to do that. It’s not just a software concept; a hardware design would make the idea accessible even to people who don’t own or know how to use computers.

It seems a powerful idea for musicians, as well, particularly if it helped eliminate the need for dedicated streaming servers. (There may be others who are more familiar with P2P broadcasting technology out there; if so, I’d love to hear from you.) Imagine tuning into a gamelan performance in Jakarta, then a live electronic music evening from Brazil, then a performance in rural sub-Saharan African (relayed to better infrastructure in Lagos).

The technology here is radio-based (see clarification from the creator of the video in comments), but mesh and P2P technologies involving the Internet — or a bridge from remote, radio- or satellite-based communication — could likewise apply.

Video feature by designguide.tv, found via toxi.

Trent sez: “Buy all these music formats from meeeeeeeeeee!” Photo: Jenna Foxton.

Artists are known to mouth off a bit about the Future of Music and Digital Distribution and whatnot, but Trent Reznor is putting his money — and not money — where his mouth is.

Nine Inch Nails Menu of Ordering Options for Ghosts I-IV

via Mashable: Practice What You Preach: Nine Inch Nails Gives Away New Album

And they certainly have their bases covered with their new album “Ghosts”:

• Get the first volume of the album free on torrent sites (or via the NIN site)
• Pay US$5 for a download of all 36 tracks (take that, Radiohead!)
• Get a 2 CD box set for US$10 (which also includes immediate full download of the tracks)
• US$75 gets you the 2 CDs, a data DVD with the digital tracks, and a Blu-Ray disc with 96/24 stereo and accompanying slideshow
• US$300 Adds four LPs on vinyl, two prints, and Trent’s John Hancock — limited-run 2500 pieces

I think they should have just kept going. You know, $800 gets you cassette tapes, Pro Tools session files, 8-tracks, surround sound. $50,000 adds an IMAX film (projector not included) and one of those little plastic mini records. $500,000 adds a DIY planetarium show, plus a special Buddha Box edition and a low-power FM radio transmitter so you can self-broadcast the album. $1 million and you get a Jaguar pre-loaded with a specially-signed sound system that plays the album, plus reel-to-reel multitracks. $500 million and Trent comes to your house, brings his studio rig and console, and re-records the album for you in your living room.

Before you assume the downloads are worthless, though, even the torrent file includes PDF “liner notes” and 320 kbps MP3 files. Buy the download and you have an option of either FLAC lossless or Apple Lossless audio — something I know readers here have complained about.

There’s only one problem. The fact that musical superstars are experimenting with various formats amounts to great research into what people may want. But if you’re not a Nine Inch Nails junkie, this is all awfully … well, complicated. For lesser-known artists, it seems like finding just one or two solutions that make most people happy is a better route, and it’s not clear what those are yet.

I’m personally most interested to see how the torrent thing works. Then again, with bandwidth costs plummeting, serving up your own audio — even lossless audio — becomes a viable option for artists and small labels. And so far, the torrent doesn’t seem to be cannibalizing the for-fee options, as NIN’s site says they’re experience high volume of traffic and orders. If enough people spring for the higher-cost options, the free versions may pay for themselves.

Use it as a preview of what you want to hear if you’re lucky enough to be going to Austin, or use it as a free virtual South by Southwest and save on the hotel, air, and pass costs.

SXSW Showcasing Music Torrents

via: South By Southwest (SXSW) 2008 700 Song Torrent [GarageSpin]

In fact, if you are going to Austin, let me know — I’d love to have a write-up of the music portion, as I’m going just to interactive / film / gaming.

Photo: Hometown Invasion Tour.

Meanwhile, oink.cd’s homepage has been replaced with an ominous warning:

This site has been closed as a result of a criminal investigation by IFPI, BPI,
Cleveland Police and the Fiscal Investigation Unit of the Dutch Police (FIOD ECD) into
suspected illegal music distribution.

A criminal investigation continues into the identities and activities of the site’s
users.

[Emphasis mine]

So, will the UK really come after oink’s users, or is that just an idle threat?

Meanwhile, a number of you have written in with what I think is a good criticism of the oink raid, one worth considering even for those of us who oppose piracy. Why did these agencies go after oink first, a torrent tracker that was hosting at least some torrents uploaded legitimately by indie labels, and one far smaller and less focused on pre-release albums than bigger trackers like mininova? Was it because the site’s popularity among some of the music fan elite made it a more obvious target — or simply that the really dangerous and popular torrents are harder to squash? (Or both?) See Veqtor’s comment for a good summary. Some are also putting forward various conspiracy theories, but I personally suspect laziness on the part of the industry and UK/Europe authorities. Software developer and label owner Chris Randall has a well-argued rant against piracy in the same comment thread. But separate from that argument, the failing of the authorities in this case, and some of the potential oink demonstrates for non-pirate, legitimate sites, are well worth considering. See comments on the previous post.

Several readers have written in to say that Oink, a music torrent server, has been busted. British and Dutch police raided the servers (via several properties in Amsterdam) and the 24-year-old IT worker (and his father) alleged to have operated the site.

The news:
IFPI press release
Huge pirate music site shut down [BBC News, in a story Releasedog, without explanation, claims contains "lies." Anyone know what they're talking about?]

Oink was arguably the largest music-focused BitTorrent-based server, but its special notoriety was in pirating albums prior to release — some 60 albums this year alone, according to worldwide recording industry body IFPI. It also succeeded as being an elite, invite-only club — albeit with a reported 180,000 members. That success led Blender Magazine to name Oink’s anonymous operator “Oinkylicious Alan” one of its 25 “power geeks” of music — though, ahem, “Alen” may not be so anonymous any more.

Updated: As several of you have noted, there were some additional details that made Oink very different. The members were largely music aficionados, with a strict upload ratio meaning that it was closer to a swapping service than some other torrent sites. What that makes me wonder — oink may well have been closer to a community, closer to legit than other torrent sites. But could it also be a model for truly legit music services?

Music software, too: Based on at least one tip from readers, the same torrent servers were also popular for pirating plug-ins and music software for “evaluation” prior to purchasing. Do people really purchase software after pirating it? Our sources say some do, at least among die-hard computer musicians on CDM, though unquestionably many more don’t. The availability of demo versions of a lot of software should raise at least some eyebrows, but in fairness, not all software is available as a demo — particularly plug-ins. (Many other CDM readers, for the record, stay away from pirated music software for “evaluation” or otherwise.) But at least a couple of you have noted software wasn’t a big portion of oink.

Torrent, force for good. Note to software publishers: legit torrents could actually be a great way to distribute real demo versions and updates, at vastly reduced bandwidth costs. Unfortunately, each time torrent servers aggressively promote piracy, BitTorrent as a technology loses ground. And that’s too bad; BitTorrent really is fantastic tech with real legitimate uses.