Jeff Price’s message to the streaming services

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There is a major problem for songwriters right now when it comes to streaming. The streaming services don’t know who to pay for each song. They can’t pay the songwriters correctly cause there is no infrastructure for it yet.

Now who’s responsible for building it? The songwriters or the streaming services?

Jeff Price, founder of Audiam, TuneCore, and spinART Records knows what he believes, anyway. This is a quote from from a speech at SF MusicTech Summit in 2014:

”If you’re going to use music to sell x-boxes and x-box subscriptions, or raise your market cap, that’s fine!
Just pay on time, and pay accurately. And if you can’t do that, go create your own fuckin’ music.
Oh, it’s hard isn’t it?
Yeah! That’s why music has value!
So invest in the infrastructure if you’re gonna use someone else’s property to make your billions of dollars. And freakin’ pay ‘em.
If you’re not gonna do it, then stop using it!”

Listen to the full speech here! 

Credit or no credit?

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Madonna’s album booklet for her new album ”Rebel Heart”, which is released next week, will contain only pictures, with no lyrics or credits to writers and producers. If the label thought that her fans wouldn’t care about this, they might have been wrong. Some fans are already reacting negatively.

Borrowing music?

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In Hypebots latest blogpost the recent change in the music industry is described as a shift from ”buying music to borrowing music”. But is this really an accurate description? Did the passive music listener really ”buy” music before, when it was delivered on a LP or CD? And is ”borrowing music” really a good description of the new industry landscape of streaming services?

Actually in the old days of LP and CD, the listener only bought the physical piece of plastic that the music was delivered on, he never ever ”bought” the music itself. There has always been regulations on what is legal to do with the music you ”bought”. You couldn’t multiply it and sell it, you couldn’t play it in public without paying even more to some other ”owners”. To put it simple: It’s not yours, cause you did not buy the music. You bought the experience of listening to music. Big difference.

Unlike the old time record stores, the new streaming services, like Spotify, don’t claim that they sell music, they speak in terms of selling an ”experience of listening to music”. As if this is a major change!

I believe that the real change, that we all need to acknowledge, is that the new streaming services are finally putting words to how the record industry has always worked. It has simply been blind to the fact that it’s not selling music. The product was always the experience of listening to music. And that has not changed a bit.

Fair Trade Music?

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”An international coalition of creators has joined forces to call for fairer rules and greater transparency in the distribution of royalties by digital music services. The proposals were presented in a new report on ”Fair Compensation for Music Creators in the Digital Age”, released by the International Council of Creators of Music (CIAM), with the support of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), Music Creators North America (MCNA) and the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN). ”

Read the full story here!

Yes, Copying Deprives the Owner of Property

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Devlin Hartline gets it right in this blogpost about the meaning of property:

”…the Second Circuit nails it: Copying someone’s files does indeed deprive the owner of his property”

”It is a common mistake for laymen to think that the word “property” refers only to tangible things. Lawyers, however, use the word “property” to refer to the rights an owner holds against others vis-à-vis a given thing, whether that thing is tangible or not.”

”As the Second Circuit noted, while copying the defendant’s hard drives did not deprive him of possession, it was nevertheless a deprivation of his intangible rights in the hard drives because it deprived him of his exclusive rights to control his own files. Nothing tangible was taken from the defendant, yet the defendant’s property rights were still violated.”

Remember the Kurzweil synthesizer?

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This guy Ray Kurzweil is a busy man. In the 80’s he invented one of the first keyboards that could sample a real piano, the Kurzweil K250. Stevie Wonder loved and used it. I grew up in the 80s and I used to love those Keyboards!

Well you can say Kurzweil has moved on since then…. He sold the Keyboard company in 1990.

He’s now one of the leading inventors when it comes to artificial intelligence, he’s written 5 books and is considered one of the leading thinkers when it comes to something called transhumanism. 

He has a very strong vision about the future where the computes will outsmart humans, and that this eventually lead to human immortality. Some people call him a futurist.

Well this would not mean much to us all if it was not for one fact:

Ray Kurzweil now works as a director of engineering at…. guess what…..

GOOGLE!

This guy finally has the tools to really fulfill his dream. Think about that the next time you use google translate or send an email with your G-mail account.

So to all of you who still think about Keyboards when you hear the name Kurzweil… Think again!