As much as the RIAA has declared victory in the P2P fight, the online music genie is out of the bottle and the old ways of selling music are starting to look as quaint as the eight-track.
Eliot Van Buskirk over at Wired’s Listening Post has the low-down on a new P2P tool from Prague-based AllPeers that is “RIAA-proof.” By that he means that AllPeers is a mini-P2P app that allows small groups of friends, a little social network, so to speak, to swap music online. Because the groups set up with AllPeers are small and invitation only, it’s going to be hard for the RIAA to infiltrate the networks.
AllPeers uses a Firefox extension and leverages BitTorrent to enable the networking and swapping. A beta of the new application is here.
Meanwhile, Wired magazine’s Jeff Howe has this longish piece on a Canadian music management company and indie record label called Nettwerk Music Group, headed by CEO Terry McBride. McBride, who represents top Canadian bands and singers such as Bare Naked Ladies, Avril Lavigne and Sarah McLachlan, thinks the music industry’s business models hurt not only artists but also record companies themselves.
His idea is to sell music “in every form imaginable,” from ringtones to individual vocal and instrumental music tracks. A new Bare Naked Ladies album, which consists of 29 songs, has more than 200 copyrighted assets (all owned by the band) that can be exploited to make more money than was possible under the old, “bureaucratic” record company model.
Between ringtones, acoustic versions, and concert recordings, those 29 songs have been multiplied into more than 200 “assets” – song versions – that can be used individually or in conjunction with others to create a product. “Because the copyrights are in one place [in BNL’s hands], we can be really creative,” McBride says. Hardcore fans can buy 45 of those assets on a USB drive; others can download the special Sims versions (recorded in Simlish, no less). “For decades, people in music have used the number of albums sold as a measuring stick for success,” McBride says. “We’re trying to get people to see beyond that. It’s about revenue from music, however you make it – selling concert tickets, licensing to TV, or selling packed USB drives.”
McBride embraces P2P swapping of music (he calls fans “marketers”) and even paid for the defense of a Texas man sued by the RIAA. His radical vision even extends to selling stock in bands, an idea prompted by the revision of the tax code that makes it easier to sell intellectual property as a stock.
“Once we have access to all the intellectual property, we’re going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments,” McBride says. “Eventually, a major band could be its own public company.” The key, he adds, sounding like an overzealous investment banker, is that the value of a band would be measured like a stock and would receive capitalization in expectation of future earnings. “At that point, even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable,” McBride says.
These kinds of innovative online music developments makes you wonder whether a recent Screen Digest study on music in Europe will prove true, for the record companies anyway. This analysis projects that by 2010, online music sales will halt the decline in sales of recorded music.
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:54 AM|Comments(0)
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