Common Media has opened an online store that sells DRM-free music and video from mostly independent artists. The site uses bittorent-based technology to allow musicians and authors to sell and distribute their audio works for $.99/song or $4.99 to $29.99 for albums or spoken books.
Videos are sold for $.99 up to $49.99 each, and the site has a place for uploading and selling content for the video iPod. Content providers get to keep 70% of the net revenue of the sales. (Thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing).
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:55 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Courtesy of John Borland at CNET’s Music Blog, the Digital Media Association (DiMA), the trade group for big Internet media companies including Yahoo and Apple, have asked federal regulators to cut by about half the amount of royalties they pay to record companies for music on Internet radio services.
The DiMA has asked the Copyright Royalty Board to reduce to 5.5% the royalties they pay to artists and record companies for these services, a drop from the current 10.9%. In what is no doubt an understatement, Borland says “The proposal is sure to anger executives at record labels.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:44 PM | Print
An interesting fact from the ITU Policy Blog: Asia-Pacific has overtaken the Americas in terms of the number of regional Internet users. In 2001, the Americas had 38% of the world’s Internet users and Asia-Pacific had 32%. In 2004, this is almost reversed with Asia-Pacific having 37% and the Americas with 31%. (Click on the thumbnail for a chart depicting this trend). Europe has stayed at a relatively constant 29%, while Africa has made some minor gains, growing from 1% to 3% of the world’s Internet users.
Courtesy of Lost Remote, the BBC is following in the footsteps of Disney’s ABC by making most of its programming available for viewing on the video iPod. But unlike ABC, the BBC won’t charge a fee for the shows because, the company reckons, the shows have already been paid for by the the public license fees that fund the BBC. The BBC TV programs will be available for viewing on the iPods for seven days following their initial airings.
Nathan Torkington has an interesting essay on netlabels, online record companies, on O’Reilly Radar. What Nat says, in essence, is that netlabels benefit musicians by providing a marketing vehicle for live concerts. Given that most musicians don’t really see revenue from CD or album sales from traditional record companies anyway, netlabels might be a better alternative for musicians than the much-revered record company contracts.
They succeed because they make everyone happy. Listeners get music for free, of course. Artists get to have their music distributed in high-quality versions with good metadata, album covers, etc. rather than crappy low-fi rips with no guarantee their name is on it. But most of all, artists and the labels build brands. The music sells the artist’s live shows (if they have any), and the quality of the music found and distributed by the netlabel builds the reputation of the person behind the netlabel. And netlabels are starting to launch careers—there are a few artists, in particular a guy named Pheek who has become fairly big in the last year or two, who came entirely from netlabel releases.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:36 PM | Print | Comments (0)
A bit of trivia amid all the heavy issues: Skype Journal has an item on the origin of the word Skype. Niklas Zennstrom and some of the other early-days Skype workers originally called their PC-to-PC voice service “Sky peer-to-peer,” which got shortened to “Skyper.” But because the domain skyper was already in use, they further contracted the name to simply Skype.
This one slipped past me yesterday — NBC Nightly News announced that its evening news show will be webcast for free and available on MSNBC.com starting November 7. But it won’t be shown live — viewers will be able to tune in at 10 pm ET/7 PM PT at Nightly.MSNBC.com.
MSNBC.com claims to already be the top-viewed streaming video news site, with 75 million news videos shown in the month of September, and an average of 23 million unique visitors per month. The site already shows ndividual segments from “Nightly News,” “Today,” “Dateline,” “Meet the Press,” and MSNBC TV as well as live video events and MSNBC.com original programs.
Update: Staci Kramer of paidcontent.org has an interview with Charlie Tillinghast, President, MSNBC.com, regarding the decision to stream the Nightly News.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)Sarah Lai Stirland has a piece in the National Journal’s Tech Daily about Hollywood’s failure to push anti-piracy schemes through Congress without a special exemption for “fair use” of copyrighted content. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) has insisted that any such measures must be accompanied by legislation that would clarify consumers’ fair use rights to copy protected materials for non-commercial, private uses.
Barton introduced a bill, H.R. 1201, that would require companies to warn consumers if compact discs are sold with anti-piracy technologies that would affect those rights. The bill, which Hollywood and the recording industry oppose, would also amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to state that bypassing copy protection mechanisms would be legal if consumers did it to exercise their fair use rights.
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) the primary sponsor of H.R. 1201, also sits on the Judiciary Committee, which will hold hearings on November 3 on Hollywood’s pursuit of a broadcast flag protection requirement for digital video content.
Update: EFF links to a revival of Hollywood’s bid to plug the “analog hole” which covers devices designed to convert analog content into digital content. In a proposal for the hearing on Thursday, the MPAA has prepared legislative language that would impose regulation of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), generic computing components found in scientific, medical and entertainment devices. Basically, every ADC will be controlled by a chip that will shut it down if it is asked to assist in converting copyrighted material.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:31 AM | Print
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