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Links for 2008-06-11 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Three strikes struck off?
How the rhetoric changes in the long struggle between the would-be enforcers like the BPI and the ISPs (and their customers) - what's really going on here?

Three strikes struck off?

DJ — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 05:21:00 PDT

Four months ago lots of people were getting worked up about the possibility that the UK Government might somehow enforce a "three strikes and you're out" policy for Internet filesharers. I was asked to write an opinion piece about it myself, but more about that in a bit. At that time, the BPI — the organisation that represents major record labels in the UK — was quoted as favouring a "we do the policing, you send the letters" deal with ISPs, and as saying "we've been asking ISPs for more than 18 months to introduce a system to warn their customers (twice) before pulling the plug on them. But we haven't had much success and our faith in negotiations is running thin."

Four months on, and it's interesting to see how a BPI deal with the Virgin Media ISP is being reported. The deal is for an "education campaign" that will see users who share files illegally receive, not a warning or a disconnection notice, but "practical advice on how to prevent internet account misuse, links to legitimate sites and the potential dangers… of viruses and spyware." This last quote is from Music Week coverage [subscription required], which hails it as "a giant leap forward in [the BPI's] efforts to stop illegal file-sharing on the internet by signing a landmark deal" (my emphasis). I don't know about you, but after all that sabre-rattling, sending out letters politely informing criminals (in heavy quote marks) that there are alternatives to crime seems like quite a comedown.

Clearly the game isn't over yet, and — to mix my metaphors — one creates hostages to fortune by projecting that the winner of a battle will be the winner of the war. But that's perhaps my main point, because there is a lot of pressure both in mainstream media and in blogs to get worked up into a lather and over-react to minor or short-term skirmishes. I wrote about this under the title of slow blogging on my DJ Alchemi blog recently. As with the Radiohead hoo-ha that I referenced there, I suspect that the whole three-strikes ruckus will, with hindsight, seem like a minor skirmish in the broader sweep of events. (The fuss was whipped up over the implication that the Government, not just the BPI, was in favour of regulating for three-strikes — but firm evidence of this support didn't exist then, and hasn't appeared since.)

With that preface, here is what I wrote on 12 February, trying to anticipate the different ways the scenario might play out, and to analyse the deeper trends that this skirmish brought to the surface. It was commissioned by the Daily Telegraph though they didn't run it in the end.

"Something must be done" about illegal downloading of music and movies via the Internet. Actually many things should be done. We need a sophisticated mix of carrot and stick to tackle the full range of downloading behaviours, which extend from the 'innocent' modern-day digital equivalents of lending an album to a friend through to attempts to undermine copyright on a grand scale. However, the proposal rumoured to be included in the Government's Creative Industries Green Paper may be just one big, crude stick that could undermine other fledgling measures to create a media distribution economy fit for the 21st century.

The proposal is that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be obliged to monitor their customers for downloading 'offences'. They should warn them at first, but ultimately ban repeat offenders on a "three strikes and you're out" basis. This would require a register of offenders, presumably on a national basis, shared among ISPs to prevent them merely signing up to another provider's service.

The internet is fast becoming a fundamental utility in many people's lives, one they depend on perhaps more than landline telephony. So the threat to withdraw this utility completely from some individuals is a draconian one. What effect would it have on online behaviour?

The first thing to recognise is that not all internet users are the same. A significant number are still taking their first steps online: listening to music or watching video on their computers is an infrequent activity. These are the people who will be most frightened about unwittingly committing an offence. If the legal market for downloads is to continue growing then it needs to win over this constituency. But what will they make of sites like the free, advertising-supported music download service, We7.com? If it's free, can it be legal? In this case, yes, so perhaps legal download sites would have to create some certification scheme, with all the attendant costs, to guarantee "no offences if you use this site".

Even within the alleged six million people in the UK who download illegally there is a broad spectrum. At one end are many casual and low-volume downloaders. Their downloading fills out the margins of their listening or watching, perhaps to supplement other forms of discovery — like checking out whether a new band heard once on the radio is worth exploring further — or sharing their own discoveries with friends. They too will become much more wary of activities that could count as offences. To be safe, the activity may shift to sharing, over 'bluetooth' connections between mobile phones, burning of CDs and DVDs at home and other, non-internet means.

At the other end of the spectrum are the hardcore poachers who see downloading as part-campaign, part-sport. These technically sophisticated enthusiasts enjoy finding innovative ways of bypassing new challenges. So they will render the offences impossible to detect using so-called 'darknet' connections over the internet, and will then make these more accessible and user-friendly to less-sophisticated users.

Innovation is not, and should not be, the sole preserver of the hackers. But legitimate new business models often run on the same technological infrastructure used for illegal downloading. The legal and fully-licensed service offered by Playlouder MSP, which acts as both ISP and platform for unlimited music file-sharing, is a case in point. Will this source of extra licensing revenue to the music industry — one which aims to "monetise the anarchy" of downloading — be strangled at birth, or does the government seriously believe that technology will be able to distinguish reliably between legal and illegal uses of the same technology?

The only times I have used BitTorrent file-sharing software (known to be very popular for illegal downloading) have been to get music from the DGM independent record label. DGM actively encourages its customers to use BitTorrent because the way it shares the distribution load cuts their costs for internet bandwidth and servers. As it is, the label barely breaks even on its minority-interest releases. If government regulation were to add to the costs of companies like DGM by making their customers worry that using BitTorrent could be an offence, then that won't help either small business or the diversity of our culture.

The fact is that many things are already being done to make illegal downloading more unattractive, more legal (in the sense that it generates payments for rights owners), and to make licensed alternatives more attractive. Perhaps the innovation is slower and bumpier than some would wish, leading to frustration with the conflicting interests, including ISPs, who have to play a part in new solutions. National tracking of online offences is not likely to be either a practical or a desirable solution for anyone. But perhaps a rumoured government threat to mandate it will help focus minds on the many better alternatives.

[Postscript, 16 June 2008: Copies of the BPI and Virgin Media anti-piracy letters are now available via the Music Ally blog.

Links for 2008-06-09 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Read more of Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll on Amazon.com
Search Inside features now enable you to look inside the book on Amazon

Links for 2008-05-23 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 24 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators
How communities of fans can generate better quality metadata than either private commercial methods or public crowdsourcing, through smart use of Web 2.0

Fans will be the most comprehensive curators

DJ — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:33:48 PDT

There's a section in my book called "Creating and Curating the Archive" where I wrote,

In future, if they’re not already, fan communities will quickly become the most authoritative archivists for the artists they follow. They collect memorabilia and ephemera — from ticket stubs to magazine interviews and amateur bootleg recordings — that most people would dismiss as tat… As well as memorabilia, these items will include what are currently rare and hard-to-find audio and video recordings, which will be collected by both human foraging and automated 'sweeping' of the Net. Expert fans will catalogue them and record their digital fingerprints, to help identify whether further discoveries are duplicates or new additions to the archive.

Many of my projections in this area were based on observing the way Andy Aldridge has developed the Head Full of Wishes fansite for Galaxie 500 and associated 'downstream' acts. I profiled Andy in the book and also in this interview.

Yesterday Andy posted to the Head Full of Wishes mailing list about a new tagging framework he's created for the site. This enables him to ensure that his site is able firstly to collect details of everything that's out there on the Net and is connected to Galaxie 500, and secondly to organise and present that information in a coherent way. As he wrote,

I did this because I was finding interesting stuff "out there", tagging it in delicious and it was quietly getting lost now I can "catalogue" everything — if I find a video on youtube of Dean & Britta doing Tugboat [a Galaxie 500 song] in London (I wish) I can tag it with the relevant show and track tags and it will always be available of the page of that show (and that track)…

You can see it in action on the tugboat page where in the "On the Internet..." section you'll find a few links to various bits on the Internet about that song (actually all youtube clips but that's because that's the section I'm working on first)

On that Tugboat page you'll see the tip "To add to this list tag an item in delicious with this tag ahfow:trackid=9". Andy is using Web 2.0 techniques to enable the fan community of practice to help him. No matter how obsessive he is (and, believe me, he is!), he can't find everything on his own. So he's using del.icio.us social bookmarking and its API to make it easy for others to contribute.

At this point, some of you are thinking that just searching with Google and YouTube ought to be enough to find all the versions of song that a reasonable person would wish to see or hear. Do we really need to be that thorough?

Well, it helps if someone is, and we need to prepare for the scenario that Paul Lamere outlines for the future where the number of music tracks available online runs into the hundreds of millions (see Paul's description at the start of this talk).

With numbers like that, we need all the help we can get to organise data about what's what.

There are competing interests in this field, from privately sponsored initiatives like Gracenote and allmusic to the MusicBrainz database which is 'crowdsourced' by music listeners and is partly Public Domain (and partly Creative Commons licensed).

But none of the other players have the depth of data about Tugboat that Head Full of Wishes has. A community of fans can take shared focus and commitment for granted, and when you add smart technology, smart organisation and good leadership to the mix, the community is pretty much impossible to beat in its chosen field.

I asked Andy whether he has plans to cross-reference his data to that in MusicBrainz to increase the value of both. What was I thinking? Of course he has. I'll spare you the full technical details of his reply, because frankly I don't understand them myself. Andy has the advantage that his day job is working in an archive, so he's both professional and amateur rolled into one. (I'll bet his employer benefits quite a bit from the things he teaches himself, and experiments with, in the course of supporting his hobby.)

All of these details are, as Andy admits, deeply unsexy — un-rock'n'roll, even. In the book, I put it this way,

there is a yin and yang about rock'n'roll in the way that, for all its devil-may-care abandon and improvisation, it relies on its opposite to sustain it… In the Web 2.0 world, if the yang is the unrestrained flow of independent opinions across the net, then the yin that complements it is the canonical metadata that helps detect when people are talking about the same thing.

And this won't stop at integration with MusicBrainz to provide a comprehensive catalogue of everything that's online. The next step is offline, as my opening quote implied, to the world of physical memorabilia, which in time will also be tagged and catalogued. Every poster and setlist purloined from the stage becomes a spime.

[Update, 25 May 2008: Andy has just posted more about the thinking behind his plans, including a reference to David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous. He is also candid about the risks and weaknesses of his approach.]

Links for 2008-05-07 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Rough notes: two recent music events
Publishing my rough notes from conferences and lectures, in case they're useful

Rough notes: two recent music events

DJ — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:36:59 PDT

There are a few rules of thumb I use to filter what I write on this site. The first is that it must have some bearing on the themes of digital discovery in Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll, the book. The second is that I don't really do 'news' items here, unless I come across something that I believe deserves higher profile than it's likely to get from other channels. If you want news, you're better off going to a site that specialises: I use mediaor (built by Jason Herskowitz), which aggregates material from about a hundred music news and discovery sites (including this one!). Thirdly, I always try and add something new to the 'raw data' in terms of analysis or insight — or, when I'm lacking insight, attitude.

But often I don't have time to digest what I take in, or to compose my thoughts. That's life, and we all probably feel that way, so no complaints. But I'm always experimenting with ways to make something useful out of the undigested stuff, to provide a 'light touch' way of passing things on. The 'recently noted elsewhere' stream on the right of this page is one example of that, based on a subset of my Furl archive. Another thing I do is take rough notes at the conferences, lectures and other events I attend. I'm trying out using my Vox blog to make these available in unedited form. The notes are rough, messy and come with health warnings about accuracy. But have a peek and see if you find these two examples useful:

Music Connected — AIM independent label event last week, including Paul Brindley's state-of-the-digital-industry review and a panel on ad-supported models;
Celestial Jukebox: free streams or pipe dreams? — Music Tank event yesterday, with keynote from Last.fm and responses from labels, rights organisations and technologists.

If you're feeling nosey, there's also a mix of other personal stuff on the same blog (and if you become a friend of mine on Vox, there's even more embarrassing stuff).

Links for 2008-04-23 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The myth, science and craft of music discovery
Marc Cohen says the business model of music discovery is a "myth". I'm a little bemused by his argument, and provide my own kind of defence of what makes good discovery experiences

The myth, science and craft of music discovery

DJ — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:31:59 PDT

Marc Cohen writes a challenging post on The Myth of Music Discovery. Citing a Digital Music News report of two venture capitalists agreeing that "the next big thing is going to be music discovery", Marc says this ought to be enough evidence that it won't be.

Having written a book which takes music discovery as a pointer to the changes in the forces shaping our cultural lives, you wouldn't expect me to be disinterested, or to be able to avoid rising to this bait. Perhaps that's just more evidence to support Marc's argument. But let me try and engage with his points anyway.

Marc reports evidence that radio remains the main route to music discovery, but online channels are growing in their influence. This is now a fairly well-established trend (here's one previous post supporting this, and another). He concludes from this:

people don't seek to discover new music — it just happens. They don't listen to the radio, watch TV or talk to friends for the purpose of discovering new music. This is a byproduct of the intended object of the interaction.

For some — actually I'd concede it's the majority — this is true. But sweeping generalisations about what "people" do or don't do are not helpful to our understanding here. There is a minority who do seek to discover music. These are the 'savants' and 'enthusiasts' in the classification I use. The thing is that a minority within this minority are quite influential for the rest of the "people". They are the first movers in the interactions from which discovery is a byproduct. And they're proud of it. They take kudos from people reading the blogs in which they assiduously document their new finds, and from the buzz they build on social networks.

The dynamics of discovery include a whole ecology of social recommendations, automated recommender systems, happenstance and serendipity — and the interactions between all of these influences.

[Update, 26 April 2008: Marc has posted on the reaction and I have commented, so see there for further discussion.]

Marc's second conclusion is that (commercial) radio is a kind of ad-supported music. Absolutely, yes. But then I don't entirely follow his inference:

Since downloaded music provides a superior user experience to streaming radio, I will argue that downloaded ad-supported music will be the superior vehicle for music discovery.

The first part of this is debatable. Another time, perhaps. But the second part is curious. If one experience is superior for music discovery, doesn't that mean that there's more to the story than just "discovery (like shit?) happens" of its own accord, independent of the design of services or the intentions of people?

I'm not sure how the business model of music discovery services can be written off as a "myth", as Marc claims. Some models are better than others. I don't think either radio or downloaded ad-supported music are the end of the story. There's a mixture of craft and science involved in making the different parts of the ecology work together. From this we can knit together the possibility for stimulating, social and diverse discovery experiences.

Links for 2008-04-16 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Building swarms of true fans
Outlining some research work I'm going to be doing for the rest of the year on Swarmteams, and drawing comparisons with music business recommendations from Seth Godin and Kevin Kelly

Links for 2008-04-14 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Finding the sound that fits the vision
A future scenario envisaging tools to help you find music that will make a suitable soundtrack for your home video