Digital Music News Article

If U.S.-based, your surfing will be monitored in the future, and you will be warned and dealt with if caught accessing infringing content.  It’s part of a program that starts this summer, and is potentially an effective method for handling the piracy problem.

As part of a plan between Time Warner, Comcast, Cablevision, AT&T, the MPAA, RIAA, and others, users will be subjected to monitoring and surveilance, and issued warnings for infringing content.  That allows ISPs to avoid cutting cords, driving customers to rivals, and provoking inevitably horrible headlines.  The RIAA and MPAA still get to enforce – and potentially curb – stealing, though they’ll be forced to exercise restraint.

The project features lots of warnings, throttling, and ‘graduated responses,’ but ultimately lacks serious enforcement teeth.  And that may be enough: warnings alone have proven a deterrent in countries like the UK and France, and now, the US is giving it a serious try.

Downloading a song, movie, or album discography in a compressed folder can trigger a detection from the RIAA, who then alerts the ISP and sets a warning in motion.

“Alerts will be non-punitive but progressive in scale,” the CCI relayed.  ”Successive alerts will reinforce the seriousness of copyright violations and inform the recipient how to address the activity that is precipitating the alerts.  For subscribers who repeatedly fail to respond to alerts, the alerts will inform them of steps that will be taken to mitigate the ongoing distribution of copyrighted content.”

For those who ignore warnings and move huge quantities of illegal content, ‘mitigation measures’ kick in, which feature:

• bandwidth throttling
• ‘splicing’ of sessions to redirect users to educational pages
• disconnection implied.

“ISPs are not required to impose any mitigation measure that could disable a subscriber’s essential services, such as telephone service (to call 911), email, or security or health service,” the group explained.

That still leaves the door open to cutting the range of ‘non-essential’ services.

This approach will avoid splashy headlines like “single welfare mother of four sued for 3 billion dollars for downloading Brahm’s Lullaby”.

Read the Chicago Tribune Article

The service (competing against Spotify, MOG, Rhapsody and Sony’s Music Unlimited) is focusing on providing users with improved discovery and better social integration.

Along with a lighter color scheme and expanded navigation, Rdio added new features to the interface:

• A unified view of music, playlists and networks
• Entire albums can be added to playlists
• Users can browse what their friends are listening to in real-time
• Users can create private playlists
• Simplified sharing to other Rdio users, or via Facebook, Twitter or email.

Which is exactly the point here.  ”What’s powerful about this offering is that the music feels free,” Muve Music senior director of product John Bolton told the Guardian. “That’s important, because no one wants to pay for music.  And one year in, we have 600,000 paying subscribers, making us the second largest digital subscription service in the US.”

Both Muve and Spotify are basically taking the position that piracy has already won – and now the challenge is to work around that reality.  Says Bolton, “Consumers are getting music in a way that feels free, because that’s the next best alternative for them anyways – which is to go to a computer, download it and get it illegally.  So we need to give them music that feels free and we need to be able to pay the industry and ultimately pay the artists and the writers for the creation of their craft.”

“The big question has always been how you make money with digital music,” Bolton continued. “The answer is you don’t: you do it with other things like a wireless service, and voice, data and text messaging.  We feel we’ve stumbled on something that’s a real breakthrough.”

http://www.mycricket.com/muve-music

click here

“STHoldings can confirm that we have taken the decision to remove all STHoldings distributed content from the following music services: Spotify, Simfy, Rdio & Napster.

“Despite these services offering promotion to many millions of music listeners we have concerns that these services cannibalise the revenues of more traditional digital services. These concerns are confirmed in our own accounts and a recent study by NPD Group and NARM.

“As a distributor we have to do what is best for our labels. The majority of which do not want their music on such services because of the poor revenues and the detrimental affect on sales. Add to that, the feeling that their music loses its specialness by its exploitation as a low value/free commodity.

“All the labels we represent have been given the choice to have their music to Spotify, Simfy, Rdio & Napster. As of today (16.11.11) from the 238 labels we distribute, 4 have expressed that they would like to be on these services.”

The group also shared some depressingly-low payout figures to bolster its case.

During the third quarter – the first full quarter STHoldings supplied content to Spotify and others:

1.  - digital revenues dropped for the first time.  The year-over-year decrease was 14 percent.
2. iTunes revenue dropped 24 percent.
3. Spotify, Rdio, Simfy, and Napster accounted for 82 percent of all content ‘consumed,’ but just 2.6 percent of overall revenues.
4. Spotify paid £2,500 ($3,376) for 750,000 total streams.

By contrast, aggregate sales of online music will climb from $6.33 billion to $6.8 billion next year and to $7.7 billion in 2015.

Music downloads will still be the format of choice, with revenue growing from $3.63 billion this year to $3.85 billion in 2012 and $4.05 billion in 2015, Gartner said.

Connectivity is key – the rise of connected devices is contributing to an increase in the number subscription services like Spotify, allowing users to access millions of licensed songs and either cache them locally or stream them over a wireless network. Subscription service revenue is expected to ramp from $532.1 million this year to $2.22 billion in 2015, according to Gartner.

Given the consumer demand to access media “anywhere, any place, any time”, wireless carriers and ISPs could certainly accelerate the return to paid music by offering cloud storage in addition to high bandwidth for streaming.

Now comes  eVinyl, an LA-based oufit focused on building a new format for music.  Consider it a mashup of an ebook and a CD – like the old vinyl experience, album art, liner notes, and music are combined, plus video and sharing.

eVinyls are built in the EPUB3 format, enabling cross-format compatibility across Kindles, Nooks, and iPads.  eVinyl’s goal is to create a more structured and universal format for albums in media players.

Plus, artists would also be able to make changes and instantly add content into their customized eVinyl releases.

Here’s a preview link

Watch the GIF

read more