E-Dribble

Charging users that embed Youtube videos with music in it although they’re already charging Youtube for the same videos? No sweat.  Have the gall to consider a cellular phone ringtone a public performance?  These guys do.

Man, it seems like these guys have hit the bottom of the barrel.

Hehe, just kidding. Now they want to get paid for the 30 second previews used to sell their music.

Although the purchasing public continue to fund them, the recording industry doesn’t let appreciation get in the way of suing the very same people that line their pockets.  This though, surprised even me and I’m not shocked by much that they do.  Charging people to listen to a thirty second clip so you can sell them an overpriced album?

Fantastic!

The Smashing Pumpkins have decided to release their next effort free of charge, with a limited edition set you can buy, if you’d rather.  I think it’s pretty fantastic, but I’m going to be honest, the approach is a little confusing.

Beginning around Halloween, they’re going to release 44 songs, again all will be available for free.  For those that wish to support the band, they will package them in 4 song EP’s, totalling(if my math can be trusted) 11 albums you can buy.

I really hope they consider a boxed set, as Paypal is likely to freeze my account for suspicious behavior if they make me buy each EP separately.

I totally support them and don’t want to be the one to cast derision towards any group that steps away from abusing their fans but I have to admit that I’m more than intrigued to see how they decide to market a 44 song release spanning months.  It’s what I would consider at the very least an eclectic method of music marketing.

I was utilizing the various tubes of the internet 2.0 to find some new music a few nights ago when I came across “Cage the Elephant”, some Kentuckians that transplanted to the UK.  Man, some seriously fantastic music(check out “No Rest for the Wicked“).  I knew I needed the album, so I checked to find out who their label was.  It’s getting tougher to plow through all of the faux-hip sounding names that the publishers are using to hide the real owner, but eventually  I found it to be Sony BMG, so I bought a used copy.

That’s beside the point.  During my search, I found this fantastic article. In it, the CEO of EMI Records laments that while he knows that a divide exists between EMI and it’s customers, he’s not sure what he can do to lessen that gap.

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Regardless of who you side with, you can not argue that the music industry’s relationship with their customers is in the crapper.  If you’re like me, you view this as a good thing.  Even if you’re not though, you can’t really be wondering why, can you?  In times when Warner will force the removal of audio in a satirical youtube viral vid, you can be sure that they don’t have much of a sense of humor about anything any more.  They’ve run out of things to sue over, so they just throw hail mary’s where ever they can.  Lyric and chord/tablature sites, people with radios turned up too loud, parents of kids that might have shared songs, some guy that chose Gn’R of all bands to leak tracks of….  It’s truly comical the lengths to which the whole industry is going to completely decimate their relationship with the people that put them in their Beemers and Versace.

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Songbird just released ver. 1.1 of their media player.   It’s already replaced Foobar as my media player and it makes the loss of Amarok a little less painful.

A little less.

New Hotness: Paying to not have any rights to the song at all.

Werner Music Group is in a pickle.  They want you to start buying their music again but they also think that DRM isn’t quite restrictive enough. Sure, they already tell you what players you can listen to your music on, they tell you how many times you can listen to it and on how many different devices.  They even have the ability to take away those rights at any time with a simple shutting down of a DRM server when they don’t feel like honoring the license agreement any more.

As I’m sure you’d agree, WMG feels that you have too much freedom with your purchased music.  To help curtail the rampant piracy allowed by previous draconian measures, they’ve come up with LaLa.  What is LaLa?  It’s simple. With LaLa, you can pay ten cents per song.  You then get absolutely nothing.

Seriously.  You pay them ten cents and they will allow you to listen to the song from a browser tab on their site.  Much like you listen to a song on M-TV or the radio, only that’s free.  This allows you to pay for that privilege.  You do feel privileged, don’t you?

While Michael Roberts is more diplomatic than I am about the whole affair, he doubts it will fly.

Imagine that.

During one of my light reading sessions in the bathroom yesterday(what, I know I’m not the only one.), I was reading this month’s WIRED magazine. During my reading, I actively try to ignore the ads in the page, just to spite the company that so shamelessly packs more ads than content into their magazine, but one ad slipped by. It was for the Microsoft Zune.

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Well, when it comes to lawsuits against their fans.  When it comes to providing their music in new and innovative ways, they’ll wait until it’s been proven economically feasible before they’ll try it.

You’ll remember that Metallica was one of the main proponents in the initial lawsuits that brought down Napster. Now, they’d like you to know that it was never about downloading music.  They just, you know…. didn’t want you to do it then.  Now it’s ok of course, because Trent Reznor made an assload of cash doing it.

What really happened is this:  Metallica got caught hugging an antiquated music distribution system.  When the fear of sales dropping touched their wallets, they lashed out.  Over the years, they’ve held their stance, because nobody else broke the mold.  Now that bands like Radiohead, Trent Reznor and others have proven that you can sell a lot of music this way, they’re willing to try it.  Oh, and hey, let’s just forget about that whole “attack our fans” phase we went through.

Hey, who am I to judge?  I’ll download their new album…. If they offer it for free.

Hey, I’m no pirate.

DRM only hurts pirates.

Oh, and everyone that legally purchased music from the now defunct MSN Music, who has decided to shut down the DRM servers, thus locking you into the same 5 computers for the life of your music. Upgrade your OS or change computers, and kiss your music goodbye.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t feel an iota of pity for those that bought into this payment scheme for music they can never own.

I just like this story because any time DRM fails, an angel gets his wings.