Music, copyright and gymnatsics

I was sorting out some information for a longer, and somewhat more thoughtful, post when I found this: apparently The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada wants all the local gymnastics clubs to pay royalties for the tunes they use for routines.

The news just shocks me since I've been in my university gymnastics club for several years. And although that sort of a thing would probably never happen in Russia, I just can imagine what sort of troubles it could bring.

Finding just the right piece for a floor routine is hard enough. It should be instrumental. It should have at least two slow parts and a fast part to meet both choreographic and and acrobatic demands. And it's just about 1-1.5 minutes long. Moreover, it's used only for floor routines done by girls.


Photo: "Candlestick" by Dmitriy Tugarinov at Moscow Museon park


The article also state that the clubs are non-profit organization. In my case, I never could understand how my club survives at all. We never had any submission fees. Competitions attendance was always free. The system itself seemed to run on pure enthusiasm.

It also makes me wonder if the high-profile unprofessional gymnasts or figure skaters (those who go to the Olympics) should also worry about copyright laws while choosing the music for the routines? Read more...

Leaving the death of Michael Jackson alone (although not leaving alone this great MTV logo above!), lots of thing happened in the music industry since I’ve updated properly and thoughtfully. So I decided to sum up all of it in one post.

First, of course, this blog is now indexed by Google, horray!

Now to the serious news.

There were several big and small news on Pirate Bay. They’ve got some support from musicians and from simple voters, were called to court by Twitter, and finally were sold to the Swedish gaming company Global Gaming Factory X for 60 million Swedish kronor

The major streaming sites + music-social networks were also producing a somewhat constant float of news. Last.fm was left by it’s founders Martin Stiksel, Felix Miller and Richard Jones. All the others got new royalty collection agreement

Virgin megastores finally closed. Independent stores kept fighting for their lives.

And a series of stupid fines: from Jammie Thomas-Rasset to music industry (American); Rapidshare to German record industry; and (ha!) Deep Purple to Deep Purple

London people promoted piano music, directly.

People who do science tryed to prove that twitterers buy more music.

At last, I want to link you to two of my favorite blogs. I know that the odds of you reading me and not reading them are hilariously small, but still if it happened you just have to check out Techdirt and Idolator!!
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Danger Mouse and his blank CD-R release.

This news seems really amazing to me. DJ Danger Mouse is going to release a blank CD-R along with proper art work so anybody who buys it is free to find the album on the web and record it themselves.

While this news is presented as a part of a battle between Danger Mouse and EMI, I think it also represents a very important concept of modern music industry. It's not the music that we buy when we buy a CD. It's a material piece of fandom, a chance to support a favorite artist, a sign of devotion to a certain kind of music. So in this world it doesn't really matter if an artist sells a blank CD, or even some sort of artwork without any sign of music. Read more...

CD prices start to drop?

Fat Wreck Chords announced that they would sell their CD's for less than $10 from now on. And sometimes even under $8. Just about time!

I wonder what should happen in this big mad world for all record labels to finally drop their CD prices. If they (CD's) would be a commodity, those prices would have fallen several years ago.

I also wonder when somebody would start selling music on CF cards, or in FLAC, or in any other innovative way... It's weird that almost nobody tries to break that conventional structure of CD-mp3-world with the sales dropping so bad. Read more...

"Casual pirates" vs. "hard-core pirates"

While I was making up my mind on writing this post, the news on BI Norwegian School of Management research on piracy and legal music purchases spread around the net so far, it’s even all over Cyrillic web. But I didn’t just waste that time. I google-scholared the subject, and found a) one relatively old article from two researchers of that school and b) the only paper that sites that paper from (a). The (b) is a doctoral thesis, it’s a very interesting (and long) reading and it’s available in pdf!

The idea of “piracy” in general being positively correlated with “willingness to pay” for the music seems ambiguous to me since the “pirates” are very different. There are people who’d download the latest Beyonce single, there are people who’d download “the best of… anybody”, and people who’d download “the full discography of… their favorite-one-and-only”, and finally there are people who’d download “almost everything available, just for the sake of new music”. These people are very different in their “piracy” patterns and in their willingness to pay. Hence, in an ideal world where their download behavior is perfectly observable and legal, they can be clasterized and price-discriminated.



For the sake of simplicity, I’ll try to explain what I mean with only two types of “pirates”. I’ll call those who download the last a-la-mode single “casual pirates”, and those who download virtually everything they can reach and grab the “hard-core pirates”. And I know what I’m talking about since I know both types, and I used to be a “hard-core” myself in the wild days of Audiogalaxy. 

The “hard-core” pirates are spending much more time listening to the music and looking for something they like. They are investing their time into research of the product and it means that when they come to a store they are ready to invest some money in what they know they like. This is good for the music-publisher, resellers and generally anyone on the other side of the counter, because those people can be charged more. And this is good for side-business development because these people are willing to pay for any tools that would help them do the research (I’ve just bought a book on history of Soul for thrice the price of the casual book and I’m happy about it because it gives me a good new mapping of my now-favorite style, yet my mom is shocked). 

The “casual” pirates actually don’t care for the music at all; they care for, so to say, the social value of music. They are good for the industry if they don’t download, since they are persuadable and would buy everything new and glittery. 

Hence when those two types of pirates are combined, we can get the “more downloads – more legal buys” effect. My idea is that they should be treated differently. While for the “hard-core” pirates this can be true (the more dirt we search, the more gold we find and we’re ready to buy that gold), for the “casual” pirates that shouldn’t hold. 

Two notes:
I don’t think that “casual” people are wrong or not good for music in general. The industry exists because of the “casual” people. 

The industry seems to see the differences between at least two types. More and more independent labels and musicians without labels would offer free “testing” material for those who want to do the research. While the mainstream singles are easier to download legally from iTunes than to look for illegally on the web.
 

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Today. Legally free goodies.

Two free and very interesting things online. If you follow the news on music festivals and\or e-books you might already know it. But if you don't, here are the links and comments for you.

The Londonist blog posted some free mp3's of Camden Crawl'09 participating bands and musicians today. I'm not sure what's inside those two archives (200+150 mb). But if you're planning on being somewhere near London this Friday and Saturday, this is an interesting thing to see, I'm sure, although they say only tickets for both days are available now. Don't forget to check out the Line Up.

Also, on e-book front, the original manuscript of Madame Bovary has been scaned and transformed into readable digital text. Now you can see the original pages along with the two versions of text (as I understand it one is "usual", i.e. the one that is published now, and another one is a digitalized version of the manuscript with some of the words crossed out etc.). It's really exiting to see all those old pages, and most likely none of us would be permited to see them without the scanning.

Next on my list: I would try and put up some thoughts I have on the news about "pirates" buying more legal music than "non-pirates" (found here or here) in a few hours.

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Record store day. Russian edition.

As you might now, a "Record Store Day" was celebrated 3 days ago (18 April). And if you don't know, it's just a day to support your favorite local independent record stores, and for those record stores to pay you some love and respect back, with discounts and live performances aboard.

The stories about how the actual Record Store Day worked out may be found at the home site of the event, or in oh-so-famous, google-reader-promoted and actually very interesting to read blogs Idolator (there's something wrong with this tag, for there was more than one post on the topic) and Stereogum.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking that here (and that would be in Moscow, Russian Federation) we don't have enough independent record stores to support. And no surprise, nobody here knows anything about "the Day"... Also, I've been trying to find a proper picture, or just a concept of a picture that would represent a concept of "economics of music" somehow and googled my nose right into this one:



First thing I'd like to say about the picture - they should have lost India somewhere along the way! I mean... just look at it, every country with a relatively big population has it's own piece of a disc, and India somehow doesn't. I don't believe that poverty is washing out this population factor in amount of music illegally consumed. Maybe they just don't know how to count it there?

And now about the big share of that disc going to Russia and about 'our' record stores.

- If you live in a russian city that has, say less than a million people, you can be at least 90% sure your local record store sells illegall CDs. The other 10% would go to huge national music-related retailers and would usually have nothing interesting for a music-lover, hence no reason for support.

- Even if you live in a big city, say Moscow or St. Petersburg, most of the records available to you are "semi-illegal", since russian copyright law is far less seveir than US or even EU copyright law. (And I must say - thanks God or whoever responsible for it!).

- The official imported records you get are sold at double price (if you compare it to the US\EU before-export price) and it has absolutely nothing to do with international trade restrictions. Pure profit, or loss if you're a consumer.

- Those "semi-legal" records are sold at affordable prices, but they are so boooring...

So who I have to support? National giants like "Soyuz" (union) or "Nastroyeniye" (mood, and by the smiley face in their logo you should assume that the mood is good, but no), or all-in-one stores like MediaMarkt? Or those guys who travel to Europe, carefully chose some records there and then copy those records illegally for everybody's happiness? Or maybe just my computer?

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