Legal Music Trading Group

The idea goes thusly:

There are a number of sites providing legal downloads of music which is licensed to encourage copying. Instead of trading tracks from our existing collection of extremely copyrighted CDs and downloads, we each go out trawling the various sites dedicated to freely-tradeable music, find the best of that stuff, and use it to create mix CDs. (I have to give Thorog credit for the original idea of getting a bunch of people to fill up a pre-designated space with MP3 tracks, and then burning the results as CDs and distributing them... possibly for a small fee to cover materials and postage.)

This has the advantage of giving some "ear time" to some seriously overlooked artists and hopefully finding some overlooked tracks, rather than rewarding the monopolistic traditional-license record labels for their possessiveness and unwillingness to change.

It can also be kept legal as it scales up; Magnatune, for example, lets you instantly license tracks for small-quantity reproduction. They also allow you to legally give away three copies of tracks you've purchased. So once the group starts to get to be more than a handful of people, you could purchase a license for any Magnatune tracks you wanted and legally sell the CDs on which you included them, with a small markup to cover burning costs, and of course adding on for shipping costs. (We'd have to see how the economics worked out once we actually had some track selections to get prices for; it may be that Magnatune is charging too much to make the resulting CDs affordable, but it's definitely worth the experimentation to find this out, in my view. Magnatune and others are still largely testing the waters, and I suspect that they'd be very interested in hearing our feedback.)

Once you get to the point of having a handful of handfuls of people, it starts becoming worthwhile to set up a web site to help people find groups with similar tastes. It can start simply, however, with just a few people in a chat room agreeing to participate, with no formal structure needed.

related idea from 2003

from an email I sent to Brian B. on 2003-01-20

The problem with internet radio as it is now (legal issues aside) is twofold:

1. It ties up your bandwidth (especially for those of us using dial-up, but even with cable or DSL it can be a struggle)

2. The quality sucks

WHAT IF...

(By mutual consent between the netcaster and the copyright holder thus bypassing existing royalty laws, which would seem to be a key part of The GnuMusiq Model) (Did I mention that I got the domain gnumusiq.com?)

...you could run an application which would, when your computer and internet connection were otherwise largely idle, download high-quality MP3s of a given "station"s programming for later playback either on your computer or on an MP3 player?

Without getting too technical, it looks like at _really_ high quality (Xing VBR-hi), it would be pretty easy to get a little over half an hour of programming by downloading overnight. With a little sacrifice of quality (but not nearly as much as required for streaming, and doubtless unnoticeable to many listeners -- and remember, FM quality never was CD quality), plus additional downloading during the day, it should be possible to extend this many times over. (Or possibly we could use another encoding scheme such as VQF, which delivers similar quality with significantly smaller files.)

Given this arrangement, several additional possibilities suggest themselves.

The downloader app could be configured to make it difficult to "split off" individual songs (into separate MP3s or WAVs) without permission from the artist -- e.g. if the listener had paid for that right for that song -- assuming that is something we would want to limit. (My inclination would be rather that each song should be accompanied by an "audio trademarkwatermark" as discussed earlier, identifying the source at least by artist and artist's URL, possibly also by album and song title, with free copying of the song+trademark encouraged and revenue generated at the website by a number of means. The downloader app could include a player which would make it easy to find the artist's web site and buy merch or sponsorships or whatever...)

The downloader app could also aid with the downloading of purchased CD-quality MP3s (or VQFs or even WAVs, according to taste) unencumbered by audio trademarks or whatever else we put in the "free" version to encourage purchasing of the non-free version.

I don't know how anyone else would receive this, but if it were available right now I'd install that sucker and start downloading some radio tonight. (Half an hour per day might be all I'd have time to listen to anyhow.) I'd also have no hesitation about submitting all my original recordings. (Then again, I'm probably not in the same position as a working band; my recordings are not being heard, much less generating any revenue, as they are.)

(Another thought which arrived while I was finishing up this email: I think many people (fans) would pay for the privilege of having their name -- just their name, or their business's name; no "plugs" or other advertising -- on a band's web site, prominently displayed but not necessarily on the home page; more like a separate sponsorship page, with nice layout. Like sponsoring the little league or NPR or a museum or something... More popular bands would get bigger sponsors; sponsors could pay different amounts for different font sizes, additional graphics...)

Thoughts? Comments? Bueller? Bueller?

further elaboration

from my response to Brian B.'s response, 2003-01-26

Brian B. wrote:

1. It ties up your bandwidth (especially for those of us using dial-up, but even with cable or DSL it can be a struggle) Not my experience. Heck, I've got phone service through www.vonage.com that's running at 96Kb, and it works very reliably.

Well, even when I had cable, the bandwidth was rather patchy -- and when it was fine, streaming stuff would always interfere with uploads & downloads.

It's definitely an issue for dial-up, but I guess that goes without saying...

2. The quality sucks Not my experience. Streaming 64Kb right now sounds good.

Ok, I was probably listening to a 28k stream last time I checked...

The quality issue with Internet Music is that the *BANDS* suck, which isn't a technology issue.

(Can Rosin Coven not get "on the air" on an internet "station"? I could set up a station on Live365.com and broadcast nothing but Cheap Imitation if I wanted to (last time I checked) -- you're not allowed to play more than 3 songs in a row from a given artist OR announce ahead of time what you'll be playing, UNLESS you have permission of the copyright holder, but if you do you can play whatever you want of that material.)

This point would seem to be addressed by another part of the idea which I don't think I mentioned, that of having a self-rating community for netcasts -- much the way Ebay buyers and sellers are self-rating. There are ways of preventing abuse of the system, though that is obviously a big issue at least in the design phase.

My understanding of the law is that the rate between Netcaster and the Copyright Holder is set by the federal government and can't be changed for any reason. Perhaps there a way to have the Copyright Holder "pay back" the same exact fee as a fee to broadcast the music, which is mostly disallowed but some forms of "payola" are allowed.

I don't think anyone, be it Feds or RIAA or Sony/CBS, can prevent you from netcasting your own music ("own" in the sense that you own the copyright) -- and the same holds for allowing someone else to netcast it, with whatever compensation is agreed upon mutually. It may be that if there is compensation (or, more generally, some affiliation between 'caster and artist), you would have to acknowledge this on the air or at least on the station's associated web site -- but my understanding is that this is to prevent payback to the radio station for choosing one artist or track over another, not to prevent royalty-free airplay, and even so I don't see how this could be regulated _except_ to prevent playing copyrighted stuff without permission. If a band released a song with a sort of "GPL for Music" whereby it could be played for free anywhere (just not copied for free), I don't think the industry could prevent that. (Perhaps if the artist is a member of ASCAP, BMI, or SESAC, they might be constrained by the terms of those agreements; have to look into that... The Cheap Imitation is not; is Rosin Coven?)

I think stranding dial-up users is fine. There aren't that many, and they're dwindling. If you pay $15/month for the phone line, and $20/month for the dial-up service, then either: 1) you don't stay dialed up all the time and your idea doesn't work, or 2) you realize that for only $10/month more you get a *HUGE* increase in quality, and you get broadband.

Smile when you say that... ;-) I'm currently on dial-up, shared (NAT) with at least one and as many as three other users (Anna is now an avid 'net user when she visits, and S's freshman son Mel is a compulsive MP3 downloader)... at least in part because we don't want to deal with Time-Warner Cable (evil empire), and all the other options are either unavailable here (DSL) or too expensive (satellite, ISDN) at the moment.

Of all the people I can think of whose Internet habits I am aware of (not counting y'all or us'ns), five have dial-up and two have cable.

(Memo to self: dial-up - HAB, L&B, S's mom, L's mom, S's K; cable: JERS, S's P)

Your point about not staying connected 24/7 is valid, however, for those with only one line.

I also think that most people in your target market already have broadband. Everyone I know with teen-age kids has broadband.

Well, ok, I guess we're a bit of an exception... After noodling it around and writing several different responses, then finding the flaw in each one, it comes down to the realization that you're probably right: most people who would be interested in listening to a netcast probably already have broadband. (Possible minor exception: people at work who aren't allowed to tie up the company connection with heavy downloads. The Internet connection at Carrier was always pretty feeb anyway; I wonder if it still is or if they finally caught up with reality. Pierce didn't _have_ a dedicated connection; you had to dial out thru a modem bank... but that was 1998.)

So then the main issue to address is that of quality and/or taste -- how to get music to listener X which listener X would define as "good". Which is your point here, I think --

I continue to believe that the hard problem is not the technical. Nighttime downloads are good, a good bank of streaming servers is good. However, the fundamental problem is: how do you find the 1/2 hour of music that N. Staddon wants to hear?

The essential components, as I see it:

- Community-rated 'casters -- whose real job is not so much being a dj (providing transitions between cuts, listing the tracks played (which they hardly ever do anymore anyway), making endorsements, being hip, etc.) as it is being a reviewer or an anthologist; the job of making songs available on a 'cast should be as easy as listening to them and then checking off a box.

- Personal "favorites" lists (like those on Amazon.com)

- Personal ratings of 'casters/anthologists

- message boards galore; should be extremely easy to create, configure, maintain, and use for reference; e.g. bands should set up as many boards as their fan base is likely to populate with messages. Reviewers could set up boards to discuss their preferred genre(s), artists, whatever. Postings should be "enshrinable" by moderator and/or by popular demand if they somehow enhance the community. (Other innovations are quietly hanging around the back of my head; that's just an example.) Boards should be email-subscribable, without all the personal info crap you have to give to (e.g.) Yahoo Groups to do anything there. (More like Google's boards.)

And then some combination of the following:

- some kind of inference engine for finding similarities between people's tastes as given in their "favorites" lists and thereby arriving at suggestions for other stuff they might like to listen to -- a neural net should be good at this kind of thing; many opportunities for refinement here.

If you can solve this problem, the world will beat a path to your door. It's a big freaking deal, and Comcast would use it to sell VOD movies today. Or, just use it to launch a platform like you're talking about.

VOD = Video On Demand? I suspect there are large gaps in my knowledge of this market... By "this problem", are we still talking about the taste/quality issue, getting the right selection to each user? Or something else? Seems to me that if some large studio would just put all their movies online for download at a reasonable price (less than a VHS copy), they could make zillions. They're just afraid of "losses" due to copying. (My premise is that those lost revenues are mainly wishful thinking (as with MP3s), but there's only sketchy data yet...)

As far as getting the right selection to the user...

There's tons of stuff (movies or TV shows) out there where I know the name, but nobody has a copy. The ones where I don't know the name, I can generally think of the name of at least one actor, so if they were cross-referenced with imdb.com, that would cover almost everything else. To expose people to new stuff, just categorize everything -- as finely as possible, like the topic tree @ vbz.net.

Am I missing something?

Rosin Coven runs benefits, we tend to get a few thousand dollars a year that way. I'd rather run benefits as we see fit (possibly including auctioning off web space), and pay for a service that works. (IUMA didn't work).

I guess I have a difficult time getting into the Live Performance mindset; I always enjoyed studio recordings more than live performance, both as an artist and as an audient (to use Robert Fripp's word). But I gather that for most audiences, live performances are more energizing and more likely to inspire spendage of large quantities of cash. (It's probably a little different when your audience is more than a couple of dozen people who came to see the other band, which has been pretty much my experience.)

The motivation to provide this service comes in part from a wish to create a venue for those like myself whose default mode is the studio. (Not that I'm averse to performance, but I'd need to make some money _first_ so I can afford decent equipment and have some incentive to offer other members of a hypothetical band.) Obviously if I'm going to maximize its coverage, I need to provide value as well for those whose default mode is performance.

I'm thinking that for any service to maximize its effectiveness -- which is essential for popularity, which in turn is essential for effectiveness (feedback loop) -- it has to reach a range of budgets, starting at "free" and working on up. The service should certainly work, but paying customers should get a higher level of control and flexibility. The problem with a lot of sites, I think, is they set up something that's maybe good enough to start with -- and then they never improve it. Or, if they improve it, the "improvements" are all marketing gimmicks or advertising (e.g. MP3.com seems to have gone this way). The artists and audience become frustrated with the baling wire & chewing gum after awhile, and move on, leaving the site largely a haven for transients (including big advertisers).

My guess is, they start out with venture capital; they set up the site; they see revenue coming in -- and nobody wants to be the one whose new idea stemmed the flow of revenue. Marketing people with letters after their name can be depended on to produce short-term improvements in the revenue stream without making any "drastic" changes, so they're "safe" -- even though in the long run, they damage the site's credibility and cause to a slow bleed-off of users (largely hidden by the so-far ever-increasing Internet population) and, more damaging and equally invisible, a major draining of dedication to / interest in the site.

But that's just a wild hunch based on very little real information.

Out of curiosity -- what was wrong with IUMA, from your POV? There were a number of things _I_ didn't like about them, but I would like to hear someone else's reaction...

Ok, well I guess that's today's babble. Somehow the bandwidth issue still seems significant to me... like, what if I want to take the 'cast in my car? I'd need to download it and copy it to my MP3 player or burn it to CD... but it's important to know that most people won't see it as an issue, and that perhaps it's not as much an issue as I thought, and that the quality/selection issue is perhaps the obstacle to tackle first...

more from Brian

N. Staddon wrote:

If you can solve this problem, the world will beat a path to your door. It's a big freaking deal, and Comcast would use it to sell VOD movies today. Or, just use it to launch a platform like you're talking about. VOD = Video On Demand? I suspect there are large gaps in my knowledge of this market... By "this problem", are we still talking about the taste/quality issue, getting the right selection to each user? Or something else? Seems to me that if some large studio would just put all their movies online for download at a reasonable price (less than a VHS copy), they could make zillions. They're just afraid of "losses" due to copying. (My premise is that those lost revenues are mainly wishful thinking (as with MP3s), but there's only sketchy data yet...)

VOD = Video On Demand. There's a serious problem: put all the movies online, and then how to people find the movies they want? You can work out the storage yourself (say, a 1TB server, and a DVD is 4ish GB), and you can't have all the movies available to all people -- but even if you can (there are technical ways to do so, but it's expensive), people have to find what they like!

VOD exists in many major cities today, and the uptake rates are sucky. Why? Part is the cost - putting in the infrastructure was expensive. To justify the cost, you want to find a *good* movie. Out of the 200 that might be on your local server, how do you find the one you want to watch? That's what stops people from buying movies over their TV today (in the markets where it's widespread -- and in the other markets, they're afraid to put it in until it proves itself).

More later --

Note

(from W., 2007-02-23)

Sites which provide video via torrent seem not to be having this problem, even though their indexing is very basic (searching by description, with filtering by type of download - audio, TV, movie...). I'm not understanding why the VOD services had such a hard time with it, except that they were trying to provide the service without a proper interface.

There was much more discussion of this in further emails.