Fifth Decade

You really have to say this guy hits the nail on the head when it comes to forecasting the future of digital music. It’s a shame only the precis worked as an article, but I just hate that faux friendly folksy meaningless bonhomie that some writers think makes them better writers.

My arse it does.

Original (much longer, but less informative for being so) Business Week article here. I guess they wanted it two pages so they could sell more ads…

I’ve just been sorting through some stuff I bought in the Christmas sales and promptly forgot all about. I stuffed the carrier bags into a corner and only just got curious as to what was inside them. It turns out the bags contained a pile of cheap DVDs and CDs. Who needs digital downloads when CDs are so cheap? I got most of them for a fiver, although the best one I’ve played so far cost £8.97 and it’s brilliant!

Do you remember the Shadows? They were a little before my time, so naturally when I was younger I totally ignored them. Now I’ve got a little more money to splash out (err, yes, I call spending £9 on a CD splashing out - but only because the total bill for all the rest came to about £100!) and so I bought the double CD “The Shadows - Life Story”.

It’s amazing just how many iconic tracks they laid down. Music I’ve heard so many times and not realised it was by the Shadows. Film theme music, incidental music, music for TV adverts, even stuff that must have been played on the Radio without me noticing. And now I’ve got the CD I just can’t believe how good it all is.

Tracks like Apache, Shindig, Wonderful Land, Albatross, Foot Tapper, and loads more - although the cover they did of Jean Michel Jarre was, shall we say - a little in need of improvement? Anyhow, I got 45 tracks for £9 which makes it 20p per track. And record companies won’t give up DRM in case they lose money? At these prices I’ll keep on buying stuff from them on CD permanently. Who wants pirate copies? Who needs the hassle?

First thing you have to understand is that most people believe the BBC to be the de rigeur news organisation in the world, compelled by its Charter to be unbiased politically, economically, and in fact in all areas.

But when it comes to Microsoft, the BBC does seem to have quite a few MS fanboys in its technical department. Not surprising when you read stuff like “Bumbling BBC gives away millions to Microsoft with exclusive 2 year viewer lock-in! ” which shows that someone in the BBC has crossed the line in being so wedded to their own idea of what is best they have now put themselves into the position of having to try and support their technical decision through manipulating the “bias balance” towards Microsoft. Go to any Mac forum with a UK flavour and you’ll soon see posts related to bias on behalf of the BBC in favour of Microsoft. Is it imaginary, or real?

For an example of the kind of thing I mean, look at these two reports of the recent San Diego court which has just fined Microsoft $1.5 Billion for infringing on patents for MP3 encoding and decoding technology.

The MacWorld website, not renowned for its music coverage, wrote the most informative piece, giving quite a lot of background detail and information on what happens next. The BBC website, however, really didn’t give much information out at all, with very little background and no mentions of what happens next, or why.

Considering how big an issue digital music is right now, any court case about the subject is surely a hot topic. You only have to look at the bloglists to see that it is indeed a Big Story right now - particularly the Digital Rights Management issues of restrictions against normal users.

One Blogger, Blue Magnolia, is so cross at the abuse of power the BBC is currently exhibiting they have set up an ePetition on the UK Government’s website asking for people to register their unhappiness with the way the BBC are doing things. You should drop by and sign it - it only takes a minute and will help rein in the mad Microsoft machine the BBC has become.

You should sign the petition even if you are not a Mac or Linux user, because it is the principle of BBC neutrality that is at stake here. Anyway, even Windows users are affected - if you are running Windows 95/98, Windows ME, or Windows 2000 on your computer your needs are being ignored too.

Now, maybe the BBC is being a good boy and following the government’s wishes - after all, Bill Gates did visit Tony Blair a few years ago just before a number of big decisions about which platform to use were up in the air, particularly the issue of whether Governments should use an Open Document Format or a proprietary one (it was around the time when the City of Munich announced it was moving away from Microsoft onto Linux to save money and prevent accusations of favouritism; they wanted a non-proprietary format for word processor files too).

Tony Blair is apparently a self-confessed non-expert when it comes to computers, so you can imagine him being easy to bamboozle in these matters, even if he did have some advisors around him. Since then, there have been many decisions in favour of Microsoft technologies when many of them are insecure, unreliable, or just so complex they are difficult to implement. (See Reforming the NHS and it’s National Insurance funding system for some associated information).

As usual, I’ve digressed slightly - but only because the spider’s web of intrigue crosses into many areas, background information comes from many places, and the motivation for some actions may at first appear unrelated, but are frequently causal.

I’m going to post more examples of BBC bias here, and please add any you find yourself in the comments below too. Together, we the people have a voice that cannot forever be ignored.

Isn’t blogging great?

Examples

1. One example is this story on the BBC website “News that Microsoft has been fined for violating MP3 patents belonging to Alcatel-Lucent could have widespread fallout for the industry.”

The story is a follow-up about a subject that primarily affects Microsoft and its customers, Dell and Gateway Computer, due to the patent infringements inherent in the Windows Operating System. Yet the principal photograph used to illustrate the story shows only Apple equipment, none of which has been affected by the Court case yet.

The BBC story does say that others might be affected by the ruling, but surely other users of the Microsoft Windows OS and music players that primarily play MP3 tracks would be first in line? You can see a list of those companies licenced to do so - the list of MP3 licencees.

Lower down in the story, there is a photo of some Creative MP3 players, but it’s buried. Nowhere is there a photo showing the Microsoft logo, or that of any other manufacturer. Without a picture of a wide range of products from different manufacturers it is a clear bias against Apple.

Edgar Bronfman, the CEO of music giant Warner, is completely in love with Digital Rights Management. Perhaps it’s the only strategy he knows. Well, not quite - the other one being if someone else does something better than you, buy them out so you still look good through the absence of any competitor, such as EMI, highlighting a different strategy that actually works for shareholders better than your own. So Warner are threatening to take over EMI again.

Under pressure from falling sales and seemingly cursed with an inability to understand the opportunities the new digital age offers, Bronfman is sticking to DRM more and more tightly, despite the majority of music industry executives from the majors saying DRM is bad and actually prevents sales.

Bronfman’s view is that DRM prevents copying, but that either shows a total lack of understanding of digital music, or a total lack of understanding of his own company! First of all, even the newest and tightest DRM systems only just released, BluRay and HD-DVD have already been hacked. Secondly, 90% of music sold today is sold via CD. But CD’s have no copy protection in place, they have absolutely no DRM at all - and that includes Warner’s own CDs! Anyone wishing to avoid DRM just copies the CD onto their computer and onto their iPod where it plays quite happily without any DRM in place at all.

Now, not everything that Bronfman says is quite so naive, misguided, or unsupported by the facts. But he’s an adept at taking things out of context in the hope that he won’t be noticed. Of course, the regular media just take a quote at face value, they don’t analyse it, query it, or even think about it most of the time. They just report it, often without querying the answers they get. That’s where blogs come in - we can spend a little more time pulling the relevant information together, and put some thought into tearing poor arguments apart.

So, what is it that Bronfman said that I do agree with? In a widely reported speech at the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona Bronfman said:

“I don’t agree that intellectual property should have no protection. We should all agree that intellectual property deserves some measure of protection“

I’m talking of the second sentence here: creators of intellectualy property should have some protection - just not digital. They have the full protection of Copyright Law, after all. Most people respect that. And most people object to being treated as a criminal just because some overpaid executive short on ideas feels like it.

OK, I know he has a responsibility to his shareholders to enhance the share price, so you could argue he has to act like he does; but is his strategy paying out less than alternatives? On the evidence so far, if you said he doesn’t know what he is talking about I’d believe you. Still, maybe it isn’t him who has the problem, maybe it’s the people he picked to run Warner’s marketing department?

At his last employer Vivendi (which he left with a sour taste) there were questions about his salary, and guess who he picked as his Executive Vice President of Digital Strategy and Business Development? None other than his brother-in-law, Alex Zubillaga who in the mid-’90s built a cable company called Netono in Venezuela, but came with no music industry experience.

Ironically, it was Bronfman who encouraged the other big labels to work with the iTunes music store, and he brought a focus on digital to Warner, rationalising its operations and coordinating what had become a haphazard business. He brought all the heads of department Warner had into one place on the same floor of Warner’s Manhattan office block. Perhaps with the rush to get them all talking, moving Warner’s publishing arm from California, the centre of the digital revolution, was a bridge too far? New York isn’t renowned for it’s developments in computing or digital media, from what I’ve read.

As Bronfman is clearly an intelligent man, how come he refuses to admit the genie is out of the bottle? DRM is a blind alley, as the future will show. From Cryptoblog:

As Levitt and Dubner put it in their Freakonomics the question is not why people cheat, a more appropriate question is why people do not.

And that’s what many in the music industry seem to be forgetting: most people are actually fundamentally honest.