Little help here please

I'm going to try and do a bit of an experiment in making my music available for wider use. You can already download the songs on a pay what you want basis, but that's not what I'm thinking about.
My plan is to make all the original multitracks for those songs available.
I have three challenges to this though:

1) the sheer amount of time it's going to take me to upload 55Gb of 88.2 24bit files.

2) Choosing where it should be uploaded to. I'm thinking a torrent site but with the pirate bay now being blocked in the UK (and not being particularly techy and not knowing how to get around that)  the obvious target has gone.

3) Getting word out that it's there. Back to the old obscurity problem.

Now obviously no-one can help me on the first one, but any advice or suggestions on the second two would be greatly welcomed.

Thanks

Cycling, Music and Design (well, poking a bit of fun at fashion)

I think this video just about sums up all the key areas of this blog. And it has lots of swearing in it, which is always funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgCqz3l33kU
[EDIT - updated with embed]

A Manifesto for the Content Industry – 5. Add Value.

Add value. What are you doing that your customers can’t do with 20 minutes and the internet? What are you doing that a creator can’t do for themselves? If you’re not adding value, why would someone pay you?

Now you’d think that this would be a pretty redundant article, after all, why would you be involved in a process if you weren’t adding value to it? Sadly large parts of the content industry have drifted a long way from this position.

At this stage it’s probably important to take a look at the content industry and the difference between middlemen and gatekeepers because, I think, you have fundamental difference in what they add to the artist-customer relationship. At least, this is the terminology I’m using so I’ll set out the distinction here:

A middleman is someone* who facilitates either the production of the work or the interaction between customers and creators.

A gatekeeper is someone* who restricts access to content until some kind of fee is paid.

Frequently a company can be both of these things. A record label may provide the upfront fees for a producer or session musicians, but then block the release of material via a non-traditional medium.

Frequently a company or organisation is supposed to be the former but ends up being the latter.

With the rapid improvement of consumer electronics and multitude of distribution options now available to anyone it might seem like the opportunities for a middleman to add value have disappeared. I’d argue that this is fundamentally untrue and there is still massive value that can be provided by the major players. A few obvious areas and examples are:

            Publishing: In a market that is still dominated by physical objects, distribution is key, and once your product is in the shop it needs to be visible on the shelf. You could try doing that as a self-published artist but good luck...

            Music: The difference that a good producer can make to a recording is probably analogous to the value that a good editor adds to an author, and it’s no real surprise that almost every novel you read will have the editor listed for thanks in the opening pages.

            Movies: unlike either writing or music, making movies is expensive. There’s no getting round the fact that even a budget production will probably cost you tens of thousands of dollars. And then you’ve got to find somewhere to show your film…

I could go on and talk about publicity and opinion makers and all kinds of other things, but however you look at it there is still a huge part that the established industries can play.

Unfortunately a lot of these companies seem to have decided that every interaction should also be a transaction and the only value that matters is shareholder value.

Hence they have become gatekeepers.

Where a middleman adds value to both the customer and the creator, a gatekeeper does the opposite by trying to drive a fee out of every interaction between the two. This might appear by way of a simple restriction of content (separating the customer from the creator) on you-tube “This video is not available to view in your country” – Sorry what? I’ve googled the official video for the new single and I can’t watch it for another 6 weeks because I don’t live in the US? Or by putting DRM on a video game (reducing the value) so that you can only play it if you’re connected to the web – Sorry what? I bought a single player game that I want to play on my laptop as I do my daily train commute, now I discover I can’t do that? Or a combination of the two, for example, by delaying the release of a series box-set on DVD so that advertising can be maximised via re-runs on a secondary channel – Sorry what? This was released in the US 6 months ago but I still can’t buy the box set and watch it at my convenience because you have a re-run on Sky-Atlantic.**

So to go back to our opening paragraph, one of the biggest challenges to any creator is getting their product seen/heard/read, and there’s so much good stuff out there it’s hard for the customer to find the great stuff. Connecting those two dots is value add.

Looking at the same situation from a different perspective, there’s a lot of good stuff out there that just needs a little bit of polish to really stand out. The aspiring film-maker in Spielberg’s Super 8 keeps going on about production values as a means to make his film standout in the upcoming competition and the principle holds in other fields as well***. Taking something from a “gifted-amateur” feel to a “professional-product” feel is value add.

Essentially it comes down to the title point; if you’re in the supply chain you should be adding value.

* Or a company

** Interestingly in almost all of these cases you'll be able to find an unauthorised copy for free with none of the restrictions. But try telling the respective industries that their behaviour is driving piracy...

*** Having recently listened to the first album by The National it sounds like a demo-tape for their later stuff; the talent and skill are there but the production values are in the “gifted-amateur” range compared to their more recent output.

Pay What You Think It’s Worth (or Free Market Economics).

Over on my Other Blog I’m and musician so, since I’ve been harping on for a while about alternative business models for musicians and how the biggest challenge for an amateur musician is not piracy but publicity, I’ve now decided to put my money where my mouth is and try one of these alternative models for myself.

For a long time the gatekeepers of content have tried to force the prices of digital content to match that of physical copies but it just doesn’t make sense. So what is the correct price for a download? Well, I guess it’s what the market decides is the right price. You’re the market, this is a chance to help decide.

So as of today all our music downloads are available on a Pay What You Think It’s Worth* basis (including “Free”) from our Bandcamp site**.

Personally I’d rather that more people heard and enjoyed our music than that we extract every penny from anyone who might like it. So please feel free to pass this on to anyone who you think might enjoy it (in fact, please please do that!) or anyone who writes / talks about music and the music business and might be interested in the experiment.

I put “Free” in inverted commas because if you go for Free then I’m going to ask you for an e-mail address and add you to my distribution list. You can opt out at any time and I don’t e-mail much stuff out anyway, I reckon that’s a fair trade.

N.B. the physical cds remain at fixed prices I’m afraid, because they cost a fixed amount to produce and I have costs to recover. If you download the stuff and then decide that you’d like one of the CDs (plenty of EPs left, a couple of handfuls of the Album) then I will happily knock off anything you decided to pay for the download.

Similarly if you’ve previously paid the full rate for the download and are now feeling ripped off (I really, really hope there aren’t many people in this category!) then drop me a line and we’ll see what we can sort out. I mean this, I’d hate for someone to be sitting there thinking that I’ve pulled a fast one on them.

* there is no good acronym for this.

** I’m working on setting up the same mechanism on other platforms.

 

A Manifesto for the content industry – 2. One shared file does not equal one sale lost

It appears that I have published chapters one and three but omitted chapter 2. My apologies, please accept this correction...

One shared file does not equal one sale lost. It really doesn’t. People will accept something for free that they won’t be prepared to pay for, don’t kid yourself otherwise. A shared file is equally likely to lead to more sales rather than fewer.

Whenever you hear or see stats being bandied around by the content industry, this is the principle on which they base their calculations; that each unlawfully shared file* represents one lost sale.

This is the biggie for the music industry but it’s increasingly being misunderstood by the movie business as well so let’s look at various reasons why this might be the case.

Firstly you have your hard-core never-pay-a-penny file-sharers. These are the ones who think that the labels have been sticking it to them so long that they somehow owe someone something so try to stick it back by never buying anything that they can get for free. These are your lost sales. But arguably, since they wouldn’t buy your product anyway (so they claim), which sale has been lost?

Anyway, assuming that the die-hards above are all bluff and would really be out there buying records if that pesky internet would just go away, why else would one shared file not equal one lost sale?

Here’s a few reasons:

1.  I’ve heard the single but I like this band and I’m going to buy the album when it comes out anyway, why would I pay twice for the single?
2.  I already own the song on an earlier format, I could go through the hassle of rigging up my record deck and copying it across but that’s illegal too and more hassle than just downloading a copy.
3. I would happily buy a copy of this but because it's an old song / movie you no longer sell it. How can I buy something you're not selling?
4. I’m not sure if I like it. I’ve heard it on the radio but I need a couple more listens to determine if I want to buy it. Try before buy marketing
5. It’s not worth the cash. Now that cash might only 79p**, but when you’re talking about something with a unit cost of zero, that’s still a value judgement. I have a copy of William Shatner’s Rocket Man on cassette, I think it’s a pretty funny listen, but I’d never pay money for it, it’s just not worth it. Similarly I have old mix-tapes from the radio with various chart tunes on, if they turn up as a free download or magazine-cover cd then I’ll take a copy, but it’s not worth paying to replace them.
6. Because it’s not being offered in the format that the consumer wants. Some bands / labels are rejecting the MP3 format altogether and only releasing things on hard copy. An increasing number of people are ditching hard copies altogether and moving everything to a digital file. If you’re not selling what I want to buy it’s not a lost sale.

And that’s not even considering the fact that some of the Industry numbers are counting shared playlists on social media sites (like Spotify) as shared files.

But in summary yes, some of those shared files are lost sales, but it’s not even close to all of them. Using statistics based on this premise undermines the argument and the public’s trust in the content industry.

* Including Format Shifting.

** On a separate note, can anyone justify the increase in cost of downloads when the technology and storage costs are only coming down?

A Manifesto for the content industry – 1. Do Not Sue Your Customers

Expanding from my previous blog this is the first in a series whereby I use you, my faithful readers (both of you), to sense-check my work and point out my idiocy. Thank you.

Do not sue your customers. Seriously, just don’t. It’s the economic equivalent of going to war. If, in the words of one CEO, you say “We’re going to sue the [expletive deleted] out of generation Y”, exactly how many of generation Z do you expect to buy your products? If someone is taking content you have the rights to and selling it on commercially, sure, take ‘em to the cleaners. But blocking up the legal system with 25,000 individual cases of people downloading The Hurt Locker is not only targeting a bunch of people who have no impact on your business model, it’s also an abuse of the legal process.

Taking legal action against someone is an act of aggression. In most walks of life it’s a last resort once all other options have been exhausted. If you have an argument with your partner, you talk it through, you might get counselling, you might end up at Relate, but you don’t phone the divorce lawyer straight away.

Similarly if your neighbour won’t return the lawnmower, you go round and ask for it back, maybe a couple of times, you don’t dial 999 as soon as the clippings have been emptied into the bin.

Most people would agree that the first thing to do in any disagreement is to talk to the other party and see if it can be resolved amicably but, for some reason, that doesn’t apply to the content industry. In the world of Intellectual Property, intellect is left behind and the first course of action is, all too frequently, a call to the legal department.

So ask yourself, are you getting hot under the collar about nothing? If a pre-mastered copy of your movie get’s leaked onto the web before all the special-effects are done, is this really going to stop people going to the cinema to see it when it’s done? Before you reach for the lawyers consider if you could be better served by going out there and talking to people. Explain that what they can download isn’t the finished article, empathise with them, if they’re going to that effort they’re probably some of your biggest fans. Handle it right and they can be some of your biggest advocates as well.

But let’s move on from this opening argument though and consider what to do if you think that you are genuinely being financially deprived due to someone else’s actions. There are three things to consider here:

1.  Are you targeting the right person?
2.  Are you using an appropriate means and claiming an appropriate recompense?
3.  Are you fully prepared for any backlash?

We’ll tackle these one at a time.

1.  Consider the defendant: are they an end-consumer who you haven’t effectively served in the market, or are they a middle-man profiting off your work without authorisation? If they’re the former then you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ventures like Spotify are increasingly showing that if you provide a decent legal experience that serves your customers, they don’t feel the need to get around copyright or distribution restrictions.
2.  Having identified that someone is wilfully, criminally distributing your product, you need to make a targeted and proportional response. If a torrent site in Norway has been distributing your software, use the existing legislation to find out who the uploader is and target them for proportional damages. Don’t sue the torrent site for the statutory maximum. There are two reasons for this, one is that if you take the maximalist approach the chances are that the site will close, declare bankruptcy and you won’t see a penny, the second reason is backlash (see point 3). Don’t be tempted by the dollar signs and go for the end-users either, it will sting you. The makers of the Hurt Locker are currently in the process of contacting 25,000 people and demanding $1500 dollars or threatening them with legal action (on the most flimsy of evidence). That’s what we call a shake down and it’s winning them no friends, even in the courts.
3.  Backlash. You’re probably familiar with the Streisand Effect. If not, take a moment to google this. Memory refreshed? Right, consider this and the quote at the top of the page. The internet is not going away. No matter how much lobbying is done. The current crop of rights holders are not going to remain the gatekeepers forever; there are too many alternative distribution methods now. If you aggravate and disenfranchise your artists’ fans both they, and the artists, will route around you. In some cases (see ACS Law) they may take active steps against you. This doesn’t mean you can’t take action when it’s needed; but you’ll need to be on the front foot with your web presence and you’d better have a good and honest explanation.

The bottom line is, if you’re relying on taking legal action to try to prop up a business model that’s no longer serving your customers, then you’re failing both your customers and the artists you’re claiming to represent. Adapt or be forgotten.

A manifesto for the content industry

Following on from my previous blog about the gender discrepancy between the charts and the amateur scene I’ve been doing some further thinking about how the music industry, and the wider content industry / rights holders* might want to behave if they are to survive (and even prosper) in the post-digital economy.

So, the manner of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I have produced a Manifesto for the Content Industry.

Now, before we get onto the manifesto, I want to head something off at the pass. This is not about whether it is right or wrong to copy and distribute files via the internet. This is not a moral debate. File sharing happens and, in one form or another, will always happen. This is a suggestion for how companies can accept this economic reality and still remain a viable business.

Right, now we’ve got that out of the way, here are my founding principles for a modern content provider. They’re in no order apart from number 1 and I'll expand on them in turn in future blogs:

1              Do not sue your customers. Seriously, just don’t. It’s the economic equivalent of going to war. If, in the words of one CEO, you say “We’re going to sue the fuck out of generation Y”, exactly how many of generation Z do you expect to buy your products? If someone is taking content you have the rights to and selling it on commercially, sure, take ‘em to the cleaners**. But blocking up the legal system with 25,000 individual cases of people downloading The Hurt Locker is not only targeting a bunch of people who have no impact on your business model, it’s also an abuse of the legal process.

2              One shared file does not equal one sale lost. It really doesn’t. People will accept something for free that they won’t be prepared to pay for, don’t kid yourself otherwise. A shared file is equally likely to lead to more sales rather than fewer.

3              Content will always be produced and consumed with or without you. You are just a facilitator. If your entire industry disappeared overnight, people will still create and they will find other ways to share and appreciate it. Never lose sight of this.

4              You can compete with free. Seriously, there are plenty of working business models out there, study them. You are better placed than anyone to make this work, failure to do so is not about not being able to compete with free, it’s a failure of your business acumen.

5              Add value. What are you doing that your customers can’t do with 20 minutes and the internet? What are you doing that a creator can’t do for themselves? If you’re not adding value, why would someone pay you?

6              Focus on quality. A corollary to adding value; you cannot compete on quantity, it’s you vs the world, you have to be better than good.

7              Be brave. If you’re focussing on sequels, glorified karaoke acts, this year’s answer to “X” or trying to build a brand then you are guaranteed to miss the next trend when it comes along.

8              Use your experience. There’s a lot of noise out there, but there’s also a huge amount of good stuff, your job is to find the great stuff. For example, if you’re a newspaper then do the investigative journalism, get into the detail and find the facts behind the story. I can get opinion and newsfeeds faster than you can go to print, get me the truth and I will buy your paper.

9              Be genuine. We’re sick of spin, we’re sick of hype. If you churn out repetitive and unoriginal content whilst claiming it’s the best thing since last year’s clone, we’ll stop listening and go elsewhere (a lot of people already have).

10            Free your people. If you’re doing the other stuff right your people should have some pretty interesting jobs. I bet they’ve got interesting stuff to say. Do they blog? We do. Do they comment in chatrooms? We do. Let them join the conversation, it should be part of their job.

11            This is a global market. If you charge western prices to the third world then people will find a way to get the content for free. 99c might not be a lot to readers of this blog but it’s a day’s wage to large amounts of the globe. But the bad news is that you can’t stop a European going to an African website and buying from there, your unit cost is zero, expect your prices to trend that way.

12            The gravy train has stopped, it’s time to get off. You are no longer the gatekeepers to content and you no longer have a monopoly. Lobby if you like (and we know you do) but you’d be better off coming to terms with it and adapting.

13            The customers are out there. A corollary to 8; the argument that people are unwilling to pay for content has been proven false by the success of I-tunes, Spotify, The Financial Times and numerous others. You have to figure out who you’re trying to serve and what their needs are (Hint, the answers aren’t “everybody” and “everything”)

14            Do not sue your customers. I know this is the same as 1 but it’s so important I thought I’d say it twice.***

So there you go, that’s my stab at a set of principles for a 21^st century content provider. What do you think?

* Please note, I am using the term “Content Industry” as a catch all to cover the major players in the Intellectual Property market (Studios, Record Labels, Publishers, Newspapers, Software houses) rather than the actual creators of that content (Artists, film-makers, authors etc) as the behaviours and ambitions are generally very different.

** Take legal action against your competitors if you must, but be aware of the Streisand affect. You can lose as much business being in the right as you can being in the wrong.

*** With reference to Red Dwarf

1000 just isn't enough

In my opening post i mentioned the stuff i'd been reading on the technium about the concept that's been doing the rounds for a while now, that a band can get by with 1000 true fans.

What defines a true fan is probably up for debate but for the purposes of these arguments it can be taken as someone who'll buy everything you release. Which is nice of them, but, and this is where it gets interesting, being a true fan they're more likely to want some kind of hard-copy product rather than just a download.

This, therefore, means upfront production costs. This is particularly true of any merchandise other than music (ever tried downloading a t-shirt?).

Production costs rack up quickly. Let's say that your true fan will spend £25 on your products per year, say, for the sake of argument, an album, an EP and a t-shirt. That's going to cost you about £1500 for a thousand t-shirts, about £1000 for a run of a thousand albums and a similar amount for the EP. These are ballpark figures, you can probably find cheaper if you search around but it's a good place to start.

That's £3500 you've got to find upfront (albeit potentially in installments) to produce the physical item.
Let's talk studio costs now. In fact, let's do it in reverse.
You have 1000 fans all willing to spend £25 (+ or - a few fans and + or - a few £)
So your merchandise income is £25k
less VAT of 17.5% (£3723)
less production cost (£3500)
leaves you 17700 (and remember this is your full time job)
Studio time will cost you probably £20 and hour for the studio and another £20 an hour for the engineer (last time i looked)
Now if you spend every penny of that £17700 on studio time, that works out at about 444 hours. If you compare that to a 9-5 job that's about 3 months. That's probably enough time to record an album and an EP.
But you're not going to be eating in that time, out of that money, partly because you won't have made it yet, partly because there isn't any left.

So you're basically going to need to live off your live performances.

Now i don't know about you but i have found one thing to be consistent on the live circuit - the "better" the venue (i.e. the more it is a recognised venue with appreciative audiences and big name draws), the lower the payout at the end of the show for a supporting act.
If i wanted to live off music i could probably manage it playing covers in bars 3 nights a week in the region. Just*.

But playing covers in bars doesn't get you true fans; you want true fans you have to be playing your own stuff. And that doesn't get you gigs in bars.

I dunno, maybe that's just me, but that's my experience. So basically, 1000 fans isn't enough. 2000 might be, 3000 is probably closer to the mark. And that's for a solo artist/duo. If you're a band then you've got to be looking at around 5000 i think.
And that's a helluva a lot of people to get interested in your music by yourself.

Which i'll come back to in the next installment...

* Money is drying up in the recession, fewer places are putting music on and fewer people are going out.

Yet Another Music, Design And Cycling blog

Welcome, Wilkommen, Bienvenue, in the words of the best band in the world ever*.
So here we are on our first of an irregular series of blogs that will cover, generally speaking, Music, Design and Cycling. I've chosen to write about these three things as they are intrinsically linked in a singular way.
I.e. I'm interested in them.
But nowadays with music comes technology; so i'll be touching on that here and there as well.
In fact, we'll be starting with that.
I've just finished reading a very interesting article on The Technium called Better Than Free; it talks about ways to monetise a product in a world where copies are free. And it's a lot better thought out than most posting on the subject.
This is especially true when read in conjunction with two of his other posts: The Reality of Depending on True Fans and The Case Against 1000 True Fans.
It seems the debate is still very open with only one clear example of someone managing to make the new paradigm (did i really write that? I guess i did, oh well) work being Jonathan Coulton.
I suspect that where we will end up is with the rise of either the marketeer / artist or close collaborations of the two. Either way, it's not enough just to produce music and publish it on the web, nor is it enough just to produce music and play live. There's a huge amount of effort required to persuade people to get off their arses and come to a gig, and then another chunk of effort to persuade them to buy what they can otherwise get for free.
And sometimes that's kind of hard to do at the same time as holding down a day job.

* Blot - Midnight Oil