Category: the future of music

No, Internet Piracy is Not A “Service Issue”…

Popcorn Time is now using the tired old Kim Dotcom defense that piracy is a “service issue”. We’ve heard this nugget for over a decade.  The argument may have had some merit in 1999, but that is just not the case today more than a decade and a half later.

So with that in mind, here is our response to the “service issue” argument when Mr. Dotcom attempted it back in 2013…

In the anticipation of the announcement of the new Mega launch, Pat Pilcher at The New Zealand Herald wrote an article titled “Kim Dotcom on Ending Piracy” in which the journalist listed Mr.Dotcom’s five steps to ending piracy. Pilcher writes,

As ironic as that may sound, Kim Dotcom’s logic is inescapably robust. Here’s what his end to piracy manifesto says:

1. Create great stuff
2. Make it easy to buy
3. Same day worldwide release
4. Fair price
5. Works on any device

Looking at what Kim is saying, the 5 points seem pretty obvious, although each could quickly get bogged down once Hollywood gets involved.

So let’s look at these one by one.

1. Create Great Stuff
Well, that’s a no brainer. The content industries create the most prized and sought after “stuff” in the world including films such as Avatar, The Avengers, and The Dark Night Rises as well as franchises like Iron Man, Transformers, Harry Potter and others. Music artists include the likes of Adele, The Black Keys, Taylor Swift, The Beatles and countless others. Making great stuff has never been a problem.

2. Make It Easy To Buy
Another no brainer. Perhaps a decade plus ago this might have been an argument, but not today. There are over 500 legal and licensed music services alone. For the film industry there are services like Netflix, Vudu and Cinemanow as well as other direct to home video on demand providers that give consumers more access to more content across more platforms than at any time in history.

3. Same Day World Wide Release
For music this is more less the standard now and is also more and more common for feature film releases as well. This is a common practice for the largest and most anticipated releases of music and films, the “stuff” that is the most aggressively pirated. For smaller indie releases this may not always be possible but than again I’m not sure that the problem we are combating is in Nigeria on indie rock albums and movies that are more or less film festival darlings.

4. Fair price
Done. Netflix is $7.99 a month for unlimited access to it’s entire library of films and tv shows. Spotify is $9.99 for unlimited access to it’s entire library which consist of probably 95% of every known recording in print. Add to this the cost of a song download is 99 cents. Less than the cost of a candy bar. Renting a movie from a video on demand service ranges from 3.99 to 5.99. Price is no longer an issue and has not been for years.

5. Works on Any Device
Music is DRM free and has been for at least half a decade. Streaming Services such as Netflix and Spotify are also available on every major platform including not only Mac and PC computers, but also mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets by a variety of manufacturers. Additionally most new video game consoles and blu-ray players also include many of these same apps.

So there you have it, the end of piracy. Even Pat Pilcher at The New Zealand Herald agrees a referring to a similar response from the New Zealand record industry. He writes,

Well there it is, RIANZ’s response in full. I can’t argue with much that they’ve said, as they’ve pretty much complied with most of Kim’s 5 points.

So Kim Dotcom’s five suggestions have been fulfilled and yet, I don’t think we’ll see an end to piracy anytime soon. There is still one thing piracy offers that legal, licensed and legitimate services do not, and that is compensation to the artists, musicians, filmmakers and creators which requires that consumers actually do pay the fair price asked.

It’s all pretty simple and by Kim Dotcom’s own suggestions and admission it’s pretty clear where the problem is from here on out, and it’s not in his five suggestions…

And, of course, let us not forget this classic… Kim Dotcom Parody Video Appears on YouTube

 

by Trichordist Editor

The Times They Are A-Changin | Guest Post by Marc Ribot

Guest post by Marc Ribot.

The deceptive premises of the NYTimes Editorial “Keep the Internet Free of Borders” 8/10, begin with the title, which leads one to believe that this ITC case will take something away that actually exists.   In fact, the Internet is not now and has never been,  “free of borders”. Copyright law prohibits unlawful distribution of copyrighted works outside national borders and has strict provisions on import and export of copyrighted works. The Internet has never been free of copyright law, because copyright  is nation-based. That’s why a new treaty was adopted to address the cross-border issue of distribution of works for blind and reading impaired persons- the Marrakesh Treaty adopted in 2012-, and why a global treaty for libraries is now under discussion: to make cross-border distribution legal in certain cases,  precisely because right now it’s restricted.  Even Google knows that the Internet has national borders.  It found a way to respect them for Google Books-  a mechanism to prevent export of copyrighted works to other countries. There are patent rules too.  All universities have policies regarding import and export of patented material. Export control rules and guidelines already cover patented material/trade competition and have NEVER  been restricted to physical goods.

When the editorial extrapolates its argument to the record industry, it goes even further afield.  ” The I.T.C. has long had the power to forbid companies from importing physical goods like electronics, books and mechanical equipment that violate the patents, copyrights and trademarks of American businesses…The commission’s order to ClearCorrect was the first time it had sought to bar the transfer of digital information.”

The Times takes the RIAA to task for supporting the decision: “Groups like the…Recording Industry Association of America are supporting the commission’s view… that, as trade increasingly becomes digital, the definition of “article” should include data.”

Yet when there was actually legislation on the table supporting the alternative remedies to ITC intervention that the editorial now claims to favor,  the NY Times took the exact opposite position ( Beyond SOPA 1/28/12), and supported empowering the ITC:  “By giving the International Trade Commission sole authority to determine infringement, [the OPEN Act] would…[give]  copyright holders powerful new tools to protect themselves [while] protecting legitimate expression on  the Web from overzealous content owners.

Funny how ‘Times’ change.

In any case, the alternate remedies proposed in last weeks editorial simply don’t apply to recording artists works.  “There are far better ways to [protect…patents and copyrights]….Align could sue ClearCorrect and seek damages for patent infringement. Or the company could ask a judge to order ClearCorrect to stop selling products made using the information contained in the files.”

Sounds great: but asking a judge to order an infringing company to stop selling [physical] products made using information contained in infringing files’ isn’t relevant for people whose product is the files themselves.  And  of course, suing companies profiting from infringement is precisely what musicians can’t do, thanks to the Safe Harbor Clause of the DMCA. That clause exempts online businesses from the normal responsibility of companies for violations of the law occurring on their premises.

Is the NY Times now going to support ending Safe Harbor protection for companies whose business models are based on aiding, abetting, and profiting  from infringement?  Such a position would be the only way musicians could have access to its suggested remedy.

We certainly hope so, because while congress has failed to effectively regulate the unfair black market destroying the value of our work, our industry has crashed and our livelihoods are suffering.

Our problem isn’t new technology itself, but the failure of government to regulate new and unfair forms of exploitation. The internet has borders: it is bound internationally by the laws of sovereign nations, and internally by laws which protect the rights of citizens. It also has hugely powerful corporations attempting to violate those borders on a massive scale in order to create consumer ‘facts on the ground’ which render those rights politically un-enforceable.

International borders aren’t the only boundaries threatened by big tech’s drive to profit from infringement: the consequences of the failure of government to stand up to this corporate manipulation won’t stay neatly contained within the music industry.  Nor will the effective nullification of citizens rights stop at those protecting artists.  Its a slippery slope, baby.

– M ribot

by Trichordist Editor

Are Creators Really Thriving in the Digital Age? Doesn’t Look Like It | Robert Levine @ Billboard

“Free Ride” author Robert Levine takes on Steven Johnson’s stats and conclusions…

In this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, author Steven Johnson wrote a piece, “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” which ventured to examine the state of creative business in the digital age. Johnson conclusion was that it’s thriving. I have strong feelings on this topic, since I wrote a book that makes the opposite argument. I’d very much like Johnson to be right, since the health of the creative business strongly correlates with my ability to put food on the table. But although I think he’s a smart writer — we worked together, briefly, years ago — I think he’s looking at wrong information in the wrong way. He ends up oversimplifying a complicated subject to make a contrarian point.

Johnson’s premise is that the best way to assess the health of the creative businesses isn’t to look at falling sales or struggling companies but how actual creators themselves are faring. It’s a smart, refreshing approach. But his evidence that creators are thriving is far flimsier than it looks.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BILLBOARD:
http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6677568/are-creators-really-thriving-in-the-digital-age-doesnt-look-like-it

by trichordist

NY Times Gets It Wrong on Musician Stats | Stats Chat

The NY Times get’s it wrong. Stats Chats takes on the numbers:

The larger category, “Musicians and Singers”, has been declining.  The smaller category, “Music Directors and Composers” was going up slowly, then had a dramatic three-year, straight-line increase, then decreased a bit.

Going  into the Technical Notes for the estimates (eg, 2009), we see

May 2009 estimates are based on responses from six semiannual panels collected over a 3-year period

That means the three-year increase of 5000 jobs/year is probably a one-off increase of 15,000 jobs. Either the number of “Music Directors and Composers” more than doubled in 2009, or more likely there was a change in definitions or sampling approach.

 

READ THE FULL STORY AT STATS CHAT:
http://www.statschat.org.nz/2015/08/22/changing-who-you-count/

by trichordist

The 1 Percent: Income Inequality Has Never Been Worse Among Touring Musicians… | Digital Music News

One of the mantra’s that we always hear about the internet and musicians is that the revenue has shifted from recording sales to live ticket sales. So the great accomplishment of the internet according to Silicon Valley wisdom (and Steven Johnson of the NY Times Mag) is that artists can hit the road. “The dream of the 90s is alive, the 1890s…”

Well, if you’re not an established hit artist, here’s how that is working out in the post-napster era. Oh, and by the way, songwriters don’t tour, record producers don’t tour, recording engineers don’t tour… well, you get the point. Here’s the stat as reported by Digital Music News.

Note that in 1982 almost 40% of the revenue was divided between the “bottom” 95% of artists, while in 2003 they received only 15% of all revenue.

Could it be that these top-grossing artists benefited from launching in an era when artists didn’t have to be in the top 1% to develop a healthy live following over years of touring?

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2013/07/05/onepct/

by Trichordist Editor

Updated: Recording Sales Declines & Musician Employment, 1999-2011… | Digital Music News

This week there will be a lot of discuss about Steven Johnson’s piece in the NYTimes Magazine. It’s important to note that there are some very serious questions about how Johnson arrived at his conclusions. This piece from Digital Music News from 2013 offers another perspective, and one that is far more consistent with what we see.

There’s more music being created than ever before, but paradoxically, musicians are making less. Which means there are also fewer musicians and music professionals enjoying gainful employment, thanks to a deflated ecosystem once primed by major labels and marked-up CDs.

It’s a difficult reality to stomach, especially given years of misguided assumptions about digital platforms.  But it’s not really a revolution if it’s not getting people paid.  And according to stats supplied by the US Department of Labor, there are 41 percent fewer paid musicians since 1999.

READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2012/08/25/recording/

by Trichordist Editor

Technology Apologist Complex : Steven Johnson Strikes Again | Jonathan Taplin @ Medium

This week’s apology episode from Johnson is entitled The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t — and its one of the most brain dead pieces that the New York Times Magazine has ever published. I’m shocked the Public Editor has not already taken Johnson to task. I won’t go into all the details because David Newhoff has already destroyed most of Johnson’s argument that the Internet monopolies have actually been a boon to the average artist. This is total nonsense as this chart shows.

READ THE FULL POST AT MEDIUM:
https://medium.com/@jonathantaplin/technology-apologist-complex-eafcf14df530

by Trichordist Editor

Understanding Music And Blockchain Without The Hype

Well the bitcoin fervor seems to have already peaked and we’ve moved on to the blockchain (the underpinning tech that makes bitcoin work) as the new investor de rigueur. It’s like that moment when your favorite unknown band goes from obscurity to superstardom and suddenly everyone is telling you how much they’ve always loved them. Everyone loves the blockchain. In fact when it comes to solving the many issues facing the music industry, there is a massive rush of interest in using blockchain technology to solve them all, citing the ridiculously bandied about word of the moment, “transparency”.

What currently concerns me with the goldrush to fund or participate in blockchain projects is of course the fact that when investors jump into nascent tech, it often gets convoluted from its original intent to something often unrecognizable. What made bitcoin and blockchain so attractive to many developers and users was that it wasn’t part of “the system”, nor built around the idea of being part of the establishment. And yet, that is exactly what is happening.

As someone who actually has a technology platform that works with blockchain, let’s look at it with some critical objectivity.

What is the blockchain?
Without providing a deep and detailed explanation of how “ blocks” become the “blockchain,” or talking about miners mining bitcoin, and other concepts that will cause your eyes to roll into the back of your head, just think of the blockchain as an immutable decentralized (no one owns it) public ledger or record of transactional data. That data is distributed around the world to multiple servers that allow this transactional data to be written into a permanent record. Each copy of this data is designed to contain the same data as the others. Essentially, you can trust that if you write a transaction into the blockchain, they all have the exact same transactional information. To boil it down to a very basic level, if you put something in it, it is there permanently, impossible to tamper or change.

Right now there are newly funded companies trying to use the blockchain to validate/record stock trades, artwork, music, copyright, diamonds, and other tangible/intangible assets. Even banks and governments are looking into how they might utilize the blockchain for documentation of important information. Many within the music industry feel that by writing practically everything into a blockchain they will solve all the issues and we’ll suddenly be returned to a time of unicorns and rainbows, with more money than ever before falling from the sky. And maybe it can.

It is in fact quite a brilliant bit of kit and as of late, other people have started to see that having such a mechanism could be very valuable for other types of transactions. And so we’ve got other companies and organizations creating not only their own cryptocurrencies, but their own versions of blockchain technology. In fact, what could be the version of the blockchain that is recognized as “official,” is currently in the process of experiencing a fork in the road. Sparing you the politics behind what’s going on, there are certain limitations inherent on the blockchain that a group of developers want to re-engineer to solve, and so they are in the process of what is called “forking” or splitting off the blockchain to run a new version of it.

Confused yet? Welcome to my world, and I’m using it every day.

The blockchain, in theory, shows some promise as an immutable public ledger that provides some needed transparency when it comes to important transactions, whether they be purely financial or a public statement of fact. However, if it is going to get past the point where it is being funded for the sake of finding the next big thing (beyond bitcoin), to actually being the next big thing, it has to solve five main issues, Authority, Immutability, Scalability, Legacy, and Privacy.

Authority

“Def: the confidence resulting from personal expertise: he hit the ball with authority.• a person with extensive or specialized knowledge about a subject; an expert: she was an authority on the stock market.• a book or other source able to supply reliable information or evidence, typically to settle a dispute: the court cited a series of authorities supporting their decision.”

Humans tend to trust people and institutions because they place within them authority. If one institution fails us, we often have recourse to go to another to find satisfaction. We hire experts in certain fields or use certain organizations to perform certain tasks, because of the authority invested in them. Authority doesn’t inherently exist, but is something that has to be recognized and accepted by humans, because data (good or bad) is just data. Regardless of how many times technologists want to convince us that AI and technology can do certain things better than humans, almost every person prefers to have a direct connection to another person when resolving issues.

The blockchain does not possess cognitive empathy and does not understand nuance, therefore sometimes the only way to solve a problem is with a person to person dialogue. Blockchain is not an authority unless given that state by humans. It has to be recognized as such. However, blockchain also belongs to no one, and it in fact is simply a public ledger or record of information pertaining to a transaction or asset, and it can in fact be polluted by humans (garbage in/garbage out). It cannot be accountable because it has no one to be accountable to, and no one is truly responsible for it. Since it is designed to exist in a decentralized format, (meaning it lives out in the ether of the Internet and has no owner), the perceived value is that anyone can write to a blockchain and by making it public, almost anyone can use it to validate a transaction.

However…

It hasn’t been tested in a court of law. While I like the idea behind decentralized transaction ledgers, I see some serious issues specifically surrounding authority. There is no centralized authority responsible for blockchain, and therefore you can’t really hold anyone accountable for the data. Certainly for many, this means there are pluses and minuses, yet while a record may be a record, generally in court you have an authority which can validate the authenticity of that record going in and coming out.
If you have a land dispute, for example, you may have to call in not just surveyors, but also government officials who have the original land deeds or registered documents on file to testify to the validity of said data. They always possessed the data and it was recorded at that location, so they can testify to its validity. When it comes to copyright, in order to sue for a valid copyright infringement case, you have to have (in the US) registered your work with the Library of Congress, not simply throw something into the blockchain. There has to be someone accountable.

You also have to in fact be able to 100% trust who is entering that transactional data, and they have to be accountable. If that trust is being put into the hands of a private technology company, and you are relying on that data and that company, you have to understand there are risks. That company could in fact be acquired or go out of business. While some of your data might safely tucked into the blockchain, that doesn’t mean you are 100% protected and free of risk.

While we may or may not like it, having authorities (institutions/people of repute) that we generally trust, has always been critical to society, and it is not just information that backs that up, but people. I know some will say that blockchain is impossible to “hack” or game, but I’ve yet to see any technology that hasn’t been exploitable on some level, so who will people turn to when they have disagreements or feel they have been taken advantage of? Sometimes data also doesn’t tell the whole story, which is why we don’t call computers to testify, we call humans.

Since anyone can essentially write anything into the blockchain, this is why having trusted institutions involved is so important, but to date, all the language I hear from blockchain disruptors is that they want to burn down the old legacies, yet they don’t yet have a trusted replacement for them yet.

Immutability
I think my biggest issue to date with those rushing to work with blockchain is the idea that you can and therefore should write any and all data into the blockchain. For example, several companies I’ve talked to (and some I’ve met) have thoughts of writing business logic into the blockchain, which could include metadata, ownership information, spits, rates, terms, and so on. The thought being that if everything is out there, it is easy to parse out, interpret (via people or machines), and deliver that always elusive “transparency.”

Besides the technical limitations on this, even if possible, it is a remarkably stupid idea.

Business logic is not always immutable. In fact, it isn’t even always that logical. All creative industries are in a constant state of flux. Rates, terms, use, and even ownership can change at any given moment. There are not simply market forces at play, but there are emotional forces at play. It is one of those ideas that on the surface sounds brilliant, but without any real thought as to what comes afterwards as far as resolution conflict and other complications that are products of people. The music industry is replete with battles and disagreements and misunderstandings. It also doesn’t take into consideration  the power of “oops.” Mistakes will inevitably be made.

Certainly, some data can and should be written into the blockchain, but the idea that there will be a magical wonderland of machine logic that will always know how to handle every given situation is laughable. Machines do not understand intent, and they do not understand abstractions like fair use, parody, or pastiche. Humans barely understand these ideas. On the scale that things like user-generated content are created, the idea that this can all be handled in this manner is illogical.

There is a better way to handle business logic, and that is using a method I call “immutable fluidity.” It is in creating a hybridization of static and motion. That’s another article.

Scalability – Size
Here’s some of the reason we’re seeing a fork of the current blockchain. When it comes to scalability of size (and speed), there are two camps on this. One is saying blockchain scalability is not an issue, and the other says that it is a major issue. Which is it? I think I can make an argument for why it may not be scalable. With the rush to build/fork blockchain into the “blockchain for x” and the “blockchain for y” are we not exacerbating the issues of scalability? We certainly are making it very difficult to pick a platform to back.

Let’s look out a bit into the near future and take into consideration all the possible uses for blockchain. We’re talking trillions of transactions/records every day. Massive amounts of data that, while not blob data (large files like video/music), is still data.

If we take the bitcoin wiki scalability targets they use by comparing bitcoin/blockchain to the Visa platform, then according to the wiki, Visa has a peak capacity of around 50k transactions per second. I know that’s “peak” (not average) but if we are looking at displacing other payment systems as well as other data recorded in blockchain, you have to build for the world you may have, which can include a future of trillions of micro transactions as well. From just a financial transactional aspect, you are talking roughly 4.5B transactions per day or 1.6T transactions a year. Now add to that the traffic and data requirements for blockchains that cover all sorts of transactions that may not have any financial aspect or may in fact have both financial and other data requirements that need to be recorded. Judging by some rough numbers, we could be looking at many terabytes a day and a few petabytes a year in data, likely more. All of this data has to move and be stored somewhere, and there is cost to that in financial and time factors as well.

Now I understand that not all nodes need to store the entire blockchain, but for many of the transactions people are talking about, they have to exist forever and there must always be a record of it somewhere. We know that systemically it is possible for things to fail and decentralizing data can help prevent from some critical aspects of this from occurring, but it is possible that at some point this data becomes untenable. Yes, I know that storage and bandwidth become cheaper all the time, but we’re talking about still needing to handle the traffic/storage of photos and video and music and whatnot (that we already do online), on top of blockchain data.

Scalability – Time
Over the past 2 years, the average round trip time for confirmation on a blockchain transaction has hovered in the 6-10 minute range, typically around 8 minutes. Two years, and transaction times have not decreased, but also not increased with the popularity of bitcoin. This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing. However, many mission critical uses of blockchain will in fact require transaction times measured and confirmed in milliseconds.

Recently there’s been a lot of press written up around an announcement about how a music intelligence company is partnering up with blockchain/cryptocurrency company. From what I gather, they are taking a stab at creating yet another rights database, on top of the dozens of other attempts to do this around the world at the moment. In fact, another blockchain rights database project is also being developed on the competing blockchain platform. How many projects like this can we really have? At some point some serious decisions are going to have to be made.

Legacy
Many of the people I’ve met who are working to introduce blockchain solutions operate with the general idea that the old systems are broken and we need to simply burn it all down and start over. Hard to argue with that, considering it isn’t as if things are running like clockwork and there is a tremendous amount of wasted revenue that is eaten up by overhead and broken methodology. But whenever I hear anyone use the word “music industry” as a way to demonize a system that clearly has both positives and negatives, it harkens back to another time I heard those same words…

Sure, I’m a technologist, but I’m also a writer. I was told 15 years ago by the tech industry that this was our coming golden age. The walls are coming down and you’ll be able to self publish your work and make more money than ever before. In those intervening years I’ve seen peers go from making $1 a word to around $.01 a word, and as far as all the of walls coming down…the last time I checked with this great disruption and golden age, Amazon was on top controlling the methods of sales, distribution, and with devices…consumption. Not content with that, Amazon now is funding books, movies, tv shows, etc…not far from being the only game in town.

Great job technocrats!

Here’s my fear. First of all, with all of the differing approaches and variations of blockchain technology, combined with the undermining attitude of burn it all down, what that in fact might do is create the worst of all partnerships…big media and big tech united against a common enemy.
You see a lot of investors and money are in Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Rhapsody, Google Music, YouTube, Amazon, etc. A lot of rights owners of all kinds (majors and indies) have committed to moving past music sales and on to supporting streaming. And while they both desperately need each other to make this work, they are also not friends. There is an inherent distrust of tech from creative industries and vice versa. Right now this is actually a good thing as it keeps everyone on their toes and it is these issues that drives the discussions of making better solutions. But if you “disrupt” or threaten to “disrupt” these “legacy” platforms, you may just unite them against a common cause, positive progress. That battle will put big media and big tech together with big government and we’re talking about trillions of dollars and the ability to legislate you into oblivion. That means once again failed attempts of planning and strategy will have the opposite effect of your desired revolution.

I think it is critically important to instead work to build a bridge between legacy and the future if we want to see a future. I’d hate to get to the end of this and all we’ve done is further consolidated power in the hands of the old or the new, and failed to actually build a fair and equitable system. Again, these promises have been made before and the outcome not so good.

Privacy
One of the key and primary features inherent in blockchain is the ability to put data into a public ledger that has a level of privacy. However, there are many things that people do not want to ever enter into any blockchain. Some things should always remain private and some transactions should never be made public. In some cases, there are private sales of valuable assets whereby certain parties do not want entered into any public ledger, including things that are political or involve safety. Not only that, but there are issues surrounding just how private any transaction can be:

“Elliptic’s ability to track various participants in the bitcoin network should be an eye-opener for anyone who still thinks the digital money can be easily transferred in an anonymous manner. When asked about his thoughts on future privacy enhancements for bitcoin, Dr. Smith explained:

‘We welcome increased privacy features, and such new technology will inevitably change the way we have to detect crime, but increased privacy does not necessarily have to equate to more freedom for criminals.’”

A nice sentiment, protecting us all from criminals, but criminality is often an issue around territories and privacy isn’t always about criminal behavior. While you cannot defend any centralized technology company or online retailer as a bastion of security <cough>ashleymadison</cough>, at least some of those exposed transactional events are mitigated by being limited to specific platforms. But what about splaying everything out in the open? Also, privacy can not only be a positive aspect, it can also be a negative one. For example, there is the possibility that blockchain could be used for nefarious purposes such as distributing malware or child pornography:

“A loophole in the code that powers Bitcoin, which heretofore has mostly been used to post jokes, was discovered this week to contain repellent links to sex sites, including child porn, according to CNN Money.
The code was uncovered in Bitcoin’s blockchain, the distributed digital ledger that keeps track of all Bitcoin transactions.”

and

“Although the code modifications are not dangerous in terms of malware, they do pose a potential danger to anyone who owns Bitcoin. The problem with this rubbish—well, one of the many problems—is that these messages become part of the blockchain for the life of the ledger.
According to a statement from INTERPOL and researchers from cyber security research firm Kaspersky Labs, uploading malware to the blockchain would make it extremely hard to get rid of. Indeed, there are “no methods currently available to wipe this data,” according to the statement. Once a file is in the blockchain, and hence on every computer in the Bitcoin network, it’s there forever. For now, at least.”

In fairness, pretty much anything on the Internet is capable of being used for good or bad behavior, but this does go to my point of how important authority and trust will be with using blockchain.

In Closing
While there are certain benefits from the ideas behind blockchain and distributed databases, which citizens and entities can use as a way to validate that something happened, we already have database technologies and platforms that perform these exact tasks, and in many cases, the companies that back them up are not only already considered authorities, but have the financial and insurance backing to give them an added element of trust.

If there’s a violation of trust somewhere down the road occurring with a decentralized database that belongs to no one, who will we go to to get our recompense? In fact one could even argue that corporations could adopt decentralized blockchain transaction ledgers to indemnify themselves from risk, and when citizens want accountability, they just pull a “safe harbor” type of shrug and tell you you are out of luck. Sorry your money is gone but the blockchain doesn’t lie. So while there is great promise in the ideas of “why” blockchain, it may be time to evaluate the best ways to execute these ideas before we find ourselves too far down a road without truly thinking what the outcome will ultimately be. We certainly have seen enough negative disruption that has hurt many a career, and can creative industries really afford to take another hit? Maybe the rush to jump to funding or back every blockchain technology should be met with some added scrutiny, and I include myself in that.

———

P.S. My Personal View
I feel I’ve been critical enough with the above observations that I can now honestly tell you that regardless of the issues I’ve mentioned above, I actually do support blockchain technology and some of the ideas behind it. That didn’t happen overnight. For our own project, OCL, I simply looked at those issues and asked myself, how do we solve them?

My favorite quote is from Dieter Rams who said:

“Question everything generally thought to be obvious.”

We all sat down, did just that, and worked out solutions around those concerns. Once we got past that, I realized that yes, there is remarkable value and power in the ideas behind blockchain, but it will require more than just a bunch of clever ideas, it also will require a great deal of cooperation and a bit of hand holding, and some patience. But if we can get beyond all the media hype and hyperbole, there is something amazing here. The question to ask though, is whether it will truly benefit artists and the creative class or will we simply give birth to yet another techno-oligarchy.

Alan Graham is the co-founder of OCL http://n2one.us

by agraham999

Streaming Music is Ripping You Off | Sharky Laguna via Medium

A worthy read from Sharky Laguna on how streaming music has disconnected fans from bands.

You Are Worthless

Imagine a hypothetical artist on a streaming service. Which do you think that artist would rather have: 10,000 fans who stream a song once, or one fan who streams it 10,001 times? Seems obvious, right? 10,000 fans is much better than one fan! But the Big Pool method, which only cares about the number of clicks, says the single person is worth more!
Ass-Backwards

This is bad for the artist, but astoundingly it’s even worse for streaming services: if each subscriber is paying $10 a month then those 10,000 subscribers would generate $1.2M in annual revenue, while the single user only generates a measly $120. Clearly the services benefit from getting more subscribers, not more streams, so why are they incentivizing streams and ignoring subscribers?

READ THE FULL POST AT MEDIUM:
https://medium.com/cuepoint/streaming-music-is-ripping-you-off-61dc501e7f94

by trichordist

Streaming “Transparency” and the 70% Black Box Lie… The Solution Is #gettherateright

The argument goes something like this…

Streaming companies are paying 70% of their revenue but artists are not getting paid enough. This must be the result of record labels and rights holders not passing on the right amount to artists.

The first question is, how do we know that streaming services are actually, really paying 70% of their top line gross revenue to rights holders? We know what the revenue of a transaction is on iTunes, because it is factually transparent – it is the list price being charged. We all know this, and we can all verify this. A $9.99 album on iTunes pays out $7.00, or 70%. Same thing for a $.99 song that pays out $.70, that’s also 70% of revenue.

But when if comes to streaming services however we do not know what the revenue is that should be credited to artists and rights holders. This is what is actually of concern. There is a big black box at the top of the waterfall from which all other money flows downstream.

So if streaming services are paying 70% of revenue, what exactly is that revenue? Let us see it. So here we are with the issue of transparency. If we can’t actually see or know what that number is then yes, the low payouts are very much of concern and have very little to do with intermediaries.

We can disagree about how the 70% of revenue is passed onto artists from iTunes and other transactional sales. But one thing is clear, we all understand the transparent economics of how much money is generated on each transaction. This is not so with streaming. So without transparency at the top of the waterfall, everything that follows is suspect.

More importantly, and more to the point, if there are established retail and wholesale rates for each stream, the calculations become immediately transparent in the same way they are with Itunes. See, the issue here is not what is going on downstream, but rather what is happening at the top of the waterfall.

“WE HAVE A MONETIZATION PROBLEM”

The truth is by now (and everyone should be able to agree on this), we know that streaming creates too little revenue relative to the value of the product. In other words the product is being sold to the consumer for less than the cost that it takes to create and produce it, and still remain sustainable.

In simple terms this is expressed as selling a Porsche for one dollar. It doesn’t matter how many Porsche’s you sell for one dollar while paying out 70% of the revenue, there will never be enough money to actually pay for the cost producing the car. Porsche’s, like professional music are expensive to produce. Despite the advances in recording technology, it is he cost of human labor that is the most important in the value chain.

This is the economics of music streaming in a nutshell, but with one added twist. The Porsche may be sold for one dollar one month, and be sold for only eighty cents the next month, and maybe the month after that sold for a dollar and ten cents. This is because of the fixed (and unsustainable) revenue pool that is divided by the total number of plays.

The common sense solution would be to establish a fixed per stream rate at each platform. This is the most simple way to encourage transparency and fairness as the revenue generated per stream can be transparently and easily calculated from top line data – no more black box at the top of the waterfall. The funny thing is, the people shouting the loudest for transparency also seem to be the most opposed to the easiest solution. Why is that?

So, if we are to have conversations about transparency let’s at least be clear about what it is that we actually need to see.

 

by Trichordist Editor