Official Whitehouse.gov website is #TeamSpotify Despite Unfair Pay to Artists

 

The White House is #TeamSpotify.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/08/14/white-house-just-joined-spotify-listen-presidents-summer-playlist

This is an official US government site.  Staffed with employees of the federal government.  The writer clearly implies this is an official act of government and an official White House Channel.

Let the White House know what you think about the low rates paid to artists by these highly exploitative services.   Doubt we can get through through to the president but we can let the the head of digital strategy know:  Kori Schulman.  Twitter @KS44.  As always be polite.  It’s unlikely that The White House or staff has any idea how exploitative these services truly are.

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Full PDF here below:

 

The White House Just Joined Spotify: Listen to the President’s Summer Playlist | whitehouse.gov

by Dr. David C Lowery

Pay the Band | Memphis Flyer

Brice S Newman of Memphis details why support for the Fair Play, Fair Pay bill is essential for all musicians and creators to support.

There are four parts to the initiative, which includes a comprehensive bill that gives music creators pay parity. First, legislation would establish a process for setting fair-market royalty rates, not some pathetic low royalty rate that is decades old.

Second, the legislation would create a performance right for artists on terrestrial radio in the U.S., so that artists can get paid when their performances are on the radio. This is how it’s done in much of the rest of the world.

Third, this legislation would close a 1972 loophole and would guarantee that veteran performers receive royalties.

Fourth, the legislation would codify royalty payments to producers — the people behind the songs. If we can make all this happen, I am sure we will be paid back many times over in good music that’s been created by musicians who deserve to make a living.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE MEMPHIS FLYER:
http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/pay-the-band/Content?oid=4073778

by Trichordist Editor

The Crowdsourcing Scam | The Baffler

It’s all the same Silicon Valley scam. Whether you are a musician or a cab driver, this about labor, and you could be next…

Silicon Valley calls this arrangement “crowdsourcing,” a label that’s been extended to include contests, online volunteerism, fundraising, and more. Crowdsourced work is supposed to be a new, more casual, and more liberating form of work, but it is anything but. When companies use the word “crowdsourcing”—a coinage that suggests voluntary democratic participation—they are performing a neat ideological inversion.

The kind of tentative employment that we might have scoffed at a decade or two ago, in which individuals provide intellectual labor to a corporation for free or for sub-market wages, has been gussied up with the trappings of technological sophistication, populist appeal, and, in rare cases, the possibility of viral fame.

But in reality, this labor regime is just another variation on the age-old practice of exploiting ordinary workers and restructuring industrial relations to benefit large corporations and owners of the platforms serving them. The lies and rhetorical obfuscations of crowdsourcing have helped tech companies devalue work, and a long-term, reasonably secure, decently paying job has increasingly become a MacGuffin—something we ardently chase after but will likely never capture, since it’s there only to distract us from the main action of the script.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE BAFFLER:
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/crowdsourcing-scam

by trichordist

California’s Other Drought: The Coming Ad Revenue Crisis

Guest Post By Alan Graham

Last month I published this piece over on LinkedIn, but I felt it might need a second viewing (with updates) over here based on recent news on ad blocking and other developments. 

————–

Silicon Valley has a drought problem. But it isn’t the lack of water I’m concerned about. It is the over reliance on ad revenue and venture capital that is sustaining both tech and media. Now there’s a debate raging about whether or not we’re in another bubble (I was in the last one). The pro-bubble argument is often about overvaluations and spending. The anti-bubble argument shows charts on how VC investments and IPOs are much lower than the last one. Both sides completely miss the mark which is that since Google (er…Alphabet) and others began building empires on “freemium” type services, we’ve become accustomed to not having to pay for things, and what began with a tool here and there and some “free” content has actually become the predominant method of generating revenue across the web.

A possible disaster.

For the past two years I’ve been working on a project called OCL. One thing it does is it is the world’s first true microlicensing platform for apps that allows the merging of any creative asset with any other creative asset with all of the rights cleared “faster than instantly.” Yes…that’s possible. And it is actually built upon the idea of paying for things (a novel idea these days I know). I’ve run into a lot of resistance over this model to the point where I recently had an argument with a music journalist who saw no problem with the idea that advertising was a viable long term model of revenue and my predictions/concerns over a non-sustainable ad market (for everything) was silly.

I’ve also had many a meeting with executives who told me countless times that the punter won’t pay for anything. Their business model is to license large platforms and take a cut of ad revenue. During this time I’ve pointed out that with a finite amount of ad revenue that must be shared across all creative industries and tech platforms (all vying for attention), it simply is not possible to sustain a vibrant creative marketplace that requires ad revenue to keep it chugging along. And if those platforms have their revenue somewhat interrupted, that trickles down.

The reasons for being concerned are clear:

-ContentID was a anomaly born out of necessity to bring some order to a chaotic system of copyright infringement and push the biggest piracy site into some form of legitimacy.

-YouTube went from a method of promotion, to a method of generating much needed revenue, to cannibalizing sales of media, as there was no reason to purchase what you were already viewing/listening to.

-Ad revenue (CPCs) have been dropping year over year for the past 5 or so years, while volume continues to increase.

-Volume is increasing because there are simply more and more locations to place ads in an increasingly competitive market with a finite amount of ad dollars that simply shift from one point to another depending on popularity. Companies with ad budgets don’t suddenly spend more money because there are more locations to spend it. And quite frankly…volume is practically infinite.

-Increase in volume means a competitive marketplace that can drive CPC and other ad rates down further because we’re witnessing something happening to ads that happened to media, commoditization. All about numbers at this point, not quality of creative.

-We’re just getting started. Estimated reach/penetration of iOS/Android/FB is anywhere from 5M to 9M apps/platforms with 40k apps being added to iTunes each month alone. Reports show that the range of “free” apps is somewhere around 90%, both ad supported and in-app purchases. As that tail grows, so does volume.

-86%+ of our time accessing the web is now done through apps.

-Ad networks and other ad-based companies are going to get squeezed out of existence because of this, causing a collapse of an entire segment of tech which means thousands of high paying jobs are gonna go bye-bye and never come back. This is already starting to happen.

-Ad revenue is currently 80%+ of all revenue generated by Facebook and Google, two of the most important platforms for media distribution. It keeps their lights on and it is this revenue creators hitched their wagons to.

-Media companies (music, news, video, images) are scrambling to get a cut of that same ad revenue and finding they not only are competing for that money, they often have to spend money towards making that money back. Welcome to the world of paid non-organic reach. You now work for the company, live in company housing, and shop at the company store.

-Ad blocking is starting to take off in popularity and in court cases the judges in two instances sided with the ad blocking company stating that the user gets to decide what they want to do with their devices. 

What does this mean for rights owners?:

“Online ad blocking costs sites nearly $22 billion
The study, by software group Adobe and Ireland-based consultancy PageFair, found that the number of Internet users employing ad-blocking software has jumped 41 percent in the past 12 months to 198 million.”

 “Those losses are expected to grow to more than $41 billion in 2016, the study said.”

But that’s not all, there is also fraud:

“Last year, Google reported that 56.1 percent of all ads served were not measured viewable by humans.”


“Last December, the Association of National Advertisers and security firm WhiteOps estimated that up to a quarter of video ad views were fraudulent and resulting from software bots. It also said that as much as half of publisher traffic is from bots. This represents a projected $6 billion-plus in wasted ad spend this year.”


“Some industry observers go further than that, arguing that the digital ad industry is beset by traffic and other fraud because there’s a sort of arbitrage going on. Some exchanges, publishers, and ad networks are looking the other way, this argument goes, because they can make money on fraudulent traffic and fake ads.”


“The main losers are the advertisers themselves. But the publishers are getting shafted as well, Spanfeller said, since advertisers are paying $10 per thousand impressions while some publishers ‘get a buck.'”

 

-Mobile carriers in Europe are hinting that they also may begin to block ads at the carrier level citing increased performance and reduced bandwidth. How soon until we start to see ISPs offer the same services?

-It is estimated that Google is seeing as much as $6B in ad blocking occurring, and their total revenue in 2014 was $66B. That’s no laughing matter for a company making 90% of revenue from ads. Their response was to essentially say that the reason people are blocking ads is because we’re simply not making good enough ads. Yeah…that’s the reason. That type of flippant response to a $6B loss is why you should be very worried, because it means they are worried and don’t yet have an answer.

-For smaller publishers the problem is more pronounced. ProSiebenSat, one of the companies that sued Ad Blocker Plus and lost, stated that ad blocking was costing them upwards of 1/5 of their revenue or €9.2M

-Ad blocking users have grown to an army of nearly 200M people. That’s a word of mouth marketplace that any company would kill to have, except they are evangelizing the death of your business. Think about it as 200M people who have decided what you provide is interesting enough, just not interesting enough to pay for it via your #1 monetization plan. What’s your backup plan for monetization? What that says to me is that there are likely millions of content platforms overvalued and poised to collapse.

-With Apple’s recent announcement that they would allow third party developers to create ad blocking extensions for mobile Safari, the attention brought to this might take it mainstream, considering there are hundreds of millions of iOS devices and mobile Safari represents 25% of browsing. Welcome to the next viral technology success that you can’t actually afford to have take off.

-Facebook’s Instant Articles strategy could possibly be where advertising lives on, meaning that online publishers will have to become even more reliant on the tech giant for revenue, although it is likely both Apple and Google will follow suit. Meaning more of the open web gets sucked into the app environment where walls and AI decide what we will see and hear.

-My own tests with ad blocking has removed every ad from YouTube, one of the primary revenue sources for music labels and artists. Consider that most videos using music on YouTube (likely 60-70%) never generate any ad revenue at all, not to mention that YouTube is still not profitable (really?), this is one basket of eggs I’d be thinking of taking some eggs out of…

-Ad blocking is getting more and more sophisticated with ad block plug ins for Safari, Android, Chrome, and even Spotify. Not only can you block Spotify ads (the freemium model they defend to the death – no freemium no paid), but you can rip tracks from Spotify with all the metadata intact.

–PopcornTime. Free movies and tv shows playing direct to your device with a gorgeous interface, high quality resolution, built-in VPN, and zero ads…need I say more? Expect more solutions like this to pop up, including alternative music platforms. IMAGINE: Playlists created in Spotify exported to a BitTorrent decentralized music player…this will happen.

The next 12-24 months are going to be a watershed where we see just how much of this shakes out. The problems are numerous, but the biggest issue I see is that we’ve spent so much time investing in ad-based technologies and their revenue streams, we’ve not built a single alternative solution which can cover any losses if this all goes belly up. There is a massive consolidation of power occurring at the top of tech where we may only be left with 4-5 companies that control most of the web/Internet as we use to know it, and the creative class is left with no real technology of its own and very few options of how to reach their customers without being at the mercy of another giant tech company.

Years ago I use to drive between California and Oregon quite often and I began to see a trend happening. The boats on the reservoir began to leave the docks as the water receded from the shore. They began to huddle together in the center of the lake as there was less and less water. Essentially they became the last holdouts hoping a great rain would restore everything to the way it was. But it won’t.

Part of the problem California is facing with its shortage of water is due to the fact that they never planned for the possibility of drought, although they certainly talked a lot about it. They are shortsighted. They saw an endless supply of water and all the riches it brought. As humans we very rarely ever prepare for the worst, because we’re always so caught up in the moment and at the moment we’re still feeling the best of times: toilets are still flushing and faucets are still flowing.

The situation with ad revenue and VC backed advances and payments is no different, and if we don’t start working on a fundamental shift on how we as a society pay for things we value, we’re going to see a lot more than just water dry up.

Alan Graham is the co-founder of OCL

by agraham999

Stop calling it the “Sharing Economy.” That isn’t what it is. | Olivier Blanchard

What it is, is the Exploitation Economy…

“Disruption rocks though!”

No, it doesn’t. The right kind of disruption rocks. The kind that has value, that solves a problem, that improves an imperfect system. But disruption for the sake of disruption is just noise. It can even be destructive, and that doesn’t rock. It doesn’t rock at all.

Because Apple was “disruptive,” anything deemed disruptive now somehow borrows from Apple’s cachet. “Disruption” has become another meaningless buzzword appropriated by overzealous cheerleaders of the entrepreneurial clique they aspire to someday belong to. And look… every once in a while, someone does come up with a really cool and radical game-changing idea: Vaccines, the motorcar, radio, television, HBO, the internet, laptops, smart phones, Netflix, carbon fiber bicycles, drought-resistant corn, overpriced laptops that don’t burn your thighs in crowded coffee shops… Most of the time though, “disruption” isn’t that. It’s a mirage. It’s a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes, episode twenty-seven thousand, and the same army of early first-adopter fanboys that also claimed that Google Plus and Quora and Jelly were going to revolutionize everything have now jumped on the next desperate bandwagon. What will it be next week? Your guess is as good as mine.”

READ THE FULL POST AT OLIVIER BLANCHARD:
http://olivierblanchard.net/stop-calling-it-the-sharing-economy-that-isnt-what-it-is/

by trichordist

Uber and the Lawlessness of ‘Sharing Economy’ Corporates | The Guardian

It’s not only about musicians and creators, we are just the first to be effected.  The same Silicon Valley scam is going to exploit more and more people. Read on…

“Nullification is a wilful flouting of regulation, based on some nebulous idea of a higher good only scofflaws can deliver. It can be an invitation to escalate a conflict, of course, as Arkansas governor Orville Faubus did in 1957 when he refused to desegregate public schools and president Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the law. But when companies such as Uber, Airbnb, and Google engage in a nullification effort, it’s a libertarian-inspired attempt to establish their services as popular well before regulators can get around to confronting them. Then, when officials push back, they can appeal to their consumer-following to push regulators to surrender.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/28/uber-lawlessness-sharing-economy-corporates-airbnb-google

by trichordist

Michael Price: Composer for Sherlock blames Google and YouTube for suppressing rewards songwriters receive | Independent UK

More artists, performers, songwriters and composers are getting it.

“YouTube are effectively paying incredibly low rates and are not a willing partner to negotiate licences and that pulls down the rates from someone like Spotify, which has to compete in their free service with YouTube,” he told The Independent on Sunday.

“The value from the music we create is being sucked out into the companies that aggregate it, [but] YouTube … are not happy to set adequate streaming rates. There is a huge shift of value from artists to tech companies.”

READ THE WHOLE STORY AT THE INDEPENDENT UK:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/michael-price-composer-for-sherlock-blames-google-and-youtube-for-suppressing-rewards-songwriters-receive-10447054.html

by trichordist

Lawrence Lessig for President. Not a Joke.

Screen Shot 2015-08-11 at 3.27.18 AM

What the fuck does this slogan even mean?  Equal citizens go first?  Unequal citizens have to wait their turn?  

Lawrence Lessig for president.  Hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahah.  Amazing.

I thought this was a joke.  The man who has worked relentlessly to relieve individual creators of their constitutionally protected rights wants to run for president.  Let’s elect the man who when faced with the choice of whether to side with an individual’s right to control their artistic work or a tech corporation desire to exploit the work, never seems to take the side of the creator.

Yeah this really seems like a guy who will look out for the little guy.The man who Wired magazine once declared would “smash apart the copyright machine” (to benefit big tech) is running for president.

But forget copyright for moment.  The real danger is that this guy is the Manchurian candidate for Silicon Valley billionaires.  Sure he seems like a progressive guy, “reforming” copyright, Creative Commons founder, Free Press board member,  but when you really dig into everything that he has done and proposed,  it becomes clear his efforts have benefited his financial supporters mostly large tech companies and tech investors while hurting individuals who make their living from copyright. 

Don’t believe me? Just follow the money. Lessig launched his career at the Google funded Berkman Center at Harvard. Look at all the tech billionaires that supported his Mayday Pac. Check the open secrets website for his PAC . Look at all those  Silicon Valley venture capitalists.  Among them the arch libertarian Peter Thiel who has declared he no longer believes in democracy nor does he think women voting is the best idea.  Yeah we should vote for Thiel’s candidate.  Good idea!

Oh and then there is that pesky little matter that he took money from a self-confessed felon to bankroll his causes.  And even ickier read this.

Yet Lessig with a complete straight face claims his campaign is built on “equal citizens first.”  What does that even mean?  Some citizens are equal and they get to go first?  Unequal citizens have to wait?  Huh?

Well come to think of it, that pretty much describes the political worldview of Silicon Valley. Fake progressive political “talk” while “walking” a crony capitalist walk. 

Lessig who admits to alternating between extreme right wing positions and extreme “progressive” positions would like to “hack our democracy” and become president.  Do you want some politically unstable ethically challenged Harvard professor “hacking” our democracy?   I don’t.

Look clearly we have a problem with our democracy when big money interests can essentially buy our government.  We should fix that. But a guy supported mostly by big money interests isn’t gonna fix it by attempting to buy/hack the presidency with the backing of these same moneyed interests. 

Watch the video. It’s fucking unbelievable.

by Dr. David C Lowery

Did Google & YouTube just Scam The Entire Record Business into Free Streaming Licenses? MusicKey is MIA…

Remember all the controversy over YouTube’s ad-free streaming subscriber service, MusicKey? If the words “Google” and “Ad-Free” sound like a complete contradiction, you are not alone.

MusicKey_AdFree

Ok, so where is it? We tried to sign up, but we’ll be notified later when the service is available.

whenMusicKey

Remember how one of the requirements was ALL OF YOUR MUSIC also had to be licensed for FREE STREAMING on YouTube or your promotional videos would be blocked or banned from the site?

Did you forget? No worries, here is the recap from Zoe Keating’s blog that brought the issue to light.

1) All of my catalog must be included in both the free and premium music service. Even if I don’t deliver all my music, because I’m a music partner, anything that a 3rd party uploads with my info in the description will be automatically included in the music service too.

2) All songs will be set to “montetize”, meaning there will be ads on them.

3) I will be required to release new music on Youtube at the same time I release it anywhere else. So no more releasing to my core fans first on Bandcamp and then on iTunes.

4) All my catalog must be uploaded at high resolution, according to Google’s standard which is currently 320 kbps.

5) The contract lasts for 5 years.

So, “All songs will be set to “montetize”, meaning there will be ads on them.” That’s one hell of a trade-off to get some subscription money, but maybe it won’t be so bad once that MusicKey money starts rolling in right? YouTube and Google have a HUGE amount of users to convert to PAYING SUBSCRIBERS, right?

Hahahahahahahahahaa. You fell for that gag? Seriously? Here’s what YouTube says about that little side business of PAID SUBSCRIBERS…in an interview between YouTube Senior Exec Robert Kyncl and Music Ally: YouTube Music Key delay ‘nothing too serious’ says senior exec.”

“We’ll always have ad-supported: that’s our core, and we’ll never stop focusing on it.  It’s in Google’s DNA to be in the ad-supported business.

Subscription is just an add-on. It’s an adjacent business that we’re building.”

Suckas… You seriously thought Google who has slathered the internet with advertising on “User Pirated Content” across multiple platforms was going to pivot to a paid subscription model to move away from advertising on it’s flagship video streaming site? Really? Seriously?

You saw that five year term, right? So MusicKey is a no show for subscriber revenue but thanks to that five year term the largest streaming service in the world, that pays the least amount per stream now has licenses for the next half decade. As the kids say, LOL.

Don’t worry about MusicKey not showing up anytime soon with that Paid Subscriber Money, in the meantime enjoy your life’s work as a YouTube auto-generated music video and playlist, for free.

Oh MusicKey we would have loved to have known you – now all we have is our catalogs of master recordings being monetized on old-school YouTube for pennies on the dollar of every other streaming service including Spotify. Wow, just wow.

And Speaking of Spotify, guess who has a seat on the board to make sure that their “ad-supported DNA” remains the primary focus of that music streaming service? Three guesses… Yup, it’s Google.

Here’s a trip down MusicKey memory lane…

April 2014 : Exclusive: ‘YouTube Music’ Is Launching This Summer… | Digital Music News

June 2014 : Artists who don’t sign with YouTube’s new subscription service to be blocked [Updated] | Ars Technica

June 2014 : F*&K It: Here’s the Entire YouTube Contract for Indies…| Digital Music News

November 2014: YouTube’s MusicKey Will Cause $2.3 Billion In Music Industry Losses… | Digital Music News

January 2015 : YouTube Is Removing Any Artist That Refuses to License Its Subscription Service…| Ars Technica

April 2015 : If You Don’t Agree to YouTube’s New Ad-Free Terms, Your Videos Will Disappear…|Digital Music News

June 2015 : YouTube Music Key delay ‘nothing too serious’ says senior exec | Music Ally

Exhausting… Why would anyone trust these people? All hail “User Pirated Content“… and if that doesn’t work just come up with a non-existent paid subscriber streaming service that auto-generates music videos and playlists on the free, ad-supported platform. At least that part is working, right?

Let’s talk about transparency for a second. Why is it that YouTube would be excluded from Google’s own DMCA tracking report? It couldn’t be because DMCA notices and takedowns of infringing material YouTube dwarf even the most notorious of pirates sites say like The Pirate Bay? No, that wouldn’t be the reason would it?

553k_InfringingBusinessesMaybe #adbusters and #blackspot really do have it right…

by Trichordist Editor