Music may be like water — but it’s not water. Applying a tariff for all users of digital devices misunderstands consumers, music, the industry — and water.

One of the debates I get dragged into quite regularly is the Music Like Water thing — the idea that if everyone pays a little bit of money as a kind of flat tax (or the way we pay utility bills) and then listen to whatever they want over the internet, the music business will be just fine and dandy.

I’m skeptical.

I was interviewed via email for Denmark’s largest music community: MyMusic.dk, and with their permission, I repost the entire interview here for your entertainment — and hopefully to spark a bit of debate in the comments.

My interviewer writes: The debate on the whole music-like-water has been very one-sided in Denmark and everyone seems to think it’s a good idea. Inspired by your blog post on the subject, I would like to ask you a few questions.

Fire away.

[Read more]

In which I speak to three different (semi-fictional) characters to try and look at the problem of selling music online from several different angles.

Steve Jobs hammers home the £1 per track dilemma

‘How do you make money from music?’ is an increasingly complex question these days, and one that I keep getting different answers to, even from myself. The ground keeps shifting, and the context within which making money from music can occur is altered almost by the day.

Like I always say — the music industry has not changed, it is changing. And it will continue to do so at an increasingly accelerating rate. Trying to anticipate a future in which things will have resolved themselves and a new model will dominate is as senseless as trying to keep doing what you’ve always done as the walls crumble around you.

I was in London the past couple of days meeting with a bunch of different people for a number of different reasons. While I was there, Steve Jobs was elsewhere, launching the 160GB iPod, and that sparked a number of conversations with a number of different people.

[Read more]

See that big orange button up the top there? Go click it. Then don’t come back.

My observation that my stats were down yesterday actually caused some people to apologise that they were just looking at the RSS feed, using Google Reader or similar. Let’s be clear: I’d far rather you were just looking at the RSS feed.

In fact, this should be your approach too. No matter how wonderful your web design, it’s far better that somebody keeps up with your writing, news, happenings and events without effort than occasionally remembered to stop in and see if there’s something new.

RSS provides a way for your readers (or, in this instance, my readers) to opt in and automatically receive everything. It’s like having an open invitation to come into their house whenever you feel like it, and tell them stuff you think is interesting.

How much more value is that to someone who wants to make money out of building a relationship around music online than something as passive and vulnerable as a simple web page?

When I talked to Gerd Leonhard from Sonific on this blog recently, I mentioned I’d be featuring another widget-based tool for online music distribution. Introducing Nimbit.

I’ve been looking around at widgets that musicians and their fans can embed into their MySpace page, website, blog or whatever. Sonific was a really good example of something that allowed people to share tracks they liked and link directly to a way of purchasing.

Nimbit’s a little more ambitious, and essentially wants to be the full online merchandise and music fulfillment package. I’m worried that it might look better on paper than it does deployed in the field, but its ambition seems to be its strong suit.

I spoke to CEO Patrick Faucher about the service.

[Read more]