Copyright

Information wants to be free – so we’ve set it free


Photo by Chris Metcalfe

It must have seemed quiet here at New Music Strategies for quite a while. We haven’t been blogging, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. In fact – kind of the opposite.

We’ve got some big news coming up, and some really exciting projects that we’d like to get you involved in… and we’re going to tell you about all that stuff really soon – but first there’s something we’d like to do.

We want to start the NEW New Music Strategies with a bit of a clean slate. This website already has a lot of stuff on it. There’s a free e-book, and about four years worth of advice for independent musicians, observations about the digital environment and general discussion about all sorts of related topics. But that’s all from the OLD New Music Strategies.

New Music Strategies is now no longer one man’s website where he writes what he thinks about music online. It’s a home for the activities of a team of five people who do interesting stuff with music in the digital age. And we wanted to make that a significant change – so we’re going to do something that might appear a bit radical (it’s actually not – but some people seem to think it is).

We’re releasing OLD New Music Strategies into the wild. It’s public domain. Free culture. No rights reserved.

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Help

I have a new page here on New Music Strategies, which outlines some of the ways I can help musicians, and independent music businesses. Naturally, I’ve called it my Help page.

I was trying to think of a suitable picture to put at the top of that page, and I had a song stuck in my head. So I went to YouTube, found the video clip and embedded that straight in there.

But then I started to worry. Here I was using a song that was still under copyright on a page that is, for all intents and purposes, entirely commercial. In a way, I’m using the song a bit like a jingle. That can’t be right, can it?

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Like DRM, only sinister-er?

Surveillance

I’ve been having conversations today about a ‘non-DRM solution’ to filesharing. This conversation comes up pretty regularly, actually. I’ve now been approached by no less than three companies that would like me to examine, and perhaps endorse their own system.

Each time, it involves watermarking files. The idea is that it is completely invisible (and inaudible) to the listener, but tracks where the mp3 (or some new proprietary audio file) comes from, and in most cases, information about the person who originally bought it.

I’m sorry, but no. That’s not a DRM-free system of anything. That’s Digital Rights Management by definition – only this time it uses surveillance, rather than the more clumsy and obvious ‘reach in and break your computer’ tactic of older TPM (technical protection measure) systems.

It’s just as bad. Probably much worse.

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Coalition for Culture

FAC

I love the music business. I think musicians are great. I believe they do amazing things that are richly deserving of great rewards, the lot of them. I think it’s appropriate that everyone gets whatever they deserve. It’s a hard world, a hard way to make a living and times are tricky.

As I’ve often said, most musicians spend more time training for their career than most brain surgeons – and most of them end up earning less than most supermarket checkout operators. And that’s both significant and important.

But the establishment and announcement of the Featured Artists Coalition over this past week or so has made me a bit cross.

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