Business Quests in the Information Age

Free music picking-up steam

At long last music is going to be freed from the straight-jacket of clumsy protection systems that end up bothering legitimate users without preventing fraud. Jamendo's CEO used to say that "DRM is the only technology that has a failure rate of 100%", meaning that it is always circumvented by fraudsters almost before it is adopted. Laurent was visionary in his assessment done as early as 2005, that DRM would end-up failing to provide the benefits expected by the old-school music industry and by extension by content industrialists represented by the RIAA and the MPAA. These organizations have yet to recognize that the mass availability of content leads to a paradigm shift in which the competition for human attention is just much more intense. Hopefully their positions will evolve and the new business models of their industries will go mainstream. In that perspective I expect Jamendo and its team will have fascinating business quests of their own in this space.

clipped from slashdot.org Your Rights Online: Amazon DRM-Free Music Store Goes Beta Posted by kdawson on Tuesday September 25, @03:57PM from the 2-million-songs-from-20-thousand-labels dept. LowSNR writes "Amazon this morning moved their DRM-free music store into open beta.  According to the release, 'Since all our digital music downloads are DRM-free, you can play them on anything that plays mp3s including PCs, Macs(tm), iPods(tm), Zunes(tm), Zens(tm), iPhones(tm), RAZRs(tm), and BlackBerrys. Plus, our Amazon MP3 Downloader application makes it easy to add your downloads to iTunes(tm) and Windows Media Player(tm), so you can sync up your devices or burn your music to CD hassle-free.' Not to mention Linux." Of course, without DRM few of the major labels play with them.

Great news for Jamendo

There we go. Unlike a couple of days ago, I can now say how happy I am for Jamendo, who published an interesting press release.

Post published on 7-JUL:

Today I got some pretty good news for Jamendo, the leading entrepreneurial initiative in Creative Commons licensed music. I won't disclose any details: this is just to tease you and to congratulate Sylvain, Laurent and Pierre, the founders and their team on the achievement of a beautiful success and a major milestone.

Jamendo picking-up speed

Jamendo recently announced having over 2000 albums online and their website is more and more active with the number of members growing fast and volumes of file sharing exploding. Today they announced a revenue sharing scheme thus starting the roll-out of a business model that is suitable both for artists who wish to keep offering their music free of charge and for bands who intend to use Jamendo as a direct distribution community-enabled platform. For details, take a look at the press release below.
Download pr_jamendo_rs_en.pdf

Big labels are f*cked, and DRM is dead

Got this article from the CEO of Jamendo who never thought DRM was a viable way to proceed in this industry. Actually, he walks the talk to the point of building the business model of his company in a way that does not require any DRM and that focuses entirely on the participants in the ecosystem of the music industry.

My humble opinion is that creating artificial scarcity has seldom been successful in economic history at least in the long run. The media & entertainment industry had better reinvent its model instead of trying to persuade everyone that piracy is the reason why people buy less CDs and to coerce people into paying the outrageous margins of an obsolete value chain that comprises many unnecessary intermediaries. The point of the matter is that we consumers demand:

1. usability in the form of easy access to content through open technologies making it possible to transmit and reuse content in a fair way (managed within the framework defined by Creative Commons)
2. convenience in the form of not having to toy around complicated rights management stuff whenever we want to simply listen to music. That means that we want to maintain at least the same degree of flexibility with digital content as we have with off-line stuff (e.g. if I can lend my collection of CDs to a friend, I don't see why that is so cumbersome to achieve with DRM protected material)
3. seamless usage of content across our various devices because nobody understands why for example some protected CDs will not play in a car audio player...

for a reasonable price that compensates the artist and those adding value to the industry.

And as a matter of fact, the distinction between producers and consumers of musical content is fading away; this is the age of the prosumer in music too... Alvin Toffler was right in his analyses in the Third Wave and in Powershift.

== Go read the article in The Register
Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager. Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum. And he doesn't pull his punches.

read more | digg story

Adding sound to the web

It seems that one of the big trends today is in adding sound to web sites. A couple of weeks back I tried Sonific's widget for adding music to blogs (on the right-hand side bar of this blog); I actually like Sonific's model a lot and I think the company has a great asset in Gerd Leonhard. Today I came across a service called Razz. What I really like about Razz is that it provides for reuse of digital content, which I think is a key feature of web 2.0 services: it is read and write. In a matter of minutes I was able to upload a sound file (a song I got from a band on Jamendo) and to mix it with recordings that were available on Razz... Now, I don't claim any artistic quality for this, but it is an example of some interesting initiatives out there..

Make your own Razz!

My questions:

1. how is Razz going to make money? I can see a couple of ways, but since I have no idea of their business strategy and business model it's a tough call;
2. is this a venture that will actually generate over 100 million US dollars within 5 years? It seems Guy Kawasaki thinks so... which is interesting

"Recueil Désuet" : A dive in fantasy

Maya de Luna - "Recueil Désuet" on Jamendo

This is a great creation. I really like the way music and voices mix creating a strange and inviting atmosphere that prompts me to imagine fantastic landscapes and settings. It's lively, yet quiet and melodic... great discovery.

Gloomywood

Please take a look at David Dossot's blog for an excellent article to which I subscribe 100%, even if "counter-culture" or "alter-culture" is in fact part of the larger system that has Gloomywood (nice word by the way) as an established player. One thing cannot exist without its opposite; light cannot be without shadow and vice versa. Harmony stems from the coexistence of opposites and the combination of similars...

Hence my question: how do we combine fair creation and respect for necessary intermediaries? Intermediaries will always exist because mankind is relational. They are neither "good", not "bad". It all depends on how they play their role.

Positive coverage for Jamendo

As you know I have been following Jamendo for over half a year now, doing some work on their business model and business plan. In the process I also became a member of the community and I discovered quite a few jems in the music published on Jamendo. Today, I am really excited with some very positive news from their tour in the US and from their participation to events for start-ups in Europe. Let me quote this bit from this blog:

"Company: Jamendo <http://www.jamendo.com >
Customers: from Google Ads
Competitors: Magnatune, Soundclick, Snocap.
Key Judge Question: As an artist what does the deal look like for me?   
Monetization: Ad sales, Media Partnerships, Revenue split with Artists 15% of commercial use licenses.
Business Challenge:  Bringing the model to the US.
Quick Take: The have exponential growth, and like all communities that add value to their users, they seem to be growing very fast via word-of-mouth.  The business model is also refreshing and should go far.
Would I invest: Yes."

The following links are also interesting to visit if you want to learn more about Jamendo.

• reference to Jamendo on the news of Creative Commons
• slides of Jamendo's CTO at Holland Open Conference in Amsterdam

Les Temps Modernes : Musical modern times from Ehma (Belgium)

Ehma - Les Temps Modernes on Jamendo

I have been using Jamendo for over three months and I just love the musical discoveries the platform offers. My latest is an album called "Les temps modernes" by a band called Ehma who are from Belgium. Now, the funny part is that I live in Belgium but was able to discover Ehma only through Jamendo; in fact that is also the power of the web and I think it disproves the assertions of many who believed technology isolates people. Anyway, enough about the greatness of the web: go listen to Ehma because it's really worth it. Enjoy!

Yet another beautiful discovery on Jamendo

Just amazing how much good music there is on Jamendo! Here is an album I downloaded today; Rob Costlow is a great musician, or at least I just love his music. Not quite like Yann Tiersen, but the sound of Costlow's piano is deeply moving... I just admire great creators and I think he is one of them.

On top of that, I just love the way he uses the web to promote his creations by dealing directly with his listeners. The web is a method for flooding the system, a fantastic means for messages to emerge from the individual choices of free individuals (versus top-down logic of traditional media)... Anyway, listen to Costlow, pay a visit to his site and support him via Jamendo's donation management system.