Protecting the family jewels
By Russell Brown,
DRM isn’t dead yet, so enjoy it while you can
[Music]
When Rupert Murdoch reconfigured his musical interests and sold Festival Mushroom Records to Warner Music, our family jewels went with the bargain.
Actually, it’s probably more accurate to compare the Flying Nun Records catalogue to the houselot of heirlooms left behind by a late maiden aunt: you can’t take any of it to the dump—it has way too much sentimental value—but what exactly do you do with it?
Warners, as it happens, did a pretty nice job with the best of what was stowed in the attic, releasing a 25th anniversary Flying Nun box set that occasioned some grumbling among the artists (with a $90 production cost, Warners simply couldn’t afford to give a box to every artist) but did do justice to the label’s heritage.
So what next? Modern logic would suggest that Warners should use the box set as a leader into a long tail sales strategy. You liked the Alpaca Brothers’ 1986 tune ‘Hey Man’? Perhaps you’d enjoy their rest of their sole EP, Legless, too. Or Bird Nest Roys’ Whack It All Down, which enjoys cult status in American indie circles? Sneaky Feelings’ lovely Send You mini-album?
The place for these would be eMusic.com, a download service that, with its strong community and rich cross-referencing, is set up for discovery. Its monthly prepay system encourages fans to have a dip on something new.
Indeed, some of the Nun back catalogue—notably releases by The Clean (enthusiastically recommended by indie aristocrat Ira Kaplan, who says “I’ve spent more time loving The Clean in the last 25 years than any other band”) and the 3Ds—is available on eMusic, but only because independent label Merge has licensed those releases for the US market. New Zealanders are, ironically, blocked from downloading them (indeed, so far as I can tell, we can’t buy the Nun catalogue online at all).
The catalogue on eMusic—and some of it is brilliant—comes almost entirely from indie labels. Why? Because eMusic sells its tunes as high-bitrate MP3s, with no digital rights management to restrict its use, and Warners, like the other majors, would apparently rather not sell music than sell it DRM-free.
“Actually, it’s probably more accurate to compare the Flying Nun Records catalogue to the houselot of heirlooms left behind by a late maiden aunt: you can’t take any of it to the dump—it has way too much sentimental value—but what exactly do you do with it?”
It’s not just about the back catalogue. I’ve just bought Shock Rocket, the bangin’ new EP by Auckland DJ-producer Greg Churchill, from Beatport, an online dance music store that ships downloads in four different non-DRM formats, including CD-quality WAV files. I grabbed the new Feelstyle single as an MP3 from Amplifier.co.nz. The common thread? They’re both on independent labels who know their market, and neither is on the iTunes Store or Vodafone Music.
This isn’t to say that indie labels have a religious objection to DRM-based services—they’ll sell anywhere they can. It’s big music that has the hang-up. Which is odd, because it’s almost fashionable now for music executives to say, off the record, that “DRM is dead”, or at least more trouble than it’s worth.
Don’t expect the imminent demise of DRM, though. Apple likes the DRM on iTunes Store releases because it locks consumers into the iPods that make Apple so much money. Microsoft, enviously eyeing Apple’s hardware lock-in, has virtually built a shrine to DRM in Windows Vista and the Zune player.
In truth, the punters buying pop hits by the hundreds of thousands from the local Vodafone Music store seem undeterred by the irksome Windows Media DRM in which their tracks come wrapped. But given the choice between even the relatively transparent DRM that comes with iTunes tracks and music that just works, whenever, any informed consumer would choose the latter.
There’s a part of the market now that does baulk at the idea of paying for downloaded music that’s less useful than if it were bought on CD and, as a result, acres of catalogue that goes unexploited. So if there are to be experiments in selling music that isn’t locked down, the latest singalong from Nelly Furtado, staggering under the weight of its marketing spend, isn’t the place to start. But the Kiwi indies and catalogues that realistically will never be re-released in physical form are. So let’s be having the Alpaca Brothers.
Comments
Jason Kemp
There are some useful stats and graphs on DRM and related matters at this post
http://www.dilanchian.com.au/content/view/187/56/
Warners have 11% market share apparently
Short summary DRM in some form is a fact for most people.
Noric Dilanchian
Thanks Jason for the reference to my post on DRM. To emphasise the point that the death of DRM is probably a pipe dream, I said there: "Format lock-ups and format wars are par-for-the-course in the century-old history of proprietary recorded music formats and the technical and legal regimes used to lock-in or lock-out users of content and software of all sorts."
Exploring that line further, and using the example of the "speed wars" between record formats in the 1950s to 1970s, is a related post (Music formats and law: commercialisation of 45-rpm records) at http://www.dilanchian.com.au/content/view/196/56/
I admit in that post I'm looking backwards to see ahead, so the rider I'd make is that we are certainly living through interesting times and things other than format tie-ups might create a new tomorrow for music.
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