In Case You Were In Any Doubt The Music Industry Is Still Fucked
Stories on the decline of the music industry are two-a-penny yet today a glut of articles have come along to prove again that 11 years on from the advent of Napster no-one has a clue how to solve the problem of illegal downloading.
La Roux Leaves Free Spotify – Yeah we’re not massive fans either but as ‘In For The Kill’ was the 37th best selling song of the 00’s you’d expect the songwriting duo to be one of the few acts raking in a few bob from the Swedish streaming service. Turns out they think they’d make more money without having their music listed on ad funded websites which is a shame because…
Universal Offer Free ‘Download-For-Adverts’ Service – In America only La Roux’s record label have decided to do just this with their entire back catalogue. Freeallmusic is exclusive to beta users as of now although this just goes to show the major record labels are nowhere close to giving up on business models that don’t involve customers paying for music just like…
OiNK File Sharing Site Creator’s Trial Defence Begins - Alan Ellis who founded the UK’s equivalent to torrent host behemoth The Pirate Bay. As is par for the course with these things Ellis claims he only established site to ‘furthering my skills as a programmer, as a software engineer’. By some crazy coincidence however, he also managed to end with a bank balance that was £190000 in the green. Still on the plus side…
Free Pavement and Dirty Projectors Downloads – Pavement are releasing a ‘Best Of’ compilation called Quarantine The Past to coincide with their forthcoming reunion. Click the headline link and in exchange for your email address you can get a free digitally remastered download of their classic track ‘Gold Soundz’. Also fellow label mates at Domino, Dirty Projectors are offering two of the leftovers from their recent most decent album Bitte Orca in the same method. Use the widget below to get your mitts on those.
I spent £32 in HMV today. Am I living in the past?
No just one of an unfortunate minority. I’ve also spent far too much money in the Rough Trade online store recently…
I’ve recently discovered bleep.com . I’m petrified of receiving my next pay packet now.
Alan Ellis the founder of OiNK was cleared of all charges today. Well, thats two years of tax payers money wasted….
Anyway, OiNK was offering a service that nobody else offered, regardless of its legality. Much of the content that the site linked to was FLAC and other lossless audio formats that you simply cannot get from the likes of iTunes or 7digital. Ellis was simply filling a gap in the market. The so called “big four” record labels could have done this themselves but chose not to.
Spotify is a pretty decent service. Unfortunately it is currently only available in a handful of European countries. What is the rest of the world meant to do? On top of this there are some major acts missing from the music library including The Beatles, Oasis and Led Zep. Additionally the free version of the service is currently available by invite only, and why anyone would want to pay £10 per month just to stream music i’m not really sure.
There are similar issues with the Universal service that you mention. i.e only available in America.
The recording industry needs to seriously adapt its business model if wants to compete with the “free” services available on the internet.
Rather predictably I’m gonna disagree with you over Oink…the idea that they were filling a gap in the market is only applicable if they were in the market in the first place- whilst I doubt they made much money out of it and never suspected Oink was trying to ‘defraud’ the music industry, it would seem bizarre to make a martyr out of a website that gives even less back to the artist than the record companies we’re all trying to defy.
I still end up buying CDs for the very reason that it offers the best vfm in terms of quality, even if I’m just pretending to notice the difference most of the time. Hopefully more businesses like bleep will thrive and the lossless community will be fully served by a market dominated by iTunes.
Spotify on the other hand is starting to show that its free business model is not sufficient enough even when subsidised by a paid model. Whilst I’m thrilled that an alternative business model has been established and could see myself paying more towards the £7.50 mark if I had a mobile device that supported it, La Roux’s withdrawal just goes to prove that the free-rider : subscriber ratio is insufficient. Whether expanding the regional markets would help or worsen the situation is something I’d be quite interested in finding out.