the dotmatrix project

It’s Time To Rethink Copyright Law
Michael Arrington

[...] My position is that it’s bad to criminalize natural behavior. And watching a clip of The Office, whether it’s legally on Hulu or illegally on YouTube is natural behavior. The only question is whether or not people are getting sued, or going to jail, for doing it.

It’s time to rethink copyright laws, and it’s time for copyright holders to rethink their business models. The winners won’t be the companies that win or lose billion dollar lawsuits. It’ll be the companies that throw out everything that’s come before, and build new businesses around the natural behavior of people. Remove friction and win.

We’re really trying, Michael.

Image originally uploaded by Kingdom of Awesome

(originally uploaded by Steve Keys)

[...] If you want mainstream rewards, you’ve got to make mainstream music. I know you hate that, but that’s true. [...]

-Bob Lefsetz

That quote is ridiculously profound on its own, but let me add this nugget to the mix:

Being innovative doesn’t guarantee mainstream rewards; being innovative while transforming culture’s perception of your innovation into a mainstream percept does.

This is true not only in music, but across every industry I can think of.

A few examples:

• Google was a game changing search engine years before they went public, became a commonly used verb and eventually traded at >$700 per share. But in order to become perceived as more than just another search commodity to the casual user, Google stayed true to their take on search while focusing on delivering an elegant presentation of their product. That focus slowly began to win over the masses previously using uber-diverse properties such as Yahoo! and Lycos.
• The Roots have been spitting rhymes as a live Hip Hop band since the early 90’s — it took years for their innovation to become recognized as not only a valid (read: viable) extension of Hip Hop, but more importantly to their potential core fans, an amazingly rich, textured tribute to the genre and it’s predecessors of Funk, Rhythm & Blues, Spoken Word and Jazz. Hip Hop heads couldn’t embrace their style when they broke out the gate; now The Roots sell out arenas to all types of listeners while retaining their originality.

I’d also add to Bob’s quote by recommending that if you truly want instant mainstream love, then simply replicate a mainstream concept and toss in a differentiator or two. You’ll separate yourself from the competition — hopefully with a better sound, product, etc. — while displaying similar product DNA for the market to instantly relate to. You’ll have a much greater chance at “succeeding” short-term.

That’s the major label methodology.

Now, if that sounds like an empty way to spend your time digesting O2 on this spinning rock, then truly innovate a style, concept, approach, etc. while nurturing your community of participants.

If you’re open to iterate your direction at the drop of a hat with input from all directions, you’re setting yourself up to succeed in this online world of discovery.

Yes, it’s a long-term play with absolutely no guarantees in garnering mainstream love, but if people do start to feel you, chances are pretty good that the snowball will start to roll downhill.

And who doesn’t love winning a game of chance?

Dan and I just finished remixing the live albums for both Sorry About Dresden and The Radials. Both bands gave us similar feedback on our original mix — vocals dominated while the instruments faded at times — so we took a few hours tonight to make the changes. It was worth it, as they both sound much fuller now.

We’re using the Mackie Tracktion 3 music production software that came with the Onyx 1620 board w/ Firewire output. It’s basically left us marveling over the fact that unlike the old days — when bands had to navigate their live play around one centrally located ribbon mic to land a decent recording — we have the luxury with out-of-the-box software to record multiple channels directly to a rather standard MacBook Pro and get amazing results.

I love me some technology.

Here’s the channel breakdown for how we setup the first show:

• Red: Backup vocal mic one
• Orange: Backup vocal mic two
• Yellow: Lead vocal mic
• Green: Guitar mic (The Radials only)
• Aqua: Reverb channel
• Sky blue: Band mic, left
• Dark blue: Band mic, right
• Purple: Audience mic

Based on the bands feedback, we’re going to move in the left and right side band mics closer to the amps for this Thursday night’s show. They were directly behind the FOH monitors and didn’t get quite enough oomph with their default output. We might even play with running extra lines directly out of the amps to capture the sound clean.

We’re recognizing patterns on a bunch of levels these days at HQ, and not only within the production environment.

A Different Kind Of “Label”

If we keep up this show & recording pace, we’ll probably put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 live albums per year — all acts local to Greensboro and the surrounding region — with quality standards moving towards being just a few degrees below a studio recording. All at no cost to the artists.

So what’s in it for us? Straight up and down, the answer is quite simply, “the attention.”

No, I’m not referring to attention as in the, “Check us out, we’re fucking cool,” kind of attention. We’re not shooting for gold stars, free drinks or ego boosts — we’re talking about harnessing the attention economy of the internet age.

This is an information age business in the planning.

While we’re building community in the real world with live, original music productions in downtown Greensboro, we’re simultaneously creating synapses in the intertubes with media reproductions of each evening — live recordings, photographs and music videos.

Once the media has been generated, edited and uploaded, we’re applying a pretty intense metadata schema to each media object for enhancing findability and to grow online community around all of the participants — the musicians, filmmakers, photographers, sound engineer and, yes, our brand.

At the core of this entire approach is the notion that this is all free for people to engage with — from going to a free show to ripping track recordings for iPod plays to participating in the tagging of online media which helps promote your favorite artists or songs.

More important to the core position of the dotmatrix brand — built around the idea that many individuals coming together will convey a unique experience in the aggregate — is that whether the participants of the dotmatrix project are musicians, filmmakers, photographers, audience members or online fans, each participant can be promoted to one degree or another due to the structured nature of web object data and metadata aggregation.

Bands building community around media of their performances; people building community around similar tastes in music, videos, photos and shows. And hopefully, a business that can present compelling interface representations of these relationships — both in the real and online.

Down the line, this 2.0 focus on already valuable semantic concepts like free, open, read/write and aggregation will most likely vest with future implementations including notions such as Data Portability.

All we have to do in the short-term is make sure we don’t hard code our business plan into a corner where it can’t be tapped by the never-ending “things to come.”

Oh, yeah. And to make sure we don’t get crappy instrumental channel recordings.

(originally uploaded by maria flash)

Blogs will be Record Labels, and Bloggers will be the new Music Moguls - BlogJs anyone?

Within 2 years, the leading music blogs will become what used to be called ‘Record Labels’. The people running them will be those sharp, tuned-in, hyper-networked and resourceful BlogJs formerly known as bloggers. They will use their blogs as the primary attention channel (yes - attention really is the new distribution) and will dish up a complete, interactive and highly relevant multi-media experience that will include TV shows, chats, webcasts and games. Forget about ‘websites’ and browsers - the BlogJs will do it on all platforms and devices.

The future brings 1000s of micro-music-channels that will literally broadcast - or rather, ‘narrow-cast’ their longtailing creations — be it text, audio, images or videos — to their hungry subscribers using MediaRSS feeds and customized my-stuff-pages such as [fiction alert] imoogli, beatwibes amd muflakes that will ‘live’ on any connected device, e.g. your mobile, your TV, your computer, your interactive bathroom screen, your wrist watch, your wimax-ing car radio, or your new P2P global gaming network. Widgets will continue to become instant, ubiquitous mini-site modules that will allow anyone to re-distribute any kind of content, to any device and any platform, anywhere. Most marketing will be done through and with the users - and some of them will get paid for it, too.

[...]

n less than 2 years from now, ubiquitous and fully legal yet ‘feels like free’ music offerings will bring us music bloggers that will become bigger than the biggest radio DJs we’ve ever had. And just like a lot of successful radio personalities before them they will move on to become A&R people and label owners, too. The difference is, of course, that they will have powerful, direct, zero - friction distribution channels at their disposal, and a loyal global audience, built-in and ready to go. All they have to do is keep on earning and retaining the attention of their users.

[...]

It’s a bit choppy and reaching, but Gerd Leonhard’s full article is a must read.

Along the lines of the article, a major part of what I’m trying to do in this spot is build an attention economy around the dotmatrix project; not just to spread the word of what we’re doing, but to help evolve what we’re doing.

I’ve been jumping between pimping local music, exposing instances of music impacting culture and delving into thinking about the business of music — from where we were to how the industry is folding to where we might go. As guest bloggers begin to post here with similar but varied opinions, drivers, experiences, the dotmatrix project’s direction will undoubtedly be influenced.

[insight] The genesis of the dotmatrix brand name is this crazy idea that while we’re all individuals, when we come together over a similar interest and build community, a position becomes apparent. And with a position, comes opportunities to interact… to build… to exchange… to create. [/insight]

Another angle of our approach is participating in the live music scene with a recurring event in downtown Greensboro — we’re putting on our first show this Friday night at The Green Burro. Where that leads or how it folds into this site is still up in the air, which is exciting.

If anything, that notion is the future of music — having fun enjoying a personalized experience with artists that you directly support. From a “label” perspective, the money will come based on how open you are and how committed you are to the careers of artists you assist.

Or not. Fuck it. Either way, we revel in music.

(via KOAR)

Obviously, we’re not going to go to the, uh, you know, superstars and say, “We want a percentage of your…” They’d be like (makes a dumbfounded face)

It must suck to watch your industry fall apart at the seems. Hell, I experienced it in 2001 working in Silicon Alley. Too bad for the music biz that their problem isn’t as simple as the net bubble burst with overzealous investors saturating an immature market.

That’s a correction at worst, not a complete redefinition of industry.

Is the 360 deal the silver bullet? I doubt it. It reads as a way to stop the bleeding, not the necessary organ transplant of the business model. One Golden Goose (record sales) dies, so Flom and company pilfer the remaining geese — that’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, not changing the foundational approach of what it means to be a music label in 2008.

They’re not getting to the heart of the matter.

The music industry’s problem is that too many people can make, find, enjoy, experience and share music without ever needing to step foot in their marketplace. They can sign bands to 360 deals until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that we’ve moved away from a world of massive record sales and sold-out stadium shows to a world where free music online leads to well attended, yet cozy venues and small festivals.

We are living a more personalized, fun and affordable music experience.

Of course there will always be superstars, relatively speaking, and they’ll demand a higher price point across the board, but marketing teams won’t be the genesis of their popularity moving forward. The web enables decentralized power through the aggregate of individuals — whether the individuals are musicians or fans — so our “chock full of choice” world is now aligning along the edges, not within the artificial heart of where the music industry dictates.

The 360 deal is a short-term play for industry executives to keep making coin, not a long-term solution to evolve their business.

Labels need to do more with less because the ratio of revenue delivering superstars to nominally successful acts is becoming a smaller integer as each day passes. Indie labels without aspirations of world dominance can swing that transition because they’ve been working smart, sleek and forward-thinking all along.

How does a major label — with all of its bloated, corporate structure — compete in this dynamic environment?

They don’t.

(via KOAR)

I’ll update this post later with more details, but from a cursory glance of the Terms of Agreement, a 10% “Share” payout is based on the number of full-length plays by an artist divided by the overall number of full-length catalog plays.

There will also be a subscription service with unlimited, on demand radio play. Don’t know if downloads are included.

The times are a changin’.

UPDATE: More on how the free radio model works, from Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired’s Listening Post:

[...] Every time you listen to a song on the service, Last.fm tracks it, despite the lack of a login requirement. If you delete your cookies, the site apparently won’t be able to track you. I confirmed that by deleting the Last.fm cookies file within FireFox, one can listen to a song for a fourth time without even restarting the browser. When asked about the possibility of people using this trick to gain unlimited listens, Miller said he would prefer not to talk about it, but that only technically sophisticated users with an agenda would bother. (One unwelcome side-effect of the cookies being deleted could be that Last.fm loses the demographic information so valuable to the site’s advertisers.) [...]

Anyone who listens to Last.fm is technically sophisticated… and we all have an agenda of not spending money. From the position of an indie artist manager, I don’t think gaming the cookies would affect the royalty payment scheme, so I really don’t care. Along those lines, here are some of the royalty program details (pulled directly from the T&A when signing up):

7.4 Last.fm shall pay the following royalties in respect of the transmission of Your Content as permitted by You:

• for the free radio service, 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the free radio service.
• for the personalised premium radio service, the greater of 10% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the personalised radio service or US $0.0005 (Ed: 1/200th of a penny for non-math majors) for each complete transmission on the personalised radio service of a track which forms part of Your Content transmitted on the Last.fm service.
• for the free on-demand service, 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the free on-demand service.
• for the premium on-demand service, the greater of 30% of the Share of Last.fm’s Net Revenue from the premium on-demand service or US $0.005 for each complete transmission on the prepaid or subscription on-demand service of a track which forms part of Your Content transmitted on the Last.fm service.

The first two payout options are based purely on revenue generated by free plays, while the last two are based on revenue generated by the on-demand (free and premium). As an indie manager, I’m going to need to dive deeper to wrap my head around the free & premium on-demand services.

In any case, this is found money as far as the indie artist is concerned — well, at least it is until an act’s popularity starts to actually chart. But even at that point, Last.fm replaces radio of old — in a much more dynamic fashion — and what artist gets paid for radio plays?

As a music fan, I’m totally cool with three free plays; that’s all the sampling I need to know if I want to support the artist with a purchase or a Lala.com trade.

This looks promising for all involved — labels, acts and fans.

I’d rather pull out my eardrums with tweezers that listen to most 50 Cent tracks, but you gotta give him credit for staring technology in the face and not blinking. I guess he has an advantage over Doug Morris and the rest of his ilk in that he’s previously dealt with raining bullets.

Dodging the damage of MP3 downloads must be cake by comparison.

Check out this exchange from an interview by Pål Nordseth at a club in Oslo, Norway:

[...] “How are G-Unit Records doing in these times of file-sharing?

“Not so good.” he responded. “The advances in technology impacts everyone, and we all must adapt. Most of all hip-hop, a style of music dependent upon a youthful audience. This market consists of individuals embracing innovations faster than the fans of classical and jazz music.”

“What is important for the music industry to understand is that this really doesn’t hurt the artists.”

Thats quite a statement. Organizations like the RIAA are always talking about how the artists get hurt by file-sharing but 50 Cent clearly doesn’t agree. In fact, he appears to appreciate the value of a good fan, whether he buys or file-shares his music, as he explains:

“A young fan may be just as devout and dedicated no matter if he bought it or stole it.”

Indeed. It’s been said time and time again - get the music out there by any which way, fill the gigs and capitalize on the merchandising and ends will meet. 50 Cent agrees:

“The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”

He finishes up: “The main problem is that the artists are not getting as much help developing as before file-sharing. They are now learning to peddle ringtones, not records” he said.

“They don’t understand the value of a perfect piece of art.” [...]

50 Cent is using marketing terminology like “360 degrees” to describe the value proposition surrounding an artist and the major labels can’t come up with anything better than suing their customers and boycotting iTunes.

Amazing.

UPDATE: Cayocosta, over at RecProAudio, has a different take on 50’s revelation:

Apparently not realizing that piracy-catalyzed 360 deals are actually recouped directly out of the artist’s pocket, he went on to offer the following when addressing the issue of lost recorded-music sales revenue, “The concerts are crowded and the industry must understand that they have to manage all the 360 degrees around an artist. They, (the industry), have to maximize their income from concerts and merchandise. It is the only way they can get their marketing money back.”

Further expounding on the negative effects of piracy, he offered, “The main problem is that the artists are not getting as much help developing as before file-sharing. They are now learning to peddle ringtones, not records. They don’t understand the value of a perfect piece of art.”

I could be off here, but 50 Cent’s perspective sounds steeped in the shoes of an artist / label executive, not in naivety.

With most major deals, all money put up by the label must be recouped prior to an artist getting a dime of profit from any revenue stream managed by the label. With fans that download music for free, it seems to me that 50 Cent is looking at the silver lining of the situation and chalking it up to a marketing expenditure — similar to producing music videos in the golden age of MTV.

Maybe instead of suing people for spreading the goodness of an act, labels should focus on the remaining opportunities to maximize their profits and stop trying to force their will on both a market and open technology? 360 deals don’t represent an ultimate answer, but neither does suing their fan base.