p2pnet.net News:- Are some of the members of the Big Four record label cartel finally realising they’re in the 21st century?

First, Sony BMG licenses its online catalogue to an English MSP (music servicer provider) and now, Warner Music Group has come up with a new “music-distribution mechanism” that’ll rely on downloads instead of discs, says CNET News, going on:

“Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music’s chairman and CEO, said Monday that the new mechanism will be called an ‘e-label,’ in which artists will release music in clusters of three songs every few months rather than a CD every few years.”

It’s an experiment with a “new business model,” he apparently told an audience at a Progress & Freedom Foundation conference. “We’re going to try to see where this goes.”

It goes fine, Edgar, as the majority of the online music-loving public, who’ve been using p2p for years, already know. Start exploring the depths of p2p and you’ll hack away many (most?) of the incentives for counterfeiters and duplicators who, at the moment, use the billions of discs you pour out as templates for fake product.

You’ll also save a bundle on printing, packaging, storage, transportation and other hard costs associated directly with physical inventory. And since all of these (and other linked) savings can then be used to pay your artists properly and drastically reduce wholesale and, hence, retail prices, all of a sudden you’ll have millions of eager music lovers eagerly lining up to buy your new releases.

And three songs instead of an entire ‘album’? Great idea, as long as it’s not one good tune and two extremely ‘B’ sides – stuff no-one wanted in the first place. And, Edgar, think of the costs you’ll save there, too.

“The e-label will permit recording artists to enjoy a ‘supportive, lower-risk environment’ without as much pressure for huge commercial hits,” Bronfman said, acording to CNET. “In addition, artists signed to the e-label will retain copyright and ownership of their master recordings.”

Loaded with DRM
Looks good, but don’t get too excited.

Just because Bronfman, who’s from a family which made its original money out of alcohol during the prohibition era, seems to be waking from a coma, it doesn’t mean he, or any of the other people who run the Big Four music label cartel, will suddenly begin to think clearly and behave intelligently.

For one thing, you can be 100% sure the new e-label will be loaded to the gills with DRM

And, he said he didn’t support government interference in “what should be normal fair-market mechanisms,” instead, as CNET continues, praising “mandatory requirements designed to filter pirated material from peer-to-peer networks and levies such as Canada’s proposal, currently on hold, to tax iPods.”

Actually, it’s not just an ‘iPod’ tax. And it’s not on hold. Canada won’t be taxing digital music players of any description and money so far collected between December 2003 and December 2004, some $4 million, will be returned to importers and manufacturers. Customers, too, will be reimbursed.

“We like government levies when they benefit us,” Bronfman said, according to the story. “I would like none of the legislators in France, for instance, to say they should no longer pay us a levy for all the blank CDs that are being sold, (though) it doesn’t make up for the revenue that we’re losing…If the government mandated filtering technologies, we’d be delighted.”

A Warner Music representative said afterwards that the company didn’t believe it was “politically feasible to push for mandatory filtering and it was not supporting such a requirement – or blank media levies – in the United States”.

Stay tuned.

Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
online catalogue – UK firm gets Sony BMG tracks, August 22, 2005
CNET News – Warner Music readies CD-free ‘e-label’, August 22, 2005
‘iPod’ tax – Canada rejects iPod levy, July 29, 2005
reimbursed – Canadians to get iPod refund, August 9, 2005

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