Tenebris

The NYT on Elvis Costello

Those who, like me, number themselves among the ardent fans of Elvis Costello will enjoy this piece on what restless musician has been up to lately: This Year's Model Is the Only One That Matters. I haven't seen the Cole Porter biopic yet, but one of the reasons I'm looking forward to it is to see Elvis perform "Let's Misbehave." For anyone interested, the lyrics to one of my favorite E.C. songs: "Poor Fractured Atlas."

P2P companies to share profits with artists?

ABC News online in Australia reports comments by Kevin Bermeister, the chief executive of AltNet, a company involved that helps distribute P2P applications, that those companies are planning to give back revenue to some of the artists affected:

The profits from file-sharing programs which allow users to swap music files will be shared with artists once litigation settles down, according to an executive involved in digital download services.

Seems a bit farfetched.

Does music piracy hurt music sales?

This discussion is about as close to a burning philosophical question as we modern people get, but there is of course an argument to be made that music piracy does not hurt the sales of CDs.

How could this be? The researchers believe that most downloading is done over peer-to-peer networks by teens and college kids, groups that are "money-poor but time-rich," meaning they wouldn't have bought the songs they downloaded. In that sense, the music industry can't claim those downloads as lost record sales. In fact, illegal downloading may help the industry slightly with another major segment, which Oberholzer and Strumpf call "samplers"—an older crowd who downloads a song or two and then, if they like what they hear, go out and buy the music.

I fall into the category of sampler, in the terms outlined by the authors. But that said, I also buy less music than I used to. That's because file sharing allows me to be a more educated music consumer. It's possible that educating consumers really does work against the industry.

Introducing Webjay

A few years ago, a dear friend of mine worked for Uplister, a notable dot-com failure. Notable, that is, because of the fabulous idea at its core. It allowed people to create music playlists for one another, and provided a means for individual list creators (DJs, if you will) to gain their own followings. You could search for like-minded music lovers by means of mutually cherished songs. Amazon.com is among the companies now utilizing this idea to create customer-driven cross marketing.

Great idea. Lucas Gonze, a deep thinker in the music P2P scene, has now created Webjay, a noncommercial application that does something similar. Rock on.