Please don't tell me to 'do the math'

Hypebot has invited a guest blogger, Bill Houghton, to run his eyes over the likelihood of advertising supporting the music industry online.

He's not encouraging:

A quick analysis of both industries illustrates the point. Including P2P downloads, the online music industry has an estimated value of about $30 Qtraxbillion and rising. That number will only rise as in-store CD sales continue their slide. Free and subsidized distribution models also will increase the percentage of music distributed online.

Meanwhile the total revenue from Internet advertising across all markets and platforms is about $20 billion as reported by MediaPost. Experts are predicting this number is approaching a plateau for various reasons. Online media accounts for only 20% of consumers’ attention – implying that there’s a limit of 20% market share that online advertising can hope for.

That’s a clear shortfall of $10b billion and growing. Obviously the entire ad industry does not produce the revenues sufficient to subsidize the online music industry… and it likely never will.

Bill concludes than an all-advertising model is, thus, impossible.

The other possibility, which Bill doesn't entertain and won't provide any comfort to people running music operations for profit, is that the current 'market value' of music is unsustainable.

Neither ethical nor well-executed

Two days after the ship had sailed, Leona Lewis is still trying to buy her way to success in the Brits.

Bestival scoops the lot

Bestival - when it's not smiling gently at Glastonbury and going "what happened to you, Dude, you used to be cool?" - is actually managing to pull together a pretty impressive line-up, headed off with My Bloody Valentine.

Will Smith: Never loved Hitler

The World Entertainment News Network has apologised and paid damages to Will Smith after it reported him saying he thought Hitler was a good man.

His solicitor, Rachel Atkins, told London's High Court the article was "deeply distressing" to Smith and had caused him "acute embarrassment".

Ms Atkins said the star, who was not in court, was "a highly-respected actor of international repute and a man of complete integrity".

She said the I Am Legend star believed Hitler to be "a vile and heinous man".

"The article alleged that the claimant had declared in an interview that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was a good person," she said.

"The allegation is false and without any foundation.

"It wholly misrepresents the claimant's actual words, given in an interview to the Daily Record, a Scottish newspaper and website."

What Smith actually said was the slightly more subtle 'Hitler thought what he was doing was good':

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."

Actually, we're quite taken with the idea of Hitler waking up in the morning and deciding what he's going to do each morning; perhaps over a bowl of sugarpuffs.

That's what Michael should have done

If only Michael Jackson had followed the example of the Cowboy Junkies, Thirller 25 might not have been kept out of the charts. For the twentieth anniversary of The Trinity Sessions, the band have gone back to the same venue, and re-recorded each track. Pitchfork aren't impressed, mind:

The performance has been released on CD/DVD as Trinity Revisited, and it is certainly an odd product-- redundant to anyone familiar with The Trinity Sessions and unconvincing to everyone else. This isn't a reinterpretation, but a re-enactment. The Junkies run through songs almost note for note, and when they go off-script, as on the overly dramatic reading of "Sweet Jane", they display only their limitations.

Which seems a little unfair - if you see the album as an attempt to see what difference twenty years makes, even if the answer if "precious little", that doesn't entirely make it a failure. It's like the way scientists have to explain to arts graduates that experiments which don't deliver the expected results haven't failed, but worked.

Government pushes ISPs to become the police

It's been trailed quite heavily, so it's not a surprise, but Andy Burnham's DCMS proposals to do the BPI's bidding and 'open consultations' on whether ISPs should be made to police their customer's online activities still bring something of a shudder.

Leaving aside the issues of copyright and ownership and if it could work: Andy Burnham is proposing that private companies should not only be given the right to eavesdrop on your conversations, but could actually be legally compelled to do so.

And what makes it even more frustrating is that even the BPI don't believe it'll make any difference to their sales. The record company cartel's spokesperson Matt Philips admitted as much to the Guardian's Technology supplement yesterday:

But imagine, finally, that a rigorous self-regulation procedure is in place, and that the internet populace knows about it. Does the BPI think its members' sales will grow? For once, Phillips hesitates. "That's really hard to answer. But it would send out the message that copyright is to be respected, that creative industries are to be respected and paid for," he says. "It would mean that the people who are paying for content wouldn't be subsidising those who don't. But I can't say to you now that it would make sales grow, or by how much."

So, this invasion of everybody's privacy - the treating of all broadband users in the UK as suspects, and as such open to the investigation of any corporation which provides ISP services - isn't even going to do anything other than "send out a message" about copyright. Let's hope they don't start publicising new records in the same way - "we're asking the government publishes people's health care records online to promote the new Kylie album".

The official announcement of the threat is part of a wide-ranging DCMS press release which tries to get away with hiding the unpleasant policy amongst some fluffier stuff. But it's in the fluff that you can see the little deals that have been done behind the scenes - clearly, part of the trade off has involved record companies doing little favours to prop up Burnham's weak creative industry 'stimulation' plans in return for being allowed to dictate government policy on filesharing:

# securing 5,000 apprenticeships across the creative industries by 2013. BBC at mediacity:uk, Tate Liverpool, Universal Music Group and Monkeydevil Design are among the first to sign up to offer high quality training

# working with the industries’ most successful creators, including Aardman Animations, EMI, and the Royal Opera House to develop five new ‘centres of excellence’ in creative skills

[Our emphasis]

Universal and EMI, eh? That's a strange coincidence, isn't it?

The government is trying to make it sound like it's merely encouraging a dialogue between ISPs and the BPI:

The Government supports current discussions between internet service providers and rights holders for action on illegal file sharing and our strong preference remains for a voluntary solution. However, to date no voluntary agreement has been reached, and we will shortly consult on options for a statutory solution, with a view to implementing legislation by April 2009. This consultation is in parallel with the voluntary discussions and we will stop the statutory “clock” if and when a voluntary solution is reached.

All very civilised. However, when the negotiations are taking place against a ticking clock, with the knowledge that if there's no agreement, the BPI will get what it wants anyway through legislation, you might wonder how fair the government is actually being.

What was the theme of the Brit Awards? 1970s sexism, apparently.

There was some confusion over the theme at this year's school prize giving. The presence of Ozzy, the giant skull, the apparently-straightfaced-use of Anarchist symbols on the onscreen graphics suggested that this was an event with ROCK at its heart.

But then Kelly did say it was the year of pop when she was presenting. It's very confusing. Who can adjudicate on such matters?

How about the Official website? Rock or Pop, Brits - what were you?

The theme of this year’s BRIT awards is Glam Rock and every last bit of the BRITs is dripping with glamour.

Glam rock? GLAM ROCK? In what way was the theme of that event glam rock? Did someone do a T-Rex cover we missed? Was that Ian Hunter rather than Paul McCartney getting the lifetime achievement award? Was the event so poorly conducted that Elton John's pieces got dropped from the running order?

Of course, the glam rock angle was just an excuse to explain why the BPI had taken money from Agent Provocateur to let them have space backstage. Anyone who thinks that the inherent sexism of the music industry and the marginalisation of women into the limitied roles of groupies or girlfriends is a thing of the past, look away now:

And what’s more rock ‘n roll than half naked girls? Accordingly, Agent Provocateur, who have built a special boudoir booth to showcase their new skin care and fragrance have their very own scantily clad vixen.
[...]
Esme’s acting skills won’t be heavily called upon this evening as all she has to do is hand a mike over to whichever presenter is mounting the stage. She’s one of a quartet of glamorously dressed girls who are here for the sole purpose of “adding some beauty and some boobies”. “The presenters will run through a gamut of girls who’re there to escort them to the stage, they can take their pick”.

Picking from a bunch of mute women - sorry, girls - who are just there to add some tits to the proceedings. Doesn't the British music industry make you proud?

Mika Bomb make a bomb

Simon out of Sweeping The Nation emails to alert us to the unlikely presence of Agi from Mika Bomb on the BBC News website, reporting on the different shape of the music industry in China.

We have to raise a curious eyebrow at this:

The singer made about $2000 (£1,000) a month from music royalties and live shows with her band Mika Bomb when she lived in London.

But in China, her band Long Kuan Jiu Duan can almost double that by singing just one song at a commercial gig.

The singer from Mika Bomb was raking in a grand's worth of royalties every month? Really?

Although the article is headlined 'Chaos' Of China's Music Industry, the piece is less about chaos and more about an industry that's accepted that the shape of the world has changed and it needs to explore different approaches to selling music. Is an industry where an artist can make a couple of thousand pounds for doing one song at a corporate gig in more than chaos than one where - having spent a couple of years trying to sue its customers - they're now trying to make telephone companies check every bit of data for illegal filesharing?

You might not like some of the conclusions China's music companies are reaching - the reliance on sponsorship money raises a slew of questions - but at least they're not desperately trying to find a thousand ways to preserve a business model that's more extinct than an all-male species of impotent monkeys with intimacy issues.