Some surprises: IFPI & RIAA issue takedowns on Radiohead's "behalf"

You'll recall last month Warners blithely issued a DCMA notice against us because we, erm, used a link to a file on a band's own website that the band's own label's PR team had invited us to link to. That seemed a little bit like people over-reaching their powers, but today the IFRI is at it again.

Takedown notices have been sent out ordering bloggers to take down In Rainbows tracks:

"These recordings are owned by one of our member companies and have not been authorised for this kind of use"

That's what the letter claims. Only... they're not, are they? In Rainbows was self-released. Sure, it might have been licensed to ATO in the states, but they don't own the tracks.

After all, the record labels have been telling us for years that just because we have a license allowing us to use tracks it doesn't mean they belong to us.

The tracks do appear to have been being used without permission, but it's clear that the RIAA had no authority whatsoever to demand they be removed.

These takedown orders are proper, legal statements. They're made under the pain of perjury. If the music industry continues to press them, they should at least get them right.

[Thanks to @jamesthegill]

Every time you share a download, Ian Astbury cries

You know the thing about sharing? Sharing is selfish. Don't take my word for it, Ian Astbury says so:

"Whoever was irresponsible enough to decide that music was worth nothing and decide to give away the music, that was a very selfish move," he said.

Yes, curse you, the marketplace.

Astbury, bless him, is getting on a bit and doesn't really understand what he's talking about - confusing the value of music with the price of a recorded audio track.

But do share with us... sorry, not share, sell us your explanation of your thoughts:

"When I look at a 17-year-old kid who's starting out in a band and is hearing, 'You know what kid? Your music's worth nothing.' I think that is disgusting."

Ian, sweetheart - a seventeen year-old will have spent most of their music-consuming life living in a digital world. Most seventeen year-olds will have downloaded, ripped, shared. They come from the new musical world, and they will know how it works, its opportunities and shortcomings.

You're talking as if people in bands emerge from pods, rather than grow out of people who love music. The only way it would be news to someone starting out in a band that some files get shared, and some get shared for no immediate return would be if they were fifty and having a mid-life crisis. After returning from a island they've been stranded on.

Seventeen year-olds don't need to be told about what the digital world means. It's the world they live in, Astbury. It's the world they helped forge.

Ian isn't done, though. He rails against Radiohead, too:

"I thought it was irresponsible what Radiohead did. People watch what they do and they copy it.

How irresponsible to try and find a way of selling music that works. People might try to do the same sort of thing.

"I don't see U2 giving their music away for free. They're smart boys."

Actually, Radiohead didn't give away In Rainbows for free, they... oh, what's the point? Anyone who thinks that U2 are "smart" rather than simply "a multinational corporation who, though in decline, are still large enough to operate in a different way" doesn't really have much of a grip on what he's talking about.

In short: Ian Astbury said "waaah, waah, things have changed and I'm too conservative to operate well in a world where there's fewer big bands getting all the money at the expense of everybody else."

Off-Message: Radiohead should split

Showing the sort of intuitive understanding that makes a great music manager, Brian Message advised Radiohead to split up during the making of In Rainbows.

Although he did have a point at the time:

"Radiohead are a once-in-a-generation act," Message told the Music Managers Forum in Dublin, "but you have to be honest if it's not working."

There aren't many managers who would advise a clapped-out band to call it a day, and fewer still who would admit to having said so during the making of one that year's best albums.

Message also differs from many other managers with his approach to the internet:

"We find ourselves out of step with the rest of the industry on [internet issues]," Message said. "We believe filesharing by peer-to-peer should be legalised. The sharing of music where it is not for profit is a great thing for culture and music."

Message condemned the proposed "three strikes" legislation against filesharers...

Here comes the 'but':

...and argued instead for a tax on internet use, that would help remunerate artists. "As a free market advocate I never thought I'd say this but we will have to have government intervention to force the internet service providers to adopt a licensing mode," he said. "Those who are providing [filesharing] facility as part of their value proposition should be contributing to the artists."

A tax on internet use.

It's actually handy when you phrase it like that, as it does make it clear what we're talking about here: The government raising a levy on access to information. Like a tax on printing presses, you mean? Or a tax on knowledge. But - hey - if the money is going to go to Peter Skellern and Survivor, then that can't be a bad thing, can it?

If even well-minded music industry types can feel comfortable putting aside their dearest beliefs like this, how about we create some similar taxes that flow in the opposite direction?

Like, for example, flyposting. Flyposting is a nuisance to councils - it costs money to police, and to clean up flyposters. Why don't we simply levy a tax on all promotions of cultural events? Sure, many gig promoters and bands might not actually use illegal flyposting, but someone has to pay for the clean-up. Naturally, anyone who chose to not pay the levy would be banned from advertising any events, because those who are benefiting from promotional activities should be contributing to the costs of scrubbing walls and repainting bus shelters.

Yes, it's arbitrary and unfair and capricious - but then so is the web tax. Why should only the music industry get to make bad laws?

Long tail wagging a dog?

The popular belief in the the long tail might be a bit of a myth, reckons a couple of new surveys.

The idea, of course, is that the value of digital sales lays in everything selling a little, rather than a few big hits. But is that what's happening?

UK music royalty collector MCPS-PRS says only 173,000 albums were bought through 2007 from a total of 1.23 million available; that means only 14 percent ever got a sale.

This, though, misses the obvious: one of the great joys of digital sales is that you don't have to buy entire albums, as you're free to abandon the concept of bundles of tracks and just buy the songs you want. Offering the lack of old albums as proof that the long tail doesn't work is like suggesting failure to sell cans of baked beans shows that restaurants don't have success at selling food.

This is a small update (via Times Online) to a study the organisation’s economist Will Page presented in November, which found, in the singles market, only about three million of 13 million available were bought, and 80 percent of sales came from 52,000 tracks.

That presentation and subsequent interviews is worth a close look. Page claims he was inspired by Chris Anderson's original theory, but with a but:

Given the clear relevance of collecting societies to the ‘long tail’ debate, I was surprised to see so little mention of them in Chris’s book - or the blogs that followed. For example, our US equivalents’ ASCAP and BMI don’t appear once in the book’s index.

Can you hear the wounded pride there? Even although there's no earthly reason why the collection societies should have appeared in the book - it's like the manager of Watford Gap services moaning that they didn't get a look-in in a Department Of Transport green paper.

Indeed, it's arguable that it was better for the collection agencies to be left out of the book - as a world in which the shape of music sales is very different probably requires a very different sort of royalty collection system than one designed to cope with a few radio stations and physical records being sold clustered around Top 40 releases. In fact, it would be perfect for those old-world collection agencies if they could pour cold water on the very idea of a long tail...

I was pleased to see The Register picked up on the role of a collecting society, an institution that receives surprisingly little coverage in Long Tail debate, yet has pioneered the creation of long tail markets for musical copyright through patent pooling and blanket licensing for almost a century.

... or at least try and pretend that it's always been doing the long tail thing.

Will Page offers some statistical 'evidence':

For example, we found that only 20% of tracks in our sample were ‘active’, that is to say they sold at least one copy, and hence, 80% of the tracks sold nothing at all. Moreover, approximately 80% of sales revenue came from around 3% of the active tracks. Factor in the dormant tail and you’re looking at a 80/0.38% rule for all the inventory on the digital shelf.

That would seem to remove the long tail as surely as Owl removed Eeyore's. Having said that, though, there's a question of methodology, and expectation? What period was Page looking at? What market? No proponent of the long tail would suggest that everything would be purchased by someone in the UK in any given period, and it would be pretty easy to disprove (or prove) the existence of the long tail by setting the parameters carefully.

That's not to say Page is wrong. Indeed, on his own terms, he's right. He just might be looking at the wrong things, or the right things the wrong way. First rule of any numbers dragged from the internet is that they almost certainly won't be counting the things that anyone you share them with will assume they're counting.

One thing that does make me nervous about Page's figures is that he also claims that peer to peer filesharing is equally built on hits rather than long tail - using the large number of 'illegal' downloads of In Rainbows as evidence:

My hunch, based on the evidence we presented in that paper (pointing out the 2.3 million illegal downloads of Raidohead’s new album when it was also available ‘for free’ on their own website), is that the black market is even more hit-centric.

Actually, that proves nothing more than (as I've argued before) 'if you tell people they can get an album for free, people who might not normally use an "illegal" route to obtain music will feel comfortable hitting the torrents. Building a theory about online activity on the basis of the performance of an anomalous release is a curious route.

So: is there a long tail? The clue is in the name - we won't know until we've had the experience of a long run.

McCartney: It's not quite an endorsement for copyright theft

Legal experts are stressing that Paul McCartney's vague words on downloading doesn't mean you can download The White Album for nothing:

He observed download culture to be a little “weird” to him, saying, “I’m not from that. I’m from going into a shop and buying a 45. We’ve come through vinyl, tapes and CDs – it’s all the same, except people don’t pay for it [now]. I don’t mind. It works out.”

That's more or less what the world has been telling the BPI and the RIAA for years now, but nobody seems to listen, Paul.

He explained that while he doesn’t download illegally himself, he was tempted to buy Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’ for a penny, but only so he could tell his mates he’d paid much more.

Well, yes, Paul. I expect otherwise your friends might not know you're suckling-pig rich. Unless... you don't think he was going to try and tell Heather he'd spent his entire fortune on a download of In Rainbows, do you?

Chasing In Rainbows: Radiohead accounts

About-a-year-on, Warner Chappell, the publishers for Radiohead's catalogue, have revealed some of the sales figures for In Rainbows.

Tellingly, they still don't confirm what the average amount paid per download was, but the company confirms that three million tracked copies of the album were sold - across the box set, various official download sites and the pay-what-you-want site. As the Music Ally blog points out, this compares with six-figure sales for the last three albums from the band; it's also despite there being far more copies harvested online in the traditional (i.e. without paying) fashion.

Yes, it's Radiohead and it doesn't mean that Frank from the pub would sell millions if he adopted the model, but even so - Radiohead did much, much better financially than they would have done if they'd just shipped a load of CDs to HMV and skidded on the iTunes. What the figures can't show is what the effect would have been had In Rainbows been one of dozens of albums from dozens of bands being released in a similar fashion - how much the boost came from the flexible payment scheme, and how far it was down to the publicity around the idea.

A snapshot of that new world

Big Champagne - who have been counting torrent downloaders since the days when people still used to ring up their mate who was good with computers to do it for them - have issued some interesting stats about Radiohead's In Rainbows, which PaidContent see as some sort of sign that we're all doomed:

Some 2.3 million people skanked Radiohead's latest album from BitTorrent sources during the two months it was legally available for free. A research paper from P2P monitor Big Champagne and the UK's MCPS-PRS royalty collection society said the "staggering" number "far exceeds what outsiders have reported as the estimated download total from the bands official website, regardless of whether those downloaders paid or not".

See? Even if you try to give people something nice, they'll still rob it! Doom! Darkness!

Maybe so many people are already downloading the rest of their albums from torrents, they simply couldn't be arsed to type inrainbows.com in their browser. The bottom line is that legal free was trumped by illegal free.

But is this really doom? Isn't this news quite cheery for the music industry? Scroll down the report a little:

In Rainbows torrent downloads peaked on the first day data was collected, October 27, at 400,000 - what Page and Garland call "a bloody big number". How big? More than double the top torrent through March and May (Panic At The Disco's Pretty Odd) got in a whole week (ie. 10 times Panic's daily average).

So, what we're talking about here is not large numbers of people habitually pinching albums. What we're talking about is a spike in free downloading of an album that was available for nothing.

So, while the MCPS scare about for sky-falling reasons...:

The report's "venue hypothesis" posits net users have simply become accutomed to using technologies like Gnutella, BitTorrent and trackers like Mininova. What's more, "an off-limits venue may be even more appealing" to the core youth market. So illegal is now entrenched, it's habitual and the business faces an uphill struggle to change that.

... isn't the evidence telling us that people do have the ability to download stuff from the torrents, but mostly aren't using that ability; and that they only did when they had reason to believe it was okay to do so. Because can anyone explain to me the actual, real "illegality" of downloading for free something from one place that one can legally download for free from another? I don't mean the letter-of-the-law difference, but the moral difference? And, even if you can, isn't it just possible that the nicety was lost on the great masses who heard Radiohead were making an album available for free (as was repeatedly, erroneously, reported at the time) and didn't see there was a problem in where they didn't pay for it?

Noel Gallagher: You couldn't give away an Oasis album

Radiohead, eh? Giving their albums away for nothing? You wouldn't catch Noel Gallagher doing that:

“I wouldn’t have thought so. That’s not our bag,” he told the BBC.

“I didn’t spend a year in the most expensive studio in England, with the most expensive producer in America, and the most expensive graphic designer in London to then give it away. Fuck that.”

You'll note he sees the input into his album as an expensive producer, an expensive studio and an expensive designer, rather than, say, the best musicians or months and months of careful crafting of music and diligent rehearsing.

You might also note that he views creativity as something that can be measured by price rather than quality.

And, given that he has more money than he could possibly have a clue how to spend, why does he need to squeeze every red cent from those who have supported him in a retrograde march down the blind alley he has chosen?

What, exactly, is your "bag", Mr. Noel? Bag... bag... bag...

Radiohead must be kicking themselves, reckon U2

You or I might have thought that by any measure, Radiohead's In Rainbows experiment was a bit of a success - demonstrating that some people will pay for something they perceive as having value, even if they don't have to; selling a large number of physical CDs; zooming to number one; generating a massive surge in free publicity.

We're wrong, though. It "backfired" to some extent. So reckons Paul McGuiness, manager of U2 and increasingly one of the most conservative voices in the music industry. How so, Paul?

The majority of fans who downloaded In Rainbows ignored the band's website and acquired it illegally by other means, Paul McGuinness told BBC 6 Music.

"Sixty to 70% of the people who downloaded the record stole it anyway, even though it was available for free."

Can you steal something that's being made available for nothing anyway? This alone shows how caught up in the 1980s McGuiness' thinking is - while Radiohead took a relaxed attitude to the album, and effectively separated out the concept of 'owning' a recording and rewarding the artists, McGuinness is convinced that people sharing a record are "stealing" it simply because the files aren't coming from the official website. But if Radiohead had been bothered about that, they'd have slapped DRM on, wouldn't they?

It's also far from clear where this "sixty to seventy per cent stole it anyway" figure comes from. It's possible McGuinness has some secret figures he's quoting; it's possible he simply plucked a figure out the air. Or, it's possible he's got confused and is thinking of the 62% figure of people who downloaded the record without paying from the official site. But that wouldn't be stealing, because they were allowed to.

But let's assume that he's actually not got his statistics mangled, and take them at face value. Even if 70% of people who downloaded the album got it off bittorrent, how does this make the experiment one which "backfired"? Even if In Rainbows had had a U2-approved proper release, with a cardboard cut-out of Thom Yorke in every HMV and a tie-up with iTunes, wouldn't the record still have wound up on the torrents? Wouldn't a large number of people still obtained it without Radiohead getting a penny?

Of course, McGuinness is keen for everyone to think that the experiment was a terrible disaster for all concerned - because he's got a vested interest in the status quo. That's the latin sense of status quo; we wouldn't want to suggest that Paul McGuinness makes his money managing a band who are still coasting on one good idea they had a few decades ago:

"We will obviously work with whatever technology is available to make the release of the new record as interesting as possible," he added.

"[But] for U2, physical sales are still an enormous part of our business and we still sell a lot of actual CDs."

He seems to have missed the whole 'physical sales of In Rainbows going to number one' part of the experiment, doesn't he?

Come again?

Let's hope that Thom Yorke didn't take advantage of Colin Greenwood's temporary deafness during the making of In Rainbows to, for example, sell the idea of the pay what you like pricing to him.

Greenwood's hearing problems were quiet acute, but got better:

"For a few months afterwards I'd be watching the telly and suddenly hear these high pitched whistling noises as more and more high frequencies came back."

He doesn't say his hearing is now sharper than ever, but we're going to hang around outside his house with one of those silent dog whistles.

[Serious bit: really, really - get some ear protection if you're going to be exposed to loud music, either in a studio or at a gig.]

Yorke: We won't do that again

Thom Yorke has decided, on reflection, it might be a good idea to not let people take albums for free in the future:

"It was a one-off in terms of a story. It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time."

Apart from anything, that any free album promotion online is now referred to as "doing a Radiohead", the prospect of "Radiohead do a Radiohead" headlines must create a risk of the universe crashing into itself and ripping open portals to other dimensions, like when Dawn's blood splashed in the wrong place.

Trent Reznor calls Radiohead

Although there might not seem to be too much difference between Trent Reznor and Radiohead's pay-if-you-like models for album releases, Trent Reznor reckons he's actually purer that Thom Yorke, on the grounds that the Nine Inch Nails downloads are of a superior audio quality:

"What they did was a cool thing; I think the way they parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," he told ABC's Michael Atkin. "But if you look at what they did, though, it was very much a bait and switch to get you to pay for a MySpace-quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."

"There's nothing wrong with that - I but don't see that as a big revolution [that] they're kinda getting credit for."

"What they did right: they surprised the world with a new record, and it was available digitally first. What they did wrong: by making it such a low quality thing, not even including artwork ... to me that feels insincere."

'Not including artwork' - yes, because a small thumbnail of an album cover to pop up on coverflow really does add something to the experience. And since Radiohead allowed people to pay what they believed the downloads were worth, surely you can't argue that people didn't get what they paid for? The very opposite, surely?

Charlatans: Free at last

If Thor felt annoyed when his thunder was stolen, you can imagine how The Charlatans must have felt when their announcement of 'free album' was eclipsed by Radiohead's 'pay what you feel' plan.

But while In Rainbows has been and gone, and come out in a conventional form, the world has still been waiting for the Charlatans' You Cross My Path. Until now - XFM are hosting the free download of the whole thing; you can also pick and choose individual tracks (on a try-before-you-don't-buy basis, we suppose) including A Day For Letting Go and Missing Beats (of A Generation).

Let's just hope nobody like, ooh, Trent Reznor launches any high-profile free album round about now, eh?

Dave Cameron does a Thom Yorke

The new Tory party is, indeed, a broad church, magpie-ing away policies from all over the place.

In today's The Times, for example, Dave Cameron steals one of Thom Yorke's ideas:

Radiohead are one of my favourite bands. But it's more than their music that I've found inspiring. In October last year, Radiohead released their latest album, In Rainbows, online - but that wasn't the only innovation. They invited their fans to download the album for whatever price they wanted to pay. Many people thought they were mad. But Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, has since revealed that the digital income from In Rainbows has surpassed that of all their previous albums put together.

Do you see where this is going yet?

Well, he may not appreciate me for saying this, but I'm afraid that Radiohead's innovation has become a model for something else: for the Conservative Party's new effort, launched today, to reform the funding of political parties and engage more people - particularly young people - in politics.

Yes, Dave is introducing a new membership scheme - sorry, "Friends" scheme (they are, after all, going for the MySpace kids) - with a pricing model ripped off from In Rainbows:

We want to reinvigorate politics by giving people new ways of supporting our party. And, vitally, I see this as a way of broadening our funding base. That's where Radiohead come in. Like them, we're not specifying how much people need to donate to become a Friend of the Conservatives: you can donate as much or little as you like.

'Freinds', then, will be able to get what they need from being associated with the Tories without full membership.

You pay what you can, you get what you need.

Or, to put it another way: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

Hang on - that wasn't Thom Yorke, was it?

Radiohead relent

The Amplive In Rainbows remix - which appeared, and then disappeared after a cease-and-desist letter - is back online after both parties came to an agreement. You can now download the whole thing without Thom Yorke sobbing a leopard from his eyes.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Radiohead out in the world

When they were selling In Rainbows as a download, Radiohead promoted online.

Now it's an actual record you can buy, Radiohead are going out to promote it in shops.

We're given to understand they're playing the Rough Trade shop in London this evening.

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Phew

The news that In Rainbows is likely to take the number one slot in the album charts this week has come as something of a relief to Gennaro Castaldo:

"This demand underlines the enduring appeal of the CD," said HMV's Gennaro Castaldo.

Well, yes. Although it also kind of undermines the claims of the music industry that downloading music must harm physical sales, and if there's an "enduring appeal" to the CD, why are HMV so busily withdrawing from CD sales?

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

David Byrne meets Thom Yorke and Wired records their conversation about the In Rainbows experiment and what it means for the music industry:

Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?

Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don't see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.

Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.

Yorke: Exactly.

Byrne: I've been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part. Maybe it's just because everybody's thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months.

Nicky Wire doesn't like the Radioheads

Nicky Wire is angry. Angry, angry, angry, with Thom Yorke, who is conspiring to kill music:

"Fair play to Radiohead for doing something different. It's certainly great for publicity but I think it kind of demeans music.

"Music used to be a market, now it's all gone digital. It's worrying and it seems to be the way of the world at the moment. Sales are doing well everywhere else. Cinema is doing well, video games are doing well but music isn’t. The free download phenomenon is ruining the industry."

It's interesting that Wire thinks sales in music are doing poorly compared to films and video games because of "free downloads", rather than the other possibility that perhaps people are happier to pay for video games than music. That maybe - given the choice between having the family round the telly flying off to Saturn with Mario Galaxies on the WII, and the Manics last bloated album, packed with Davroesque impressions of their younger selves, the music will always struggle.

We never had Wire pegged as a company man, but the band have been with Sony a very long time, and clearly he's comfortable with the industry. That's the only explanation for the RIAA-tinged view of In Rainbows as being part of the problem rather than an interesting attempt to find a solution. It's obvious that - in years to come - historians of music aren't going to see an experimental pay-what-you-like download in 2007 as the point where the music industry imploded; that happened years ago.

And since when was "music a market", Wire? Do you really think that in the 70s and 80s there was something organic about pop music, that we would nip down to Woolworths, choose from thousands of albums and haggle a price? If anything, the old pre-digital world was more like a petrol station shop than a market; a limited range of mostly inedible sludge offered at artificially high prices. The digital world allows the people who make the music to deal more-or-less direct with the people who consume it - it's potentially a farmer's market of the music world. It may be a world where large consumer electronic companies cease to subsidise old bands to make disappointing albums simply to ensure the band keeps the lucrative back catalogue with the label, but why would that worry you, Nicky?

Hang about though: actually, it's not Radiohead who are killing music. It's TV:

"I can't bear the X Factor judges and the shit they put out every year. It's just a load of talentless fuckwits that destroy the industry."

Up to a point, you'd have to agree with him. But he's also moaning that nobody buys records - and yet they're buying Leona Lewis in shedloads. Isn't that what he wants? If he fetishises markets so much these days, doesn't the market speak and say 'we sort of like this stuff, and will at least buy it in fairly large quantities...'?

Hersh shares

Kristin Hersh is experimenting with a new way of making music available; the PR team working with CASH music have (admittedly somewhat apologetically) described it as "doing a Radiohead - sort of", but it's much different too that: she's making a new track available each month under a Creative Commons licence, alongside the ProTools bits needed to remix, remake, remodel; although there's a request for payment, it's not the same thing as Radiohead's In Rainbows arrangement at all.

It's part of a wider plan, as Hersh explains:

Just to head off any potential confusion, CASH Music is not "me", or "mine". It's a group of people that have built a framework that is not meant for any single artist. I'm only the first. Look for more artists soon. The next featured artist and a co-founder of the coalition is Donita Sparks. CASH will soon be open to any and all independent artists who want a set of tools to offer their music directly to their audience for collaboration as well as financial support.

The first track, Slippershell, is available in in a number of formats and is rather fine.