Amazon do a good thing

Let's start 2016 with a warm, amusing story.

Pegida, the German Nazis have released a pop song, and it's doing fairly well in terms of downloads.

That might not sound too amusing - and it isn't - but there is an upside.

Amazon, noting that they're raking in money off sales on this tatty piece of shit, came up with a fuck you Nazis plan. They're giving the money to help refugees.

Yep, they might struggle with paying their taxes, but at least Amazon have come up with a way to ensure that far-right propaganda helps fund the very people the nazis demonise.

Who sells the most vinyl?

Amazon. Obviously.

But before we move on from the question, it's interesting to note who else sells vinyl in quantities in the US:

1. Amazon 12.3% of US retail vinyl market
2. Urban Outfitters 8.1%
3. Hastings Entertainment 2.8%
4. Hot Topic 2.4%
5. Trans World Entertainment 2.2%

Yes, there's two clothes shops on that list. (I know Hot Topic would claim they're some sort of alternative lifestyle shop, but they're a clothes shop with a record rack.)

How does this work, exactly?

Where's the best place to buy an iTunes exclusive album?

Er, Amazon, apparently.

The helpful reviewers of Amazon: Slap them, they're talking French

Perhaps persuaded by their Glastonbury performance, you might be thinking of buying Reflektor. Thank god Fleece Fire can stop you before you waste your £4:

The lead 'singer' can't hold a note to save his life. And they keep chucking in French just to, y'know, be arty (aka pretentious). Nothing is catchy and the lyrics are too serious. Lighten up guys! Oh, and they just had to have an album cover based on a famous sculpture because they couldn't think of any original ideas on how to express themselves.

Canada isn't too great at giving us great bands. Celine Dion, Avril Lavigne, Justin Bieber, Nickleback. It's all terrible.

Avoid like the absolute plague unless you're partial to having the musical equivalent of icepicks stabbing you in the ears for 75 long, LONG minutes.

- Hey, Regine, what shall we put on the sleeve?
- Hmm. Fresh out of ideas, Win. Let's just go and get a postcard from the gallery and lob that on

What I think is most acute about Fleece's insight is that they know the band are Canadian, but don't seem to know that 'speaking French' is a thing that many Canadians do habitually, not pretentiously.

Will Amazon trickle out a stream?

The New York Times reckons that Amazon might quietly launch a music streaming service today.

That they'd pick World Cup Of Soccer day to do this suggests it's the softest of soft launches. Which may be down to the likelihood that one of the majors - UMG - doesn't appear to have been signed up yet.

How does this make any sense?

You can spend £6.99, and get all the songs on Dean Wareham. Fair enough.

Or, you can spend 34p more, and get all the songs, plus, all the songs put onto a small plastic disc, in a package of some sort, all printed and professionally presented; driven from a factory to a storage unit; picked from that unit and put into a box; and then driven to your door.

I'm not sure how that makes any sense.

On a related note: is it just us, or is everyone finding the Amazon site running really flakily over the last couple of weeks? I'm having to stop pages as they hang half-way through their loading cycle just to get the whole thing to load in.

Bookmarks: Amazon

[via The Daily WTF

Downloadable: Lambchop

Also free, also from Amazon: Lambchop's Gone Tomorrow

Downloadable: Sharon Von Etten

You'll possibly already have this, but just in case: Amazon are giving away Sharon Von Etten's Leonard for no money at all.

GaGa says 99cents is about right

Talking to the Wall Street Journal, Lady GaGa has said that when Amazon flogged the new record for less than a dollar, they were probably right:

“No. I absolutely do not, especially for MP3s and digital music. It’s invisible. it’s in space. If anything, I applaud a company like Amazon for equating the value of digital versus the physical copy, and giving the opportunity to everyone to buy music. It also wasn’t really 99 cents, because Amazon paid the difference on all of those purchases as part of their promotional campaign for one of their new services. I think it’s amazing and it was a really nice surprise and I felt honored that they chose my record to be part of it.”

The interesting bit is tucked away in the middle - 'sure, sell them for 99cents. Providing I still get my full pay from somewhere'.

Maybe the next album could be sold exclusively through Family Dollar?

Lady GaGa brings Amazon to its knees

Today was the launch date for Born This Way, and Amazon in the US came up with a wicked ruse - why not sell the download for 99cents?

(I'll bet that made the RIAA delighted; the biggest release of the year and Amazon effectively gave it away.)

It's not worked out well for Amazon, either, according to Hypebot. So many people tried to get GaGa for pennies that its servers struggled, making what was supposed to be a showcase for Amazon's cloud music services into a bit of disaster.

Oh, and as people get pissed at Amazon, their negative reviews are hitting GaGa's rating, too:

Dozens of Gaga fans have chosen to show their displeasure by rating the experience on Amazon - and thus the new album's has dropped from 5 to 3 stars. "Either Cloudplayer is buggy for this download or is just unstable and pointless. I had to send an email to customer Service to get help downloading. And they'll get back to me within 12 hours?!? Its a download service and you can't get back to me any sooner than twelve hours?," wrote one two star reviewer.

Another user cited by Hypebot reported a three and a half hour struggle which resulted in just the booklet being downloaded.

It's early days for the Amazon cloudplayer, but not having calculated the likely demand and made sure it could cope seems a bit of a fumble. Unable to cope with the numbers? The cloudplayer was born this way.

Google: The major labels are disgusting

It's only a rumour, but Wayne Rosso is reporting that Google have lost patience with the record labels.

The majors and the search engine are trying to come to an agreement over licensing for Google's supersecretcloudmusicservice. But even although Amazon have just stuck two fingersup at the RIAA cartel and said that people no more need licenses to store music on a server in a distant building than they do to store them on their own hard drive, the labels are digging their heels in. And Google are disgusted.

On a scale of disgust, at the top, is Warners:

[T]he label’s head of digital, Michael Nash, is said to be convinced that Google should be charging users $30 a year for the cloud. Google, in response, is said to think that is way too much and wants the first 500 tracks stored by users to be free of charge.

Nash is probably blissfully unaware that you can currently store 1,000 megabytes of music, in the cloud, via Google, without payment, right now. (Google Docs will let you store any digital files up to that limit for free.) Charging $30 to do the same thing, with the only difference being that you're paying $30 for it, makes no bloody sense.

Google are, claims Rosso, thinking of giving the labels an Amazon-style response, and launching without their blessing.

Daily Mail claims Google is robbing Adele, gets it very wrong

There's a great piece on MailWatch this morning looking at Alex Brummer's piece in the Mail which droned on about how Google is evil.

Google threatens to destroy not only pop sensation Adele, but Britain's film and music industries. So why is No.10 in thrall to this parasitic monster?

You might be surprised to hear that Google is threatening to destroy Adele. Sure, Twitter has issued a death threat against The Vaccines, and Bing insists it will start to remove one of The Saturdays every hour unless its demands are met by midnight, but Google threatening to destroy Adele seems to be something we've missed.

Brummer told his readers:

Nine out of the first ten websites which pop up on Google’s search engine are run by pirates who have downloaded Adele’s output and offer it online far more cheaply than official copyrighted sites and High Street retailers.

Mailwatch takes this surprising claim and grinds it into dust:

From this sample it seems that Google seems very adept at putting Adele’s fans in touch with official sources of information about her. Only the lyrics page seems unofficial or unapproved – and do lyrics really count as piracy?

There's a couple of other surprising claims in Brummer's article which are deserving of a closer look. Remember, by the way, the Brummer is not a generalist hack trying to froth up a piece; he's a former British Press Awards financial journalist of the year and a former city editor of the Mail.

The music and books retailer HMV and the music giant EMI are two of the grand old dames of Britain’s music industry. But the future of both these historic enterprises, with a pedigree of recording talent going back almost a century, is in doubt.

Together with other UK-based creative champions such as Warner Music as well as a host of imaginative, independent record producers, they are in danger of extinction — as is this country’s extraordinarily successful music business.

Where do you start? HMV has a "pedigree of recording talent", does it? Admittedly, there was an HMV label but that business has nothing to do with the shops.

More importantly, Warner Music are not "UK-based". Their headquarters is on Rockerfeller Plaza in New York.

Brummer suggests that the woes of the industry are related to Google - which is such a narrow view of what has happened since music went online as to be laughable. His subs make an explicit link in an image caption:

Grand old dame: But the future of recording giant EMI is being undermined by Google

Really? EMI still turns profits; the future has been undermined by loading the company up with unsupportable debt and a management regime ill-equipped to nurture the legacy of the company, and uninspired to cope with the future. Even if you want to take the RIAA line that unlicensed file-sharing is part of the problem, Google aren't putting the files there and work over-strenuously to take-down when their users have ignored the licensing regime.

There's a massive clunker from Brummer when he turns to HMV:

In Britain, some 70 per cent of music sales are still in the form of CDs and come through the High Street, where HMV is now the main retailer following the collapse of Woolworths and Zavvi in the early part of 2009.

Woolworths and Zavvi both collapsed at the end of 2008 although some stores were still being wound down in early 2009, but that's a minor quibble.

Oh, and HMV was already the main retailer before Woolworths and Zavvi collapsed as its sales outstripped both of them. But that's another minor quibble.

The bigger problem is the claim that 70 per cent of music sales "are still in the form of CDs and come through the High Street". Is that by volume? Is that by value? Brummer doesn't say, although the difference is important.

But if we accept his claim that most music sales are still on CD, does he really think most of those CDs are being sold through physical stores?

Does it not occur to him that a large chunk of HMV's problems are down to supermarkets selling large numbers of CDs as loss-leaders alongside the Mum's Day flowers and BOGOF baked beans?

And has he never heard of Amazon, which is selling quite a large proportion of those CDs, without the need for anyone to go near the High Street?

Although I suppose you can find Amazon by using Google. Clearly that's Google's fault, too.

Google aren't targeting Adele. It does sound rather like Brummer is using dodgy arguments in some sort of attack on Google, though.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Amazon cloud

Bascha watches the record industry squawk as Amazon allow you to swap a hard drive at your house for a hard drive in the cloud, and sighs a long sigh:

I do not think that Sony and their ilk would be, shall we say, opposed to having one giant virtualized pool of everyone’s music resources. One place where you stored every music file you owned? That would make it eerily simple to monitor music consumption. To identify misappropriation.

The problem is that the major music labels do not own Amazon’s pool, and they don’t have means to see inside it. Google and others, it’s been suggested, were in talks with the labels to negotiate terms for very similar technologies. Licensing terms could kick back for music stored, monetarily and--most likely--in data and assurances. In addition to the fees they already paid for music sold.

[Thanks to Michael M for the tip]

Amazon want you to build your own streamers

Quietly launched (on amazon.com, not yet on .co.uk, is Amazon Cloud Storage. You get five gig of free space to store stuff in.

Yes, yes, but that's not all - if you use your cloud drive to store mp3s, you can play them from there. Streaming to computers or android phones. All rather nice.

You can buy extra space, too (US customers only right now) - it's the sort of cheap deal that can rapidly become uncheap; a dollar a gig up to a thousand.

As a nice extra, if you buy mp3s from Amazon, and lob them into your cloud, they don't count against your space.

It looks at first glance like something useful; Mashable are impressed. It's not a totally new idea - there were similar, though more limited, services offered about ten years ago, but back then record labels squawking about piracy had them closed down. (Just as well - had they not had music lockers chased off the internet, their business might be looking pretty sick today, eh?)

Apple are rumoured to be about to offer something similar. If the cellular and wifi networks can cope, your music collection might never be bigger than your music player again.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Piracy

Fred Wilson spends a lot on music. He's a brilliant customer. He's the sort of person the music industry would have to keep sweet. So how come he was forced to "steal" music? It's a story of how the music industry really isn't ready for 1995 yet:

Then I searched the Internet for the record [The new Streets album]. It was not even listed in iTunes or emusic. It was listed on Amazon US as an import that would be available on Feb 15th, but only in CD form. I'm not buying plastic just to rip the files and throw it out. Seeing as it was an import, I searched Amazon UK. And there I found the record in mp3 form for 4 pounds. It was going to be released on Feb 4th. I made a mental note to come back and get it when it was released.

I got around to doing that today. I clicked on "buy with one click" and was greeted with this nonsense ["Sorry, you can't buy outside the UK" message]

[via Charles Arthur in the Guardian]

Downloadable: UNKLE

As a way of interesting you in new album Where Did The Night Fall, UNKLE and Amazon are doing a free download of the track Natural Selection.

No bobs, your UNKLE. If you like.

Downloadable: Sympathy For The Record Industry

Available for absolutely nothing over at the Amazon MP3 store: A Sympathy For The Record Industry Sampler. New York Dolls, April March, Holly Golightly... worth a moment or two of your time, surely?

Downloadable: Goldfrapp

In a bid to turn you into a beast, slathering for the new Goldfrapp album, Amazon are offering a free download of Rocket (Richard X One Zero Remix)

Online music: The name escapes me

ConsumerFocus published a survey this week which laid out its case in a rather blunt headline:

More must be done to make Consumers aware of legal options to buy music online before an enforcement approach is taken.

Which you'd have to give two cheers to, although, frankly, the problem with the Digital Economy Bill is not that people don't know what their legal options are, and more about the whole throwing-people-off-the-internet-because-a-Japanese-electronics-company-says-so approach.

The survey makes an eyecatching claim, as surveys tend to:

The research released today shows that four in ten people are unable to name a single online music service at all – despite there being over 20 services on the market.

If you twist that round, it actually says that 60% of the UK population are able to come up with the name of an online music service, which is quite good, I'd have thought.

The problem is that ConsumerFocus focus on these 40% who can't. They suggest if, in a room of ten people, four can't even come up with Amazon or iTunes, that's a pretty shabby state of affairs:

Jill Johnstone, International Director, Consumer Focus, said: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services. If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives?

“Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”

You'll know that I tend to not be a great fan of "the music industry", but this seems a little unfair on them. Why should you expect a wholesaler to pay for their customers to build their retail brand identity?

More to the point, is a 40% shrug rate actually bad? After all, is someone who, when asked to name an online music store, can't even think of iTunes really going to be then going home and searching for torrents? Not even the RIAA have suggested that the Pirate Bay has infected the files it tracks with a drug that makes users forget the name of legal services.

And while Consumer Focus doesn't bother to share much of its methodology in the press release, it does offer this:

The face to face omnibus survey was carried out by BMRB Omnibus Surveys from Thursday 18th – Wednesday 24th amongst 1995 adults aged 15+. The findings are representative of the GB population.

So they've asked everybody. In which case, amongst those four-out-of-ten who can't name a music service is quite likely to be the two out of ten who have never even been on the internet [according to the ONS].

So, that's ten people, six of whom do have knowledge of legal online brands, two who don't, and two who don't go near the internet at all. Surely not a major problem?