Leave will screw the music industry, too

While as a nation we try to come to terms with just how self-defeating half of our compatriots are, you might be wondering what it means for music.

Before the vote, Pitchfork warned that it would probably be bad:

British media coverage of EU funding trains a negative focus on all the so-called red tape you have to endure to access it. But there are endless EU programs that benefit the music industry, which Britain excels at securing: In 2012, UK applications (in general, not just for music) had a 46 percent success rate, almost double the average success rate of 24 percent. If the UK leaves the EU, in all likelihood, that funding will no longer be available. The benefits of this money are vast, wide-reaching, and often not obvious to the public. The Village Underground, a well-appointed, 1000-capacity warehouse venue in east London, currently benefits from two EU programs. Liveurope pays them to host emerging European bands support slots on bigger bills, giving these acts the chance to get out of their own countries, and prompting venues to have a more diverse program. Creative Lenses is a four-year investigation into new business models for the cultural sector.

The BPI issued a statement:

“The outcome of the EU Referendum will come as a surprise to many across the music community, who will be concerned by the economic uncertainty that lies ahead and the impact this may have on business prospects.
"However, the UK public has spoken, and once the short-term political and macro-economic consequences have played out, this decision will mean new priorities for the music industry in our work with Government. We will, of course, press the Government to swiftly negotiate trade deals that will ensure unimpeded access to EU markets for our music and our touring artists. Our Government will also now have the opportunity to legislate for stronger domestic copyright rules that encourage investment here in the UK and which will protect UK creators from piracy and from tech platforms siphoning off value through copyright loopholes. We are confident that British music will remain hugely popular across Europe and we will work hard to make sure UK labels are able to capitalise on that demand.”

Bpop rearranges line-up

The troubled BPop live event - the gig encouraging people to vote leave in this month's referendum - has struggled with a line up after 5ive and Alesha Dixon discovered what they'd been signed up for and, well, voted to leave the bill.

But people are rushing in to fill the gap. They've got an Elvis Impersonator and, erm, whatever cadaver the bits of flesh that used to be Bucks Fizz are stitched into these days:

bpop live has Bucks Fizz and an Elvis impersonator as its new line-up: will it be third time lucky? pic.twitter.com/xaz7OJz5Td

— Asa Bennett (@asabenn) June 1, 2016

Not the real Elvis. Not the real Bucks Fizz. For the campaign without any grounding in reality. It all makes sense now.

Roger Daltrey is an angry man

Roger Daltrey has announced that he will never vote for Labour again.

Why, Roger? Is it because a man with three houses voting for a party of social justice might be too much irony for you?

Depressingly, no: it turns out that it's foreign people upsetting him:

I will never, ever forgive the Labour Party for allowing this mass immigration with no demands on what people should be paid.

Didn't Labour introduce the minimum wage which, pretty much, is a demand on what people shou... oh, hang on; he hasn't finished.

I will never forgive them for destroying the jobs of my mates because they allowed their jobs to be undercut with stupid thinking on Europe, letting them (immigrants) all in, so they can live 10 to a room working for Polish wages.

This might sound unlikely, but it turns out that Pete Townshend has been replaced with ten Poles. Shocking.

I could pick Daltrey's argument apart, but frankly, Daniel Knowles dismissed this tired old whinge in the Telegraph pretty comprehensively:

Here's what the Migration Advisory Committee goes on to say:
But this possible displacement of British workers only holds for those migrants who have been here for under five years. Both EU and non-EU migrants who have been in the UK for over five years are not associated with displacement of British born workers. Between 1995 and 2010 employment of such working age migrants rose by approximately 2.1 million. The associated displacement of British born workers was, on our own calculations, around 160,000 of the additional 2.1 jobs held by migrants, or about 1 in 13.
[...]
There are some reasons to worry about immigration. The evidence is ambiguous, but it's not unreasonable to think some foreigners may be coming to claim welfare. There is also a cultural argument, and while I wouldn't make it, not everyone who does is a racist or a bigot; Ed West frequently makes the case convincingly. But while it is reasonable to be worried about immigration, it is simply not true to suggest that "foreigners are stealing our jobs" or that immigration is responsible for unemployment. And those who do, in defiance of the evidence, make me wonder about their real motivations.

Even someone who worries that perhaps foreign people are coming to the UK to get access to cheap-ish prescriptions and IDS' welfare disaster doesn't buy that they're stealing jobs, and wonders if there might not be some sort of other agenda at work here.

But Roger doesn't have a problem with the foreign people he's singling out and unfairly claiming are driving British nationals into penury:

"I've got nothing against the Poles at all but that was a political mistake and it made me very angry and the people who get it in the neck are the immigrants and it's not their fault."

You know the best way to help those people who are given a hard time? How about not standing up and yelling that they're undercutting wages and causing mass unemployment when it really isn't true, Roger?

Interestingly, Daltrey doesn't seem to have a problem with the bits of the EU settlement which made it as easy and cost-effective for The Who to play Paris and Amsterdam as Birmingham and Glasgow.

File sharing not killing music after all, it turns out

It's not Girls Aloud coming to a graceful end; that other music industry trouper, the claim that file sharing hurts music sales, has pretty much been laid to rest as well: Extensive research from the European Union confirms what a lot of us have thought all along: unlicensed listening doesn't really take money from anywhere else:

The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet.Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate theeffects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Ourresults suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute to legal dig-ital music. Although positive and significant, our estimated elasticities are essentially zero: a10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legalpurchases websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (butstill small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting complementaritiesbetween these two modes of music consumption. According to our results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites. We find important cross country difference in these effects.

So - it differs a bit from country to country, but broadly speaking, there's a tiny positive effect, and - oh joy - even legal streaming leads to a small rise in actual sales.

Even if you accept that the upswings are as small as to be zero, that's still no negative effect.

You don't, of course, take down one of the RIAA-IFPI shibboleths with data and expect the music industry to admit they've been wrong. So they try a response to tear the research to shreds. It doesn't quite work:

IFPI believes the JRC study is flawed and misleading. The findings seem disconnected from commercial reality, are based on a limited view of the market and are contradicted by a large
volume of alternative third party research that confirms the negative impact of piracy on the
legitimate music business

Let's just look at that a little closer, shall we?

"Flawed and misleading" is quite a big claim - one suggesting incompetence and one duplicity. You better have something strong and convincing to follow that up.

"The findings seem disconnected from commercial reality". And, really, they don't. "This survey doesn't confirm what I believe, so it must be wrong" is just piffle.

"are based on a limited view of the market" - this seems to be the objection that the survey takes no account of legal streaming. Except it does. Look, that bit we quoted up there makes it clear that the impact of legal streaming on the download market is part of the thing they were investigating. Bit misleading to complain that research hasn't investigated the effect of legal streaming on legal streaming, isn't it?

"and are contradicted by a large volume of alternative third party research that confirms the negative impact of piracy on the legitimate music business" - nice to see the music industry calling itself a legitimate business. There's a pleasing Corleone ring to that.

I think this existence of contradictory data is upon which the IFPI are building the claim of the survey being misleading.

Trouble is, two of the three surveys are referenced by the EU survey - their findings detailed, and proper references given; the intention being that people read them alongside the EU findings.

To not have included the research which contradicts their findings would have been misleading. You know, like if the music industry issued a press release which only cherry picked research which agreed with them and ignored the research which took an opposing position. Like this one.

So what of the flaws? The IFPI details a "key example" - which apparently is so key they need no further examples:

A key example of this problem is the treatment of iTunes ‘clicks’ by Nielsen. iTunes is a major legal music service and an essential data point in establishing legal music consumption. Nielsen measures use of the iTunes application, which involves any activity around iTunes - such as a user simply plugging their iPhone into the PC (which launches the iTunes application), a user listening to music via iTunes, a user synchronising their Apple device with their PC, a user renting a film on iTunes, or downloading a game app. Each one of these instances are counted as an iTunes ‘click’ and considered as legal music behaviour by the JRC. This severely impacts the results and is not a good proxy for legitimate music consumption

Does Nielsen really count someone launching a desktop application as a click on a website? If that's true, then the methodology flaw is Nielsen's. (I've dropped an email to the IFPI to check where they're getting this definition of a click from.)

Even if we take this at its word - although people who still sync iPhones with PCs are hardly going to have much of a grasp on modern technology - there's no indication of how "severely" the impact of this is. (Really? Every time someone starts and stops a song and starts another one of their desktop iTunes player Nielsen adds a click on iTunes? That's extraordinary if true. Is it?) The IFPI might be right, this could undermine the findings. But rather than give us any data which could be set against the research, the IFPI just shrug and say they reckon it's just enough to know it could be flawed.

If they were interested in the truth, the IFPI would be pointing to a better source of the music interaction data. That they don't suggests their takedown is a panicky attempt to get everyone to look the other way.

[UPDATE: Took a while, but finally got a confirmation from Nielsen that their methodology can, indeed, include people recharging their iPhones as a visit to iTunes. I don't think that fatally undermines the EU report, but it does weaken it to the point where it's worth approaching the findings with a bit more caution. I've written more about this here.]

EU, US allow Universal and EMI to decline together

It's been a long, slow process, but today both the EU and American authorities have sighed and said it'll be fine for the two decaying bodies to merge themselves into a single, leeching exercise.

As part of the deal, some chunks of EMI will be cut off and left to flounder on their own - Parlophone will be looking for a new, different owner to manage its decline.

Experts nodded wisely at the news that the Universal-EMI merger will finally happen, noting that formal EU approval officially kick starts the long, slow process towards Universal-EMI merging with Warners.

Offloading Parlophone

As Universal continue to try throwing things out the basket to see if their EMI takeover can get lift-off, the latest plan is to try and flog Parlophone to BMG.

Yes, yes, BMG had stopped being in the recorded music business when it withdrew from what is now Sony alone, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be interested in getting back into such a vibrant, profit-loaded sector, right?

There is a slight problem with the plan, thought. The idea is to convince that the EU that the embiggened Universal wouldn't control too much of the market for the biggest selling acts, but, says MediaGuardian:

One source with knowledge of the situation said that any potential sale of Parlophone, one of EMI's most famous labels, would include Universal "cherry picking" key artists to keep such as the Beatles and, potentially, Coldplay.

It's like those hoarding programmes where the guy agrees to get rid of his enormous collection of plastic horses, only to get to the shop and announce that he's keeping all the dappled ones.

EU considers the Gallo report

More attempts to stretch copyright beyond its origins as a fairly good idea for creative people to the basis of a fictional industry, as the EU takes delivery of the Gallo Report, a nasty bit of work which attempts to protect "intellectual property" like it was children. As La Quadrature:

The Gallo report calls for the creation of private copyright police, where infringement are dealt in an extra-legislative way, with cooperation with the Internet Service Providers, such as in the "three strikes" policies of the first HADOPI or DeBill laws.

Private copyright police. That sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? ComputerWorld has some ideas about how to get involved to stop the proposals before they become very, very bad law.

EU: Turn it down, Apple

Doubtless Nigel Farrage will be on the televisions now, insisting that it's every Englishman's right to bugger his hearing without being told not to by an edict from Brussels, but that's what's going to happen. The EU is going to instruct personal audio manufacturers to set a lower default sound level on devices sold in the future.

EU tells UK government to hit play and record

As part of a "know your digital rights guide" launch, Viviane Reding, the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media, and Meglena Kuneva, the EU Consumer Commissioner called on the UK to allow personal copying to help harmonise copyright rules across Europe:

Reding and Kuneva want to go further with a "digital agenda" for the future. This includes addressing the online music market, attacking the spam problem, mandating better privacy policy disclosure, and smoothing out "private copying" inconsistencies.

Of course, not even the Blakeys who run the IFPI would ever try to bring a legal action against a UK citizen for ripping a CD they'd bought to their own computer or iPod, so it would be more a tidying up rather than the granting of a fabulous new legal right.

And, given how the IFPI is turning slightly more Kurtz than Blakey, it might be just as well to have some legislation to fall back on.