Yahoo adds download button to Tumblr; adds trouble to users

As Yahoo struggles to remember why it bought Tumblr, and shakes it to see if the previous owners left any money down the back of it, it's tried a new idea: since the start of the month, it's popped a little download button on audio posts, to allow visitors to not merely enjoy audio on the page, but to take it away with them, and put it on their devices.

Hey, that's wonderful functionality. Right?

There's a bit of a problem, though. The music industry has never been happy with people posting copyrighted stuff to Tumblr; adding a download button has turned a small transgression into a major problem.

Sure, it's always been a violation of the terms and conditions, and posting music you don't hold a licence too has carried a threat of account deletion, but apparently not coincidentally linked to the download button appearance, the music industry has started to get militant with Tumblr abuses. Stewardessme sums up the situation:

For years, Tumblr allowed us to upload music (up to five audio posts a day) because it substantially increased Tumblr’s user base and user “activity,” therefore increasing Tumblr’s value to its eventual buyer, Yahoo, and to the advertisers Yahoo is so eager to court. Now Yahoo/Tumblr is letting us take the DMCA fall for it, reminding us yet again that we aren’t the customers, but the product being sold to advertisers.

And, of course, because the music industry is using an automated machine, the sort of mistakes we've seen all over the internet are happening:

http://inaraoftyria.tumblr.com/post/111060807046/hey-jeremy-banks-hey-ifpi-no-you-do-not-own-my

If Tumblr is good at anything, though, it's good at forming support groups. And the community is coming together to help people who might be worried that having stuck a couple of Imagine Dragon tracks onto their blog could result in their entire Tumblr existence being wiped out. So there's a lot of activity like this going on:

http://iron-siren.tumblr.com/post/111058041597/resources-for-those-concerned-about-ifpi-takedowns

The lack of clarity about what's happening from Yahoo has generated a massive rumour mill, making things worse - people whose blogs are based on song titles or lyrics are panicking that they might be wiped as a result. That seems unlikely - a douchebag too far even for the copyright industry - but it'd be nice to see someone confirm that. Because, ah, it would be no rock and roll fun if that happened.

The return of dotmusic, sort of

Remember dotmusic? The one-time online home of Music Week from the days back when the internet was in black and white and closed down at 10.30? Sold on to BT, and then to Yahoo, where all the effort and marketing cash ended up in the service being folded into the now-defunct-on-its-own-right Yahoo Launch? You remember, right?

Lets hope Yahoo kept the paperwork, though, as there's no fewer than four (five, depending on how you count it) companies called dotmusic something or other bidding for the rights to be registraron the soon-to-be-launched .music top-level domain.

.music is part of a massive push to try and create new domain names, partly to stop the crush of demand for the dwindling supply of .com names. (It's doomed to failure, of course - large numbers of .music and other new web addresses will be registered, at great expenses, but research will discover that people trying to guess names will still always plump for .com, and so that's where the real demand will be. You know how you smile indulgently at companies that still use .tv as their main website? It's like that.)

Hypebot has a helpful list of contenders:

DotMusic Inc.
Dot Music / CCGR E-Commerce LTD - founded by Constantine Roussos, who began lobbying to establish the .music top level domain in 2005 and has the edge with the support of TuneCore, LyricFind, CD Baby, ReverbNation, The Orchard, INgrooves Fontana and others in the industry.
dotMusic Limited
Amazon
Victor Cross
Charleston Rd Registry / Google
.music LLC / FarFurther - supported by the RIAA, The National Music Publishers Association, A2IM, Impala and The Recording Academy.
Entertainment Names Inc

I know, it's like suddenly in the middle of 2012 there's something a bit like an ITV franchise round.

The real point of interest here is that the Roussos bid and the FarFurther biddraws support roughly split between internet-native businesses (Roussos) and old-school music endeavours (FarFurther). I think a useful rule of thumb is any initiative being supported by the RIAA is liable to work against the general interests of musicians and audience, and in favour of the multinational companies which used to be the music industry. On that basis alone, lets hope one of the others wins. The RIAA already believes it controls music; let's not let it control .music, too.

Jet attempt another take-off

Yahoo is incredibly generous to Jet tonight, almost as if they know what it's like to be a hotly tipped property which suddenly runs out of support. They pick up a Reuters interview:

After selling more than three million copies worldwide of their first album, there was really only one way Australian rock band Jet could go.

Selling more, do you mean? Because three million worldwide isn't really a lot; it's all right, as sales go, but leaves plenty of room for increases.

But, no, Reuters suggests that selling three million is some kind of peak; that it is the point from which there are no more lands to conquer:

Crash and burn.

But then again, even if three million did represent a copy for everybody in the world, plus a spare, there'd also be the option of maintaining that level of interest, wouldn't there?

Apparently not. Reuters collude in trying to remake 'overhyped band shrink back to more appropriate level' as some sort of rock history:

"You grow up reading those books about (troubled classic rock bands), and then all of a sudden you find yourself in that cliche. It's pretty surreal," drummer/singer Chris Cester said in a recent interview, accompanied by his older brother Nic, the band's singer/guitarist.

No, Cester. You weren't part of some classic rock story. You were just a band that didn't really have it in you to be selling millions of records. It wasn't some terrible calamity that did for your second record; it was just the whole not being very good.

"There's a lot of goodwill that I have noticed for our band, a lot of people who really want this to go well, which I'm really grateful for," said Nic. "We're not trying to fool anyone. This isn't like a marketing campaign. We're just a good band, and we write good songs and we love what we do. It starts and ends there."

It isn't like a marketing campaign, he says in an interview with a major news organisation timed to coincide with a tour starting to promote a new release.

Common still shooting for the Zune

Yahoo tech news gets cautiously excited about Common's tie-up with Zune, although not too excited:

A video for the title track on hip-hop veteran Common's forthcoming album, "Universal Mind Control," begins with a digital music player pulsing to the beat. The viewer is pulled through the screen into the gadget's guts, where the cool, collected rapper lets loose an easy stream of lyrics.

It takes hitting rewind a few times to notice that the music player isn't one of Apple's slim new iPods. It's a Zune, and it's made by Microsoft Corp.

Perhaps Microsoft will feel flattered that you have to look closely to realise it's not an iPod, but a Zune. On the other hand, they could feel a bit deflated that unless you watch carefully and repeatedly, the average viewer is going to assume they're seeing the guts of an iPod.

At the other end of the telescope, there's a broader question of just how Common - a man paid by Microsoft to endorse their product - magically came up with a video which showcases, however ineffectually, a Microsoft product. Perhaps - let's be generous - Common decided on a video featuring a Fantastic Voyage into an MP3 player, and the Zune just happened to fit the vision.

On the other hand, did Microsoft ask him to make a video featuring a Zune somehow in return for their marketing cash. Which, of course, is not illegal but feels a whole less moral. If Common is selling his 'cool' and, by implication, his audience, then at the very least the deal should be made explicit.

In other words: Is Yahoo writing this puff piece because Common thinks the Zune is so cool, he built a video around it? Or is Yahoo writing the puff because Microsoft thinks Common is cool they gave him money?

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Apart from swallowing whole Gallagher's claims that The Smell Of White Lightning has got a Krautrock influence, Yahoo's primer's guide to Krautrock is pretty good:

Bands were also anxious to direct their amps and fuzz boxes against the political establishment, which in 1968 still contained many Nazi-era officials, said Guru Guru's Neumeier.

"There was a thick layer of dust everywhere left by Uncle Adolf, and we wanted to really blow it away," he said.

Anglo-American domination of the record industry was a further obstacle to German acts, which needed time to find their own voice in the Cold War aftermath of the Nazis' defeat.

"After the war, we had no self-confidence to put down roots on our own turf, musically or otherwise," said Holger Czukay, bassist for Cologne-based Can. "It only really began in 1968."

Yahoo make vague promise of DRM cashback

The decision by Yahoo to turn off its DRM servers continues to generate a PR disaster that will end up costing more than just leaving the server switched on, as - having delivered its subscribers to the more expensive Rghapsody service, Yahoo attempts to deal with the people who bought their hobbled files outright and how to cope with the realisation that they've got files that will not work any more if they change machines:

"You'll be compensated for whatever you paid for the music," [Carrie Davis, spokeswoman for Yahoo Music] told InformationWeek. "We haven't said exactly what we will do, but we will take care of our customers."

Compensated for whatever you paid sounds pretty clear - you get everything back - but "we haven't said exactly what we will do" sounds somewhat less definitive.

Indeed:

The company planned to reimburse customers on a case-by-case basis, and has posted an FAQ page that includes a "contact customer care" button at the bottom for former Yahoo Music Store customers. Davis said customers could be reimbursed in several ways, including getting back the money they paid for the music or receiving MP3 versions without DRM technology, which means they can be imported into any music playing software.

Getting an mp3 file - at a lower sound quality than the original file you paid for - isn't quite the same thing as being "compensated for whatever you paid", is it? We'd suggest that "getting your money back" would be the only way you could do that.

And why on earth is it going to be done on a "case-by-case" basis? Since Yahoo must have records of who bought what, why can't it just decide how it's going to fix this, and then fix this? A cynic might suspect that by doing a piecemeal compensation package would enable Yahoo to make it an opt-in offer, rather than a blanket compensation package.

Whatever, though, in terms of costs of administration and reputation, is it really worth the savings made by switching off the computer?

[Thanks to Karl T - who suggests that the Yahoo customers would only spend compensation "on magic beans or something"]

Yahoo make customers' music evaporate

Microsoft tried this, and had to walk quickly backwards when faced with angry dupes. Now, Yahoo are announcing the switch off of their DRM servers, rendering paid-for music suddenly useless. Unless you never upgrade your computer again. Or suffer a crash. Ars Technica is not impressed:

Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

Why would Yahoo have taken this step knowing it made Microsoft look even shabbier when they tried it? Are things so tough at company that they can't afford to leave the server switched on for a few more years?

Songwriter's payday: AOL, Yahoo, Real told to dig deep

A Federal Judge in the US has settled the long-running debate about how much the major internet companies should be paying to songwriters. The judgement could be backdated to the start of the millennium; sample figures suggest that AOL will have to find six million dollars, for example, to cover 2006 alone.

Yahoo! takeover: agreed, completed

No, not that Yahoo deal; this one is the handing over of their online music store to Real Network & MTV's Rhapsody service.

Yahoo! Music Unlimited customers - of whom there must be, ooh, many - will have their library transfered to the Rhapsody service, and "for a time" pay the same as they're used to. Which is business talk for "will find their prices going up in the midterm."

Meanwhile, Yahoo has swallowed FoxyTunes, the Firefox plug-in business which combines a web-browser remote control for your iTunes with some Last FM-esque sharing-and-community gubbins.

Yahoo! context and hubris

Ian Rogers has worked in both what we still call 'new' media and for record companies in the past; he was with WinAmp; he's currently with Yahoo! Music and has just posted a presentation he gave to some "friends in the music industry" in which threw down an interesting new policy.

First, he illustrated that convenience will always win out over hubris (or, rather, the perception that better makes people happy to pay and jump through hoops):

History tells us: convenience wins, hubris loses. “Who is going to want a shitty quality LP when these 78s sound so good? Who wants a hissy cassette when they have an awesome quadrophonic system? Who wants digitized music on discs now that we have Dolby on our cassettes? Who wants to listen to compressed audio on their computers?” ANSWER: EVERYONE. Convenience wins, hubris loses.

Then, he extrapolated what this will mean for Yahoo!Music in future:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

If, on the other hand, you’ve seen the light too, there’s a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

So, what does this mean for Yahoo, then, besides a firm rejection of DRM? Rogers believes that Y! can offer something which iTunes - "a spreadsheet which plays music" - can't, and that's context to the music. By a strange coincidence, the 'context' is what Yahoo is kind of good at - or at least, should be.

Here's where we start to disagree with him - to be frank, although we're quite curious about matters musical, we've never once thought "if only iTunes could tell us what the drummer on this track ate for breakfast the day he played" and tapping the questions that we do have into a browser has never proved too onerous; indeed, we've got iTunes plugged into Firefox anyway thanks to FoxyTunes.

But convenience? That can only be a good thing.

Amazon, Yahoo set to flog MP3s

Inspired by Universal's attempts to break Apple's online music dominance, Amazon and Yahoo are readying their online music stores. Music Week is reporting Amazon will be flogging MP3s from September; Yahoo from January 2008. Although not actually DRM-free (the tracks will be traceable), the new stores are hoping that the more open format will allow them to chip away at iTunes' market share.

Musicmatch users up for a fight

Musicmatch - one of the most venerable music services on the net - is about to disappear, as current owners Yahoo want to force all users to "upgrade" to Yahoo Jukebox.

That's upgrade as in move downwards, of course, and Musicmatch subscribers aren't happy. There's talk of a class action suit, not least because, as Yahoo's FAQs hint, the new service lacks some of Musicmatch's functionality:

What if I choose not to do this migration process? Can I stay with Musicmatch?

Musicmatch services will be discontinued at some point in the future. Many of the features you have now with Musicmatch are offered with Yahoo! Music, as well as new ones, plus a much larger library of music.

Emphasis added.

Radio silence after dark

The excessive rates being demanded from American internet broadcasters from next month has generated a protest campaign - SaveNetRadio - who are co-ordinating a day of online radio silence on June 26th. Yahoo, Rhapsody and NPR are on board, dozens of smaller stations are also pledging to take part in the cultural strike.

Probably just a coincidence

Members of the Primal Scream Yahoogroup may or may not agree that the band have a bit of a cheek charging one pound fifty to watch a video on their website, as an email person suggested.

They may also pause to note the complaint came from someone with an '@nickelodeon.co.uk' address - and wonder if there could be any reason why an employee of the same organisation that operates MTV could be complaining about bands selling their videos direct to the fans?