Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Oasis, Jamiroquai and even Madonna have something in common. They all decided to turn their backs on the Music Industry and either market their albums directly or – in the case of Madonna – use a company that is not related to the Music Industry.
Copying bought music is stealing !
That is at least what Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, said when questioned in court about her music piracy understanding. I think that this is one of the main reasons why the Music Industry is doing so badly. Their view collides with the demand of the consumers.
20000 Euro per song ?
Server operators who happen to have songs on their servers that are distributed illegally will have to pay the fine of 20000 Euro ($28000) per song: at least in Germany according to the district court in Hamburg. Private downloaders get it much cheaper though. They only have to pay 6000 Euro for the first song, 3000 for the second, 1500 for the third and 600 for all remaining ones. A cheap bargain don’t you think ?
Media Defender email leak
More than 6500 internal emails from anti-piracy company Mediadefender have been leaked on the Internet as one big Mailbox file that can be imported into email clients. Mails give in depth information about tactics that have been used to spread fake releases, fake edonkey servers and their opinion about several bittorrent clients.
The Pirate Bay introduces Playble
You can’t say that the guys from the Pirate Bay are full of ideas and surprises. Their latest project is called Playble, a website that offers free music to the visitors while still paying the artists directly. This is the biggest difference to the dominating music portals such as iTunes that do not pay the artists but the record labels who in turn pay their artists. This concept eliminates the need for a man in the middle who collects the money and distributes it to the artists.
New Trend: Raise Music Prices by offering DRM Free Music
Now if that is not a clever idea. Force DRM on the users for several years with a pricing scheme straight out of hell and then use a huge publicity machine to make the customers believe that DRM free music is the future raising prices once more. If you thought that everything would be good now that many labels decided to offer drm free music albums as well you could not be more wrong. What is happening now is that the Music Industry once again fools the customers by offering overpriced products.
DRM Free Songs come to iTunes
Apple and Emi announced today that the entire digital repertoire from Emi music can be purchased at Apples iTunes store without DRM. The songs will be offered at a higher quality which means an encoding quality of 256 Kbps instead of the usual 128 Kbps. There is however one downside: The DRM free songs cost $1.29 per song instead of the usual price of $0.99 per song. I’m a little bit concerned about the 30% increase which can not be explained rationally I think. Albums on the other side will not change in prices at all which makes the single song price increase a mystery to me.
