Boom!

Record label Warner Music has said it will stop licensing its songs to free music streaming services.

How much do they make as a cut of advertising on those services vs. paid pipes?

[via]

zachklein:

I roared with a belly laugh when I read this headline in bed earlier today. Could Capitol Records truly be this misguided? Do they not realize that if you were to sort Internet brands by those most emblematic of creativity — not piracy — that Vimeo would line up at the top? Lip-dubbing is harmless and perfectly fun, and ultimately will define the aesthetic of an Internet generation. Other than for some petty legal jockeying towards a greater strategy can I imagine why this record company would sink such a potentially valuable lifeline — Lip-Dubbing and Vimeo create tremendous relevance and usefulness for their catalog!

If anything better underlines my point it’s an email I received from Sean Nelson, the frontman of the band Harvey Danger, whose song Flagpole Sitta we’ve now infamously lip-dubbed:

That Flagpole Sitta video made me incredibly happy, just when I thought there was NOTHING that could make me listen to that song again. A thousand thank you’s.

Capitol, you’re a bunch of goof-balls. This lawsuit is the tactical equivalent to pooping on someone’s birthday cake.

I, for one, am willing to boycott Capitol artists unless they reconsider, and I implore other labels to pivot and spur conversations with Vimeo in order to determine a simple process to give people access to copyrighted music for personal video that is satisfactory for all. Preemptive strikes simply won’t do anymore!

Who does Capitol think they are, Warner Music Group?

I read about Jango this morning via our Tunecore account and immediately drafted a strongly negative post, but after taking a deep breath and thinking about it more, I’m reconsidering.

At first the idea of paying someone to play your songs on internet radio is borderline offensive (as if giving it away for free weren’t enough!), but as a marketing expense, it’s not a terrible idea.

In fact, it dawns on me that this is analogous to Google Adwords for music.

As a prospective artst (RRR), my immediate questions are:

• How big is the listening audience?
• How can I reach fans with my existing newsletter or other forms of marketing?  (Contacting them only through Jango is not terribly helpful.)
• How scalable is the method of self-selecting similar artists?  (We can’t all sound like a handful of top artists.)  AdWords uses some sophisticated algorithms for ranking ads from numerous advertisers that want to be associated with certain keywords; this will eventually need something similar, à la Pandora’s music genome.
• Speaking of which, how does this compare to submitting your music to Pandora and getting paid in their rotation (for free)?