Speechless (or, did iTunes Match just legalise piracy?)

I’ve always thought that, while the partial saviour of the recording industry, iTunes has also been a massive contributor to the problems of the industry.  On the positive side it has allowed a lot of people easy access to a large variety of music and, perhaps more importantly, got them buying now and thinking about the bill later.  The problem, however, is that it plays by the industry’s backwards-ass licensing rules.  It’s like trying to discipline a bully by enabling them just a little bit in the hope that, through positive reinforcement, they’ll eventually realise they’re being an asshole.

The thing is, Steve Jobs knows this.  The man has issued various treatises on why the labels and their lobbying bodies are being dicks, and slowly it’s worked – witness DRM free content on iTunes.  It’s not enough though, it’s not even close. There’s still a massive gulf between what the music industry should be doing, and what they’re actually doing.

Reading this blog post from Ethan Kaplan really helped to contextualise a lot of thoughts I’ve had relating to the industry over the last few years (I guess before I start on about what impressed me most about his article though, I should point out that I’ve attempted to provide a bit of background at the bottom to where I’ve come from and why I care so much about the industry).  A lot of the post is Ethan (who, at the time of writing was one month past leaving his job at one of the majors) reflecting on his time with the company, but at the end he covers something that I’d never actually considered but is just so important for the growth of music industry.

What is exciting for me personally, as I’m ending my first month away (but not away) is that for many years the music business had a “oh, those kids!” attitude toward the startup community. The divide was bridged by few, but diligent people in the business (ie, Robin Bechtel, Rio Caraeff, EMI’s digital team, E-Labs at Universal, the WMG/WBR Tech department), but the ecosystems didn’t commingle. The participation was on the API key level, but API keys didn’t extend to lawyers and litigators.

But I can see now an ecosystem starting to form that could potentially be as strong as those around SaaS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. A day, hopefully where licensing content is as simple as API key and a credit card. Interoperability of things like playlisting. And hell, maybe some standards.

It is an exciting time to be in the music business. Just not if you were once self defined as in the Business of Music.

In this I think he touches on something that is very important but  that I’ve always missed – despite being quite connected to both the startup and music industries.  Content should be easily accesible via an API.  All content silos should have easily accessible api’s where someone like myself can write a simple service and sell their shit.  Anyone can.  Then they’ll sell more, because people will buy content wholesale, target specific stores and content to specific markets and, importantly, MORE CONTENT WILL BE SOLD.  The mere existence and dominance of iTunes in an age of relatively easy and standardised API programming is completely ridiculous.  It is a successfu representation of trying to have old models work on new mediums, but it is so incredibly limiting for people trying to sell music.   The weirdest thing for me about iTunes though, is that iTunes is bad for the labels.  It allows Apple to control the supply chain, which to me seems like something the labels would want to avoid as much as possible (but here we are!).

Ethan’s post has got me fantasising about a world where I can decide I want to sell content and, instead of having to negotiate per label, there are aggregates (A la Google) with easy and powerful API’s, who are licensed to onsell the content so I can just get it programmatically and then sell and present it in my own unique way – and so can everyone else.  The problem with the music industry is not the lack of content, it’s the lack of access to it.  Thus far the powers that be have been excessively stingy in this regard, but that has to change. For the good of all of us, musicians, business people and consumers alike.  The industry needs to give up on paying idiot lawyers to lobby for ever-draconian copyright laws (as New Zealand has just passed) and focus on making it easy for people like myself to help them sell more content, otherwise someone will do this, but there’ll be no major label content on the service and it will become quickly apparent which service will be more successful.

Footnote:  I’ve been involved in and around the recording industry for years, primarily through my father (who’s a recording engineer).  As I grew up I took music at high school, got quite good at the guitar, sat exams etc. etc. and ended up studying it at Otago University.  While here I got exposed more to business through a partially completed marketing degree (I absolutely hated how it was taught) and the varsity business competitions (I never did very well, probably because I always entered ideas to do with the music industry).  I was also exposed, through my BA in communications, to a lot of media and culture theory and the combination of everything had me constantly trying to come up with new ways and business models to save the industry.  To add to this, for my Honours thesis I did a somewhat comprehensive investigation into the mechanics and motivations behind music piracy.  During the academic stuff I’ve also been a working sound engineer and performing musician.

Tags: API, idiots, music, music business, open data