Psonar Blog

Web 2.0 is about “… community and collaboration… “. Which works because people want to adopt, adapt and share things that interest or stimulate them – passing them on because they believe that what they’ve found will be of value to other people.

Every marketer now knows that the power of social recommendation – i.e. an ordinary citizen telling others about some product or service – transcends any paid-for advertising in its effectiveness. Look at the phenomenal growth of tweetmeme’s re-tweet button – the easiest way for people to draw attention to what they’ve found and want to share with their friends and followers on the web.

The challenge is, however, that word ‘share’ and how it impacts on music. While it’s the convention that journalists’ creative works (articles, blog posts etc) can be copied and re-published subject to proper attribution, that isn’t, for obvious reasons, the case with music – otherwise recorded music would have no value. Instead, music is trailed in a relatively restricted eco-system of radio stations and blogs or is available to be discovered on services like YouTube. The way music trailing on radio stations works is well-established and makes economic sense for artists and rights holders. It’s much harder to make the economics work with web services: what’s the reasonable return YouTube should give an artist for millions of plays of their music – not the $167 that Lady Gaga allegedly received earlier this year.

Part of the problem is that new web music services are too fixated with the music itself. Strange thing to say? Remember that community and collaboration are the core values of Web 2.0, so it’s what people do and say that should drive the music exploration process – at a personal level based on human communication. In contrast, the dreaded “people like you listen to music like this” algorithms of the recommendation engines run the risk of everyone ending up listening to the same stuff. Where’s the serendipity and magic of discovering the unexpected in that?

At Psonar we’re in the process of building a great ‘Social Music Exploration’ experience. Which is a way for people to navigate through music, and to new music, based on their friendships, contacts and other ways that connect the members of the Psonar Community. Personally, I’d like to know what cool, Rock Mountain girls listen to, for instance, and I’m hoping that Rich and the team are building a great way for me to explore their musical tastes (undoubtedly varied) without having to emigrate from Cambridge or join Second Life.

If I were a Lala user, I’d be pretty angry right now: last week Apple announced that the service is closing May 31st.

Why should Lala users have to waste time and effort working out what to do about the music stored on Lala’s servers which, presumably, disappears into the ether on May 31st? Isn’t it incumbent on Apple, as Lala’s acquirer, to continue to offer the service as designed to the people who had signed up for that service?

At Psonar we offer our users and prospective users this pledge – we will never do anything that denies you perpetual access to your music other than due to events beyond our control. And, if we are forced to change or take down the service, we will do all we can to ensure users get adequate notice (cerainly more than a paltry 31 days) and are given a means to transfer their music elsewhere. We believe that this is the minimum pledge that a service like Psonar should make to its users.

We’re not the only people who think like this! @Project_Felix, @derekbrown, @ItsJimD

In a thought-provoking Guardian article published yesterday, Cory Doctorow, the digital media commentator, grabbed my attention with a dire warning about the Digital Economy Bill, currently working its way through Parliament.

Doctorow writes that the BPI, the record labels’ trade association, is well aware that the Bill serves the interests of conservatives in the music industry – those who want the most inflexible interpretation of what constitutes fair use of copyright material (i.e. you can’t copy music, not even for back-up let alone have several copies of the same piece of music available for use on your PC, iPod, home entertainment centre etc). He accuses the BPI, who have been the most effective lobby of politicians over digital rights, of stifling real debate over the Bill by acquiesing in the government’s determination to get the Bill enacted before the general election which must be held by May.

Cory Doctorow, photo by Joi Ito, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

The particular danger is in an amendment to the DEB which was inserted during the Bill’s passage through the Lords. The amendment would give copyright holders the ability to seek an injuction forcing an ISP (such as BT, Virgin or Carphone Warehouse) to block access to a website that gave access to material that the copyright holder had previously requested be taken down as infringing copyright. This gives a potentially draconian weapon to copyright holders in any dispute over fair use of copyright material. That such disputes will arise is inevitable, since the government has sought to avoid the political storm that would arise by trying to amend the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 to permit new forms of fair use of copyright material in a digital age which the Act could not anticipate.

Doctorow’s article is a wake-up call to anyone who wants to see successful, new business models built around digital music. The take-away is that if we don’t start lobbying MPs and Peers now – and get this Bill stopped before the election, we’ll end up with an albatross that will severely inhibit the ability of the UK to compete as a centre for innovative online music businesses.

One of the best ways to get your voice heard is to join Coadec (the Coalition for the Digital Economy) and circulate its open letter to newspapers or the excellent blog post by Jeff Lynn.