Staff Memos

I've been dutifully ignoring the hysteria around “Broadcast Flag” until now, chalking it up as some problem a bunch of foreigners were going ballistic over and I really didn't care. Today there is a lot of buzz around the net that its going to get snuck back into legislation as an attachment to some other Bill (I never understood how US politics worked in that respect, they can pass legislation on duck hunting and somebody can sneak in a rider to nuke Switzerland).

So today I got curious enough to actually look it up. What the hell was Broadcast Flag anyway? Its a simple binary digit that is supposed to mean “you can't tape this”, save it to any non-volatile media, skip commercials, etc.

The ramifications are that hardware and software vendors are supposed to start complying with this at some point and suitably neuter their offerings to respect the flag.

The situation came up here in Canada last year when XM Radio sued Scott McLean for his TimeTrax software which could record satellite radio broadcasts for later consumption.

Suppose for a minute I am the original artist behind this graphic (which I'm not):

And then I sell it to you, but I tack on a EULA: You agree that you will ONLY look at this image and see a vase or a candlestick. You WILL NOT see two faces when you look at this picture. If you do, you are in violation of the EULA. I will sue you.

Sound nonsensical? It is. Similar to the fact that the picture is nothing until the light bounces off the canvas or the screen, onto our retinas and is parsed by our brains, if I pay you for a bitstream, all it is is 1's and 0's until it hits my processsor and my operating system. What I do with it at that point is my business, not yours.

I believe the marketplace will ultimately reject any technology that embraces this approach and 12 year olds will crack anything that tries.

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Is the title of the write-up about us in the Toronto Star business section today. If you need a login (which are free) and don't feel like creating one, try this:

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I'm listening to Evil Genius Chronicles podcast number 99, interviewing Paul Melancon (whom I've never heard of until now) and there is a lot of talk about the music industry, breaking in, getting signed, and recouping.

As Paul laments, he doubts he will ever “make it” in the music business in the sense that he feels he'll never get signed because no major labels will ever sign a thirty-year old who doesn't look like a teenager. And he's probably right. He goes on to say that he would be thrilled if he could just generate enough income from his music career that he wouldn't need a day job.

We here at Parkdale Hookers International Inc. know we'll never get signed, we're nearing 40 and at varying stages of balding, and we like our dayjobs (it's a lot easier to like your dayjob if you own the company 😉

But I think Melancon hits on a few points which will define the ever widening rift between the mainstream music industry and the shift ocurring in the medium we use to transmit music (you know, analog to digital, the end of discrete units called “records”, “songs” or “albums”, the beginning of “downloads”, “clickthroughs” and “conversions”).

Listening to the podcast, I like Paul Melancon's music, I think it isn't an unrealistic dream of his to derive a living from turning out more like it. And I think he'll have a better shot at it if he just forget's about the major labels. Everyone will.

My “big dream” for the where the music industry is going and how the internet will effect it is that we'll see something emerge that hasn't really existed before: a musician middle class. Until now you either made it big or you're bussing tables and there is no middle ground. Very few artists exclusively writing or performing their own music and bringing home somewhere between 30K and 100K a year, steady.

I think that will happen, and it won't be because the indie bands crack the DRM conundrum and manage to make their music uncopyable. It's going to happen because the indies are going to do an endrun around DRM, forgo the major labels and develop their own inroads to their public via podcasts, blogging and P2P.

As I've said many times: our band isn't trying to sell 500,000 records. We're out to get 50,000 uniques a day to our website. Who cares if you miss out on a theoretical mechanical rights royalty of 2.5 cents a track when you can earn

$2 CPM?

The model will work. If the Parkdale Hookers never get to 50K-a-day on our website it won't be because the model failed, it'll be because our music did.

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We played our CD release party on thursday night at the Bovine and Kelly Clipperton (who does a lot of the tPH photography work) brought his band Kelly and the Kelly Girls to open for us.

They were great. Different genre than us, sort of a power ska/rythm and bluesey thing but very energetic and Kelly is the consumate showman. MC remarked “he's kinda like a combo between Twisted Sister's Dee Snider and Prince“. Good call MC.

Great band, I bought their CD.

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Pick U Up was podcasted in episode 15 of the all creative commons Staccato Music. A mellower sounding set of songs but a lot of good stuff in there.

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Listening to Danny The K's I”ve Stopped Making Sense podcast on Old Wave Radio which is supposed to be the best sounds of the 70's and 80's but yet, our very own Stop Draggin' Us Nowhere is the leadoff track.

I guess that means we sound “post-punk” (Danny thinks we sound like the Jam!) but hey, we're not complaining. Thanks Danny!

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Michael Geist, (who I’ve had the pleasure of sitting on the CIRA Board with for the last three years) has published this article where he dissects the Canadian music industry’s claims of damaged revenues from P2P file sharing.

The short version: the industry and artists are likely more than making their money back on reduced CD sales from royalties being distributed under the new blank media levy in Canada and indie labels and artists (people like us 🙂 think P2P downloads ultimately help sales.

When faced with nonsense from the industry about filesharing I always pose the question: Pretend you’re an artist. You write a song. It catches on like wildfire and millions of people download it, share it, tell their friends about it, and blare it out of their cars while they’re driving down the street. Cover bands cover it. DJ’s play it and netheads podcast it. From the artist’s, their manager’s and the label’s perspective: is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Anyone who argues it’s a “bad thing” needs to retire.

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Thanks Jason for including us in your absolutely fsck-ing KICK ASS IR #21: Rock the @!#% Out! podcast.

I can only say…

WOW

I'm halfway through listening to the podcast and I've been just blown away by almost every track, a lot of these bands have really impressed me. I'm honoured to have tPH in the set, thanks for the kind words.

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The Global TV Segment on Podcasting has aired, very nice that they used Song About a Girl in the leadoff/intro. Thanks again Ross for including our music in your show.

All in all an interesting piece. Mark Federman from U of T's Project McLuhan noting that mass media is no longer “for the masses” but now “by the masses” may be only slightly ahead of it's time. Alan Cross from Edge 102.1 was downplaying the imminent death of radio, stating the industry will somehow co-opt the phenomenon to its own design. Which is possble but there is no denying that the emerging phenomenon will certainly change things.

The way I see it, mass culture used to be disseminated primarily via broadcast, what we'll see now is the emergergence of “network effect” proliferation. Those who have studied the propagation of memes or urban legends will enjoy seeing bits of narrowcasted cultural bits spread via network effects (P2P, podcasting, blogging) and the ones “with steam” will cross over a “tipping point” into broadcast or pseudo-broadcast.

Example: ever heard of Sri Lankan “sensation” M.I.A? Maybe not yet, but apparently she's spreading like wildfire and primarily via blogs and P2P.

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Thanks to Ross Rader for using Song About a Girl on today's Random Bytes show. Apparently Global TV is at Casa Disco as he does the show, doing a piece on the entire podcasting phenomenon.

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