Jamendo’s artist donations are paltry

Torrentfreak’s Ernesto crunched the artist donation numbers on Jamendo, the awesome Creative-Commons powered free music community:

Of the 423968 users, 1650 have donated something, little under 0.5%. In total, these users were good for 2712 donations adding up to just over $36,000. This translates into an average of little over $10 per donation. The largest donation on Jamendo thus far was 200 Euros ($250) [...] Jamendo currently has close to 10,000 artists (not all of them accept donations), and 648 of those received at least one donation.

(If you doubt Ernesto’s figures, see for yourself). Even factoring in Jamendo’s sharing of advertising revenue with artists, it’s pretty clear that there are not many indie musicians out there supporting themselves through Jamendo donations. It’s hard to draw general conclusions about this future of the music industry as this sample is heavily biased: Jamendo probably attracts more serious music lovers, who donate more than the average music consumer does or would, while there is large volume of utter crap on the site which never had much hope of drawing a profit, deflating the average donation per artist.

Nevertheless, I take this as weak confirmation of my belief that donations will never significantly replace old-media sales as a major pillar of artist profits. As Enernesto points out, a lot of minor and\or independent artists are realistic about this and choose to release their music through Jamendo or similar free channels in order to capture other benefits such as acclaim, merchandise sales and concert attendance. I’m not all that confident about the merchandise-and-concerts model either: there are only so many concerts even a die-hard music lover can go to. Many people have tried to convince me that only a handful of megastar artists were scraping massive profits from music sales anyway, and the inevitable (and largely complete) shift to free media will not affect the living wages of indie artists for whom it has always been a labour of love. I’ll believe it when I see the statistics.

In related news, I was intrigued by the decision of Magnatune, a creative-commons music store, to switch to a pay-what-you want model for their DRM-free all-you-can-eat subscription. I particularly loved the subtle bit of behavioural framing below the text box for the customer’s chosen price. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, although as far as I know Magnatune is not particularly open when it comes to sales figures. I was tempted to sign up myself, until I remembered that the limiting factor on my own Jamendo addiction was not catalogue range or quality, but time and bandwidth.

“Comes with music” will fail

This week’s edition of the Economist newspaper features an article on “Comes with music” (CWM), the latest addition to the legion of subscription-based “solutions” to the file-sharing “problem”. Under CWM, mobile phone makers purchase 12 month subscriptions to online-music catalogues and bundle them with handsets. The idea is that end users will not mind paying for music if the cost is hidden inside the price of something more tangible. CWM is touted as a win-win-win model: handset makers get an extra feature to entice customers, end users get “free” music, and record companies get to make a profit. The Economist describes CWM as “potentially a big step forward”. I think it is a half-baked idea which is doomed to failure.

The first reason is the restricted nature of the service. Major record companies are a lot like alcohol addicts: although they know as well as anyone how much it hurts them, they just can’t compel themselves to give up a bad habit. So it is no surprise that the tracks available on CWM are strait-jacketed with Digital Rights Managment (DRM), the asinine technology which attempts to restrict users from moving or playing music files in anything but the most strictly prescribed way. Of course, even if the DRM method Nokia is using remains uncracked, nobody is going to put up with the restrictions or pay to have them lifted when they can just download the music from a P2P file-sharing network, unrestricted and free. At best, all DRM will achieve is to encourage users to use CWM when convenient – when they want a certain song, right now, on their mobile handset – and carry on downloading the bulk of their music the normal, illegal way. On top of this, the twelve month expiry limit is simply irrelevant to a generation for whom downloading is the norm. If the users even notice that CWM has expired, they will hardly care.

The second reason is that, of course, CWM is not free. The handset maker has to pay at least one record company for the subscription, and that cost ultimately must get passed on to the consumer. Nokia may choose to cross-subsidise the service with profits from other handsets, or cut other features from CWM handsets, or whatever. Regardless, handsets with CWM will be at a competitive disadvantage against handsets without CWM. This is only an intuition, but I strongly doubt that the addition of CWM will sway consumers purchasing decisions more than an infinitesimal amount. It simply isn’t a shiny, attractive feature when file-sharing is so easy and familiar, and when mobile carriers and ISPs are already pushing so many other DRM-stunted, mutually incompatible digital music services, subscription and otherwise. The Economist article even suggested that the “unlimited” downloads will in fact be capped by a “fair use” limit, which will tarnish CWM’s image yet further. Unless Nokia can find a way to make CWM sexy – a very tall order – or to absorb the cost, CWM handsets will not be competitive.

The final and most basic reason is that the music industry has left it far too late to supply an alternative to file-sharing. My generation grew up with Napster, Limewire and BitTorrent the way our parents grew up with television, air conditioning and jumbo jets. For us, file-sharing is not a way to get music, it’s the way. A technologically disinclined friend recently bought a new laptop and asked me what software he should put on it. I suggested, among other things, OpenOffice. He recoiled: even though OO’s user interface is a near clone of MS Office, and OO is entirely free, he would rather find a pirated copy of MS Office than deal with a slightly unfamiliar interface. He also turned down my suggestion of Vuze as his file-sharing client; he had been using Limewire for years and didn’t want to learn a new system. There are a lot of people like my friend out there, and a lot more who are open to new technologies but who just like file-sharing better. Why would they bother adopting a restricted, closed-catalogue, closed-medium system when they could just keep on downloading like they always have? Boosters of CWM must remember that it is competing against a file-sharing networks which are free, ubiquitous, near perfectly stocked and completely familiar. It’s hard to imagine a better music delivery system, much less one that would turn a profit.

I don’t know how musicians are going to make a living as music sales continue to plummet, but CWM is not part of the solution. My strong intuition is that anything which requires users to pay for music (or any digital content) is a lost cause, and profits will have to come through adjunct channels. However, I’m skeptical that donations, concert tickets, merchandise sales or advertising will entirely cover the gap. It will be fascinating to see what solutions the market comes up with. At least we can be assured that great music can be given away sustainably.

Image credit: “stereo geisha white“, by chotda, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license.

Funky french ska album, released under CC

I’ve been compulsively re-listening to the short but sweet 2007 latin/ska/rock album Kasane! by French band INTI. Like all albums on Jamendo, it’s released under a creative commons license, meaning you can download it for free, completely legal and legit.

You can download the album from Jamendo, or spare their servers and use one of these torrents: MP3 (zipped) or OGG (zipped).

Show Me More Ads!

The only thing better than a free lunch, IMHO, is a free book. In the last six months I’ve made my way through dozens of great ebooks and audiobooks that I got for free, completely legally, because their authors chose to release them under Creative Commons licences. Cory Doctorow claims that he releases his books for free because it drives up sales of his print editions, and I have no doubt that, for him, this is true. As attractive as this sounds, it is not a long term strategy. Releasing high-quality works under CC drives up print sales because it is still a rare enough event that potential readers who would otherwise not have heard of the work become aware of it. Doctorow acknowledges this when he paraphrases Tim O’Reilly: the problem artists face is not piracy, but obscurity. If all artists were to release their media under CC, overall they would get poorer: their works will still be just as obscure, and those handful who are interested in it can just take it for free.

I’m addicted to the Economist’s audiobook edition. At first I tried to obtain it legitimately, but soon discovered that the legit route was an incredibly painful one. Their distributor’s website refused to accept my registration for days, crashed constantly, and generally spread misery. After a few weeks of this, I gave up and started getting the download from bittorrent, painlessly, freely, and illegally. This is file-sharing, and it’s not going away. As long as media can be digitised, they will be shared. Why waste money and effort on something that can be obtained freely and easily?

So giving media away for free won’t work, and people are not going to stop pirating and sharing the non-free stuff. A world in which the only cultural products around are labours of love, or government backed, or donation-supported, would be a world in which the pool of cultural products would be tepid and a good lot smaller. None of the commonly predicted equilibria – musicians living off live concert profits, authors living off donations and hard copy sales – are remotely plausible except for the top percentile of cultural products. Markets are supposed to find the equilibrium that nobody could ever have guessed, but this isn’t a typical public goods problem: how does a market function when there are no realistically enforceable property rights?

Rather than backing bold and implausible schemes, I think the better part of wisdom is to sit back and see what happens, while supporting the partial solution that has worked for many a non-excludable good in the past: advertising. Please, keep writing your books and audiobooks, and please keep releasing them under CC. But make sure you’re still making money for yourselves. I’d rather hear or read a few ads then have you shut down production entirely. And Economist, I have no idea if your audiobook is breaking even in the face of file-sharing. It’s in my best interest for you to remember though: nobody is ever going to stop pirating your audiobook. However, the world would be a worse place if you stopped producing it.

105.7

Some people say triple J’s demographic leans slightly more towards the indie-hippie-roots-n-all scene than the average Aussie yoof. Those people may just have a point. For what it’s worth, Neon Bible and Dystopia would also be on my 10 ten list, near the top. The only absence I’m surprised about is PNAU, although that did release quite recently.