Internet Service Providers are done enticing consumers with mere access

The clever ones transform themselves into Content Service Providers, or as Playlouder will have it, MSP’s.

From their website: ‘That’s right, PlayLouder is bringing yours truly the first ever Music Service Provider! Raaaaaaahhhhh! Which basically means you will now be able to share and download music with your mates and virtual chums all over the UK, without worrying about Mr Big beating you with a truncheon, nicking all your cash and throwing your miserable ass in chokey.’

What makes it so great – ‘you dear music lovers’ – is that together with a broadband connection, the lucky citizens of the UK can now gain access to thousands of legal music files, free of Digital Rights Management (what’s DRM?).

And how, in Conservative Music Mogul’s name, do they do it? They’re paying royalties to the record companies for activities previously unlicensed and unlawful. ‘Neat eh?’ I should think so (if not for the idea, then at least for pulling off such a deal).

True business model innovation, and it comes packed with a fair amount of witty laughter. I’ve already e-mailed the good people at Playlouder MSP, begging them to come over and connect us deprived citizens of the Netherlands.

But they let me know we’ll have to sit our miserable Mere Access Provision for the time being.

Read more elsewhere

Playlouder seems to grab a bit from all of Eric Bun’s Five inspiring Business Model Innovations in the Telecommunication Industry, which is a good overview on what’s happening in the ISP industry.

And, for some stick on how not to approach this – on both ISP and the music industry fronts, have a look at The Register’s Andrew Orlowski: How to Destroy the Music Business. It talks of blanket license free proposals of €1, per year – per household, and how such measures would destroy any incentive for consumers to pay for better-than-almost-free ‘value added services’  (check out more recent, related articles at the bottom of that post).

Finally, read Wikipedia’s article on the analogue hole to find out what the photo at the top wants to convey about the futility of DRM (and don’t get your hopes up, because it’s not about porn).

(photo Radio At The Edge Session on Digital Rights Management dan taylor)

In its recently published report, TNO – Dutch public institution working for the applicability of scientific knowledge in government and industry circles – concluded the following: access to a wide range of cultural goods increases out well being, simply because most of us would never have bought our downloaded content.

File shares are financially unable – or plainly unwilling – to buy many of the things they’re enjoying via p2p networks. And getting stuff for free obviously makes us feel nicer than not getting the stuff at all.

But before we’re made to believe that companies should be losing their money for a public cause and an economic externality – even when both of them are nice side effects, the report’s researchers also found this: people who download music and film are buying no less than people who don’t.

Gaming company Electronic Arts admitted last year that ‘every Bittorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale’. This report goes one step further: file sharers visit concerts and buy games more often than those who don’t.

And while the Netherlands’ entertainment industry continues to suffer losses in the order of €100 million per year, consumers are spending an estimated €200 million per year more because they have free access to not-so-free content.

So now its official: the industry’s arch nemesis is a very successful marketing tool. Yet, as the report will have it (of course), within the music industry it’s the lesser-known bands that profit the most from file sharing.

To me, another sure sign of a playing field in transition. While most big and established companies are slow to recognize that bygones should be bygones, the smaller, newer ones see opportunities in the web. Instead of whining about it, they’re discovering how they can monetize on the Internet as a non-exclusive distribution platform.

And let’s not forget about us consumers, and how this report will make us feel even better than we already did. As dxtr says in reply to Torrentfreak’s post on the subject: ‘Wow! I never knew that I had been contributing to the growth of my country’s economy since age 10! That is so cool!’

More

• Read the original Torrentfreak post on the report by clicking here.
• Read the full report (142 pages – and in Dutch), register and  download it for free by clicking here.
• Read how EA’s view on piracy is changing – and how they’re trying to emphasize the non-piracy prone aspects of their games, by clicking here.
• Check dotbejamin’s ‘Failing Industry’ post, which accompanies the picture shown above ().
  

Very clever, extremely humorous, and free to watch (donations happily accepted). Click play on the screen below, and/or read on for a textual nutshell.

Beware of People

Society has become cultural industries’ biggest competitor. Copyright law – and especially all its subsidiaries (many of them lobbied into life because of the Internet), is working extremely hard to prevent this competitor from moving around in a free market.

People now have cheap access to the tools that used to be reserved for heavy-on-equipment, professional creators. This allows almost anyone to be a producer of culture instead of a mere couch potato.

But the kind of creativity this spawns is dangerous for the well being of the established industry model. So its moguls call out to their exterminating agent: copyright law.

By suing the fans, the industry hoped to make set an example to all the downloaders and remixers out there. But, for one, bald chickens make for bad plucking: they don’t make any money from what they’re doing; they don’t have the money to pay the required fees for what they’re doing; and if they did, it would take someone like GirlTalk – musical cut, edit, mix and mash up genius, about 50 years to clear all the rights for what he’s doing (click here for my personal selection of the late greats of 2008, including a GirlTalk track).

but more importantly, it doesn’t work. If anything, it’s destroying what little credibility big creative industry companies still have in fostering cultural development. So where’s the fun in that? What’s it helping anyone?

The only one making a ‘better’ living through all of this is the lawyer who gets to spend his expensive hours suing twelve-year old girls.

Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Reality and Love the Remix

If you know where you’re music’s being played the most, you’ll better be able to decide where you should be on the stage. If you sell a live registration of your concert, to the audience, immediately after your performance, your studio work is but a marketing gimmick for the real thing – the real experience connected to a specific place and time.

So instead of going after downloaders and the remixers, to try and punish them so to set an example for the rest of us (or: to fence in what’s turning into common cultural practice), entertainment moguls should really be looking at them as a source of business model inspiration – or even as partners.

Emerging cultural forms of production are the R&D-labs of cultural industries. Not only do they provide insight into what’s driving potential consumers, they’re brimming with enthusiasts promoting someone’s work for free. Such developments are an opportunity, and seeing this allows companies to rethink what makes their business. Yet few are able to let step out of the comfort zone, to nurture this new practice, and make it work for instead of against them.

‘You can’t be taller than me and shorter than me at the same time. You go ahead and take the high-end of the market; let us play elsewhere. We’ll happily occupy that space.’ This film is remixed poetry – in images, music, and words.

Thanks to Rolf @ Loupe for letting me know.

(photo IMG_0729 by mecredis)