A Year of Music

MIDEM is apparently a huge music trade show that happens every year in Cannes, and it’s going on right now, so there’s a flurry of announcements of various significance coming across the wire from sources like billboard.biz and Coolfer. Many of these announcements demonstrate that digital music is finally going through its own little dotcom bubble. I know there’s a bubble a-borning because there are all kinds of businesses popping out of the woodwork that fail even the most basic bozo check.

Take, for instance QTRAX, the most recent attempt to take peer-to-peer filesharing legal. How do they intend to do that? By wrapping DRM around their “25 million” track library (which in actuality has nowhere near 25 million different tracks), so they can track media plays, so that rightsholders and advertisers can get paid – which, to me, presupposes that you’re going to have to use their client to listen to your music and view the non-optional ads. Which leads me to heave a huge sigh, because I just don’t have the heart right now to discuss the now-ubiquitous practice of using advertising to make your halfassed idea suddenly seem profitable. Ad-based business models are the beenz of 2008.

If Brilliant Media’s claims add up, they’ve got a pretty impressive team working on their software, because the initial version is using Windows Media for its DRM, yet they have a roadmap promising Mac OS X and iPod support by mid-April. There are all manner of technical reasons that make me skeptical that they’re going to be able to pull this off. For starters, the only supported library for accessing Windows Media content on the Mac is Flip4Mac’s, and it’s a buggy piece of crap.

On the other hand, it may be irrelevant, because I have a hard time seeing too many people using QTRAX. As this article in the International Herald Tribune makes clear, “free” music services are suddenly plentiful, and web-based services like last.fm’s are way easier to use. This leads me to conclude that the major labels have flipped from their former paranoid selfishness to a passionate desire to sign deals with everybody who’s not Apple, because they want to break Apple’s hold over the download business. I’m skeptical that this is going to do them any good in the long run, although it’s refreshing – if a little unsettling – to see the 4 majors coöperating, instead of continuing to try to corner the market themselves.

I’m also just plain ambivalent about the focus on Apple. I work for a competing music service (Rhapsody), so I’d like to see our business grow (if only because I think subscription music makes more sense for more people than its limited success so far indicates), but at the same time they’ve managed to create a download market by using the very tools (software-hardware bundling, platform lock-in, flat pricing, no DRM) that made the major labels crazy. Without Apple, there wouldn’t be a market for the major to take away. I don’t really feel sorry for corporations, and it’s not like Apple needs my sympathy anyway, but it’s off-putting to see how public and gleeful so many groups are about taking Apple down.