An Open Letter to the Big Music Labels: Pipe Up, Please!

March 30, 2011 at 3:45 pm PT

Dear music business,

How are you?

Okay, okay–bad question. I know.

What I meant to say is–why so quiet?

Since Amazon launched its cloud-based music service on Tuesday morning, you guys have barely said a peep.

To date, the only on-the-record comments I’ve seen are from a Sony PR rep, who expressed disappointment that Amazon didn’t get licenses from you in advance, and from Sony/ATV publishing head Martin Bandier, who said Amazon was “really disrespectful.”

Off the record, you guys are more vocal. You tell me that even though Amazon has said it doesn’t need a license for its service, it’s now talking about getting one from you anyway. And that some of you are considering legal options.

But what options do you have? As The Wall Street Journal’s Ethan Smith notes, Amazon’s service appears to be modeled on Cablevision’s cloud-based DVR system, which the Supreme Court blessed in 2009.

And lawyers aside, it’s hard for most people to understand what your beef is: If Amazon wants to let me store my music in the cloud and listen to it whenever I want, what’s wrong with that?

So here’s an open invitation: Does anyone want to explain, on the record, what Amazon has done wrong? Beyond being a bit rude, that is.

I’ve already asked all four of the big labels–Sony, Warner Music Group, EMI and Universal–to sound off, and so far I haven’t gotten a response. So I figured I’d ask again here, just to make sure my request didn’t get lost in the mail.

And to be clear: I’m easy. We can talk in person or on the phone. Frankly, at this point I’d take an email. Just something staking out your position, on the record. I’ve got unlimited space here on the Web. So you can go on as long as you’d like.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Thanks and regards, pk

Tagged with: advertising, Amazon, cloud, digital, entertainment, Internet, MediaMemo, music, music industry, Peter Kafka, software

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what an idea thank you for sharing
Anonymous

There is so much wrong with the music labels. However this represents a unique opportunity to file suits, make it look like they are doing something and bill back a special charge to artist account.

This is a Red Herring. The only reason to pursue this is as a distraction.
Anonymous

One more thing. They may want Amazon to help them break the itunes strangle-hold on the market.
Anonymous

From a legal standpoint, I don’t see how Amazon’s locker differs significantly from mSpot’s, and even though Sony barked at mSpot CEO Daren Tsui at MIDEM earlier this year, that was the beginning, middle, and end of majors’ attacks on that service.

Isn’t it possible that they just don’t have a legal leg to stand on?
http://profiles.google.com/fridayfracas R. McAuliffe

I cannot speak for the labels, but as an entertainment lawyer that has represented platinum-selling artists, I’ll take the bait.

Is Amazon any less aware than Limewire was (or indeed Napster was) that illegal downloads are going to be served to users by their servers? If not, then the same legal precedent is there that got Napster and Limewire shut down: contributory infringement. They take your illegal music and provide the player, they provide “management” (TOS), they provide Gracenote … and most of all they provide cloud-based access and mobile access, the best thing that’s ever been invented for music. That is way more than Limewire ever did. Limewire was “capable of non-infringing uses” as well.

There are an estimated multi-billions of illegal songs still out there from activity of the last 15 years. Amazon has to know that 1/2 the stuff that is uploaded to its cloud is illegally downloaded, ripped from a CD the owner no longer owns (e.g sold back or returned to the library) stream-ripped, etc. It is one thing for illegal downloads to be stuck on hard-drives and not widely available for mobile except on iTunes clunky side-loading system. But when you unveil the state of the art mobile app and don’t bother to distinguish between legal and illegal it is very bad. If McDonalds announced tomorrow that it would accept counterfeit bills at all 10,000 of their stores in the US, what would that do to the value of US currency?

If you look on Amazon for physical items, you will see that most music is under a dollar and the biggest payday on selling a CD is the $2.98 “shipping and handling”. So Amazon, via the phenomenon of rip and ship specializes in driving down the price of music. Taking a billion or more illegal downloads, or rip and ship downloads, or stream-ripped downloads and giving people state-of-the art access to them … is guaranteed to drive the price of music down to zero. Why buy a download? Why buy Spotify or anything else?

Amazon, in the end, doesn’t care about the price of content. As pointed out in a chart in the WSJ on Tuesday, they are hawking business services now more than ever. This Cloud Player is a way of bringing more people under their sphere of influence in order to hawk other stuff. Thus, it is a naked power grab at the expense of artists and content owners in general.

The entire industry (record industry, cloud providers, publishers, apps, subscription services, etc.) needs to send this message loud and clear to users:

“If you downloaded illegal music from 1996-2011, good on ya’. But that doesn’t mean you have the constitutional right to have that song be forward compatible w/ every new service that comes down the pipe.”
Anonymous

I agree with everything you just said in principle, but I don’t understand what could possibly be done to verify the legality of every song that’s going to be uploaded to these services.
http://profiles.google.com/fridayfracas R. McAuliffe

Max … that is, indeed, the question. Because you made that comment perhaps you would agree with me that what is driving the debate on this issue is despair. People assume that there is no solution, or that a solution cannot be invented.

But like everything else wonderful about the internet, it is not going to just drop into your lap: you have to innovate. Solve the problem!

But if no one bothers to even look at the problem, it will not get fixed. If the users are greedy on one hand and just want free music by whatever means necessary and the record labels just one up-front cash to help with the next quarterly earnings report, the problem will not get solved.

What if the solution is not being looked at because everybody’s vested interest is too entrenched?

This will be the first time in the history of the ‘Net (that I am aware of) that people will have collectively assumed that there is no solution to a problem.
Anonymous

Your thoughts are well articulated, but I find that every conclusion you draw is wrong.
Anonymous

That was rude and was not meant to be.

What is the first thing a platinum act does upon certification?

Audit the label.
Anonymous

That was rude and was not meant to be.

What is the first thing a platinum act does upon certification?

Audit the label
http://twitter.com/djxplosive DJ Xplosive

If Amazon could be liable for contributory infringement by not policing the music shared via their cloud server; couldn’t the same grounds be used in a suit against Google, Yahoo, etc for not policing illegal downloads that are emailed using their mail servers?
http://www.inkfarm.com Inkfarmer

You make some valid points regarding the legality of this issue, but the fact of the matter is that music, for better or worse, is in essence, free. There is nothing the record labels or the government can do about this. Technology will continue to advance, and it will only become easier to get free media. I’m a musician (not professionally), and I recognize this fact. Now, as company working in the music space, do you waste your time and money fighting what is obviously a losing battle, or do you innovate?
http://www.facebook.com/Richdys Richard Dysinger

The sad part is that I hear nothing but laments and woeful cries about the state of music today as compared to the 60′s, 70′s and 80′s. . . If you are not going to pay performers for their content via copyright protection the performers you incent/reward will rely on spectacle to make their way in the world. They can charge admission to see the freak show. It is no coincidence that since the digital revolution we have gone from James Taylor to Lady GaGa.
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/ PKafka

Sorry, can’t stand this argument. There was plenty of dreck produced in the pre-Napster era, and plenty of good stuff today. And before Napster and MP3s torpedoed the industry, it was dominated by there three acts: Britney Spears, N’Sync and the Backstreet Boys.

An Open Letter to the Big Music Labels: Pipe Up, Please!

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