Your Children are not Special

Saw and band called called Antisocialite on wednesday, in a dingy little music venue just near Highbury & Islington Tube station. They were really quite good, and included a wonderful song called 'Your children are not special, which tickled me pink. Also met a shortarse rock chic drummer who said I should do something unspeakable with this blog - anyway back to the topic.

Whats interesting is that MySpace are providing an interface for indie bands like Antisocialite, to play and download music. So much for DRM then?

Copyfarleft?

Yep, Copyfarleft. No really. No honestly I'm not kidding, I think they are serious. See:

• Drink Soaked Trots


• Dmytri Kleiner

Its as if the soviet union never existed, and all the failures which led to the downfall of that empire are not failures at all. Kleiner talks about 'art' in the context of Copyleft GPL, but this licence was designed for software only - not for artistic expressions such as music, plays etc. A better way for these is the Creative Commons. Artists should look to licenses based on this, not the GPL! The concept of 'copyjustright' seems to make sense for artistic works. The DRM issue is not directly related to SCO vs IBM case re: Linux and trying to make a direct link makes no sense at all. A piece of music is not the same as a piece of software (the former does not need to be maintained, the latter does). This misunderstanding makes the article pretty incoherent. Companies get involved in open source (or free) software development, largely because of the technical and economic benefits which accrue - they don't 'own' the software, property in terms of free and open source software is something of a fuzzy issue.

The article puts forward the notion that Copyfarleft could be applied to artistic works. I'm interested in the idea as applied to software. Copyfarleft discriminates against a) groups and b) individuals. Any license based on this concept (assuming it could be enforced legally) would reduce the number of people using and developing the software, and therefore reduce the effectiveness of the open source development model (less eyeballs on code). It isn't going to work for software.

Creativity Stifled

Larry Lessig talks about how creativity is being stifled by the Law. Its a very wide ranging talk and I can strongly recommend it.

I've been posting about DRM recently e.g. here and here and while Lessig's presentation tackled copyright in general, it is clear to me that the thrust of the argument is against technologies such as DRM. It criminalises people for no good reason.

The argument used is lets go back to what you used to do before the advent of technology such as the phonograph (record player to oldies like myself, or CD's to you younger folk). Musicians earned their living by traveling around and giving performances. Music was a shared experience. Lets go back to that.

The danger is not restricted to just this one area - stifling of creativity in the software area is another bone of contention with me. Software patents are stupid, and should be abolished. They are virtually only ever used (apart from a tiny minority of case) by companies to counter sue other companies, who might sue them for a copyright breech. So the only reason to have patents in software is to make lawyers rich. erm...

The death of DRM

Further to my post on Music IR, it appears that DRM is not likely to be around for very much longer. Some evidence:

• DRM free music sales outnumber DRM sales by 4:1.


• DRM free music sales shifts albums - 70% MP3 sales being full albums.


• Shift from unbundling albums to single sales caused revenue decline

I will not be mourning the death of a pointless and self defeating technology.

The Need for Music IR

Allister Heath and Jon Ashworth have written quite an interesting article on the massive changes going on in the music industry, and I wanted to pen some reflections on the implications of these changes with respect to music retrieval.

The evidence appears to show that more and more folk are buying their music online, and that CD sales are falling. Some artists are using a different model for generating revenue e.g. Prince released his recent album free with the Daily Mail, but did something like 21 dates at the O2 centre (that big tent thing) in Greenwich. Things could be going full circle here – musicians before the recording era earned their money from live performances. Things don’t look so good for the big labels (EMI, Sony BMG etc) let alone the music stores.

Hence Digital Rights Management (DRM) e.g iTunes. Music companies hope that this will stop their revenues from declining even further (evidence from the Heath/Ashworth article says that it would never replace CD sales). Personally I think they are going to be disappointed – for all sorts of reasons. If Prince and other artists want to give their music away freely, there is no need for DRM. Many DRM players are incompatible and users have to download specific software to use them. In some services (Napster), if you stop paying you are denied access to music you have already bought. In the long term I don’t think users are going to buy the DRM thing. Many voices e.g. Steve Jobs, have come out against DRM (at least for music). There is also very strong opposition to DRM from people like Richard Stallman and Ross Anderson. Frankly, I’m with them – DRM is mad!

It is my view that some stage in the future, we will have massive databases of music and will therefore have a big information retrieval problem (even if the music companies don’t release their back catalogue). How do we cope with this in terms of technical and user issues? Music IR has become something of a hot topic, and the ISMIR series of conferences and many of the technical challenges are being addressed including the process of matching and evaluation. Some of this research will prove very useful. However one important area is not being addressed sufficiently widely IMHO. Despite the excellent efforts of people like Sally Jo Cunningham, not enough research is being done into user needs for music. It’s all very well building sophisticated algorithms for matching, but how do you know they will actually service user needs. When attending an ISMIR conference, I remember being amazed by a statement by one computer scientist who claimed in all seriousness that ‘he knew’ what users wanted and didn’t need to talk to them. No, I didn’t believe him.

This is an important research direction for me. I have published in the area and have a student working on a project. Watch this space!

References
Heath, A. and Ashworth, J. (2007). “A brand new beat”, The Business, Available on line: http://www.thebusiness.co.uk/the-magazine/focus/269696/a-brand-new-beat.thtml [visited: 23rd October 2007]
Jobs, S. (2007). “Thoughts on music”, Available on line: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ [visited: 23rd October 2007]

Web references
ISMIR: http://www.ismir.net/ [visited: 23rd October 2007]
MUSIC IR: http://www.music-ir.org/ [visited: 23rd October 2007]