A few, rather small & quiet, news items caught my attention shortly over the holiday season. During the season of CES & Macworld, or the blissful orgasmic gathering of tech geeks as I like to call it, it’s easy for other important news items to be drowned out. Small, minor movements in the industry seems insigificant next to the big boys announcing the next awesome hardware-soon-to-be-vaporware. The first is the announcement of a label completely going digital. The second is Jason Mraz releasing his latest EP.
To be honest, I think the Jason Mraz EP has been out for quite a while, I just haven’t checked his website recently. I’m also not up to date with the ongoings of the music industry, part of which I contribute to my age. As my parents used to hang on tightly to the music that they heard in their youth, I used to struggle with the notion that I may one day be out of touch with the current state of pop culture. Inevitably I’ve lost connection with what is hot and cool (all at the same time), and thus transitioning from MTV to VH1, and now really nothing at all.
What is exciting to me, is that Jason Mraz released his EP not in iTunes, not in WMA format with DRM, and most certainly not on the Zune marketplace (that wouldn’t have done him any good at all, would it?); but in pure, unadulterated MP3 file format. The audiophile in me still despises MP3 for what it is, a lossy compression format where some of the most important and delicate detail in the music gets freeze dried, but it is by far more preferable than any other DRM-laden formats.
Similarly, Ropeadope has announced that they’re going to all digital distribution of their records starting this year; and early indication is that they will be distributing via MP3′s, sans all the DRM-goodness that major record label deem as their sacred family jewel.
It is also worthy to mention that some big artists that has less need for major label backing, such as Phish, has been publishing their own music on the web for years now. Phish goes one step further in distributing not only MP3′s, but uncompressed versions of their live tours.
More and more, record labels are exposed as promotional vehicles of bland and uninspired music rather than scouts of original & exotic talent. Several years ago Apple had the chance to revolutionize the music industry by allowing artists to directly publish music via iTunes Music Store. Instead they went the safe route and established a storefront for a pre-existing, but archaic economy. It certainly doesn’t help that Microsoft essentially sanctioned treating people like thieves by giving record labels royalty on every Zune player sold (which isn’t all that many, I wonder if they have to provide royalty on the players they give away?).
People love the artists, everyone hates the record label. The record industry has a chance here to gain a huge amount of traction with the public by allowing people the freedom to do what they want with their music. Remove DRM, and suddenly the record industry improves its image by a huge amount, and maybe that plunging music sale would surge back up again. Keep going down the DRM route, eventually all good artists will start publishing their own music, on their own terms.
