The organisers of DEMF 08 are streaming some of the sets from last years event here: http://www.paxahau.com/sounds/mp3/2008_movement.html

Guillaume & The Coutu Dumonts is particularly worth a look in. As is DBX at DEMF08

You can download most of them from here if you feel the urge:  http://www.djscene.lt/forum/viewtopic.php?t=30503&sid=ede02cfcf727ea873492c809764b2df6

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bob in drag shows off his ticket to tom jones, with some random girl

You can’t get a good ticket.  Not unless you’re an insider or you’re willing
to pay a ton of dough on the aftermarket.  To what degree is this hurting
the music industry?

There’s a fascinating analysis on ESPN’s site that claims that the luxury
box, high-priced ticket stadiums in the NFL have eviscerated home field
advantage.  The true fans just can’t get close enough to the field to feel
part of the game.  Those who talk about the team, who live for the team, who
tailgate and keep sports talk radio alive have been if not completely frozen
out, turned into second class citizens.  Made to park far away and sit down
during the game, so as to not block the view of the wine and cheese crowd.

Used to be if you were willing to camp out overnight, you could get a
concert seat right down front.  At a reasonable price.  Now you go on
Ticketmaster.com and find out mere seconds into the sale that your only hope
of getting a good seat is to pay way more than face value at TicketsNow,
where Ticketmaster scalps the act’s own tickets for them.  Concerts used to
be a tribal rite, now they’re evidence of a have/have not culture.  Doesn’t
make a difference if you played the album every night for a month, doesn’t
matter that you turn your friends on to your favorite, it just comes down to
how much money you’ve got.

Unless, of course, you’re a fan of the Dave Matthews Band.  Fan club members
get good seats.  And Coldplay upgrades those in the rafters to seats right
down front.  Hell, Chris Martin is smart enough to know you want the people
right down front on their feet screaming.  And it’s much harder to scream
from the rafters, you feel almost like you’re watching on TV.

Concerts are not only about grosses, not only about momentary profits.  A
concert tour should be another linchpin in your career, building you to a
new height.  But in the nineties, before the Net impacted the mainstream to
such a degree, the arena concert was where the flavor of the moment MTV act
appeared on maybe their one and only concert tour.  Sure, they played some
smaller buildings on the way up, but by time the second album came out, most
people didn’t even care.  Can we say “Spice Girls”?  And the dinosaurs made
you feel privileged to attend.  After all, they might die any moment.  But
Keith Richards is like a cockroach, he’s going to outlive us all.  Why pay
all that money to see him and his band ruin their old tunes and your
memories?

There’s a cost to high priced tickets and the inability of the regular fan
to get good seats.  Career momentum is dashed.  And now that the recession
has hit, people aren’t lining up to pony up the big bucks.

Concerts have to return to the people.  Concertgoing needs to be cheaper and
a regular activity.  Now, except for a distinct minority, a concert is a big
bucks affair you attend once a year.  That’s what Michael Rapino says, Live
Nation patrons average fewer than two shows per annum.  How do you grow a
healthy business when almost no one can partake?

Greed not only decimated Wall Street, it’s hurt the concert business too.
We’ve been crowing about grosses not noting that they’re propped up by
ever-increasing ticket prices.  We haven’t been developing new acts.  And
Live Nation has to report to Wall Street and AEG is perching itself at the
absolute top of the market.  Take a look at the three rows of luxury boxes
at Staples Center for illustration.  No, look at the rafter seats above
these boxes to see how bad it is to be poor in America.

But now everybody’s poor.  And a machine has been constructed that doesn’t
comport with reality.  Concerts used to be just one step above movies.
Reasonably priced nights out.  I went to the movies last Saturday, the
multiplex was packed.  Unless it’s a superstar, the concert venue is not
sold out.  And this is not good for our business.

We need new acts.  We have to stop living in a winner take all world.  New,
innovative tours, akin to Warped, have to criss-cross this nation.  At a
fair price.  With ticketing fees low and included.  Stars must realize that
hard core fans must be able to get tickets and that a certain percentage of
them must be good, up close and personal.  The fat cats with thick wallets
only come to tell everybody else they were there.  They’re not interested in
your career.  If they’ve got any cash left, they’ll spend it at the gig of
the next flavor of the moment.  Meanwhile, you’ve alienated the fan and
burned your career.

Labels care about radio, acts care about capturing the secondary market and
no one cares about the fan.  Fuck the fan.  He’s got nowhere else to go.
Well, that was true before the advent of video games and a plethora of other
diversions.  And people used to want to come, because there were seemingly
endless headliners, that’s where it was happening, at the music venue.  But
music’s been whored out to such a degree that you’ll only go to hear your
favorite.  Other than that, the average punter is giving the middle finger
to the business.  Sick of being ripped off and unsatiated.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/partone/081121

 
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By Julian Sanchez | Published: October 07, 2008 – 11:30PM CT  from Ars Technica

A 20-year game of Telephone

If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you’ll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of U.S. jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the U.S. economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus.

“I have said it thrice,” wrote Lewis Carroll in his poem The Hunting of the Snark, “what I tell you three times is true.” And by that standard, the Pythagorean Theorem is but schoolyard gossip compared with our hoary figures. As our colleagues at Wired noted earlier this week, the 750,000 jobs figure can be found cited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Customs and Border Patrol, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others. Both feature prominently on TheTrueCosts.org, an industry site devoted to trumpeting the harms of piracy. They’re invoked by the deputy director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. And, of course, they’re a staple of indignant press releases from the congressional sponsors of tough-on-piracy legislation.

By more conventional standards of empirical verification, however, the numbers fare less well. Try to follow the thread of citations to their source, and you encounter a fractal tangle of recursive reference that resembles nothing so much as the children’s game known, in less-PC times, as “Chinese whispers,” and these days more often called “Telephone.” Usually, the most respectable-sounding authority to cite for the numbers (the FBI for the dollar amount, Customs for the jobs figure) is also the most prevalent—but in each case, that authoritative “source” proves to be a mere waystation on a long and tortuous journey. So what is the secret origin of these ubiquitous statistics? What doomed planet’s desperate alien statisticians rocketed them to Kansas? Ars did its best to find the fountainhead. Here’s what we discovered.

Looking for lost jobs

 First, the estimate of 750,000 jobs lost. (Is that supposed to be per year? A cumulative total over some undefined span? Those who cite the figure seldom say.) Customs is most often given as the source for this, and indeed, you can find press releases from as recently as 2002 giving that figure as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimate. Eureka! But when we contacted CBP to determine how they had arrived at that imposing figure, we were informed that it was, in essence, a goof. The figure, Customs assured us, came from somewhere else, and was mistakenly described as the agency’s own. This should come as no great surprise: CBP is an enforcement agency, whereas calculating the total loss of jobs from IP infringement would require some terrifyingly complex counterfactual modeling by trained economists. Similar claims have appeared in Customs releases dating back at least to 1993, but a CBP spokesperson assured us that the agency has never been in the business of developing such estimates in-house.

With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986. Yes, back in the days when “Papa Don’t Preach” and “You Give Love a Bad Name” topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan’s own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at “anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000.”
Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge’s claim—or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy—but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government’s vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to “as many as 750,000″ jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill.

$250 billion? What’s that in real money?

 What, then, of that $200 to $250 billion range? Often, it’s attributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and indeed, the Bureau routinely cites those numbers. According to FBI spokesperson Catherine Milhoan, the figure “was derived through our coordination with industry, trade associations, rights holders, and other law enforcement agencies” at a 2002 anti-piracy confab. But neither the Bureau nor the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which assembled the inter-agency powwow, could find any record of how that number was computed.

At this point, it’s necessary to get a little speculative. As with Customs, the FBI is not in the habit of doing sophisticated economic analysis in-house. And the last time the government conducted any sort of verifiably rigorous study of the costs of IP theft—about which more presently—it was a protracted undertaking that involved sending detailed questionnaires to hundreds of businesses, which government economists concluded was still insufficient to produce a reliable figure for the economy as a whole. However, $250 billion is about the number you come up with if you start with $200 billion in 1993 dollars and adjust for inflation to 2002. And that lower end of the range, $200 billion, happens to date back to 1993.

Another group that routinely uses the $200 to $250 billion figure is the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, which (along with the FBI) is often given as the source of the number. That organization’s white papers, as recently as 2005, footnote the figure to 1995 congressional testimony urging passage of what became the Anticounterfeiting Consumer Protection Act of 1996. So Ars dug into the archives at the Library of Congress to discover where the witnesses before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees got their data.

Several of the witnesses were conspicuously vague about their sources. An IACC factsheet submitted for the hearings said the group itself “estimates the economic cost due to product counterfeiting to exceed $200 billion each year,” a number repeated by the group’s then-president, John Bliss. Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) gave the same figure without sourcing.  But several witnesses pointed to Forbes magazine as the source of the number. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) noted that the International Trade Commission had placed the size of the counterfeit market at $60 billion in 1988 and that “a more recent estimate by Forbes Magazine says that American businesses are losing over $200 billion each year as a result of illegal counterfeiting.” Finally, Charlotte Simmons-Gill of the International Trademark Association was kind enough to give a precise citation: the October 25, 1993 issue of Forbes.

Ars eagerly hunted down that issue and found a short article on counterfeiting, in which the reader is informed that “counterfeit merchandise” is “a $200 billion enterprise worldwide and growing faster than many of the industries it’s preying on.” No further source is given.

Quite possibly, the authors of the article called up an industry group like the IACC and got a ballpark guess. At any rate, there is nothing to indicate that Forbes itself had produced the estimate, Mr. Conyers’ assertion notwithstanding. What is very clear, however, is that even assuming the figure is accurate, it is not an estimate of the cost to the U.S. economy of IP piracy. It’s an estimate of the size of the entire global market in counterfeit goods. Despite the efforts of several witnesses to equate them, it is plainly not on par with the earlier calculation by the ITC that many had also cited.

But here, at last, we have a solid number to sink our claws into, right? Sure, it’s 20 years old, but the U.S. International Trade Commission at least produced a reputable study yielding a definite figure for the cost of piracy to the U.S. economy: $60 billion annually.

Well, not quite.

“Biased & self-serving”

 The number the ITC actually came up with, based on a survey of several hundred business selected for their likely reliance on IP for revenue, was $23.8 billion—the estimated losses to their respondents. That number was based on industry estimates that the authors of the study noted “could admittedly be biased and self-serving,” since the firms had every incentive to paint the situation in the most dire terms as a means of spurring government action. But the figures at least appeared to be consistent and reasonable, both internally and across sectors.

The $60 billion number comes from a two-page appendix, in which the authors note that it’s impossible to extrapolate from a self-selecting group of IP-heavy respondents to the economy as a whole. But taking a wild stab and assuming that firms outside their sample experienced losses totaling a quarter to half those of their respondents, the ITC guessed that the aggregate losses to the economy might be on the order of “$43 billion to $61 billion.”

The survey also, incidentally, asked respondents to estimate the number of job losses they could attribute to inadequate intellectual property protection. The number they came up with was 5,374. If we assume, very crudely, that job losses are proportionate to dollar losses, then the ITC’s high-end estimate of $61 billion in total economic costs would correspond to a loss of not 750,000 jobs, but 13,774.

If we want to be very precise, however, we should note that the ITC was not calculating losses from IP “theft,” but rather “inadequate protection” of intellectual property. And “inadequate protection” was interpreted to mean protection falling short of the level provided by U.S. law. The protection provided by a foreign country might be deemed “inadequate,” the study explained, if “exceptions to exclusive rights are overly broad”—for example, if a country’s law contained “broad exceptions for public performances in hotels or film clips” or “too broad exceptions for educational photocopying.” A legal regime could be “inadequate” because “terms of protection are too short” or because of “inadequate” civil or criminal remedies, meaning monetary damages or criminal penalties for infringers were not high enough.

Calculating the net cost of piracy to the economy
 
One final, slightly theoretical point deserves emphasis here. All the projections we’ve discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net “cost to the U.S. economy.” But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else.

 In economic jargon, charging anything for pure IP—which has a marginal cost approaching zero once it has been produced—creates a deadweight economic loss, at least in static terms. The actual net loss of IP infringement is an allocative loss that only appears in a dynamic analysis. Simply put, when people pirate IP, the market is not accurately signaling how highly people value the effort that was put into creating it, which leads to underproduction of new IP. To calculate the net loss to the economy over the long run, you’d need to figure out the value of the lost innovation in which IP owners would have invested the marginal dollar lost to piracy, and subtract from that the value of the second-best allocation—which is to say, whatever the consumer of the pirated good spent his money on instead—and the value of the deadweight loss (free music or software is a net economic benefit to someone) incurred by pricing IP at all.

If that sounds incredibly complicated, it is. And in fact, it’s more complicated than that, because as Yochai Benkler has argued persuasively, IP is an input to innovation as well as the product of innovation. So under certain very specfic conditions, “piracy” can produce net gains. While it seems extremely unlikely that this is the case in the aggregate—IP theft almost certainly does impose net economic costs—simply calculating lost sales and licencing fees, assuming someone could produce a credible figure, would not provide a complete picture of the economic impact of IP infringement. It would give us, at most, one side of the ledger.

Conclusions

But enough theory and speculation; here is what we can say for certain: the two numbers that are invariably invoked whenever Congress considers the need for more stringent IP enforcement are, at best, highly dubious. They are phantoms. We have no good reason to think that either is remotely reliable. 

Perhaps more importantly, both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists.  That’s especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we’ve done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain. But of course, if you simply recycle the same numbers from 15 and 20 years ago—remember that IACC’s 2005 publications still cite that 1995 congressional testimony, from which it seems safe to infer that they have no more recent source—then it will necessarily seem as though no ground has been gained.

Neither figure is terribly plausible on its face. As Wired noted earlier this week, 750,000 jobs is fully 8 percent of the current number of unemployed in the United States. And $250 billion is more than the combined 2005 gross domestic revenues of the movie, music, software, and video game industries.

Still, anything is possible: The figures could happen to be more or less accurate. But given the shady provenance of the data, the one thing we know for certain is that we don’t know for certain. And we’re making policy on the basis of our ignorance.

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From my fave music industry commentator, (if you hadn’t guessed I’m the industry wanker at stink finger), Bob Lefsetz comes this amusing and accurate Enemies List. For those new to Bob, the other one, check the link below and join his email list – he’s a prolific and opinionated man, beware his music rants, he has to my ears shocking taste – do read them though as he has passion and thats what digging this music stuff is ALL about.

Enemies List

1. Doug Morris

Despite the aegis of caring about music and consumers he’s an ignorant old man who is single-handedly holding back the monetization of recorded music online.

No one who sues his own customers can give a shit about them. That’s like killing slaves for their own good.

And, believe me, RIAA policy is Universal Music policy. Based on the company’s market share, if nothing else.

This is an old man whose success is based on a radio/retail model, get the song on the radio and see if the album is moving at the store, when radio is terrible and ineffectual, kids not listening to it, and it’s difficult to even find a record store.

This is the guy leading the charge?

And you wonder why we’re in trouble.

2. Zach Horowitz

Morris’ consigliere. If we want change, we’ve got to kill them both.

3. Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton? Huh?

Yup, he signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which ruined radio.

Twenty two minutes of commercials per hour and predictable playlists. Music on terrestrial radio is finished. All because of this legislation.

4. Gene Simmons

For spreading the heinous concept that musicians are just in it for the money. For blaming the chaos of today’s music world on the fans. You keep telling us how smart you are Gene, but every time you open your mouth you just demonstrate how uninformed and dumb you truly are.

5. Bob Sillerman

He rolled up concert promoters, he created a mountain of debt. Without Sillerman, concert tickets would never be so expensive.

6. Ryan Seacrest

Emblematic of the fiction that the public wants bland, ineffectual, no substance talent.

Wrong, people want an edge, they want a living, breathing human being who speaks his mind and even has warts.

7. Jann Wenner

For destroying the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Utilizing it as his own personal enterprise, Wenner lords over the organization like a despot. Only his taste counts. So we end up with non-rockers (Miles Davis) in, and classic rockers (Alice Cooper) out.

Put Madonna in the Business Hall of Fame. But once you induct her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the institution loses all meaning.

8. TicketMaster

For not leaning on promoters and talent and insisting that the fees be included in the overall price. Sure, it’s not their fault, but do they have to roll over? No one’s hands are tied to this extent. After all, they’re almost a monopoly!

9. Jimmy Iovine

For spreading the fiction that he’s hip, when really he’s only about the money and the power.

10. MTV

For not removing the “M” from its name.

They can program whatever they want, but please don’t associate it with music. Maybe FTV, for Fashion TV. Or RTV, for Reality TV. But not MTV, not Music Television, that’s an insult to our intelligence and music itself.

11. Michael Cohl

You might have paid the acts big bucks, but we, the public, paid the price.

Now Live Nation is saddled with that Jay-Z debt, those 360 deals. They’ve got to charge a fortune to make their payments. Or else go bankrupt. Maybe that’s the better option, clearing the board and starting all over.

12. Venues

For not putting all the tickets in the building on sale. Let’s blame the promoters here too. Give us a fighting chance. If you’re going to overcharge us for a ticket, at least give us an opportunity to get a good one.

13. Antares Audio Technologies

For foisting auto-tune upon the marketplace.

Used to be you needed talent to make it. You used to be able to sing. But now Harvey Fierstein can sound like Mariah Carey and anybody can have a hit record.

14. The Acts

They’re the ones taking the money, whoring themselves out, saying their hands are tied. No, that’s untrue. You just want all the money, the TicketMaster kickbacks, the endorsement bucks…

If you’re one of the rare acts that does no sponsorships, if you keep ticket prices reasonable, if you think of your fans before your wallet, I salute you!

15. Music Publishers

For not going to a percentage rate.

16. Lawyers

For not knowing their client is the act, not the label.

17. Kevin Martin

For approving the Sirius/XM merger.

May be good for the stockholders, but it’s shitty for talent. They’ve only got one place to go for a national footprint now, talent prices just went down because there’s no competition!

Yup, a new business model has been invented. Spend yourself to death and then throw yourself upon the court for mercy, tell them to change the law so the public will benefit. Mmm… Isn’t this just what Bear Stearns did?

18. Terrestrial Radio

For refusing to pay a master recording usage fee. If you can explain to me why the writers of a song should be compensated, but not the performers, you probably believe Henry Ford’s estate should get paid for all automobile sales and companies should produce cars for nothing, maybe making ends meet on spare parts.

This is not an RIAA land grab. It’s time for the U.S. to align itself with the rest of the world. This is an artist issue.

__________________________________________

NOT ON THE LIST

Steve Jobs/Apple Computer

You don’t hear consumers complaining. He developed an MP3 player you could use and a reasonable way to buy just what you wanted online. The powers-that-be said no one wanted an iPod, it was too expensive, and that songs must be sold as albums, which oftentimes is not the way the public wants them.

Anti-Apple stories are part of a major label disinformation campaign, all with the goal to smear someone who’s more concerned with consumers than they are. The old fat cats are just pissed they can no longer win through intimidation. But, if you snooze, you lose! Or, if you don’t know how to type, if you’re not as familiar with computers as you are with your car, you’re FUCKED!

Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Doesn’t even count. He destroyed Warner Music, all in the name of profits for the original investors, who took the company private and then public again, screwing stockholders (the same way they screw consumers!)

The company’s been marginalized, but there’s still a fantastic catalog.

Stunningly, Warner has the most innovative digital initiatives, but that’s like saying your Powder Puff football team has the best quarterback… She’s still not in the league of Peyton Manning.

Guy Hands

Overpaid for a pig in a poke. Citibank would already own EMI if it knew what to do with it.

At the end of the day, it’s not bathrooms on the highway. Music is a business of creativity. No amount of reorganization/business structure can trump this.

Billboard

About as relevant as SoundScan.

If the owners/editors were smart, they’d build up the magazine’s web content, give a lot for nothing, change their business model. But no, they’d rather sell magazines. How stupid.

Scalpers

At least you can get a good seat!

Clive

He’s been marginalized. He’s no longer the whipping boy. He lost his gig because his paradigm is passe. Spending a ton of money to break a vapid act in the mainstream is a denial of the reality that the mainstream is shrinking and bland has been replaced by edgy. The future is an amalgamation of niche, not the single-headed phoenix.

Indie Record Store

They’re making their money from tchotchkes. The majors constantly fuck them in the ass because they don’t generate enough capital. If they were selling enough product, they’d get the exclusives Best Buy does, but they don’t. Now that you can get all the catalog online, they’re almost irrelevant.

AEG

Hard to hate Live Nation’s competitor. And, with Live Nation in turmoil, we’re not exactly sure who the enemy in this sphere is other than the acts/managers and agents.

Neil Portnow

Because the Grammys are irrelevant.

Michael Greene made them relevant, in an era when the mainstream still counted.

But give Portnow credit for his charity initiatives. Which, unfortunately, started with himself… Check his pay package.

–

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Dismissing the American case, US District Court Judge S James Otero said that Mr Augusto was protected by the “first sale” doctrine in copyright law.

This says that once a copyright owner gives away a copy of a CD, DVD or book, the recipient is entitled to sell it on.

Full Article Here

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