[A2k] Re: Pho: Revver, Jamendo, etc. : collecting societies 2.0

[Neil Leyton]

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Jean-Baptiste,

This type of thinking is precisely what is needed. It goes hand in hand with
what I was saying in Paris re: the present entertainment industry vs. the
rise of the real music industry (ie. those present pariahs with alternate
business models like CC Non-Commercial licences, to name just one
example)...  eventually everything points to a new, artist-run and
artist-controlled new global rights society that could well be
non-exclusive, but able to licence indie content to many different sites
like Jamendo; as well as non-DRM online commercial stores like Finetunes in
Germany.

The key here is to understand that many of us are already making more money
through alternate business models than we are via the existing rights
societies. The sillier they get in refusing to allow for the inherent
compatibility of the CC By-Nc-Sa, as well as charging artists for putting
their own contents online (the examples you mentioned are all too true
there!), the further they edge towards their own extinction - and at some
point we will see a rise in artist awareness on these issues, and a mass
exodus towards the new model - which I hope will include a new rights
society that will be fundamentally different from the present ones - and
this is key: Peter Jenner explained to the TACD Paris conference how we
presently have four different "rights"/revenue streams in the administration
of copyrights in the music biz. We need to move towards a model where all
these streams of income are re-unified, cutting out all the unnecessary
intermediaries and many irrelevant rights societies for artists who own
their entire copyright (ie. self-published, no record deals that deprive
them of master ownership, no publishing deals, and no right society
affiliation).

Neil



On 6/24/06, Jean-Baptiste Soufron <soufron@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Just a few thoughts :
>
> Revver, Jamendo, etc. : collecting societies 2.0
>
> http://soufron.typhon.net/article.php3?id_article=143
>
> ---
>
> Yesterday, after I created my small movie about how to open a closed
> wifi connection, someone just pointed me to the revver website and
> told me to upload it there : Revver
>
> So I gave it a try and I liked it. The java client was easy to use on
> my macbook,, and they provided me with a very nice player to include
> in my website.
>
> You can have a look : how to open a wifi connection
>
> But then I asked myself about the licensing aspects of their work,
> and I realized that these guys were actually very cautious about the
> legal aspects of their website. They ask the uploader to agree with a
> special kind of license that is creating some sort of an affiliation
> link between him and them. This is non-exclusive, but this
> affiliation link is not that far away from the affiliation link
> artists must get to enter a collecting society.
>
> So all this tchit-tchat is not only because I liked Revver, but also
> because I have been thinking about this for quite some time : all
> these online publishing companies are very much able to invest a
> market actually being owned by the numberous collecting societies
> existing worldwide like SACEM, GEMA, etc.
>
> This is something new. All of them are just beginning to be
> technically mature enough to redistribute their money to the artists
> they publish. But iTunes could very much begin to act as a collecting
> society if they wanted to. And then, the day they would begin
> producing music or getting agreements with producers is certainly the
> day when collecting societies could be in danger of disappearing. One
> could say that this is not necessarily a problem if these new players
> exercise the same public function, except that artists will never be
> members of Apple Corp when they actually are members of their own
> collecting societies. They could lose the small bit of control they
> currently have over the way their creation-generated value is being
> redistributed.
>
> Here is the way it's happening on Revver : each time you upload a
> video on Revver, they put a small ad in it, and you get paid 50/50
> with them when someone click on it. As one can see, the share is
> already much better than what artists currently get from places who
> sell their content.
>
> So what we have here is a good alternate business model for video
> artists who would like to publish on Internet. And the day they will
> connect with iTunes or Google will mean that artists will actually be
> granted several business models for getting rewarded of their work.
> After all, this could be a very liberal way to solve the lack of
> competition between collecting societies that the EU was recently
> complaining about.
>
> So what's next ? Other websites like Jamendo are already going the
> same way : jamendo
>
> Thus, I am curious to look at how long artists will go on accepting
> the small remuneration the get from their collecting societies when
> they could get much better ones from this kind of webservices. This
> looks stupid, but I actually got contacted by artists who were trying
> to put their own creations online. They were getting mailed by
> collecting societies that they were not even part of to ask them to
> pay some fee, or to shutdown their website. And you know what ? Even
> when they did not have to, some artists actually paid what these
> collecting societies were asking for.
>
> But what will happen now that these new websites offer them to
> publish their creations and to make money out of it ? Are they likely
> to stay that naive for long ?
>
> Of course there will be an exclusivity problem there. Everyting will
> get complicated if artists become members of both websites and
> collecing societies at the same time. It will be difficult to know
> who must pay what to who/
>
> And that's exactly when we'll begin to have fun looking these
> distribution websites getting agreements with giants like Google or
> Amazon in order to enter a legal fight against these companies. Or
> maybe some new model could emerge. Maybe the kind of competition the
> EU would like to create between collecting societies could make them
> invest in this kind of startups. Or maybe artists will understand the
> risk they would take by passing agreements with companies they are
> not members of. It's also possible to see these new websites getting
> agreements with collecting societies so that they will manage the
> online revenues of their authors.
>
> Whatever, things are likely to evolve quite soon, and since we're all
> gradually becoming authors and artists we'll all be at the heart of it.




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