Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Media Companies Target CBC's Free Music Site
silentbrad writes, with bits and pieces from the Globe and Mail: "A number of Canadian media companies have joined forces to try to shut down a free music website recently launched by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., claiming it threatens to ruin the music business for all of them. The group, which includes Quebecor Inc., Stingray Digital, Cogeco Cable Inc., the Jim Pattison Group and Golden West Radio, believes that CBCmusic.ca will siphon away listeners from their own services, including private radio stations and competing websites that sell streaming music for a fee. The coalition is expected to expand soon to include Rogers Communications Inc. and Corus Entertainment Inc., two of the largest owners of radio stations in Canada. It intends to file a formal complaint with the CRTC, arguing that the broadcaster has no right under its mandate to compete with the private broadcasters in the online music space. ... 'The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing,' said Stingray CEO Eric Boyko, whose company runs the Galaxie music app that charges users $4.99 a month for unlimited listening. 'There is a cost to everything, yet CBC does not seem to think that is true.' ... The companies argue they must charge customers to offset royalty costs which are triggered every time a song is played, while the CBC gets around the pay-per-click problem because it is considered a non-profit corporation. ... Media executives aren't the only ones who have expressed concern. When the CBC service was launched in February, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers said that when it set a flat fees for the more than 100,000 music publishers it represents, it never envisioned a constant stream of free music flooding the Internet."
It seems like the media groups would make more money (longterm) and have a better public image (which means more customers and more willing customers) if they embraced and advertised for CBC. Of course, then again, I suppose the lawyers wouldn't make any money and it's less immediate profit. Wouldn't want to think ahead.
... what the hell, guy?
I am having a hard time even understanding what the hell is going on here. Of course the CBC has a right to compete with private broadcasters... that's sort of what they do. The CBC is there to ensure that people will still have free access to the best in broadcast media, for free, forever, and as far as I can tell the only music that's available for free download is music that the artists have said they're ok with the CBC offering.
The problem is... where?
So now that I've got my initial reaction out of the way...
12.0 Why is there advertising on CBC Music?
Advertising is the primary means that allows us to fairly compensate the artists we play on CBC Music. We signed an agreement with the Audio-Video Licensing Agency (AVLA), which represents over 1,000 music labels. We are very excited to report that through this deal, all artists registered via AVLA will be paid for having their work broadcast on CBC Radio 2, CBC Radio 3, and our 40 web radio stations.
Another reason we've decided to pursue advertising on CBC Music is that, in the current economic climate, CBC cannot afford to have a large new service like CBC Music that isn't self-sustaining. This revenue stream not only allows us to survive, but also helps us to grow and continue to expand CBC Music.
Emphasis added.
So I'm not sure of the full legalities of it, but according to the CBC Music FAQ, they have acquired the right to stream all the music on their site.
What's the problem? My guess is that these are companies that refused to sign, and they're bitching about the fact that they couldn't get the price they wanted for their music. Excuse me while I shed a tear or two.
"The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing." In other words, if you haven't paid me and my friends to listen to music, you can't listen to it at all. What an asshole.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
they are using non-profit status to gain a competitive advantage over the rest of the market.
FTA they pay lower royalties and get other concessions for having this status. This is out of the spirit of non-profit and in this case the industry does have a reason to be upset
... is when the birds sing."
He picked a particularly ironic example.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
I am so freaking sick of private companies who believe the only way to protect their profits is to legislate against other organisations threatening their market share. And I'm sick of governments and courts indulging them. Take it as an opportunity to better your services and provide something that CBC (or whoever you're whining about) doesn't - there are hundreds of ideas out there. You may actually surprise yourself and become more successful than you ever imagined.
The free market is WONDERFUL, until something happens that the fat cats, criminals and freeloaders of Big Content have their business interests threatened. The stench of hypocrisy is unbearable.
If they can't compete with free, then they can either 1) do something else where they CAN make money; or 2) eat shit and die.
Except...that the media companies are asking for more restrictions and regulations, not less. And the media companies don't innovate, they take innovative work from one group of people and show it to another group of people, and charge high prices for the service. A service that's no longer required.
The real problem is that while innovation is hard, distribution is not anymore. Someone at the CBC realizes this; the media companies, which insist on charging high rates for distribution, have not.
Personally, I think what the CBC is doing is daring, and has a lot of potential to help connect Canadian musicians with audiences. Perhaps this can be a replacement for the obsolete CanCon laws, that currently mandate all those radio stations to play a certain percentage of Canadian music (regardless of how good that music is).
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
“These actions further distances the corporation from its mandate, while placing it directly on a collision course with private broadcasters who can only rely on advertising and subscription revenues to sustain their services,”
Isn't one of the mandate of the CBC to promote Canadian art and culture? The CBC does a lot more to promote quality Canadian content then any other broadcaster on that list.
"The only music that you can hear for free is when the birds sing." That guy has probably never been on the internet before... You know, the place where a bunch of bands are releasing their music for free because they love what they do?
Sorry, but "innovation" is not hard. Implementation can be hard , but innovation is simply the process of an idea.. and perhaps validation of the idea given the materials at hand.
The article points out how complex and unfair the way music is licensed. That is what is wrong with the implementation, not that thousands of people have come up with ways of innovating music in the digital age and how to turn a profit from it.
If the Music and Video industries could come up with fair ways of getting content to users at reduced prices, pick a service and it could be done.
People are quick to bash Napster as "ewww, they are evil pirates". Is it so much that they are evil pirates, or more that most of what was being traded was only available when people turned physical media in to digital to share? Or is it that some digital content is not affordable?
As again the article points out, many people iTunes as the only way to get in to digital music. What if you or your family can't afford an iPod, iPhone, MAC or PC to connect to the internet? Or if it costs so much they can't afford to download anything?
It's easy to excuse shit policies and laws in the name of innovation. Especially when the PTO has the rights to patent even the dumbest fucking ideas.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not to mention the fact that the data seems to show that they stand to gain by promoting, rather than condemning, contemporary distribution models.
I don't think it's protecting their assets so much as defending a particular, ideological view of art which is ultimately just a little blip in the historical trajectory of human creativity and how we share and experience it.
.: Semper Absurda
A condition of using Canadian airwaves or publishing music in Canada has always been strict regulation by the Federal government, requiring Canadian Content and exempting the CBC from certain restrictions.
Don't like it, then publish music in some other country.
Of course, since Canada is a net exporter of music worldwide, it's not like you have a Bieber of a chance of doing that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Have you looked at the music on offer? A lot of it is stuff that the other play-on-demand sites wouldn't bother providing because it's too obscure.
Distribution is not the only thing media companies do. They also provide financing for new musicians (try to get loan from bank for your new band), marketing, experience in the markets and connections in the industry. The latter two are usually ignored by geeks who think they are not skills or necessary but in the real world they are.
Distribution is only small part of what they do. Do remember that every new musician or band is already free to go without record labels if they don't want these services. However, most of them do, voluntarily. I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
Perhaps this is false nostalgia - but even from reading history with the gilded age and robber barons, I don't seem to remember a time when industries were so, well, unafraid of being called on their bullshit.
I mean - yeah, the meat industry has had bouts of defending deadly safety conditions leading to not infrequent outbreaks and deaths, and the tobacco industry flexed historic levels of political and legal muscle lying about their products and covering up science they knew to be true for decades - but they really did seem to at least fear being caught in a direct lie.
It just doesn't seem that the music industry even cares about what they're saying - they just mix accusation, whole new concepts of honorable ownership they just made up a sentence ago, and blatant grabs for control as if it were a newly uncovered biblical virtue, and they the new prophet.
The rhetoric borders on empire, or isolated dictatorship in terms of brazen doublethink-style selective "morality" that just amounts to everything belonging to them, under all circumstances.
There's opportunistic jerks in all groups - it's kind of an intrinsic part of everything from game theory to classic social power studies in psychology - it's a basic part of how we explore and interact with eachother.
It's just crazy that in so many nations, so much of the population ends up standing aside, so these particular jerks can be such horrible bastards on such a constant basis, and they're still allowed to buy themselves such a voice in and over our lives - right to the heart of the houses of power.
They're a small parasitic part of the music industry - not a very big industry in the first place. Most other industries dwarf them. Why are they allowed to keep ramping things up seemingly without limit? At what point does this Napoleon meet his Waterloo?
Ryan Fenton
I don't think we should be telling them that are not allowed to use services provided by record labels.
I don't think that the record labels should be allowed to dictate the copyright laws of our country to the point of regulating technology development, and I think that's a far greater and real threat than that of new musicians not finding experienced people in the music industry who want to help them succeed in exchange for a paycheck.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I don't want socailism I want to be able to pay $5-$10 dollars a month to access all (most) music from any device without being locked into some moronic DRM scheme. It's not that hard.
That's too bad because in capitalism every person and company should be allowed to freely state their prices on services and products. What you want fits more into socialist system.
Thing about that is, I suspect most Canadians would happily do away with the CBC and the CRTC. Both are supposedly for our benefit, but always seem to be working against us.
Lest we forget the outgoing CRTC president griping about how the internet limits the ability for them to force Canadian content down our throats whether we like it or not (which is true, but it shows the mentality the CRTC and CBC take .. don't improve content, improve methods of forcing it on people).
I have a theory about people like you... You use the word "Socialism" in the same way that a 4 year old uses "Shit". You really have no idea what it really means, you just know that it gets a rise out of people. The Fox News talking heads are even more guilty of this, labeling President Obama a Socialist because he is slightly less of a Capitalist than they themselves. If you want to see examples of Socialism, look to a history book. What you are seeing is a government subsidized means of distributing music. If you are a citizen of the United States, I may remind you that we are rather Socialist as well. Unless you want the free-market to determine what roads we drive on, whose houses burn down, and which kids get a decent education please go shove your divisive partisan drivel into the nearest Fox News comment section, I'm sure they'd appreciate it.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
they are a government funded network, we're already paying for it with out taxes!
Oh BS. These asshole have no problem when it's CBC radio broadcasting jazz or Classical, which it's been doing longer than any of the guys have been around. If they had a problem why didn't they go after CBC 20 years ago?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
A lot of artists under the Canadian system never see royalties - not that there is much from CBC play anyway. Middlemen tend to eat the royalties leaving artists with the crumbs. Nothing new - musicians have been screwed by business for decades, probably going on a century now.
I *love* the idea of CBC music - especially as lots of independent music is on there. Very few people under a certain age listen to the horrible big-media radio stations that are broadcast. And I love the idea that Canadian artists are featured - the quality of musicians in Canada is generally a lot higher than the U.S.
HOWEVER, the CBC Music site is an implementation mess. Sure they have a dedicated iPhone app, but iPhone is down in 3rd place popularity in Canada. Just try to use the thing on Android and watch your mobile device choke on the layers and layers of Flash badness. The site is horrible. But it should fail for the right reasons, not just because big media wants to kill it and force me to listen to Nickelback instead.
The problem there is that the financing, marketing experience etc aren't really necessary either; these days it's perfectly possible to do all that yourself, or source it from your manager instead of from your distributor, and still earn a living. The hype and marketing and financing of the big super-groups and performers isn't about music at all, and studies have shown that people who want music aren't consuming their product. At it's best it's about providing a multi-platform, multi-media marketing message that feeds and feeds on the big media industry Product. At worst, it's spending a lot of money polishing turds. Most big record-label promotion is about scrabbling for a sliver of attention from people for whom music is a background thing. Katy Perry isn't big because of her music, and people don't consume her music. They consume Katy Perry. And her bosses use Katy Perry to sell other product, like So You Think You Can Dance and whatever's passing for Super Music Video Hits of the Super Music Video Stars, but mostly they just use her to sell more eyeballs to more advertisers. And even this is probably not self-sustaining. Don't forget that Justin Bieber was a Youtube sensation before he was a mega-star. Big Media needs the digital age, but the digital age doesn't need Big Media.
Musicians are finding that they don't need the promotion power of Big Media, they can do the promotion themselves. They sell less product but the margins are much much higher, and if they're any good their customers will pay more for the product.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Proposing things to and supporting politicians with same views as you is not bribery. If they were bribing the police to bust you, then you would have a case. But it's not the same, and also, you are allowed to do the same.
Actually, in Canada it is bribery. Our Elections act is quite clear on that point. It's illegal for a candidate or party to accept funding from an entity who is not a citizen of the country (and unlike the US, corporations are not citizens). Additionally, there is a limit to how much an individual can give, per year, to a given candidate/party.
Violating the elections act can get a candidate's election results invalidated, and carries significant fines, in the case of a corporation giving money to a candidate. Lest you think that they'll find some way to hide the funding, their finances must be submitted to the elections officer, there is a limit to how much can be spent on elections, and their financial returns are a matter of public record, and can be searched by anybody.
And yet the Conservatives (Currently in power in Canada) have been found 3 times to have breached these exact same laws (and fudging the elections finance submissions) and nothing has happened (barely even made a blip on the News).
Unfortunately, there are MANY ways around these rules and way too many ways to bend them, thus neutering those laws.
They also have this tendency to fuck artists over, which is why even very big acts have to haul their thieving asses into court over unpaid royalties and other contract breaches. Anyone who praises record companies should review Robert Fripp's multi-year campaign to get Universal/UMG to provide accurate royalty figures and explain how King Crimson songs had got onto Universal-affiliated download services width out the rights holders' permission (and again being unable to report sales).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Lobbyism is bribery, period. It doesn't matter how much you dress it up it's still the same thing, people using money to gain more power than they're legally entitled to.
Couldn't it also be that they feel its unfair to have to compete with a government funded agency?
Just askin. I couldn't find any clear statement on the site as to the source of their funding.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Actually, I would advise you to read up on socialism as well. Funding roads with taxes or even medical care doesn't necessarily have anything to do with socialism even if socialists tend to favor use of taxes to benefit society as a whole. Even Adam Smith saw that the market wasn't well equipped to handle many things and favored some degree of social welfare. This is more like social liberalism.
Socialism is an ideology striving for a society where the working class (where the working class is essentially everyone who actually has to work for a living rather than live off of capital returns, i.e. capitalists) owns the means of production, where the surplus value generated by employees does not benefit a tiny class of capitalists but instead the employee and his fellow workers. Right wingers like to complain about welfare cases, well capitalists are essentially the biggest welfare cases in existence. The only difference is that the those living on welfare receive their money from taxes and can barely survive on it whereas the capitalist class receives theirs from ownership of capital and can live in luxury off it in addition to the political influence that capital brings with it, and this is very much enforced by the state and the threat of violence. In most cases when it comes to the really wealthy the wealth is passed down through generations and it only grows in each generation due to the fact that capital itself generates capital. /Actual socialist
They did state their price, and their conditions for that price. CBC just found a new way to use what they payed for, and now the companies want to alter the deal.
The CBC is government funded.
Not sure I see the relevance, though. Should libraries be shut down because they cut into Amazon's profit? Ridiculous.
Commercial radio is so god-awful here, all I listen to is CBC 1 (no commercials, mostly interviews and talk programs, news). Sure beats the alternative of 60% commercials, 40% of the same twenty songs repeated and dumb DJs hurr durring.
The purpose of human society is to provide the best possible services to the majority not to fucking enrich a psychopathic minority. If a service is best provided by a non-profit government agency, then that is the appropriate medium for provision of the service.
Forget the insane bullshit that a service should only be provided by the most corrupt most greedy organisation that can tilt laws in it's favour and and, pay for the most PR=B$ (marketing lies for profit).
"JUST TELLING" human society is for the benefit of the majority not so that a psychopathic minority can prey upon the majority.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
There are a lot of Canadians who like the CBC. I listen CBC 1 on the radio all the time as it is the only quality radio available even though I'm in the third biggest market in Canada and the only TV available for myself and many others is also the CBC. (Used to have quite a few over the air TV channels and generally the CBC was still the best. Now the governments have ordered them to move away from the good frequencies so big media and telco can make more money and the only analog station left is the CBC.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They also provide financing for new musicians,
As somebody who was involved in the underground music scene in Saint John's, I can say that the record labels are useless to new musicians. The best way for new musicians to finance themselves is to play all-ages shows, sell merchandise, and apply for (small) grants from the government. All the labels do is engage a high-risk high-return advertising machine, and work the musicians to the bone.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You don't? You mean you don't see how the CBC is cutting and gutting into new business startups, that they're exceeding their funding mandate by doing this either? Libraries are far different from what the CBC is pulling.
Almost EVERY single radio station is owned by Chorus/Rogers or is planned to be owned by Chorus/Rogers. Even the college radio stations are being bought. In my mind, all CBC is doing is modernizing. Price is not the only thing to compete on... what about News/Traffic humorous enjoyable adverts, morning shows and proper exclusive programming?!? I remember turning on the radio at a certain time to hear the on-going history of new music or could change the station during commercials or news... since Chrous/Rogers has been buying all the stations Canadian radio has gone to the shitter and they have every right to be scared that they will no longer be able to synchronize the commercials on every radio station at the same time and playing almost the same content commercials programs and morning shows.
Chorus / Rogers are complaining because free streaming by CBC threatens them by giving listeners options, something they figured they could work around by buying everything.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
And a Bieber quota.. yes.
120 characters ought to be enough for anyone
So, every thing provided by the government then?
No, only the things that citizens believe should be so provided.
In Canada, apparently, this includes streaming music.
I was a worker for many years, now I am a co-owner of a very small business. Do you know what my current windfall from the "ownership of capital" is? It's negative, "red" as they say in accounting. And it is supposed to remain so for at least a few years. Many startups fail, thus never recovering the invested money. I'm hoping for a positive return, but I'm taking large risks with my money, and I may never see it again. Are you willing to mortgage your house, for example, to invest into your own startup? If not then you are a worker.
Something to keep in mind is that small business owners like you are not capitalists in Marxist classification - they are "petit bourgeoisie". The difference is that the means of production - capital - owned by the owner of a small business is, generally speaking, not generating sufficient wealth for rapid expansion.
Simply put, you're a capitalist if your capital is large enough that you can hire a manager and retire, living entirely off the proceeds without having to work yourself - purely on the "rent" extracted from others.
The USSR model artfully combines the worst aspects of communism, socialism and capitalism. The factories are not yours, so you never get any dividends on your investment - nor you can make those investments. You only get the salary; but since the state is the only capitalist in town, the state gets to dictate how much you are going to eat today. Socialism is simply capitalism with only one capitalist; one big company town from which there is no escape.
That's precisely why a lot of Marxists argue that USSR was never socialist, except perhaps for a few years early on when it truly had factories run by their workers, but rather a degenerate form of state capitalism. As you note, the factories in the USSR were not really owned by people working in them - they were owned by the state, which exploited the workers just the same, and paid out part of what it extracted from them as salary. Soviet apologists generally claim that the state was democratic, and therefore workers were able to influence how much they were payed; but it was a sham democracy in practice with no real choices.
And there were no socialist (or self-proclaimed socialist) states that were based on any model other than the Soviet one - of all the early socialist revolutions that happened, Soviet was the only one that succeeded, and all further socialist states were backed by USSR, and, by necessity, picked up its ideology - sometimes diverging from it later, like China or Yugoslavia, but the roots were always there. So we don't really know what a "real socialism" would be like, and whether it could have worked out better.
Thing about that is, I suspect most Canadians would happily do away with the CBC and the CRTC.
I suspect you're wrong. Most Canadians I knew when living in Canada did rather appreciate CBC. The ones that hated it were mostly extreme right-wing, which are not the majority.
"I have to agree. If record companies are so evil, why are bands so keen to get record deals? "
Weed and booze. Not the best mind sharpeners.