[advocacy] Why artists should be using Ogg Vorbis

[Daniel James]

Just wrote this piece - not very original, but hopefully useful to 
persuade artists and musicians of the need to release .ogg files. 

Please let me know of any big flaws in the argument, or music-related 
sites that might like to post it.

Cheers

Daniel James
News + Web Editor
LinuxUser magazine
http://www.linuxuser.co.uk

**

Why artists should be using Ogg Vorbis

comments to daniel at mondodesigno.com please

1. Computers, control and the content industry

The major record companies would like to control the way people 
listen to music, and they are going to use both software and the 
hardware that people buy in future. 'Content', known as music and 
movies to most of us, is a global industry, worth $billions every 
year. The promise of digital music, distributed by networks which can 
deliver data at minimal cost, has not been ignored by the content 
industry.

However, the content industry sees the internet and other networks as
a pipe going between their studio and your eyes and ears - with a
return pipe going from the 'consumers' wallet to their bank of course.

With the advent of digital music, the content industry thinks that it
can massively increase profits by eliminating the costs associated
with conventional music distribution on physical media. But there is a
problem - digital music, having been reduced to a series of numbers,
is able to be copied almost infinitely without loss of quality. This
wouldn't be a problem if lots of members of the music listening public
didn't already have the means to make those copies - just about any
computer.

So the content industry can do two things - change the digital music
file somehow so that you can't copy it, or change your computer so you
can't do what you want with it. The first idea is doomed to failure,
because anything you do to a number can be undone as long as you know
the secret method - CSS and SDMI have proved easy to bypass.

Changing your computer is the only feasible way to keep the content
pipe leak-proof. They can do this with software - by persuading you to
use players and formats which police your use of music - or by selling
you hardware such as CPRM disk drives, which will do the same.

Let's not confuse making a compilation for a friend, or a copy to play
on your portable, with the counterfeit CD and tape business that takes
place in most of the countries around the world. Clearly, those people
who are selling the work of artists without giving them a fair share
of the proceeds are wrong. The history of popular music has often been
about artists not getting paid, and not because of home copying or
commercial piracy.

2. Free Sharing vs. Pay to Play

Digital technology and network distribution has removed the middleman
between the artist and the music listener, but the content industry
wants to put the middleman back in place. They can do this with the
help of a proprietary music format and software that they can control,
with artificial restrictions to limit its potential.

The content industry tells artists that they need this control so that
they can continue to pay for things like recording sessions and
marketing - as well as artist wages.

Why should artists have a problem with this? After all, you want to
have your music heard, and you want to be paid for your work. You'll
have to participate in the content industry world on their terms - but
a bigger problem is that their vision of digital music can't deliver.

a) Getting heard

The giant record companies would be quite happy to sell us all one
recording at a time, since marketing costs and risk would be
minimised. Listening to pop radio today, the extremely short playlists
might lead you to believe that we are well on the way to this already.
The content industry wants high volume sales, which run counter to
musical diversity. If you're this year's band, that's great - if not,
forget it.

Free downloads combined with peer-to-peer file sharing (as with the
original Napster) are an extremely low-cost way to get your music
heard all over the world. It might be the only way if you're an
independent artist. It's bandwidth efficient, because the tracks are
being passed round on other people's computers - saving you a big bill
at your ISP.

But the content industry can't allow free peer-to-peer sharing,
because there's no margin in it for them. The claim that it's because
it damages CD sales is demonstrably false - by the same logic, they
should seek to ban music on free-to-air radio and TV, in case people
might hear it.

Record companies have tried to protect CD sales by only releasing
digital tracks as short excerpts, or in very low quality formats. This
doesn't encourage people to share them, but does it actually encourage
anyone to buy a track or album? It's lame, especially when you
consider that the whole track can be heard in full quality on the
radio or TV - assuming that the content industry rates your marketing
potential high enough to get you on there.

b) Getting paid

Let's look at the existing CD model, and assume the record label is
going to pay you a dollar on each CD sold, although in reality you
probably wouldn't get anything like that much after expenses have been
deducted. Let's say there are ten tracks on the CD, so you get ten
cents per track.

In the content industry's digital model, let's assume you get the same
deal of ten cents on each track downloaded. To support this, the
record company charges the same to download all ten tracks as it does
for a CD.

But where's the incentive for the listener to buy the digital tracks?
They use up bandwidth to download, they can't be freely transferred to
other computers (since this would enable sharing) and they probably
can't even be backed up. If your computer develops a fault, or you
just get a new one, say goodbye to your record collection.

People don't mind downloading digital tracks if they are free -
Napster proved that. But CD's are more resilient, highly portable
between devices and easily shared amongst friends. Paid downloads
would have to be very cheap to compete effectively with CD's - and
then where would the margin to pay the artist be?

Far better to offer official downloads for free and encourage people
to share them. Listeners will appreciate the chance to hear a track
properly before they buy your CD, and you'll save a lot of your own
time - and a ton of money - on promotion.

3. What's wrong with MP3?

So why not just use MP3? It's popular already, and listeners can
easily share it. The problem is that the people who created MP3
compression want to get in on the content industry act, and have
positioned themselves as another middleman. Free encoders for the MP3
format have already bitten the dust, as the owners of the technology
demand royalties for making software that uses it.

Although originally touted as a free format, and associated with
no-cost music downloads, the technology behind MP3 was always
proprietary. In classic 'free lunch' marketing, a product was given
away free until it became popular, at which time the owners
transformed it into a commercial product.

As an artist, the royalties on MP3 mean that you'll have to pay a
flat fee on every single track of your own music that's downloaded.
It might only be a few cents at the moment, but the people who control
the technology will be able to charge you whatever they like in
future. And this will mean you won't be able to give away free tracks
even if you want to - unless you pay the MP3 royalty yourself.

Ogg Vorbis is a direct replacement for MP3, without the technology
tax - it's completely royalty free, and will stay that way thanks to
it's free software licence. Ogg files are already supported by a
number of software players such as Winamp, and the encoders are freely
available.

The Ogg Vorbis format is outside of the control of the content
industry. They can use it, but they can't stop you from using it. And
if you want to let people listen to your music without restrictions,
or share it with their friends, you can.

But the Ogg format won't take off unless artists make the files
available. So if you want to support freedom in music, download the
free encoder from vorbis.com and put some .ogg tracks on your web
site.

** ends

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.