Steven Page and Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies appeared on CBC's The Hour tonight, emphasizing the need to reject DRM, provide fans with the freedom to use their music as they like, and the value of incorporating an environmentally-friendly approach to touring.
BNL Get It
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Nettwerk Willing to Change
BNLs partner Nettwerk Music Group (they removed “Records” from their name) is willing to not only change itself on thefly as this industry is in the throws of upheaval, but they are actually willing to be a catalyst of change by submitting their music to a number of new and exciting new music business models.
Terry McBride obviously understands that music is not going to disappear as an industry, and as such he and the artists he represents are willing to engage the evolving new music economy without fear.
Labels Missing the Boat
The major labels are missing the boat. Actually, they are missing several boats. While they continue to pursue legal remedies to control their own customers, opportunity after opportunity are floating by.
For example, I was reading a zdnet blog today that led me to the website [link ]. Have a tune stuck in your head and can’t remember the title/artist? Just hum or sing it and midomi.com searches for user-entries that sound like it. I tried three different songs and they popped up 6th, 1st and 1st in the list. Problem is, of course, the site is limited to songs that users have entered, so hopefully the song you’re thinking of is popular.
Now, imagine if the labels made the real versions of all their songs available to the site. When you find the song you’re looking for you could check out a preview version of it (as opposed to the full version of user-entries) to see if its the matching song, and then be presented with the option to buy the song or album right now. But no, the labels wouldn’t notice these opportunities, instead they want to sue us, or force us to buy via drm’ed iTunes.
Smart, real smart.