Twitter fight! Twitter fight!

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

Twitter fight! Twitter fight!

@zedshaw: @tunecoregary Holy crap man, write a blog post. Did you seriously message me that much today?

I recently had a long, occasionally sarcastic discussion on Twitter with Zed Shaw. Zed is a famously iconoclastic developer best known for creating the web server software Mongrel, that TuneCore and thousands of other websites use every day. He's a very, very smart guy, and lately he's been getting into music. He has some typically iconoclastic thoughts about how artists can sell their music directly,here, here and here.

This led to some spirited tweets between me (@tunecoregary) and@zedshaw. It got verbose, so he asked me to write a blog post. Voila. Here's a response to just a few points from the entries at the URLs above. Zed's right in several areas but way off in others.

What’s needed is a mechanism for a musician (or any artist) to put their music on their site, and then let a fan click a button to buy it. Wow, revolutionary right? A widget that plays some music, and then has a link to where you can buy the music. Gee, that sounds kinda hard, I wonder if I could do it.

We're doing that right now, except the links go to iTunes, where the music is already hosted, and they handle payment and download. That's got its plusses and minuses, everyone knows it. So maybe artists could go direct. Enormous questions about the specific mechanisms of payment (is it PayPal?), fulfillment (is it streams, downloads, partials, unlocks, what happens when a download/stream is interrupted?), copyright (there's incredible legal exposure here at all levels, who's responsible?) or quality issues/returns--those are questions merely at the selling end, what about the accounting end? But forget about all that and about the demands of artists and fans (who always want choices, choices) for a moment.

Direct sales are definitely possible, it's true. Artists have sold their CDs out of the trunks of cars at their shows for years. Selling direct off your own website is kind of like that. I expect most artists would still rather get into stores where more customers are. Since the Towers, Sam Goodys and Virgin Megastores of the world have collapsed or are on life support, those stores are now digital. It is true that they act as "walled gardens," where you search and browse only among music that has been hosted on those sites' digital shelves. Part of why we founded TuneCore was to stock the infinite shelf space of iTunes and Amazon so full of independents that it would lower those walls as much as possible. So far, that's working pretty well.

I would love for TuneCore widgets to offer direct sales to customers and allow artists to set their own pricing and completely bypass the stores such as iTunes. Unfortunately that is rife with a number of details around fulfillment and copyright that will take some time to work out. It's not as simple as an XSPF file and a few lines of Python.

As soon as there’s good search engines for music, and a good browser for music that does not honor walled garden we’ll see a massive change in the business. First to go will be these middle men...

If "middlemen" are not nimble enough to cope with the rapidly changing field, that is correct. If they truly are the "middlemen" that Zed believes us to be. If pushing files and pulling a cut of the cash was all they did, just maybe Zed might be right. However, if they provide a useful range of services and charge a fair price for it, they will survive. Further, someone who builds the search engine will become a new middleman (because of Google, SEO is a huge business) and whoever builds the browser software will probably do okay as well, in influence if not revenue (such as Firefox improving web standards compliance). And someone like TuneCore with a nice tidy place for artists to accumulate payments and host artists' assets and offer one-click or easy distribution to new venues will do just fine.

Zed also says this:

For whatever reason, Amazon caved to the labels, and in order to get the right to sell f---ing Britney Spears songs, Amazon probably agreed to cut out any potential competitors to the current business model.

That's not true. The sale of music online is rife with copyright issues, fraud and worse. This is the law, not the opinions of labels (granted, the labels had a lot of opinion on the writing of the law in the first place). TuneCore regularly pulls down albums that have been proven to contain uncleared samples or other stolen work. Most online stores have enough on their plate with customers. Stores aren't interested in dealing with hundreds of thousands of individual artists. They'd much prefer to let us do that. They love us, and we make their jobs easier. Why would they go direct and have to build that overhead of support and management? They'd have to charge more off the back end and the artist would make LESS money.

I'm paraphrasing, but Zed strongly implies that people like TC add little or nothing to the production chain and take revenue illegitimately, either up front or back end. That makes me sad. Zed apparently doesn't understand that a good distributor provides a useful service to artists, and he makes it clear he feels the sooner we can be cut out of the chain the better. As someone who has spent the last three years of his life helping artists earn money from their work, I have to respond. TuneCore provides label-like services without the traditional "sign here and give us your rights forever and the bulk of your earnings forever" handcuff model. TuneCore is most definitely NOT a label, or a "middleman." I built this company to be the good guys of the music business and I still believe strongly in that.

Another point: Zed may be right in that a cheaper competitor to TC might come along, even now there's some, but since when is "cheaper" the same as "better"? Eventually the digital music distribution space is going to be like web hosting - full of fly-by-night companies who offer cheaper and cheaper rates for no-frills service--because there's demand, and demand creates lots of different models. But then it's up to TuneCore to provide value for money. This is true of any business.

As for distribution channels and walled gardens: iTunes and Amazon MP3 are on the top of the heap right now, but that will not always be the case. TC will adapt to work with whatever new model comes along. I always conceived of TuneCore's distribution as agnostic, not dependent on iTunes or Amazon or eMusic or anyone. I'd love to seed torrents of artists' music to promote themselves, if thats what they want. We'd be happy to offer more streaming, or on demand CD printing, or direct sales via widget where the artist sets the price point. All that stuff is great, and we're working on as much as possible. But it has to be sensitive to a lot more than just the mechanics of moving the file, grabbing the cash and walking away. It's just not that simple, and the complexities are precisely where a PARTNER is just what's needed. If it's a fair partner, and a smart one, and a knowledgeable one, why not use them?

Here's to your success as a working musician.