A while back, Kirk wrote an article called “Prepare for the Worst: 4 Simple Digital Media Backup Solutions.” One of the options was the digital Music Locker at MP3tunes, where you could upload your music and store it, secure and password-protected.

This is not file-sharing. File-sharing is, of course, the digital equivalent of what music fans have been doing since the dawn of time: turning other people on to music they love. This is really the exact opposite: it is more akin to locking your music in a safe deposit vault, where only you have the key.

Apparently, EMI didn’t think so, and sued MP3tunes, essentially trying to shut down online storage of music for any purpose whatsoever.

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Whether or not you think that Radiohead’s download-only release of In Rainbows was a success or a failure; a bargain or a rip-off — and there are valid arguments that it was actually all four — you kind of knew that they weren’t the only artist of their stature who were going to try to bypass the traditional Major-Label release strategy.

And, sure enough, after what can only be described as a collective pause while everybody held their breath, in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had at least four artists with established fanbases follow in their footsteps. While each artist is doing something different, they’re all taking a piece from Radiohead’s playbook.

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When they write the history of how the recording industry botched its transition to digital content distribution, they’ll probably devote a whole chapter to the Diamond Rio.

Ugly as it was, the Rio was the first widely available portable MP3 player. While the appearance of the device indicated a clear demand from consumers for portable digital music, the recording industry saw it as a threat. Instead of embracing digital music and working to develop a viable business model for digital content distribution, the RIAA took the manufacturer of the Rio to court and tried to have the product taken off the market. The RIAA was at war with the MP3 format, and claimed that any device capable of playing MP3 files would clearly contribute to piracy.

The RIAA ultimately lost its lawsuit, and the rest is history. While the Rio may seem like a footnote now, it was an important milestone. The court ruling on the Rio case cleared the way for Apple’s iPod, and eventually the iTunes music store.

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The canine crime fighting duo Flo and Lucky were in the news again this week. The dogs, allegedly trained to sniff out counterfeit DVDs, have just completed an assignment in Malaysia where they are said to have helped uncover over $6 million in bootlegged discs. The pair was so successful that counterfeiters put a bounty on their heads, and the government awarded them medals for “Oustanding Service”.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of Flo and Lucky’s story is that media outlets have been quick to regurgitate the MPAA’s claims without actually questioning the dogs’ abilities or the program they’re participating in. Take a closer look at the facts and the two start to look more like publicity hounds than police dogs.

As I noted last year when the dogs made their first appearance in the UK, the pair obviously aren’t trained to smell intellectual property violations. An official press release explained that the dogs “were amazingly successful at identifying packages containing DVDs, which were opened and checked by HM Customs’ representatives.” The press release went on to state, “While all were legitimate shipments on the day, our message to anyone thinking about shipping counterfeit DVDs through the FedEx network is simple: you’re going to get caught.”

The message to people shipping legitimate DVDs is also clear. You can expect that your package may be opened and searched for no good reason.

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I am not normally associated with the tin-foil hat crowd but something has been cropping up with regularity in the news that has been keeping me up all night lately, which then makes me tardy with all sorts of assignments. I am talking about “Peak Oil,” the doomsday scenario that nearly everyone seems to agree we are rapidly approaching or may even be in the throes of already.

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The RIAA has finally won its long running battle to have the Russian music download site AllOfMP3 shut down. The announcement came earlier this week, curiously timed to coincide with Vladimir Putin’s visit with George Bush. Coincidence? Hardly, it’s been widely speculated that the existence of sites like AllOfMP3 were a huge roadblock to Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization.

Almost immediately after the shutdown, a new site called MP3Sparks was launched by MediaServices, AllOfMP3’s parent company. MP3Sparks offers an almost identical selection of music, pricing structure, and encoding options. The new site even supports accounts created on AllOfMp3. Or at least it did while it was online. MP3Sparks is now offline as well, and it’s unclear whether Russian authorities caught on quickly, or if the site might actually be the victim of its own success.

In another coincidence of timing, we’ve been hearing quite a bit about Universal Music Group’s efforts to play hardball with Apple. Universal is apparently refusing to resign a long term agreement to make its catalog of music available on iTunes. Instead, they’ll be negotiating on a month-to-month basis and will have the ability to pull their entire catalog from iTunes on short notice.

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I admit to being a bit old-fashioned, but in my mind, good customer service rarely involves suing your customers. But, for the past several years, that’s just what the RIAA has done. Nothing creates a warm and fuzzy feeling about an industry faster than threats. Makes you feel wanted.

Illegal downloads are a problem. I maintain — because frankly, the RIAA has offered nothing in the way of hard evidence — that the amount of money being lost is quite a bit less than what the press releases suggest. I believe this simply because every download does not represent a lost sale. In many cases, the songs would have gone unsold, unheard, unnoticed.
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We are now a decade into the digital music revolution, and everybody is on board. Everybody, except of course, those who have stood to profit the most from this — the major record labels.

Instead of realizing that this was the future in the same way that their customers did, the labels have ignored, sued, restricted, and DRMed digital music while futzing with CDs in a zillion ways (except, of course, significantly reducing prices) trying to stem the tide. Nothing — outside of iTunes, which was pared with the iPod — has worked. And iTunes has worked more for Apple than the major labels.

But now, there are rumblings that they are ready to throw in the towel, and embrace the 21st Century. And to be fair, we’re only 7 years into that century: they still had 93 years to go.

So the question on the table is this: are the major labels ready to start allowing unrestricted downloads of .mp3z? Files that will play on any device? Files that I can burn and rip and copy and trade and play on anything and open edit and do all of the same things that I was able to do with cassettes and albums and 8-Tracks and CDs?

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Following up on Kirk’s article yesterday on bootlegs, I thought it might be a nice waste of bandwidth if I threw together a list of music that I would purchase instantly if it were only legitimately released. Some of this is music that I have listened to zillions of times, in every format imaginable, as bootlegs were taped or ripped for me over the years. Or purchased on vinyl from long-gone record stores in San Luis Obispo and Westwood. Or maybe they were cassettes I found found at the Camden Town Street Fair; or CDs I came across at the KUSF record swap.

Some of them, of course, came via Napster or other like-minded sites. Hell, a couple I even recorded from the A couple I originally recorded from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. All of them have two things in common: either the record company or the artist thinks that these have no audience and/or artistic merit, and I would buy them in a split-second if they were ever actually legitimately released.

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It’s not widely known, but the first bootleg recording was made by Thomas Edison back in 1902. Edison snuck one of his wax cylinder recorders into a parade where he briefly recorded John Philip Sousa’s band as they passed by. Edison was a huge fan of Sousa and was eager to use his invention to relive the performance in the comfort of his own home. Sousa, on the other hand, hated Edison’s invention and refused to be recorded. Edison knew that his clandestine recording was the only hope he had of ever enjoying Sousa’s music privately. Music fans have been recording and trading live performances of their favorite artists ever since.

Edison’s recording is what we commonly call a bootleg. Bootlegs have been a rite of passage for music lovers throughout the rock era. You discover a band, become obsessed with their music, buy everything you can get your hands on, then move on to unreleased live recordings.

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