Blocking the Pirate Bay: A Tale of VPNs, Proxy Servers and Carrots

Today the UK’s High Court ruled that UK ISPs must block access to the Pirate Bay on their networks.  The idea isn’t a new one, Wippit’s CEO Paul Myers first touted the idea of UK ISPs voluntarily blocking access to P2P sites nearly a decade ago.  In some ways it is intriguing that it has [...]

What Happened to the RIAA’s Missing 3.5 Million?

The RIAA has highlighted research which indicates that its closure of P2P site Limewire has significantly reduced P2P levels in the US.  Unfortunately the evidence is not as clear cut as it may first appear. According to the various sources the RIAA cites (mainly a combination of Nielsen and NPD data) the effects between September [...]

When the Media Industries Really Need to Start Worrying About Piracy (and it’s not yet)

I’ve been a digital media analyst pretty much as long as mainstream music piracy has been around.  I’ve tracked the rise and fall of many sites, services, networks, applications and protocols, including MP3.com, Napster, Music City Morpheus, iMesh, Audio Galaxy, Bear Share, eMule, Gnu Network, Kazaa, Limewire, Pirate Bay, Rapidshare, Megaupload etc etc.  The point [...]

The Music Format Bill of Rights

Today I have published the latest Music Industry Blog report:  ‘The Music Format Bill Of Rights: A Manifesto for the Next Generation of Music Products’.  The report is currently available free of charge to Music Industry Blog subscribers.  To subscribe to this blog and to receive a copy of the report simply add your email address [...]

Megaupload: Another Mole Down The Hole

By utterly amazing coincidence, ahem, just as the US Congress is considering Sopa and Pipa, cloud locker service Megaupload gets closed down and its top executives arrested and refused bail.  The timing is of course important, but nature of the media industries’ latest scalp is even more intriguing.  Megaupload, along with Rapidshare, Filestube and other [...]

Sopa Highlights Media Industry Strategic Failings

The controversial US copyright and piracy acts Sopa and Pipa (see this Wired piece for a Bluffer’s Guide on what they are) have been thrust centre stage by Wikipedia’s planned protest black-out on Wednesday.  It has taken an entity the size of Wikipedia to bring the debate out of the confines of the digerati and [...]

In Conversation With Boinc’s Adam Kidron

Here is the video of my conversation yesterday with the CEO and founder of the forthcoming music service Boinc.  We discuss a number of things, including: the state of digital music Facebook’s potential impact on the space reestablishing value in music addressing the emerging market challenge Adam also shares his vision for the music industry [...]

‘Music As Free’ – What You Think

I’m going to do something I’ve never done before, I’m posting the highlights of the comments from a blog post.  The quality and the quantity of the comments was such that they deserve extra attention.  In fact the quantity is part of the reason I’m doing this summary: they added up to just under 8,000 [...]

Why the ‘Music As Free’ Argument Just Doesn’t Hold Water

Regular readers of this blog will know that I take a pretty hard line on the idea that music can ‘just be free’ and that I take a fair share of flak for my position  (see my previous post here for background). Numerous sites, forums and discussion boards pride themselves on their ‘everything should be [...]

Why UK Artists are Taking a Strong Stance on Music Piracy

Yesterday 100 UK based musicians got together in a behind-closed-doors meeting to thrash out their differences and agree on a position on file sharing.  This was done in the context of a deadline next week for submissions to the UK government on suggested provisions for tackling file sharing.  It also comes in the week that [...]