Smoke and Mirrors

Hats off to William Dyson for his recent post in "The Emperor has no clothes"! He asks us to question the real value of all the many recent Snocap announcements. So far, Snocap is a superstar at PR but to date has had very little success in building out its store inventory. There may be a few reasons for this. I've asked several independent artists and labels about their MySpace/Snocap experience and they have unanimously said it has been painful, mostly because of such a poor user experience and lack of clear instructions as to how to get the store working on the MySpace page. Further, the inventory is exclusively independent -- and music lovers, even those who go to MySpace, want choice. This means they also want major label content. The Snocap store, as far as I can tell, has not done any "deals" with major labels to sell their content in the MySpace store (albeit DRM protected). Is all of this anti-major label, or anti-mainstream artist, or anti-establishment, perhaps just anti-consumer?

And the implication that they are close to doing "deals" with major labels for mp3s is false. I'd bet that Snocap is no closer than anyone else (Amazon, for example, who is using all of its might) to convincing the majors to make their music available as mp3s. Eventually this will happen, and I’d suggest it is likely in the next 6 to 18 months, but won’t be because of Snocap. In his post, William also asks artists to take responsibility for the format that their music is sold in. I agree. This is the way forward. Eventually artists will learn that 1) the majors, in their current incarnation, have very little to offer in this new digital world and 2) MySpace is ripping them off -- all of the money generated on the site goes to Rupert Murdoch (yes, Newscorp and Fox), the very same group of people who are trying to "guide" (read: brainwash) Americans. But putting politics aside (and I don’t know how musicians can do this as they were the backbone of the cultural revolution in the 60s, encouraging people to challenge the status quo), how about the fact that MySpace is profitting from copyright infringement on a massive scale?

Back to Snocap. It is a store that is selling a very limited number of wares. That in itself does not warrant criticism. But their recent announcements about deals with so many labels is akin to a store billing itself as a supermarket and saying, “We are now announcing that in addition to dish soap we also have laundry soap.” Big deal! A music store needs to be a supermarket that makes all music available regardless of packaging (format). Until Snocap grows up they are a non-issue and have done very little to change the world of music.

While on the theme of smoke and mirrors, I have to say more power to you Pete Cashmore. You are finally waking up to the fact that PR firms and their clients are using you and other bloggers to spread the word about non-events. The partnership deals that many bloggers are talking about these days are only those done in the normal course of business and are rarely startling. Many of the deals announced (Snocap, Lastfm, etc.) are so much like those that every music store has had to negotiate in order to have the right to sell music from each label. That in itself does not make news. What does make news are new and interesting business models. We've already got one big machine trying to control the news. Many of us who read blogs hope to find fair and challenging points of views. Scrutiny should be applied to press releases from mainstream and "alternative" players in the digital music arena. But then again it is about taking personal responsibility. As readers it is our job to see through the smoke screens.

Posted at 02:28PM Mar 18, 2007 by Shelley Taylor in Music  |  Comments[3]