Two weeks ago I gave an interview to the rather remarkable Joe Shooman, a fellow Jedi and multi-skilled master extraordinaire. Joe’s writing a book about the MySpace phenomenon called “Whose Space Is It Anyway?” which is due out in March next year. Joe’s an author, radio DJ and also has the best named band in the world – “Joe & The Bastards“, which he’s amusingly invited me to join. How could you say no? The man is going places and has as many irons in the fire as me.

Believe it or not, when I’m not on MySpace, I actually have a life. No, really I do. Ignore what everyone else says. When I’m not on here professing my love for Emma Brown, I do business things. In my industry I’m quite a well known chap and considered fairly serious firepower. So it stands to reason that someone like Joe might hunt me down for a chat, as lots of others tend to do.

I remember when MySpace first arrived. I wasn’t impressed. In truth I have no idea how it got this large. So in January I gave it a go. Since then I’ve fallen in love, made enemies, posted nearly 100 articles on my blog, been haunted by ex-girlfriends, made contact with old friendsI haven’t seen for years, and met a whole load of lovely people I wouldn’t have known otherwise. All my business colleagues on it, and even my Mum checks in to see what I’ve written.

This from Joe sums it the phrase being “Cameron’d” very well:
“I’m kind of observing myself getting deeper and deeper into this, and I know what book I’m supposed to be writing but I want to write a twelve volume opus about it from every angle imaginable.”

Joe recorded the call, and here’s an excerpt. To read the whole thing, you’ll need to buy it. Would be interested to hear what other people think. This is how I talk in real life.

A: I’m a Myspace fiend; I use it every single day. I’m absolutely obsessed with it, as is everybody I know. Although apparently it’s not cool anymore; Facebook is the new thing.
JS: I’d disagree; I’d say Second Life is the one to keep an eye on.
A: Actually someone mentioned this to me; a friend of mine who works for the Internet Advertising Board says, “You’ve got to go and see Second Life.” It’s supposed to be the really big thing, and I don’t know very much about it if I’m perfectly honest with you.
JS: I’ve banned myself from that because I’d do no work. But it is becoming this 3D, Lawnmower Man-style Matrix-type world. It’s fascinating to watch its development.
A: Like a virtual game environment with a real economy; a real life thing. Taking it one step further than The Sims.
JS: Exactly, and people are trading in Linden Dollars, on eBay.
A: I saw that, you can trade credits and scores, it’s actually real financial value that these things have which is just extraordinary.
JS: It’s a symptom of what we’re talking about. And maybe the model that Myspace should be heading towards. So, I’ve got a few signposts I want to get to, but inbetween we can just chat.
A: So where shall we start? You want to look at some perceptions and insight?
JS: Pretty much, I think we’re talking about copyright really but to start it off gently why don’t you give me an overview of what you do?
A: I’m quite young, I’m a spring chicken, I’m a bit of a destructive upstart in the industry which of course is amusing. I was an engineer; I did Red Button applications. I run Digital TX now which is about 54 clients or so. We’ve got Microsoft, Google, all the major studios and record labels, doing about £615 million worth of deals. So I would argue that I’m probably the most high profile IPTV figure that I know of, who’s not working for a big company. I’ve written a lot of articles and I’ve spoken a lot in public but we have a bigger venture coming which is going to be a lot louder than what we’ve done so far. Roughly, in a nutshell!
JS: A career in twenty seconds! Impressive. Obviously Myspace has come into your life fairly recently, but given your background it must have been something you were keeping an eye on for longer than most.
A: Definitely. I never really looked at it very much; I saw it when it first arrived and was just so shocked at how bad it was! It’s so dreadful; it’s utterly dreadful.
JS: Yeah people have said that a lot. It’s a hodge podge of different codes on top of each other.
A: Yeah, it was originally Cold Fusion wasn’t it? And then Microsoft came along and said, “Oh, you’re a big site, can we give you our technology? And we’ll give you the expertise too.” So they could say that they were running Microsoft software, the dot net stuff – and it’s even worse with that stuff. The engine that runs it is a particular type of software that allows you to merge xp.net and Cold Fusion. But it’s horrid. It’s supposed to be a folksy feel when it crashes and falls apart all the time. But it’s not like that at all. All I get is errors, all day long.
JS: All users do. And you can only play so many games of Pac Man in a day.
A: That’s the thing; that’s totally it.
JS: If you had to put a date on it coming on radar, when would that be?
A: for me, the beginning of 2006. When I joined up there were about 92 Million members. But that’s a very interesting thing in itself because that statistic is false. I remember reading an article in it where someone did some basic maths where they polled 30,000 different profiles. And statistically speaking it showed that out of 110 million accounts at that time, that was literally just accounts, but it would generate a realistic figure of forty million (active) members. Which is not insignificant at all, but at the same time it’s not anywhere near where they said it would be.
JS: Dead accounts; people who’ve got pissed off with it; people who’ve fucked it up when they signed up. That sort of business.
A: Yeah, people who registered their account and haven’t bothered deleting it; people who’ve not checked their account in three months. The article was called Myspace Maths or something like that. There’s a bit of smoke and mirrors, unfortunately.
JS: There is a lot of media hype about it which we’ll get on to in a minute. But forty million is still a significant number.
A: Absolutely. There’s very few websites in the world that have that kind of traffic.
JS: So why do you think it’s had such a big take up?
A: It’s cause it’s addictive. I talk about this every single day, with people, about content. We talk about The Long Tail concept; One Percent Rules and all of these things. There’s a lot of stuff, especially since the beginning of the IPTV world and it’s specific to that and digital media. When you’ve got an absolutely unstoppable amount of digital media, an absolute mess of it, it’s impossible to find your way around. That’s the problem with it; it’s incredibly difficult. And you tend to find that the old media way is that you push things at people; whereas the new media way is that people – especially in IPTV, it’s a nightmare – assume that people are going to search or actively look for content. When the old media world says that human beings are lazy and needing things pushed at them. This is getting around to why Myspace is successful. But when you’re outside a tube station a paper is thrust into your hand; if you want to watch football matches, they’re on Sky Sports; you read an advert or read something a journalist’s written. Basically the information is put to you, it’s pushed at you. And if you look at what Myspace does, it’s very clever compared to everything on the other sites, they update you all the time; they’re always pushing things at you. They’re pushing event messages. When you’ve got new messages, new blogs and that kind of thing. They’re continually pushing new notifications at you, and giving you a reason, pushing you back to the site. Or pulling you back, if you like.
JS: The userbase, the searchable database, is a pull economy model.
A: Absolutely; there are a number of ways that they can do it. They are just very clever about the way that they deal with things that are addictive. The sharing of music on different pages – that’s very addictive. And the fact that they’ve basically screwed every dating site in the world. What they’ve gone off the back of is all these different dating community sites like match.com and Faceparty whose business model is charging for messaging. The classic example of this is [removed], which has lost something like 60% of its business because everyone you know’s on Myspace so they’ve got the critical mass issue and you don’t have to pay to message people on Myspace. You can do exactly what you can on all the other dating sites but people can do it all completely for free. Complete with no business model! Which is hilarious.
JS: One aside to that is that by not making itself into a niche site, by not saying they’re a dating site, it’s become the most powerful dating force there is.
A: yeah, absolutely, and most people are on there for dating. It’s incredible. My other half’s on there as it is now. This is the bizarre thing, my sister has just gone to her boyfriend, who she met through Myspace. It’s become a bit of a social force.
JS: It’s changed the way that people decide if they want to go out with each other, because you can find out so much about them.
A: You can screen them. Employers can screen potential candidates; paedophiles can screen potential victims. The other thing is that it’s an instant audience when you’ve got a site of that size. If you’re a band you can immediately generate a fanbase. If you’re like me and you blog a lot, I’ve got something like five thousand views on my blog in the last two or three months. It’s an instant audience – otherwise you’d create your own site and spend three years promoting it to get (an audience) that’s one per cent of the size.
JS: It’s an enabling technology, basically.
A: Yeah. It grabs you an audience very quickly; it’s a quick way to acquire a customer base. Every business I know is on it, even if they’re not even a person. There was this silly thing that they were talking about originally, a marketing idea through all the media buyers, where you would become friends with all the products as opposed to people. The other thing is that social networking’s very natural; we’ve been doing it for three thousand years. There’s nothing about social networking that’s remotely new, and there’s nothing new about user-generated content; we had ‘You’ve Been Framed’ ten years ago. Everything On Demand in the world, we talk about IPTV being On Demand; people make it out, with big hype, as this massive revolution. It’s not. We’ve been doing everything on demand for millennia. You go into a supermarket and you buy a loaf of bread when you want to; it’s on demand. Scheduling broadcasting, from a TV perspective, is actually a very unnatural thing. So a lot of its success is not because it’s a new technology, it’s just automating, in some ways, electronically doing things that we do in a very natural and familiar way.
JS: That brings with it some problems; if everything’s on demand and the schedules are being blown away, what about the copyright holders; the songs, the videos…
A: And my blogs.
JS: Sure. You said Myspace had no business model but that’s kinda not true anymore.
A: They’re trying to get there; since News Corp have started commercialising it you can see it’s the advertising model they’re adopting. Cause the moment they start charging for services… that tells you a lot about the success of Myspace, that they’re not going to attempt to put any premium charging on it. It’s the so-called ‘Freemium’ model where you give away everything for free, and then you introduce a subscription service on top where you make your money from, which is premium. That tells you an enormous amount. The advertising support is on everything. People have said before that it’s just a giant page counter with continual pages and pages to serve adverts on. And it’s very targeted as well. It’s a great way to start.Just this whole crusade of following Youtube and Google Video; I don’t know. It’s very difficult to see where we’re actually going to go next. If I was them, I’d go onto (mobile) devices. But I’ll tell you something; the most impressive thing they’ve ever done is getting things built into instant messenger. That is incredibly smart. I put a business plan together two years ago for a friend who was building a dating site. “What you need is a unified communications model – like eBay are doing, putting Skype into their webpages – you get alerts and communications via an instant messaging tool.” So the next step up (for Myspace), if I were them I’d put a Voice Over IP on the instant messenger. And start allowing people to do free calls. It’s just the same model. Advertising supported models have been here for hundreds of years. You see adverts on ITV which is entirely supported by advertising. Now the censorship is the problem; as well as the business terms and conditions. Brad Greenspan has just sued Murdoch. Because apparently he got it for a knockdown price.
JS: Apparently so. Greenspan’s contention is that, firstly it was a knockdown price – and you can see in the revenues that have come through Google in the interim that it possibly could be considered to be but it’s ultimately a business risk.
A: Well that’s cause he’s clueless! That’s what I’d do, a simple open and shut case in a court: “You’re clueless. They exploited it, got you at a cheap price, made a shitload of money out of you.”
JS: So stop whinging about it! The censorship issue has happened though where if you post links to Greenspan’s new sites in your blog or whatever it comes through on Myspace as just an underscore or a blank hole in the text instead. Which is a dangerous game for Myspace to play, I think.
A: Very much so; the other problem they have is people embedding Youtube videos, which is very popular within Myspace. But bulletins themselves are an act of genius; it’s a brilliant idea. What’s kinda irritating about Myspace, firstly, is the technical faults are getting to the point where everyone I see when I log into my account and get in there is people just getting absolutely furious with them. The second thing is phishing, which is utterly ridiculous. People promoting sites; the fact that anyone can log on. Thirdly, the censorship; fourth is copyright infringement issues. I mean, these guys have more problems than they can shake a stick at, you know?
JS: You are seeing with Gootube…
A: That’s a nice way to put it actually, Gootube!
JS: Thanks! They’re doing a deal with Universal now. And this is related because we’re talking about convergence as well I think; the Zune deal where they’re essentially paying a hardware premium to Universal…
A: This is the advertising supported model they were talking about before. They put the entire catalogue on for free and they deal with this new commercial service where everything’s paid for by advertising. Very brave of them. The other thing is that if Google are monetising the advertising on that site, now they own Youtube Murdoch’s gonna be at pains (not) to piss them off. Because if they’re big partners and they(Google)’re bringing in a lot of cash for Myspace and they (Myspace) start blocking Youtube, they’re going to be at loggerheads with Google in a very big way. And they don’t want to have that at all.
JS: I think what we’re seeing is the emergence of the new major record labels, if you like, the people who can monetise the copyright material are going to be the new gatekeepers.
A: This is the thing; that Myspace supposedly allows bands to go directly to their audiences, which cuts out the middlemen. I read something that said they’re going to allow artists to create their own online stores which is a very serious threat to record labels. That’s extremely dangerous for them, seriously bad territory. So it will come round to who owns the copyright for those songs. If Murdoch owns part copyright in all the songs that are uploaded to Myspace, then that causes some very interesting dynamics at work. You look at John Mayer, Black Label Society, they’ve got tens of thousands of viewers; all they need to do is pop up a small store and they’re already up and running. It’s the power of the audience they’ve harnessed which is why Murdoch likes it because it’s a mass market proposition.
JS: That’s a pull, rather than a push, as well.
A: Very much so. Murdoch is [removed] in the sense that in the grand scheme of things he’s an extremely greedy man, and he cross-promotes endlessly across all the media. Which is common commercial business sense, but if you see the plugs on Sky, in The Sun and News Of The World for Myspace, it’s getting ridiculous. Locking out competitors and that kind of thing. It’s all very much in his interests, and not very much in the interests of the customer, which shows you a lot about his attitudes. It’s a mass market product that he’s bought and he doesn’t give a shit about the people who are there already that he’s selling to: “You need me a lot more than I need you.”
JS: And of course what happened with Myspace was that everyone migrated there from Friendster when they got pissed off with Friendster’s functionality and restrictions.
A: Yeah, they had a limit on things.
JS: Silly stuff presumably to save their servers, but Myspace allow it and their servers are always down as a result probably!
A: It’s crazy. Also the ability to personalise pages, they’ve just got a nice formula. They’ve made it simple for idiots. There’s this whole support community around it where people allow you to generate your own page layouts, hit counters and things like that. It’s allowed people to innovate around it but that’s because it’s free; it’s as simple as that. I know why they haven’t released an API like Google Maps or something, but there’s a couple of different ways you can see it going. Number one is the advertising, the music online store, those two particular things are going to be very key. But the impression I get is for Murdoch it’s just actually a way to herd the crowd. But then again the boss of Google predicted it would be the best investment Murdoch’s ever made.
JS: Who can tell; everybody’s speculating wildly at the moment. And ‘wildly’ is probably the right word to use, actually.
A: Yeah. I read something where this guy reckoned Myspace would be worth £18-20 Billion, which is just absurd. Look at Orkut on Google – it’s shit. That’s why I don’t take what Google are saying for granted. It’s just the most dreadful website in the world.
JS: They have to have it but it’s a very transient technology anyway. People aren’t going to use it if it’s crap – although Myspace is still being used!
A: It’s Bebo and Facebook now; that’s the thing. Websites are becoming web applications, and with the advent of IPTV which is a medium that uses internet technology, any device that speaks IP can speak to any other. So you’re getting to the point where you’re getting these consolidations. Community is no longer about pages on the net – they’re about other ways to integrate. Like VOIP, Skype with eBay – they’ve gone from being this Web 2.0 model, this whole software application, to wider communications. And that’s the next step. 2D web pages are one thing, but being able to call people directly from them is an entirely different thing, on different devices.
JS: And historically, if you go right back to the birth of the web, it’s kinda come full circle. It was meant to be a read/write interface.
A: Very much so; the Web, when it originally was created, was a document management system. By Tim Berners-Lee. It’s strange, cause when we talk about the platform that we’re building, we’re bringing the internet to television, but the philosophy of the internet; not internet TV but set top boxes and everything else. People ask us what they can do with Bell and we say, “Well, what can you do with the internet? You can make a website.” That’s the kind of scope we’re talking, it’s the freedom to do things, it’s empowering and enabling people to do things. Like build crappy little page layouts; the simple little things that excite people. And some of those layouts are dreadful!
JS: Yeah, but again, not so for the people who have made them! It’s called ‘Myspace’ – it’s Their Space. And if Murdoch, or whoever, is going to make it His Space… it’ll end up being just His Space, and his alone.
A: It’s interesting that if you look at the majority of usage around Myspace, it’s based around communication. I remember speaking to [removed] about this and the most commonly visited pages are messaging and bulletins. It’s about communicating with other people. Reaching out to other people. Things like the classified ads don’t fly; groups don’t really fly. Yeah, you go and visit bands you like and that kind of thing, but it’s predominantly about communicating with others. So when you put your top eight together you’re advertising to other people about who your favourite people are. It’s based around talking to other people and it’s all based around that core way of doing things. It’s about pushing ideas and notifications of bulletins and messages and that kind of thing to people. The other stuff that’s added on – which wanky executives would call ‘added value’ – just doesn’t really fly. Your homepage, your bulletins, your messaging, your top eight, your profile – the core features which power that site are far more interesting. It’s the Pareto Principle – 80% of the features… but it’s an interesting precedent because they’re going to have to do a lot to keep up now. The competition’s going to be pretty fierce and their major battle is going to be in retaining an experience for people which isn’t frustrating. So technical error reports on every single page – they have to get that sorted, or they’re in serious trouble. The paedophile scam’s one thing, but phishing and technical breakdowns are another.
JS: What I struggle with is how they are going to monetise it. Yes, the advertising model is one thing and it will bring in a huge amount of money, but it’s not a killer application for Myspace. It’s just an extension of what’s happening already.
A: Yeah. They’re just putting adverts around everything that’s there. It’s people’s tolerance of it; how much advertising they’re likely to take, because if they introduce a Freemium service, that’s commercial suicide for them. So there’s only a couple of things they can do: monetising coms like VOIP, and advertising. But, again, it’s how much advertising the users will take, because if you start slamming advertising everywhere you’re in trouble. They might do a broker model like eBay where if you offer a download store to the artists and the bands, they might offer something like a revenue share where Myspace takes 30% of the sale of the track, depending on who hosts the material. Youtube’s bandwidth bill in its first year was $12 Million; a million dollars a month. So their infrastructure cost is getting massive. Doing Myspace Video, now, is insane: if you can’t even keep your normal service up and running on your website you don’t want to be introducing video. I think it’s Limelight who hosts all of that stuff? What they’re doing isn’t particularly tricky; it’s just very badly coded. That’s the problem. The development of the site is so dreadful. The cross-browser compatibility is just awful, and there’s things like if you edit a blog and resubmit it the time’s completely changed. I’m a developer so I know exactly what that is, and exactly how to change that. It’s only two or three lines (of code). The fact that they can’t even be bothered to check two or three lines says a lot. If they got somebody professional on it they could start developing it properly, even the Microsoft teams are pretty appalling about it as well.
JS: I guess they would say that “It works, 120 million pages are on it so it can’t be that bad.” Which is bollocks.
A: Yeah they probably would. But, no! It’s 40 million people which is a third of that, and they have no way of measuring how pissed off people

are. JS: People are spending a hell of a lot less time on Myspace.
A: Yeah, I read it in Wired magazine. The amount of time people are spending on sites; they tend to disappear after their peak period of two to three years. Friendster was two and a half hours, and now it’s two and a half minutes. And Myspace is eleven minutes or something.
JS: That’s also a function of people becoming familiar with the technology, and when the shine of it being new wears off then it just becomes part of your communications network.
A: It’s all about people. You don’t communicate with websites; this is the problem which drives me mad. It’s a social anthropology question more than anything else. It’s about people communicating with other people; they’re not using websites. This is the thing with broadband connections: you don’t buy it for the broadband connection; you buy it to look at a website. You look at a website to look at news, admittedly, but effectively you’re interacting with other human beings. If you read a news report, that’s something that another human being has written which you are reading. And when you’re on Myspace you’re looking for messages from other people and sending them to other people. You’re not using it cause it’s a great system with great functionality, you’re doing it because you’re meeting new people or building an audience – and it’s all based around being human. There’s an enormous amount of detail you could go into in that regard.
JS: Yeah, I’m kind of observing myself getting deeper and deeper into this, and I know what book I’m supposed to be writing but I want to write a twelve volume opus about it from every angle imaginable. And actually it will be out of date by the time it’s written; it’s got a built in obsolescence because every day something changes and all the fucking goalposts move again.
A: You wanna try writing about IPTV – it changes every hour! I’m probably one of the best known authors about it and even I have a problem keeping up.
JS: That’s the world we live in now; everything is accelerated. And if you go back to the music industry, which is kinda my background cause predominantly I’m a music journalist, and have been in bands and all the rest of it – the turnover in bands is staggering now. And the expectation is staggering. Socially, or culturally, if you like, there’s a generation growing up with this concept that ‘new is good’.
A: Well the way that people interact now; I look at my dad’s generation and the way that they watch TV and consume media, it’s incredibly passive. And my generation was the one that grew up when computers turned up and the internet first appeared, and we’re still pretty active about things; but the generation below us – the way that they behave is just extraordinary. How active they are in consuming media. I had a conversation with [removed] earlier today who’s coming in for our project, and he said he was getting frustrated because he can see everything happening, and everyone’s saying they’ve got a window of 18-36 months, but he’s getting angry and telling them it’s going to be twice as fast as they think it’s going to be. And I’m agreeing with him because I’m seeing this happen now and I know; I can see the speed at which things are happening, and a lot of people are comparing what’s happening in terms of social networking in digital media with the birth of the internet. They say, “The internet took ten years to take off, it’ll be the same for TV and the media.” What they forget is that we now have the power of the internet behind us to power that change. That in itself is extraordinary. There’s a thermodynamic law that says that the rate of development is, effectively, exponential, the easier it is for people to communicate with each other. The easier it is to communicate, the higher the speed of development. It’s a very simple, basic physical law. So if you have a tool at your disposal which allows people to communicate all over the world, any time and in any way that you want, with a global audience, you are not looking at a simple development timeframe of a simple couple of years. You’re talking about something that’s massively accelerated.
JS: Let’s talk about the copyright and content issue. I don’t know how to unravel that one.
A: Nobody does!
JS: DRM is dead and people haven’t accepted it; in terms of copy protected CDs and time-stamped expiring tracks and that sort of thing. The market has spoken and they don’t want to be dictated to like that.
A: No they don’t. And you’ve got people who are wanting to keep control of it and they’re failing very dismally. The record labels are saying that digital now makes up to 20% of their revenues every year. What’s changed within the labels is interesting; they’ve gone from being direct controllers of what’s going on to changing to become wholesalers. They no longer operate on an exclusive basis, they’ll deal with absolutely everyone who comes to them. They’ve come to accept that but it’s been forced on them. They’ve looked down the line with some very clever people. With digital media, when the copy gets preserved, when it gets transferred, you can’t control the spread of a file. What you can control is people’s access to it so what you’ve got in the world, if your entertainment follows you wherever you go now, via the internet, then rights are allocated to people as opposed to territories and platforms and countries. Which is enormously difficult. And things like Myspace just fuck everything up. That and Slingbox cause absolute chaos. Rights deals are massive: they’re about six inches thick. And they’re so arbitrary, there’s no commonality between any contract I’ve ever dealt with.
JS: People are talking about things like blanket licences.
A: Like Youtube’s got, like a public performance licence. It’s the only thing they can do at the moment. Tony and Guy’s TV system is run by Cube Music, based in Kingston, and they have a blanket public performance licence that allows them to do that, but it’s just not possible to licence (Myspace) because you cannot control the spread of files. So it’s impossible to licence specifically.
JS: So do you have a hardware levy? It comes back to this Zune thing.
A: Like in a DRM system. People will get around it.
JS: At the end of the day if we’re talking about people, if you’ve got a piece of music on your Myspace page, a person has created that and they deserve to be paid for their copyright and what they’ve done to enrich your life. That’s how art gets perpetuated.
A: To a certain extent. That’s what happened in the forties with ASCAP. When they started playing radio over the air for free there was an absolute backlash and now it’s all happening all over again. They did the same with cassettes and CDs – they just have a big old strop and eventually it all slows down. Download’s become more popular than the physical media chart. It’s incredibly difficult; it depends if that’s the model you want to adopt. That copyright being paid for every performance has only been with us since the 1940s, or the twenties maybe. Comparitively speaking in human history it’s a very new development. We’ve been playing music freely on the side of the road and having public performance for hundreds of years. It depends on the context of it. There’s things like the Creative Commons licence, which also changes things, allows people to modify them. But the problem with doing things with DRM is that consumers hate it, it complicates things and blocks access to the media, and the problem with advertising is that it always creates a surge of technology designed to avoid it. Take the popularity of Sky+ and TiVo. So there is always a resistance against commercialising art, because people always want it for free. And in some respects that’s not really very compatible: the expression of feeling and emotion – and money.
JS: And yet there’s a money trail you can follow between an idea and a track being released.
A: Yeah there are costs.
JS: It’s really difficult, and this is the issue with it in a music industry sense. Myspace, as a social communications tool, in the same way that Tim Berners-Lee implemented a load of different ideas in a clever and user-friendly way, Myspace has basically done exactly that.
A: Absolutely, it’s just combined a lot and found a formula which works for it. When I speak to bands, friends of mine, they always ask, “Can we put our music on our site, we just want to put a 30 or 60 second clip, what do we do? We don’t want people to steal it.” And I say, “Don’t be ridiculous. Put all your music on, full-length, but do it at 96kbps so it sounds like crappy radio. Then if people want to buy it they can buy the high definition, 320kbps track if they want. So you allow them to preview, they can get the whole track and then they can exchange it; throw it everywhere you want to.” Another interesting angle on doing this is selling eBooks. There was a protection system where you had to add a password, or a code to access the eBook. Which doesn’t stop many people, they just buy an access code and put it on a peer-to-peer network. But this particular vendor was very, very clever and made your access code your credit card number. Which is really smart because there’s no way in a million years you’re gonna give out your credit card number to anyone. It’s little innovations like that, just thinking about different ways of doing things. Eventually we’re not going to have physical media anyway – it’s all going to run across the network so we won’t have access to it in the first place. We’ll keep a local cached copy maybe, but eventually when we get tracks we’ll pull them off the network first. It’s a very difficult thing to police. Myspace is an audience, it’s not really a distribution system as such.
JS: By default it’s become one.
A: We can download all the MP3s that people put on their pages anyway. I can download the music player that people are putting on their pages, decompile it on my desktop, decompile the code and see how the XML file’s passed and just nick the MP3 via URL. I know that’s how bands are doing it, they externally host. 80% of people are going to pay for it but there’s always going to be the other 20%. Be it software piracy or music piracy there’s always 20% who are doing the pirating, and finding a way around it. It depends how vast that piracy is. Cause piracy at the moment is a reaction to the music industry’s model – it’s not a serious criminal enterprise. And if the music industry embraced the way that people deal with music at the moment it would cease to become piracy; it would just become the normal way of doing things. Piracy, in my view, is organised crime: that’s what we need to be worried about.
JS: There is one thing I want to say about that; at the moment MP3s are King Delivery Format. But when everybody’s got a fat enough broadband pipe you can have full-length, top quality files quite happily. So for the next couple of years that’s cool but as soon as the broadband’s sorted out in this country properly there’s gonna be a whole other set of problems.
A: In Hong Kong you can buy a gigabit a second. You can buy your own wavelength.
JS: Ludicrous.
A: And 100 megabits in Denmark and Sweden for the last five years. And we pay £20 a month for 2meg. Unbelievable.
JS: The technology’s pulling toward an even bigger mess of copyright I think.
A: The trick is the delivery mechanism. Audio’s fine and you can do a lot with it over the net but when you get to things like video you’ve got a bit of a step change. Broadband’s enabled people to download movies. But for video to work on a worldwide basis it has to be a commodity; it has to be incredibly cheap – literally pennies. The problem is you’ve got the carriers, the guys who own the fibreoptic cable, and the networks, who are trying to turn it into a premium service which you pay for by the minute or you pay a lot of money for. So if there’s a way to monetise those pipes – which we’re building into our venture – then you can start offering it. But for that kind of thing to happen, bandwidth needs to be a commodity and connections need to get bigger – which they will.
JS: What’s coming through to me clearly throughout this project is that there is actually a lot of money in the system. But it’s not necessarily spreading effectively to the people who are creating the content that draws people into the whole thing, to these sites.
A: There is, they’ve got far too much money. The problem that I get when I go to the labels and the studios is that there’s incredibly bright and clever people working in lots of different departments. The heads of department are all pro-DRM, but when you go a little further down the chain the Bus. Devs, the managers and some of the scouts; the guys who are on the edge – they are completely different. I mean, most of them have got Limewire in the office! They’re just the same as the rest of us; the problem is that their ideas, beliefs and passions are squashed when it comes to board level. There’s a glass ceiling that doesn’t allow them. The people above them, the executives and bosses just don’t get it. They don’t agree with them. So all the talent that they have amassed inside those places is, effectively, going to waste.
JS: there will come a time fairly soon when that’s not gonna be the case anymore because somehow, by the old guard losing their jobs because purely of the bottom line, or there’ll be new independent companies who do things in a way that clearly works better.
A: I hope so, that’s going to require the ability to do the delivery and the distribution which is where Myspace fits in. Because it enables the bands to go directly to their fans. That’s what it’s going to require and they need the distribution system to be there to be able to back it up to enable them to do that. To enable them. And the people who are controlling those enabling types of systems are big brands like Murdoch, and music labels. So if they get their act together and realize that then they can keep control, but if they don’t then they’re in a lot of trouble. The problem is you’re so far into the woods that you can’t see the trees