Music industry moguls just don't seem to get it

By Peter Vogel

Perhaps you saw the news item a week or two ago when the Pentagon announced a wide-scale blocking of Internet sites on its network of several million computers.

Among sites on that block list are YouTube (recently acquired by Google), MySpace, Photobucket (just taken over by MySpace / Rupert Murdoch), Metacafe (becoming well known for its Steven Bochco subsite, Cafe Confidential at www.metacafe.com/cc), Live365, 1.fm, MTV, ifilm.com, stupidvideos, filecabi (viewer beware!), BlackPlanet, and Pandora.

Most of these sites are so-called bandwidth hogs, sites that can place a strain on corporate networks as usage ramps up. This is particularly true of sites that offer streamed content. YouTube, Live365, and Pandora are good examples.

That's not the case with social networking sites such as MySpace and BlackPlanet. For these the blocking may have been for security reasons. The last thing a military campaign needs is someone posting, perhaps inadvertently, details of mission. The bad guys are just as adept at using technology as any Grade 8 student!

More likely, though, is that it was simply a means to cut down on overall network traffic. What use is a military network if you can't get word to and from the field because the lines are clogged with stupid videos?

The Pentagon noted in a release that many of the sites had been blocked for two years to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and that such blocking was now being implemented worldwide.

Ironically the blocking of Pandora www.pandora.com traffic coincided with a much bigger shutdown for that company on May 16. Pandora's core business is streaming music in way quite unlike any other service. I've been using it for more than a year, but surreptitiously. You see, I'm required to give a U.S. postal code to use the service (12345 worked fine) because technically the music is licensed for American audiences only.

Until relatively recently the Internet really didn't respect borders, but Pandora and others in the business were ordered, under U.S. federal statute, to implement IP-based blocking. Translation: you'd better block access to your service from anyone outside the United States by determining their country of origin from their Internet address.

In addition, Pandora, along with a few other streaming music sites, has been under industry pressure to pay increasingly steep royalties. Tim Westergen, Pandora's founder, explained in a note to listeners that there is no international agreement for streamed music licensing, and that for Canada in particular a year of negotiations had not brought success.

Outcries from Pandora's international listeners were loud and angry. Typical of them are these postings on one of many blogs devoted to the service:

Tragic ... for over 10 years I did not buy music or listen to radio. I completely lost interest because of the garbage the radio stations played. Then along came Pandora and life changed. I began to hear things I had never heard before; I bought CDs again. I began to love music again. Now the corporate types are going to kill it. Silly stupid rich people and their greed.

A little more to the point:

Yes, Pandora is really wonderful, and will be (again) in the future. What with proxies and workarounds, you cannot stop a good thing from happening. Copyright my grandmother's big red toe, man. If Universal or Sony owned this it wouldn't be stopped despite "regional issues." Pandora really makes my day, every day.

This second poster notes that he isn't going to be stopped by legalities. With a little effort, this user plans to mask his Internet address by using a proxy site. Some readers of this column may be familiar with the notion of proxies if they've run across TV program web sites that are blocked to all but American visitors.

I'm guessing that my editor wouldn't take too kindly to my running a list of easy-to-use proxy sites in this column, but let's just say that a certain well-known search engine will gladly spit them out for you.

Therein lies the madness of this situation. No one stops me from listening to KGO in San Francisco or to KOMO in Seattle on my radio, or on my computer, for that matter. The music industry just doesn't get it. CD sales continue to drop like a rock, and then along comes Pandora, a service that reinvigorates music for a huge market, and it draws a sledgehammer.

* * * * *

About three years ago in this space I wrote that digital memory cards would eventually reach the $10 per gigabyte price level. In fact I suggested it would be around two years away.

I was off a little on the time, but here we are. Just crossing my screen this afternoon: a 1 GB MicroSD flash memory card from Kingston, $9.99 with free shipping. Okay, it's American dollars, but at the present rate of exchange that's not too much above $10. Besides, the shipping is free (as long as you have a mailbox in Blaine).

These MicroSD cards have become ubiquitous in cell phones and music players. When I originally suggested a $10/GB price I was only thinking of the then common Compact Flash card: many of the smaller card types were not yet on the market, and 1 GB CF cards were well over $100.

I suggest that this small development, although likely to go unnoticed on a wide scale, is another milestone in digital electronics technology. Perhaps in another three years we'll reach a $1/GB level, although the common capacity may then well be 10 GB.

This would mean that prices for memory cards were roughly halving every year, or slightly longer. You might compare that with Moore's Law for computer processing power, which suggests that processors roughly double in capacity every 18-24 months.

As for that "deal," every few days the editors at CNET News www.news.com comb North American electronics stores and dealers for outstanding bargains and post them as their "deal of the day."

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.