Also at Ars Techica, a look at what exactly happened with Qtrax. You will recall late last January at MIDEM that a new company called Qtrax announced it had made deals with all the major labels to allow free downloading of music—25 million songs’ worth. The service was to be supported by ad sales. The site announced it was open for business and claimed an immediate half-million downloads of its browser software.

The only problem is that the majors immediately said they hadn’t signed a deal yet, and Qtrax had to back down. The story in Ars in so many words makes it clear that the company’s CEO, Allan Klepfisz, was full of crap from the gitgo, though Klepfisz says its still going to go online at some point. From the story:

It’s hard to imagine how a company that spent five years quietly trying to license rights suddenly jumped the gun and launched without those rights, but it happened. Klepfisz admitted that the launch had “issues” but insists that he was blindsided by the labels’ public pronouncements that no deals had yet been done. In his view, the rights had been secured. Only while at MIDEM, in the midst of the launch festivities, did he start to get hints that the labels didn’t see things the same way. And then he learned about a “hitch” in his big plans for Qtrax.

Klepfisz won’t say what the “hitch” was, but it’s clear that the labels weren’t yet fully on board with the Qtrax idea. While Klepfisz talked about a coming relaunch of the service as inevitable, it became clear during his remarks that Qtrax has not, in fact, yet manage[d] to secure those licenses.

Emphasis added. The other interesting tidbit in the story is that Qtrax didn’t really have an ad-supported business plan, either. Here’s the fine print of that free music:

Qtrax wants to be [a] legal method to grab music, but it’s more of a “free as in beer” service than a “free as in speech” one. The Qtrax service requires a user to 1) view ads, 2) deal with specially DRMed files that play only in the Qtrax browser, 3) consent to having playback data tracked and uploaded to Qtrax, 4) not transferring music to a portable device, 5) being online to continually refresh the DRM licenses, and 5) being prepared for upsell opportunities like concert tickets and merchandise.

Ars Technica notes the year anniversary of the RIAA’s war on college students with a chat with RIAA prez Cary Sherman.

As Billboard noted in a column I mentioned last week, CD sales are down another nearly 20 percent for January from last year. The effect the RIAA’s campaign against its customers is having can only be described a truly excellent. Sherman is now in the precise position of a captain of a sinking ship directing his crew to take pot shots at the rats leaving it.

But Ars is polite.

Here’s how the numbers look after a year. The RIAA has sent out 5,404 letters in 13 “waves” to over 160 colleges and universities. Of the 5,003 settlement letters sent prior to the batch of 401 that went out last week, “more than” 2,300 of those have resulted in the targeted students settling with the RIAA. 2,465 students have been hit with lawsuits, and all of those are moving through the legal system at different rates. At $3,000 per settlement, over 2,300 settlements translates into at least $6.9 million.

There are other numbers you can generate from those figures. For instance, let’s estimate, I don’t know, $5,000 in RIAA legal fees for each of the cases it pursues. Multiply that by the roughly 2500 cases, and you have more than $10 million. Even if the group’s legal fees are half that, it’s still a wash financially, before you take into account the millions more its silly media campaign costs. And, as the continuing decline in sales indicates, it’s obvious the group’s war is having no effect.

You want to call the effort quixotic, but Don Quixote wasn’t sadistic, vengeful and grim.

The interview is mostly filled with Sherman’s spinning whatever questions Ars asks. Like this:

“Our basic survey data is that the majority of consumers don’t have a problem with the lawsuits,”   [Sherman said]. “You would never know that from reading blogs and websites, [but] when you go out to the general public, our favorables/unfavorables haven’t changed at all.”

But of course, among not the general public but music fans, one suspects the group’s unfavorables have changed. (On the other hand, it’s possible they couldn’t go any lower!) There are two interesting discussions. One is when Sherman contends that the leveling off of activity on the music networks is a result of the RIAA suits. But a rep from Big Champaign, which monitors such activity, says it’s simply a case of market saturation.

The other is when Sherman is asked why Harvard is absent from the list of schools the RIAA has targeted. Ars speculates that it’s due to the industry’s being afraid of teeing off some of the legal talent at Harvard. That seems a little thin; a lot of colleges and universities have serious law schools, right?

As R. Kelly awaits trial in Chicago on child porn charges, a new sideshow on the R&B star’s personal life has opened up. It turns out he was boffing his publicist’s daughter.

You’re probably wondering how old the daughter was; fortunately, she’s 21, which is pretty old for Kelly, who is 41 and has been involved in at least three child-sex or child-pornography investigations.

The woman, Maxine Daniels, is the daughter of Regina Daniels, until recently a longtime publicist for Kelly, and George Daniels, who is described by the Chicago Sun-Times as a “noted music retailer” in Chicago. George Daniels has accused Kelly of having an inappropriate relationship with his daughter.

After Regina Daniels’ departure, Kelly’s camp released a statement, saying,

It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage expressed by George and Regina Daniels over R. Kelly’s relationship with Mr. Daniels’ adult daughter, Maxine. The fact is that they had no problem with the relationship—indeed, they encouraged it—while Ms. Daniels was on Mr. Kelly’s payroll.

The statement continues:

It was Regina Daniels, then working as a publicist for Mr. Kelly, who persuaded him to attend her stepdaughter’s 21st birthday party. And it was Regina Daniels who shortly thereafter gave her stepdaughter Mr. Kelly’s private phone number, with the admonition: ‘Don’t tell your father.’ It was only after Ms. Daniels resigned her position to avoid being fired for incompetence that her stepdaughter’s relationship suddenly became an issue for her and her husband.

There matters stood, until the daughter, Maxine Daniels, came out last week to say what really happened. Her version, given to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, is this:

I take full responsibility for my actions. My stepmother and father didn’t know about my relationship with the singer because I knew and he knew that they wouldn’t approve … so I tried to keep it a secret, but when my stepmother found out about our relationship, she resigned because she felt that Rob had ‘crossed the line’ by dating a girl that he has known since she was 7 years old.

The “crossed the line” phrase comes from a statement from Regina Daniels when she left Kelly’s employ: “There are some lines you don’t cross.”

Let’s see: Over the 14 years she worked for him, R. Kelly married a fifteen-year-old, lied about it, and then was forced to have the marriage annulled; had a video tape become public showing him performing a variety of sex acts on a girl—including urinating on her—police say was in her early teens at the time; and had a digital camera surface containing what police said were photos of him having sex with another underage girl. (Kelly goes on trial on charges stemming from the videotape in May; charges from the digital camera were dropped after a judge in Florida disallowed the search of the house that produced the camera. )

Those are the documented charges against Kelly. Even by the elastic moral rules of the music business, the lines that Regina Daniels thinks you can cross seem pretty out there.

(By the way, how can you assess the competence of a publicist who has a client like that to work with? The amazing thing about Kelly is that he has been able to continue his career in the five full years since the videotape came to light, enabled not just by a seemingly incompetent court in Chicago but also the radio stations that continue to play his music, the promoters who book his concerts, the other artists who record with him, and the fans who buy his tickets. Isn’t it weird that he’s allowed to tour, where young girls pay money to be in the same room with him? )

Maxim has apologized to the Black Crowes for reviewing an album that the reviewer hadn’t listened to, AP reports:

The Crowes’ manager, Pete Angelus, said the magazine explained that its review was an “educated guess.”

Maxim editorial director James Kaminsky responded Tuesday with this statement: “It is Maxim’s editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers.”

Link via Romenesko..

Last year was no great shakes, and this year it seems overall viewership dropped a full 20 percent. From Variety:

The 21.9 rating is also considerably below the 25.5 rating earned by the 2003 Academy Awards telecast, which set the low-water mark for viewership when it averaged just over 33 million viewers. It would seem to be a long shot for this year’s show to come in above the 2003 figure, even with population increases.

In other words, this could be the lowest-rated show of recent decades. The telecast, stripped down, even short, bore marks in tone and quality of the effects of the writer’s strike, which gave the presenters a limited time to put a show together. But even that can’t excuse the lack of a substantive tribute to Ingmar Bergman. What in the hell is wrong with them?

Jon Stewart should have come out with guns blazing; couldn’t his writers come up with ten good jokes in a week? Instead, he was subdued, pressing on somewhat wanly after his opening few lines went nowhere. While the Academy can attribute the low ratings to the dismal mood of Hollywood post-strike, it’s also true that someone wasn’t trying very hard.

The quality of the show is an issue distinct from the ratings, however. That’s the Academy’s big problem. What’s going to happen if the membership continues its trend of honoring quality movies, which will inevitably be smaller-grossing films? As I wrote earlier this year:

That all goes double for the overseas audience the academy whimsically describes as “one billion viewers around the globe.” This has big implications for the Academy’s prestige and influence in general and the money it makes off the broadcast in particular. For the next few years, the behind-the-scenes discussions in the academy are going to be about how to continue to make a lot of money off the TV broadcast of a ceremony designed to showcase the decisions of a membership that, peskily, can’t be counted on to make the right decisions for the ratings.

On the other hand, what’s the Academy supposed to do? Nominate  “Alvin and the Chipmuks” for something? “Wild Hogs”? “Beowulf,” to cite just three of the film’s that outgrossed all of the major nominees save “Juno”?

Now, that would be an Oscarcast! (”Who’s going to win Best Actor Too Young to Be Packing Such a Paunch? Vince Vaughn in ‘Fred Claus’ or Adam Sandler in ‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry’? I can’t wait for the show!”) Accordingly, A.O Scott’s NYT gripe fest about the Oscars was confused and odd. One the one hand, he was upset that “Lust, Caution” and “3:10 to Yuma” (!?) didn’t get more nominations. Then he turns around and says, now that the Oscars are beginning to recognize good films, the process isn’t populist enough:

Connoisseurs may be satisfied with this arrangement—we can watch the broadcast without superciliousness or slumming—but a showbiz populist might complain that, in honoring the products of the studio specialty divisions, the academy has lost touch with the mass audience.

It’s hard to see how this is the Academy’s fault. The pictures didn’t get small; the audience did.

Variety reviews a new documentary on Patti Smith:

The titular rocker-poet gets a suitable portrait in Steven Sebring’s “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” which runs radically against the grain of American-made pop music docs. The result of 11 years of filming (much of it in wonderfully grainy black-and-white 16mm), pic is designed as a stream-of-consciousness experience, following Smith as she revives her music career and considers every aspect of her life. Death, too, plays a stark role, and the textured, thoughtful results may prove too cerebral and abstract for auds beyond Smith’s hardcore followers, but long-term, this will be a loss-leader that gains much respect.

This doesn’t sound promising to me.* Smith’s an amazing figure, but she hasn’t released much interesting material since at least “Gone Again,” though the critical corps is loathe to tell you that. I’m sure she’s still interesting to see in concert, but of course that can be said of a lot of nostalgia acts.

* When I hear the words “wonderfully grainy” I reach for my revolver. Jim Jarmusch’s “Year of the Horse” Neil Young concert doc begins with the flashing words “8MM! 8MM! This movie was filmed in 8MM!” (Or words to that effect.) The audience at the premiere I saw cheered them. But then at the end of the movie there were oceans of credits about all the awesome sound equipment Jarmusch and Co. used. Why is it cool to film the thing crummily but not record it that way?

McNutty and Smeagol are on the ropes. In McNutty’s case, the imaginary serial killer is now the worst-kept secret in the department. The pressure is building!

And over at the Baltimore Sun, Smeagol, the obsessive fabricator who wants fame and fortune and a job at the Washington Post, is now being hotly pursued by his own personal orc: crusading and intrepid city editor Gus Haynes.

More on them in a second: The big loser tonight is McNutty’s love interest, Amy Ryan, who doesn’t get her much deserved Oscar (for “Gone Baby Gone”) over on ABC and here, on HBO, is stuck in a dead-end relationship with the skankiest police detective in Baltimore, which is saying something. Ryan has a great speech tonight (one of two nice moments in the show), confronting McNutty about his unmoored emotional life. Right after that, McNutty gets his plaintive moment as well. He is possessed by something; the writers of “The Wire” want it to be something tempestuous and noble, but we know it’s just David Simon’s demons:

“I don’t know where the anger comes from,” he moans to Ryan. “I don’t know where to make it stop.”

David Simon’s crazy anger—his obsessions with some journalistic disagreements he had with his former bosses at the Baltimore Sun—has ruined the fifth and final season of ”The Wire.” Those of us who are soldiering on have the sinking feeling now that things will never be made right. With but two episodes to go, we are resigned and sad. The balance of the show will never come back. The crayon-scrawled plot will glop and smudge its way to a conclusion. The cartoony villains with twirl their mustaches and giggle maniacally a few more times before sweeping their capes behind them and heading for the exits. Common sense, subtlety and artistry will remain tied to the railroad tracks, and Dudley Do Right will not arrive before the 11:15 Acela to Union Station.

All we can do to make sense of this is chart, in a Beckettian slough of despond, the things that don’t make sense:

* Freamon now is revealed as a supercop. He spends a few hours a day helping McNutty orchestrate the fake serial killer. He also runs the wires on Marlo Stansfield’s crew. In his spare time, he puts together a corruption case again Clay Davis, the state senator.

* When a serial killer of the homeless threatens Baltimore, the city turns to … McNutty. Daniels and Rawls are now the top commissioners; both of them hate McNutty with a passion. But somehow this born troublemaker and perennial fuckup is allowed free reign to investigate an ultra high-profile case and dispense departmental resources without oversight.

* No one’s double-checked his evidence or raised any of the, oh, several dozen questions that would quickly expose his silly plot, either. Of that tide of reporters from the Sun, none are re-examining McNutty’s investigation. Even the FBI is credulous.

* We see another detective blackmail McNutty into coughing up some of his excess manpower. If a dimwitted fellow investigator can figure out McNutty’s scam, couldn’t someone else?

* Smeagol/Templeton, the wayward Sun reporter, has Haynes, the city editor, watching him carefully. How does he respond? He steps up his inventions! He embellishes the already compelling story of a homeless Iraq vet … and again adds an untraceable anonymous quote to a routine story. His character was driven by ambition; now he’s a crazed, compulsive maker-upper, even when it plainly risks his career.

* An FBI deputy director’s brief cameo is, if you can imagine it, the worst cartoon yet. If he really was a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN, why would he care about impressing a couple of mopes from the Baltimore Police department?

* Huge plot points continue to go unremarked. We saw recently how the assassination of Prop Joe, one of the city’s major drug kingpins, doesn’t get discussed in the department. Tonight, Omar is killed, which is the show’s other classically shocking moment tonight, by what seemed to be a 10-year old. There is a witness, and a cop on the scene specifically tells Bunk the kid was only a few feet tall. Wouldn’t that be worth some attention? In the dog-bites-man world of cops ‘n’ robbers ‘n’ newspaperin’, wouldn’t an execution-style killing by a 10-year-old be notable?

* And what Mayor Carcetti hopes to gain politically from the homeless killings doesn’t track either. It’s another one of the headache-inducing “Wire” plot threads this season that this issue is somehow going to help the mayor make the governorship. In a state that already has a Republican governor, is a crusade against a serial killer of vagrants going to help a Democrat get elected? To folks in the rest of Maryland, does presiding over a city with a sex-crazed killer running around help a candidate?

It’s hard to see how Simon can wrap any of this up satisfactorily. If McNutty gets caught, it will only be through means that have been artificially delayed. (And ditto for Smeagol.) If he doesn’t it will seem a cheap and cynical resolution to a preposterous concoction. (And ditto for Smeagol.) It’s hard to see how Marlo gets caught legally in the next two hours, because all Freamon and Syndor have done is establish how he holds his meetings. If Michael turns in Chris and Snoop (and this seems to be where the show is headed), it’ll be via a too-abrupt change of personality. With Omar gone, the only presence in the show with a menace equal to the Stansfield clan’s is gone; if Chris or Snoop get killed it will be via a fluke. At this point, we just want everyone to be put our of their misery, but mostly us.

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”
Episode seven: Preposterouser and preposterouser!

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

(This is a continuing conversation about this year’s Oscars, running all week long, with Damien Bona, a co-author of the definitive history of the Academy Awards, “Inside Oscar.” To read the chat from the beginning, hit the “more” link when you get to the bottom of this post.)

BILL: I think you hit exactly the argument against a ranked voting system when you said, “I would want a statistician to explain to me if a point system (with voters prioritizing all five nominees, or just one’s top three) would lead to less embarrassing results. Or would it mean that the winner was inevitably a compromise choice?” There’s a perfect illustration of that, back in 1998 when the National Society, which uses a variation of a ranked system, had heated supporters of “Saving Private Ryan” on the one hand and “Shakespeare in Love” on the other. The winner of the group’s best picture that year? “Out of Sight.”(!)

I remember a friend of mine at the time arguing that it’s just a recipe for the third-best film of the year to win. Which is … half-true; in crude terms, the “third-best” film will win only when the partisans for each of the alleged top two disdain the other the way they did that year. My argument for a ranked vote is that under the current system, the fourth- and fifth-best films tend to win. Of course, a switch in the Academy’s methods will never happen, unless films like “Ghost” start winning every year. And, as we discussed when this dialogue started on Monday, it seems as if we’re in a period when the Academy has been working hard to recognize quality over box-office appeal, at least in the nominations. (And the show has been getting the ratings to prove it.)

To conclude, do you feel comfortable offering some predictions? Neither of us are doing explicit reporting on what will happen; I assume we’re basing our calls on what we’ve read and the patterns the Academy has exhibited in the past.

I think Day-Lewis and Julie Christie are likely winners in the main acting category. Javier Bardem, a formidable, brave and focused talent who has been nominated for Best Actor before, was delicious in “No Country.” There is a sentimental argument for Hal Holbrook, but I have to say I am voting my heart here; unlike you I was appalled by “Into the Wild”; it was an interminable hodgepodge of direction at the service of a misguided and fundamentally dishonest story. Supporting actress is tough but I am going with Amy Ryan.

In the screenplay categories, I say the Coens and Diablo Cody, for “Juno.” “No Country” will get a cinematography nod for Roger Deakins, who was nominated twice. “No End in Sight,” a rigorous piece of reporting, will get best documentary. (And might provide the most controversial acceptance speech.) “Ratatouille” I think will get best animated feature. I can’t predict the other craft categories.

My hunch is that the Coens will get Best Director. All week I’ve been thinking that they wouldn’t get Best Picture, though I think in the end they deserve it. It won’t be “There Will Be Blood,” because that would be the most radical Best Picture winner in many years, perhaps ever. (Has ever such a piece of Pure Cinema won? “Lawrence,” maybe?) It won’t be “Atonement” because of the lack of a Best Director nomination. I can’t imagine the award going to a movie like “Juno,” despite its amazing popularity. (And I don’t think “There Will Be Blood” will siphon off enough votes from “No Country” for “Juno” to win.) I think “Michael Clayton” is the real contender, and may squeak through, for the reasons we discussed earlier.

It’s been a pleasure chatting with you. I hope you have an enjoyable Sunday night.

DAMIEN: One has to respect the omens and play the odds. Even though its success makes no sense to me, “No Country For Old Men” has taken the majority of critics prizes and has swept the top guild awards—there’s no reason to believe the result won’t be the same here. “There Will Be Blood” is probably more respected than liked by Academy voters and it’s hard to imagine such a misanthropic film winning the hearts of this mushy constituency. It will be ironic if “No Country For Old Men” does become considered the most “radical” Best Picture ever, because it’s not as radical a piece of filmmaking as “There Will Be Blood.” (It’s a parallel situation to 1941. “How Green Was My Valley” is arguably the best movie ever to win Best Picture—it just wasn’t the best picture of the year when “Citizen Kane” was also released.) Anecdotal evidence suggests that “Michael Clayton” is the film voters really, really like and although it didn’t leave a huge mark on the cultural landscape, it’s an extremely well-crafted and intelligent film with some serious contemporary overtones, and in Hollywood that package may well be more highly-regarded than “Art.” “Juno” is held in great affection, but is probably too small-scale for the top prize, and “Atonement” is an after-thought. Thus, “Old Country” is the likely winner, “Michael Clayton” the possible upset.

Daniel Day-Lewis’s silliness is a definite lock and Javier Bardem a virtual lock. As you note, there is some sentiment for Hal Holbrook in “Into The Wild,” but his lovely performance may be too low-keyed for these people to appreciate. And you and I certainly disagree on Javier Bardem, Bill. For me, he was little more than a hulking presence; to see a REAL psycho, check out Richard Widmark’s nominated performance in “Kiss of Death” (with his creepy laugh and immortal line, “Sleep is for squirts.”) The real shame regarding actors and the Academy this year is that what I consider to be the year’s most compelling work—Casey Affleck’s in “The Assassination Of Jesse James”—is going to be passed over. This is a brave and self-effacing performance in which the actor’s vocal modulations and discreet alterations in facial expressions brilliantly convey his character’s would-be bravado and the deep resentments simmering under a scarily calm exterior; he also makes us aware of the huge ego that’s dying to get out. And to make matters worse, voters put Affleck in the wrong category—he’s a lead in the picture.

I wish I could be as sure as you and most other prognosticators about Julie Christie. Hers is one of the best—and most heartbreaking—performances I’ve ever seen, but like Holbrook’s and Affleck’s, I fear it may be way too nuanced. Okay, if Christie loses to Ellen Page that’s one thing—Page is utterly charming and never hits a wrong note in “Juno,” allowing the audience to see the scared little girl who still lies just below the surface of her specifically-adolescent swagger. But I’ll lose whatever little respect I still have for the Academy if voters are big enough suckers to consider Marion Cottilard’s waxworks impersonation of Edith Piaf to constitute award-quality acting. It’s partially the fault of the pointlessly elliptical narrative structure of “La Vie en Rose,” but Cottilard’s Piaf seems like an entirely different person from scene to scene and thus doesn’t seems like a real live person. The actress is histrionic as all get out, but it’s her make-up that’s first-rate, not her performance.

Supporting Actress is this year’s biggest crapshoot. I think you can safely eliminate Cate Blanchett (”I’m Not There” is not the kind of movie which sits well with the typical Academy member, and it’s hard to imagine a Todd Haynes picture becoming an Oscar winner) and Saoirse Ronan (she’s no Anna Paquin). But a strong case can be made for the plausibility of all three other nominees winning: Ruby Dee both for both making a very small part indelible and a lifetime of memorable acting and social activism; Tilda Swinton as perhaps the strongest presence in a well-liked movie; and Amy Ryan for the seamlessness and sheer force of her performance. I keep going back and forth on this one but at his moment right now I would say Tilda Swinton.

Look for the Coens to win Best Director, and they are also likely to take Adapted Screenplay (although Ronald Harwood’ s beautifully economical script for “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”—with its unexpected pockets of rich droll humor—is a potential sleeper here). I agree with you on Diablo Cody and “Juno.” I don’t think the Coens (or rather, “Roderick Jaynes”) will win Best Editing. Because the brothers do their own editing, many people will consider the cutting of the movie simply part of their direction and will opt to honor a full time editor—in this case most likely Christopher Rouse for “The Bourne Ultimatum.” And I think Cinematography will be one of the two statuettes “There Will Be Blood” takes home (the other being Sound Editing); Robert Elswit’s canvas contained more vistas and striking landscapes than Roger Deakins’s work in “No Country” (which is often the determining factor in this category).

The upset that would most elate me (other than Casey Affleck, but I have to be a little realistic here): the inventive, cerebral, witty and passionate “Persepolis” knocking out the completely ordinary “Ratatouille.” Not only would this French cartoon be one of the best movies ever to take home a major Oscar, it would finally justify the heretofore asinine and unnecessary “Best Animated Feature” category.

Thanks Bill, it’s been fun. Happy Oscar night!

(Click on the “more” link to read this conversation from the beginning…)

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Over in Billboard ($), the mag’s retail columnist, Ed Christman, discusses some of the numbers that have the record industry paralyzed. First, he notes, CD sales were down another 16 percent in January from last year. Given the thrust of his column, he’s focusing on the effects these drops will have on traditional sellers of hard-copy CDs. His main point is that the industry isn’t dead yet; that acts like Josh Groban (who had the best-selling album last year) have very low digital sales, and even a Radiohead is selling a respectable number of physical CDs.

More interesting are these grafs, emphases added:

In the digital world, the labels are getting their heads handed to them on pricing. Not so in the physical world, where labels get a 65% margin, versus a 35% split for retail, which on an $18.98 list comes out to about $12 per album for the label.

[…]

The mobile carriers are just too big, and can command anywhere from 50% to 60% profit margins of music configurations, leaving labels with the 50%-40% remainder. In digital downloads, profits may be split 70% for the label versus 30% for retail, but Apple is still calling the pricing shots, so that 70% profit means $7 versus the $12 a CD brings in.

Christman’s the expert, but I’m not sure that $12 figure is typical, particularly for new releases. Even if it’s $10, however, that’s a hidden 30 percent decline in sheer dollar sales that doesn’t get mentioned much. In crude terms, in other words, even if digital downloads completely supplanted physical sales, the industry could look forward to a 30 percent decline in profits.

Previously: The Year in CD Sales: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.

In the LAT, a level-headed discussion of the semantics and legalities of file-sharing by one of the paper’s editorial page writers, Jon Healy. He notes how the very term “file-sharing” steals a semantic high ground (it’s not “file-stealing“) but points out as well that the simplistic “file-sharing equals theft” equation of the records companies isn’t quite right either*:

[T]here’s a fundamental difference between intellectual property (copyrights, patents, trademarks) and real property (houses, cars, plasma TVs): The latter is tangible and limited in supply, the former is not. “Copyright infringement is not ‘theft’ in the same way that taking a CD from a store is theft,” said Mark Lemley, a copyright expert at Stanford University Law School. “If I take your physical property, I have it and you no longer do. If I copy your song, I have it, but so do you.”

Not a lot here that’s new, just a lucid primer if you’re in the mood for it.

* Hitsville’s position is that file-sharing is stealing, for a reason that Healy doesn’t quite get to. It doesn’t steal someone else’s property; but it unquestionably steals part of the value of it, ranging from a miniscule percentage to, in theory, 100 percent of it. The RIAA’s war on file-sharing is still wrong because it’s destructive and pointless, and the RIAA has no moral high ground in any case because it’s been ripping off artists and consumers for decades. In the end, the pointlessness part of this will become definitive. All the file-sharing and bit torrent networks could be shut down entirely and permanently tomorrow and the net result, say, three years from now, would not appreciably change. The data transfer methods would just evolve, primarily through emailed zip files and the so-called “sneaker net”—i.e., handing a friend 1000 songs on a DVD.

The NY Post says the only thing the Oscars have going for it this year is the fact that there hasn’t been much glitz around, what with the writers strike. Advertisers are telling themselves that that might bring in some more viewers, despite the fact that relatively few people have seen the most-nominated films:

Advertisers are counting on TV-starved viewers to make this year’s Oscars show a ratings winner despite a lineup of obscure and bleak films.

With much of the TV landscape in ruins after the writers’ strike, marketers believe the star-studded telecast will attract a relatively large audience desperate for something - anything - beyond reruns and reality shows.

An accompanying graphic detailing the falling ratings for the annual event, however, shows the paper’s true feelings. Oscar has a bag over its head in shame—and we’re told “ho-hum host” Jon Stewart may keep viewers away. It’s unfortunately true that the box office of the best picture nominees seems to have the most effect on viewership. If the ratings (after a slight bump up last year) continue to decline it seems inevitable that the Academy will have to figure out something to rekindle the show’s appeal, despite the fact that the group can always hike ad rates in the interim. While ostensible competition like the Globes come nowhere near the Oscar telecast’s ratings, the group can’t be unaware that that might not always be the case.

David Pogue in the NYT makes a lancing point in a column on home movie downloading:

…Then there is the 24-hour limit. Suppose you typically do not start a movie until 7:30 p.m., after dinner and the homework have been put away. If you do not have time to finish the movie in one sitting, you cannot resume at 7:30 tomorrow night; at that point, the download will have self-destructed.

What would the studios lose by offering a 27-hour rental period? Or three days, or even a week? Nothing. In fact, they’d attract millions more customers. (At the very least, instead of just deleting itself, the movie should say: “Would you like another 24-hour period for an additional $1?”)

David Denby, in the New Yorker, ruminates on the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre in general and “No Country for Old Men” in particular. It tracks cleanly the plain veneer of contempt in the pair’s films Damien Bona talks about below …

The Coens form a conspiracy of two—industrious, secretive, amused, and seemingly indifferent to both criticism and praise. Early in their careers, they gave detailed interviews, but in recent years they have discussed only specific and relatively trivial matters concerning their movies, avoiding comments on larger meanings or anything approaching a general intellectual outlook. This strategic reticence—the avoidance of art talk—is solidly in the tradition of American movie directors’ presenting themselves solely as pragmatic entertainers. But the Coens have gone further into insouciance than any old-time director I can think of. In the opening titles for “Fargo” (1996), they announced that the movie was based on a true story, though it wasn’t. “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” (2000) begins with a title stating that the movie is “based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer,” which they later claimed they had never read. From the beginning, they’ve been playing with moviemaking, playing with the audience, the press, the deep-dish interpreters, disappearing behind a façade of mockery.

… and in the end isn’t buying what the Coens are selling:

The spooky-chic way the Coens use Bardem has excited audiences with a tingling sense of the uncanny. But, in the end, the movie’s despair is unearned—it’s far too dependent on an arbitrarily manipulated plot and some very old-fashioned junk mechanics. “No Country” is the Coens’ most accomplished achievement in craft, with many stunning sequences, but there are absences in it that hollow out the movie’s attempt at greatness.

Meanwhile, in New York Magazine, David Edelstein discusses the movie’s chances with Lynda Obst. He likes “No Country,” despite the fact that Ethan Coen wasn’t nice to him at a party once:

Are the Coens a Best Director lock? It would seem so. They have managed to make difficult movies without selling out or sucking up or becoming players. (I said hello to them at the recent New York Film Critics ceremony, and Ethan could barely conceal his contempt … I didn’t take it too personally. I think they’re good guys who only give a shit about critics and awards insofar as it will ensure that no one bothers them.)

He too tries to come to grips with the world view of the Coens’ work:

Speaking of no climax, no catharsis, the front-runner for Best Picture is No Country for Old Men, a film that critics — this one included — cherished but has left audiences crying out in despair over the nominal hero’s resignation and the endurance of evil, however hobbled. The downbeat nonending is presented not so much as systemic failure, as in HBO’s The Wire, or the power of unbridled capitalism to poison human relations, as in There Will Be Blood. It is simply that God the Creator has left the field.

The magazine, which charted the rise of Americana, or alternative country, or No Depression music, or whatever you want to call it, started in September 1995 with Son Volt on the cover and far more quite good writing inside than one would have expected, way back in what was then the fanzine era. Among other things, the first issue had a scintillating column (by one of the founders, Peter Blackstock) detailing the history of covers of “Wichita Lineman.” From the very start the magazine had a magnanimous attitude toward coverage, looking for good music emanating from a wide swath of personal expression.

In a letter to subscribers, Blackstock (co-editor), Grant Alden (co-editor and art director) and Kyla Fairchild (ad director) track the forces that doomed the magazine:

In this evolving downloadable world, what a record label is and does is all up to question. What is irrefutable is that their advertising budgets are drastically reduced, for reasons we well understand. It seems clear at this point that whatever businesses evolve to replace (or transform) record labels will have much less need to advertise in print.

The decline of brick and mortar music retail means we have fewer newsstands on which to sell our magazine, and small labels have fewer venues that might embrace and hand-sell their music. Ditto for independent bookstores. Paper manufacturers have consolidated and begun closing mills to cut production; we’ve been told to expect three price increases in 2008. Last year there was a shift in postal regulations, written by and for big publishers, which shifted costs down to smaller publishers whose economies of scale are unable to take advantage of advanced sorting techniques.

Then there’s the economy…

The result? Ad sales down a third from what they were two years ago. The full text of the trio’s note is here. The magazine’s web site, which has a complete archive, will remain active.

Over in Billboard ($), the magazine’s executive editor, Bill Werde, is coming out strongly for an ISP tax on file-sharing as a way to compensate the failing record industry. His starting point is a MIDEM address by Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager, who Werde notes was one of the handful of folks in Steve Jobs’ kitchen when the deal was struck to introduce a special U2 iPod nearly four years ago.

And so it was important, I think, that he’s also the guy who, a couple of days later used a keynote slot at MIDEM [to attack] the Internet service providers (ISPs), telecoms and tech companies that have been happy to profit from, or at least abide by the losses of the music business.

Werde goes on to talk about a proposal along these lines introduced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF plan noted that charging “the 60 million Americans who have been using file-sharing software” $5 per month would net more than $3 billion of annual “pure profit” to the music industry. Not a shabby start for offsetting losses, but no one from the business is keen to listen to the EFF. McGuinness was the perfect man to sell the idea—not just to the outside world, but, especially, the music business.

In 2004, top label executives would tell me off the record that there’s no way you’d be able to get everyone with a stake at the same table and agree on a rate that consumers and ISPs and the music business could find palatable. Now, after three years of dramatic decline, more of those same folks—the ones that are still around anyway—are realizing they may have little choice, if they hope to avoid a swan dive of their own.

This is probably a pipe dream; such a sensible compromise is entirely out of keeping with everything the record industry has done in this arena for the last decade. To make things worse, the EFF calls for many sensible provisions. Music fans could use any software they wanted to swap whatever recorded music they wanted, all under the auspices of that dollars-per-month model. If they didn’t voluntarily join the program, they could get sued. The group also wanted a transparent, nonprofit group to oversee the money.

The big reason the industry will never go for it is that, as the EFF probably apprehends, such an arrangement will still, in the long term, reduce the industry’s impact in the music business markedly. Right now, the vast majority of the music swapped online is major-label product. As bands and artists get the hang of internet distribution, this percentage will ineluctably go down, and the amount of money going to the unaligned will go up.

Beyond that, it will remove what stigma remains from online file-swapping and, as informal friends- or dorm-based “nodes” spring up, it will make it easier for one online contact to pass music around on the sneaker net. (I’ve written before about how this will work; with the now-standard PC DVD burner, you can put fully half of the Billboard 200 album chart on one CD.) There’s even the possibility that, at a certain point, online file-sharing may start to dry up.*

There’s another argument against it, what I think of as the “let them stew in their own juices” argument. It doesn’t have law on its side, but it does have a sort of blunt moral force. The main reason the record industry doesn’t like file-sharing is that it muscles in on a hegemony they have long held. The record industry is like the Sopranos; ripping off artists is its job, and it doesn’t like faceless computer programs or emo college students muscling in on the family business.

Consider this Reuters report on a recent suit against Universal from a group of famous artists and artist estates, including Count Basie, charging underpayment of royalties. Universal denies the charges, it’s just a suit, and the company deserves its day in court. All that said, there’s a comment I have heard again and again from artists lawyers; that in a career of auditing record companies, often over a period of decades, it is almost never the case that the artist wasn’t owed money. The companies also make it punitively difficult to find out whether they do owe the artists money, as of course they would. This systemic theft is built into the structure of the industry at this point; it’s a good potent reason to hasten the end of the companies as financial conduits between artists and fans.

* As new generations of fans come online, the diversity of the genres swapped (now largely rock and pop) will gradually right itself, as jazz, then country, then, I don’t know, Christian rock will all ultimately find its online presence match its offline appeal. Isn’t there the possibility that a critical mass will be hit at a certain point? As computer storage and download speeds increase, you will soon see zip files of the complete Stones catalog, and then a complete “classic rock” catalog, swapped. It’s possible we might see a situation where an ever-increasing percentage of the population carries a complete historical collection of whatever their favorite genre of music is around on their computer, with actual swapping correspondingly declining. On the other hand, by that point the ISP fees will become forgotten and folks may continue to pay them, even if they don’t actively collect music online any more.

Previously: The Year in CD Sales: It couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people.

The fifth season of “The Wire” is David Simon’s Iraq. Backed with faulty intelligence and a cadre of wacked-out true believers, he picked the wrong target and went in unprepared. Slightly desperate, he gambled on a plot surge (I can continue this metaphor indefinitely, if I needed to) two episodes ago: the death of Prop Joe, a poignant a moment as the show has yet offered, which is saying something; and the menacing return of Omar. It can’t be gainsaid that things are slightly better; yet, as in Iraq, that just brings matters down to the realm of ongoing disaster, and there’s no end in sight.

I have, frankly, nothing new to say about McNutty’s invented homeless serial killer or the machinations of Smeagol of the Sun, the brooding fabricator whose “precious” is fame as a reporter. Their plot lines come together early on tonight. If McNutty had not created the killer, Smeagol, it turns out, would have had to invent him, which, actually, he does in any case. This is complicated, so I will go over it again: McNutty invented a serial murderer of homeless men, who does not actually kill people; Smeagol, independently, created a fake call to himself from his own killer, who, in addition to not actually killing anyone as well, doesn’t actually exist either. This creates the very real possibility that the two imaginary serial killers might bump into each other on the street while they were not killing people.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that McNutty would call Seamgol and pretend to be the serial killer and talk about the people he isn’t killing; fortunately, at the time he calls, Smeagol isn’t on the other line with his imaginary killer talking about the people he isn’t killing. Meanwhile, back at the police station, McNutty’s plan has finally paid off and he is suddenly dispensing manpower throughout the department. (Why the department would hand such responsibility to the guy who has systematically alienated every one of his bosses is not explained.) The other of the show’s cast members, meantime, politely refrain from asking any of the myriad obvious questions that would expose these quizzical scenarios, and from merely snickering in disbelief as well.

Those of us who watch with no little concentration each week are at a loss to explain what is happening; at this point it all involves helicopters, cell phones placed in kryptonite-lined bags, and a magical device, sported by Freamon, that looks like a cross between a Blackberry and a Kindle and … well it’s not clear what it does. Clarke Peters is looking slightly sheepish, these days. Forced to recite the worst lines of dialogue “The Wire” has yet proffered while explaining what the device does, he tries to keep a straight face by imagining that he is Alec Guinness in “Star Wars,” expatiating about the Force. But we can see it is hard on him. Like Bunk, Peters didn’t sign up for this.

Bunk is now coming into his own; he was the first character we saw this season, and his story arc suggests that he, along with intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, will ultimately be our hero. Bunk’s had at least two previous moments on “The Wire.” In season one, he and McNulty inspect a murder victim’s apartment, digging up evidence and piercing together what happened, uttering nothing but variations of the word “fuck.” And in season two, there’s a fabulous moment when McNulty gets called in the middle of the night to come pull Bunk together after a sexual misadventure. (Bunk had cheated on his wife; afterwards, at the woman’s apartment, drunk as a skunk, he tried to burn his clothes to hide any olfactory evidence of his actions. Bunk had, fortunately, taken the clothes off before embarking on this plan of action, but hadn’t quite thought through what he would then wear home instead.)

Bunk is now methodically trying to nail Marlo using good old-fashioned police work. The repercussions of McNutty’s plan confront him at every turn, however, and much of the time his eyes are afire with anger. His counterpart, at the Sun, is Gus Haynes, in David Simon’s universe a saintlike figure, now hot on the trail of Smeagol’s deceptions. Since he is Smeagol’s boss, he could just ask him about this in person, but “The Wire” is at pains to show that Mrs. & Mrs. Fancypants Editors, who lisp a lot and beam with pride whenever Smeagol is around, would take the fabricator’s side.

Haynes is left to grit his teeth when he sees his nemesis get front-page play with his latest self-aggrandizing story about getting called by an imaginary serial killer, so he goes to a corner watering hole to hang out with some cops and do some police work of his own. He doesn’t even notice Richard Belzer at the bar.

The Clay Davis story line comes to fruition this week, abruptly, amid a compressed time frame so extreme it seems like Davis hires a lawyer just before court that day, sits through the trial—voir dire, testimony, deliberations and verdict—that afternoon, and gets out in time to get on that evening’s news to crow about his exoneration. This sequence may be the most cartoony, unbelievable event in “The Wire” thus far this season, which is also saying something.

Our last best hope is Omar, who is now … God, wrathful and omnipotent. His most compelling scene comes when he grabs one of Marlo’s henchmen on a side street. He recognizes him as former muscle for Alvin Avon Barksdale, now shuffling drugs around for Marlo. Omar’s modus operandi right now is merely to wound Marlo’s myrmidons, leaving them to deliver his taunts at Marlo back to the boss. After what might be described as an intriguing disquisition on the difference between the practical and transcendental concepts of free will and moral responsibility, Omar shakes his head with irritation and spatters the guy’s brain against a wall.

Making an appearance on Michael’s corner shortly afterward, Omar seems frail and vulnerable. (Whether this is a feint remains to be seen.) Omar is thinking large about the world he inhabits in a way he didn’t before. In the past he has been an articulate defender of “the game”’s rules. He seems now to be losing patience with it.

Marlo, incidentally, is MIA this week, as are Chris and Snoop. Their absences aren’t building the desired tension; rather, given the tediousness of the fake serial killer story and the Clay Davis trial, we just feel a bit ripped off. One of the many sadnesses of Iraq is the resources squandered. In David Simon’s quagmire, Omar and Bunk are all we have to remind us of what we are missing.

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

The Times takes a look at the survivors from the fire at the Great White club concert in West Warwick, Rhode Island, five years ago:

Savagely burned in the fire that incinerated the Station nightclub here five years ago next Wednesday, Linda Fisher has endured a dozen surgeries to salvage her arms, her hands, her face.

Ms. Fisher inhaled so much smoke that anguishing night that even now, she gets winded carrying a basket of laundry. Her thick scars keep her from sweating normally, and she has trouble distinguishing hot from cold.

Ms. Fisher feels lucky.

“There are survivors who have no ears, eyes, nose, hair,” she said.

The survivors, and the surviving family members of the 100 who died in the disaster, have been waiting five years for some sort of official compensation; the story details the sporadic other help they’ve been getting. Among many others sad facts in the story: 65 kids lost one or both parents in the blaze.

From the Hollywood Reporter:

Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video’s announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May.

Note, however, that those “reliable sources” are really only saying that the company is “widely expected” to give up. The story goes on, however, to reiterate the format’s bleak support. With sales four to one in Blu-ray’s favor, Netflix and Best Buy are going Blue-ray exclusive. (Blockbuster has been Blu-ray-only since last year; the story says Amazon’s decision is being “closely watched.”) Meanwhile, Toshiba blew more than $2.5 million on a Super Bowl ad, and is losing a couple of hundred dollars on every heavily discounted HD-DVD player it sells.

“Filth and Wisdom,” an 81-minute feature directed by Mrs. Guy Ritchie, had its debut at the Berlin Film festival. Variety says… well, it’s best to read the lede for yourself:

Claiming the films of Godard, Visconti, Pasolini and Fellini as her inspiration, Madonna hopes to “one day make something that comes close to their genius,” according to the press notes for “Filth and Wisdom.” On the evidence of this, her directorial debut, that day is a long way off. Ineptly written and helmed story of three Londoners, although quite bad, does have a few redeeming features. Madonna’s name will ensure some kind of distribution, but her already abundant riches won’t get any filthier off this.

“Although quite bad” is I think one of the more amusing concessive clauses I’ve read recently. According to reviewer Leslie Felperin, the plot is “desultory.” The writing? “Script credited to Madonna and Dan Cadan (whose credits list work as a runner and then as an EPK helmer for films made by Madonna’s husband, Guy Ritchie) is poorly structured and cheese-ripe with clunky dialogue.”

Mercilessly, the review continues:

Having contributed to arguably the worst films of some other big-name helmers (i.e. Warren Beatty’s “Dick Tracy,” John Schlesinger’s “The Next Best Thing” and Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game”), Madonna seems to have learned little about directing from her experiences in filmmaking. Her stylistic approach seems most akin to that of late-’80s/early-’90s pop videos, wherein story is often revealed without dialogue in music-backed montages, the likes of which abound here. It’s as if she’s taken her video for “Papa Don’t Preach” as her main dramaturgical template.

The assessment ends:

Graceless editing further mars the tech package as a whole, while needlessly jiggly handheld lensing contributes to the pic’s generally cheap look.

The Hollywood Reporter is kinder, somewhat:

Ragged, uneven and potholed with some dire dialogue and performances, the film’s cockeyed optimism and likable leads conspire to bring a smile by the time it’s done. Barely feature length at 81 minutes, it will likely appeal to Madonna’s fans for its echoes of various threads of her own life story and the grunge style of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” To many, however, it will remain an oddity.

Another report from the It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Group of People Desk:

Four years ago, Clear Channel opened up a new ad strategy, “Less Is More.” With stations clogged with ads and listenership decreasing, the company decided to try to stress shorter ads, and run fewer of them per hour. According to the Wall Street Journal ($), the company is now abandoning the strategy.

The story runs the numbers in various ways. Whether the strategy worked at all is open to dispute; the company’s radio division (like the industry as a whole) has been stagnant for years, but it’s possible that without the plan sales would have dropped farther. Still, for Clear Channel haters (like Hitsville), this is good news. The company contributed mightily to the ruination of radio in the late 1990s by buying up stations, running up the number of commercials per hours, ramping up the use of voice-tracking*, and de-localizing the industry generally. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the company’s execs acted like thugs and flouted federal ownership rules, as my colleague Eric Boehlert detailed with a great deal of brio in Salon in the early 2000s.

The rise of the iPod, internet radio and satellite has been a challenge for the terrestrial radio industry over the past half decade, but Clear Channel was losing listeners at the rate of several percent a year dating back to the mid-1990s. Anyway, the company’s stock price is off by a third since the “Less Is More” strategy started. Now it’s forced back into its traditional “screw the listener, let’s load up the joint with crappy ads” gambit. And that, you gotta think, will, in the long run, inevitably lead to even fewer listeners, poorer Arbitrons, less revenue, and a bigger stock decline.

*  Voicetracking is where a supposedly local radio station has its crappy DJ patter taped in bulk and in advance by someone in a different city, and then digitally stripped in between the songs.