Wired says Congress has passed a law creating a Copyright Czar, who will presumably help beleaguered Big Content in its crazy fight against piracy. But the Bush administration doesn’t like it:

The proposed copyright czar, a position which requires Senate confirmation, “constitutes a legislative intrusion into the internal structure and composition of the president’s administration. This provision is therefore objectionable on constitutional separation of powers grounds,” the White House wrote lawmakers.

That was code for the Bush administration being in no mood to commence another war, this one the War on Piracy. The government is too busy battling the War on Terror and the War on Drugs.

Hard to see why the czar of this particular war doesn’t fit right in.

From Cnet:

ABC found that rather than cannibalizing TV viewership, giving away the shows online instead enhances it.  

The article is about how the network has seen the light about making its shows available almost anywhere—complete with commercials.*  The revelation in that sentence is something digital advocates have always contended, that new technologies always end up turbocharging the media industries. (Besides the fact that it’s pointless, these days, not to make the stuff available digitally because it de facto already is.)

As I think this through it occurs to me that TV is a special case in the digital realm. We’re used to seeing the stuff with commercials, and people will presumably accept relatively benign interruptions, particularly if the material is easy to manipulate. (Though I personally am finding the unnecessarily proprietary ABC player difficult to set up**.) Music is a lot different, because listeners will not tolerate ads, and the medium is consumed in a much different way. (Experienced hundreds of times, in some cases, rather than an average of once or twice.) Beyond that, the horse is long out of the barn.

For TV, however, there are not yet the ubiquitous players for the medium that made unauthorized music distribution so irresistible. Right now, amidst the ineluctable decaying of CD sales, it’s hard to imagine it, but it certainly seems that if all the networks followed ABC’s lead, and managed to make the players easy, and allowed embedding, and permitted distribution on the social network services, before illegal downloading becomes the norm, the medium could weather the digital conversion relatively unscathed, right?

The only question is whether it can make the economics work—i.e., will the per-viewer rates they derive from online viewing match the big sums they’ve been getting from broadcast. In this context, the money quote above in the end maybe still represent the networks’ whistling past the graveyard. Over time, broadcast viewership will continue an overall decline, and online, as viewing there becomes the norm, the broadcast shows will inevitably face more competition. Besides the lack of control of distribution the media companies are exasperated with, they still have to contend with the way the internet can arbitraily create cultural phenomena—without big marketing budgets.

* Also from the article:

ABC intends to give viewers control of their viewing experience on any platform, Cheng said. The network is already showing its shows on everything from Facebook to AOL and Veoh, and plans soon to launch a new video player on its own site. This month ABC launched its “Open ABC” initiative, giving access to developers who will “innovate and give access to our shows (in ways) we haven’t even thought of yet,” such as new forms of 3D visual search and other applications for blogs, fan sites, and social networks.

“ABC isn’t just a television brand,” he said. “It’s a content brand living on any device, and tailored specifically to the consumer and advertiser needs, and optimized for each specific use case and digital platform.”

And:

Cheng said the network had been the first on iTunes, the first to stream entire shows online, the first to stream in a “720p” format in HD, had the most views of its shows of any network online and continues to lead in attracting unique users, in pageviews and time spent per user, compared to other networks’ sites. 

** Once I did, I saw some of the Jimmy Kimmel show—an episode that began with a advertising skit, complete with a racist Hispanic character, right out of The Larry Sanders Show. That’s not a good thing. The product was an online computer backup service, the digital equivalent, I’m sure, of the Garden Weasel.

Microsoft did it, and so did Yahoo. Now Wal-Mart is giving its customers an object lesson in the downside of digital rights management. The store sold MP3s heavily laden with DRM, and required the store to authorize the  use of the music you bought on a new computer. The multibillion-dollar business has given up the DRM ghost and is moving to MP3s, but it’s too cheap just to keep that part of the business open, so it, like MSN and Yahoo before it, is warning previous customers that they should burn their songs onto CDs and then re-import them to get around the DRM markings*.

Story from Technologizer here.  Writes Harry McCracken:

Remember, Wal-Mart’s music was promoted with Microsoft’s PlaysForSure tagline, one of the hollowest promises ever made in the history of personal technology. I don’t know how much it would have cost Wal-Mart to keep its DRM servers chugging, but I suspect it could have come up with the dough if it had considered PlaysForSure to be an obligation rather than hollow marketing copy.

(Link via Mac Daily News.) Both M’soft and Yahoo eventually backed down in various ways; Wal-Mart should simply just replace the inferior product it sold people with DRM-free MP3s.

* And again, this process merely illustrates how weak the DRM was in the first place.

Maura Johnston, the Idolator blogger, on an IFC panel discussion on the future of music journalism:

There is some old cohesion to the promotional cycles—because MP3 blogs have become more professionalized.  So they are posting MP3s that are sanctioned, and that are supplied to them by a promotional company. So there is a creeping promotionalism into it.

Link via the Daily Swarm. It’s a canny observation: We’re going to be seeing two sets of bloggers, the ins and the outs, the former gifted with promo material and the like, just as college radio DJs and alt-paper writers were back in the day. The new radicalism: Posting a deep cut.

It’s because critics get into concerts free. They don’t have to pay the charges–they are barely aware of them.

I’ve gotten comped to concerts my entire life, so I don’t complain about paying occasionally; besides, an artist will get a lot more money from you at one concert than he or she will over the course of a career’s worth of album releases. Still, it’s always shocking to experience a public event as a civilian.

Case in point: An upcoming Vampire Weekend concert. I go online to the site of a local concert promotion group, Lucky Man Concerts, which has the virtue of not, as far as I know, being an arm of Live Nation, formerly known as Clear Channel.

The cost is a reasonable $19. When you start to buy the ticket online, you get the choice of will call or printing your own ticket. As you can see, the latter costs $2.50!

Printing the ticket myself saves the promoter money, right? So why am I paying $2.50?

Fine, whatever, it’s only a $20 ticket. Proceed through to checkout and you get presented with this screen:

Two more charges are appended, with no explanation other than “ticket fee” and “order fee.” Again, I’m not complaining for myself; I’ve seen nearly every great band in the world free multiple times. (And many. many more bad ones.) But this is the sort of Sopranos-like extortion that affects millions of concert-goers every year:

Original ticket price: $19.

Total price, three fees later, after being shaken down by the ticket-selling system: $30.50, for a 60+ percent premium. 

.. but if you read the coverage of its ATP show carefully, it appears that Kevin Shields didn’t play a single new song.

(Stereogum coverage here. Cool pix from the show on Pitchfork here. NYT review and Pareles interview with Shields here.)

Loveless came out in 1991, if memory serves. MBV’s two proper albums remain compelling, and their shows were sui generis: Besides the sonic textures and fierce attack, the volume level was indeed uniquely loud. It was so loud that, as you looked over the crowd and saw skin pushed back on the faces of the audience by the successive buffets of aural shock, it almost became silent.

All that said, it’s 17 years later, and Shields hasn’t been able to get his act together to rehearse a single new song, not even for a hepster festival he was the main draw for.

It reminds us that, in this time of alternative-era reunion tours (of which the Pixies and now MBV have been most celebrated), you really can’t compare these bands to the broken-down ’60s stars whose decrepitude fueled the original punk movement.

You can’t compare them because they are worse. You can’t blame the bands; Shields, for example, recorded the equivalent of two and a half albums two decades ago but still, according to Hitsville’s First Law of Reunion Tours, the amount of money he takes in this year could be as much as he’s made in his entire career up to this point. But how about the press: Has any journalist yet made the obvious point that this is a nostalgia trip, nothing more?

This is a paragraph buried in Dave Kehr’s typically erudite piece on the restored Godfathers:

The tight grain of the image, so important a component of [Gordon] Willis’s original low-light photography, has returned to particularly spectacular effect in the four-disc Blu-ray edition. The effect is not unlike that of a pristine 35-millimeter print projected in perfect focus — a rare enough phenomenon in a movie theater and, until quite recently, inconceivable in the living room.

The point of that second sentence isn’t noted often enough: Home viewing today can be with an outlay of not too much money up front not just a fair equivalent of theater-going but in a lot of cases better. (And of course for most people in the country the option of seeing, say The Godfather on a big screen in any condition isn’t available.) As I wrote earlier this year:

And these days, of course, the movie theater has become a zoo. (Before a film I saw recently at a megaplex, we were shown a commercial that featured a cartoon piece of snot in an old west setting being run out of town by a sheriff named “Mucinex” or somesuch. The theater showed it twice before the film—and then had it blaring again on an oversized screen in the lobby.) Given a scenario in which a couple or a family can a) stay in and watch a movie in superb and powerful reproduction at home in peace and quiet with popcorn at hand or b) pay $20 and $40+, respectively, before snacks to schlep to a cacophonous environment, be bombarded with commercials, experience poor projection, and have someone texting in the seat next to them, the choice isn’t even close.

A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the swankier plexes in town—the Harkins Fashion Square, in Scottsdale—to see Wanted. Outside of the picture’s being dark (because the company was scrimping on projection lamps), it was showing on a screen that couldn’t accomodate the width of the film.

In other words, a public showing in a theater suddenly became the equivalent of a cropped VHS picture on a square TV. While amenities like stadium seating have made things better, in most other ways home viewing gets better even as old-fashioned movie-going is regressing.

Which brings us back to Blu-ray, which still has not taken off. There are myriad reasons: The discs are too expensive; there aren’t enough films available, and far too few tony titles that really show off the clarity; and the players remain costly, too. (There are other, unseen, drawbacks, too, like the hidden costs of DRM.)

And in any case, the consensus seems to be that they will be around in any case for only five to ten years, until all home movie watching becomes wholly digital and wholly HD. The battles about control of those digital bits aside, what seems incontrovertible is that the very near future holds immense progress on something that matters more than DRM or box office or anything else: Movies being seen the way they were meant to be seen.

The record industry behaves a lot like a wolverine with its leg caught in a trap: An animal with a naturally dyspeptic disposition in such excruciating pain that merely being close to it becomes physically dangerous.

Given how corrupt the industry is, the sight has not been an unenjoyable one—from a distance. But there are still some cautionary tales of people who got too close. Case in point: A file-sharing case in San Antonio, Texas.

Ars Technica reports that a judge found for the RIAA in the case. But since the violator in question was a 16-year-old who said she didn’t know that downloading songs on Kazaa was illegal, the judge lowered the per-song fine to $200.

In response, the RIAA has taken the trial to a jury for damages, hoping to get the fine increased.

Full story here.

From the NYT coverage of the latest OJ Simpson trial:

The man who set up the hotel-room confrontation that led to armed robbery charges against O. J. Simpson testified Monday that he had received at least $210,000 from several news organizations, including ABC News, in exchange for interviews, photographs and parts of an audio recording he had secretly made of the events.
[…]
Those fees included $150,000 from the celebrity gossip Web site TMZ.com for excerpts of [Thomas] Riccio’s audio recording, as well as $15,000 from ABC News and $25,000 from the syndicated television show “Entertainment Tonight” for what Mr. Riccio said were interviews about the confrontation.

But spokesmen for ABC News and “Entertainment Tonight” said the payments were not for interviews but for other materials. A spokeswoman for TMZ.com said the Web site does not comment about how it acquires material.

Emphasis added. So, the guy, Thomas Riccio, says one thing, the news orgs another. Note that only one of the parties was under oath! And what would be his impetus be to lie?

Entertainment Tonight, meanwhile, still hasn’t retracted its big scoop about the birth of twins to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt back in May, which it steadfastly said it stood behind in the face of all evidence to the contrary, including the denial of the still-pregnant mother. The kids were actually born six weeks later.

Patrick Goldstein, in his Big Picture LAT blog, has been writing about Jeffrey Katzenberg’s 3-D boosterism and moderating an ongoing enthusiastic debate on the subject. This morning he wondered aloud why Katzenberg hadn’t been part of it:

As it turns out, he actually did write a response that his people sent along to my editors late last week. But alas, the response came with a series of non-negotiable demands, notably that The Times must run his response on the front page of the Calendar section, above the fold–i.e., in the same prominent position that my column originally ran. Although my editors assured him that no one, no matter how much of a Hollywood big shot, had ever dictated that their letter be run on the front page–in other words, not even Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey’s old partner Steven Spielberg or the late Charlton Heston, who set the modern record for most letters-to-the-editor by a famous actor–Jeffrey took his marbles and went home.

The big question: What happens if David Geffen owns the paper?

I was throwing away a newspaper and noticed this from the NYT obit on Richard Wright: “Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, “The Wall,” eventually sold 23 million copies in the United States.”

The album has been certified for 23 times platinum by the RIAA, but the RIAA doubles certs for double albums. So it’s really about 11 million. Weird the paper’s copy editing desk doesn’t know stuff like that. (And, of course, the band and its record company are never going to call in a correction.)

While researching this I just came upon Idolator’s essay on the same issue. It’s a terrific distillation of the problem by Chris Molanphy. He strips off the double-album dross and comes up with this revised chart of the RIAA’s top sellers:

THE REVISIONIST, SENSIBLE ALL-TIME LIST
29 Their Greatest Hits 1971–1975, The Eagles
27 Thriller, Michael Jackson
23 Led Zeppelin IV, Led Zeppelin
22 Back in Black, AC/DC
20 Come on Over, Shania Twain
19 Rumours, Fleetwood Mac
17 Boston
17 The Bodyguard, Whitney Houston (Soundtrack)
17 No Fences, Garth Brooks
16 Cracked Rear View, Hootie & the Blowfish
16 Greatest Hits, Elton John
16 Jagged Little Pill, Alanis Morissette
16 Hotel California, The Eagles
16 Physical Graffiti, Led Zeppelin
15 Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen
15 Appetite for Destruction, Guns ‘N Roses
15 Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
15 Greatest Hits, Journey
15 Supernatural, Santana
14 Ropin’ the Wind, Garth Brooks
14 …Baby One More Time, Britney Spears
14 Greatest Hits, Simon & Garfunkel
14 Backstreet Boys
14 Metallica
14 Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf

(Physical Graffiti is crossed about because he mistakenly included it in his revised list, though it’s a double LP.)

I would add only a few things. One, the RIAA certifications are based on shipments reported by labels, not actual sales, so the number of pieces sold is by definition lower than whatever whatever total has been shipped. Second, the totals of the pre-SoundScan era are suspect to this day. It’s hard to believe Tapestry, the signal album of its era, has only sold ten million copies, for example.*

There are a couple of other aspects that should be considered when thinking about these figures. The first of course is changes in population; there are half again as many potential album buyers today as there were in 1970. Individual albums make up that deficit over time, as successive generations have te opportuity to buy it, but extra credit should be given to the records that penetrated deeply into a much smaller audience pool.

And there’s also the cultural evolution aspects of the early rock era (and, to be fair, the hip-hop and alt-rock eras as well); it should be noted that Elvis Presley, the Beatles and the Stones, to note just three obvious examples, had to create an audience, something Shania Twain didn’t have to dirty her hands doing.

And finally, since we are now in the iTunes era, barring some fluke phenomenon it’s doubtful that any record released today will ever challenge the current inhabitants of that top ten; too many potential buyers will just buy the individual tracks on Tunes. I think Molanphy should take his chart one farther, and remove greatest hits albums as well. Let Thriller reign!

* And on the other side of the equation, the RIAA’s list of top sellers has just a couple of Elvis Presley titles on it, though he’s always cited as the bestselling king. A huge proportion of his alleged sales are solely attributable to the fake platinums he would garner from initial shipments.

The dual problems that bedevil Howard Kurtz were on perfect display on this morning’s Reliable Sources. Kurtz’s first vulnerability is conflict of interest. He works for the Washington Post and CNN; that calls into question anything he reports about the Post or its national competitors, and CNN and its competitors.

(In other words, he’s pretty reliable, except when he’s discussing the Post or the NYT or the Wall Street Journal or USA Today or CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, or MSNBC.)

The second problem, which seems to be caused by the first but also has the feel of being part of his journalistic approach in any case, is a talent for bland mooting, as the British say, of journalistic problems but never addressing head on their obvious implications. In this way, he is the ostrich of media reporting.

Case in point is today’s show, which was playing off Wall St.’s near-meltdown this week. (Transcript available here.) His guests are Ali Velshi, billed as a “senior CNN business correspondent,”  and Steven Pearlstein, a Post biz columnist. Note that both are colleagues of Kurtz’s.

My impression is that the NYT and the WSJ have been fairly aggressive in their coverage of the run-up to this little disaster, going back to the predatory loan scandals earlier this decade and continuing through the risks of the complex financial instruments whose elusive values nearly brought our financial system to a halt last week. If you’re doing a show about who got the story right and who didn’t, wouldn’t you bend over backward to acknowledge those who did? Kurtz gave his newsroom buddy Pearlstein lots of time to pat himself on the back for his work on the issue, and he probably deserves it, but the Post’s biz section can’t compete with the Times’ or the WSJ’s. If the latter two operations didn’t cover the run-up well, Kurtz should have said so. If they did, he should have acknowledged it.

Kurtz didn’t do either because he’s not in the business of actual media reporting. He’s in the business of media non-reporting.

In the course of this journey, he’s developed the facility of acting like he’s saying something but never managing to bring it down to reality. Here he is questioning Velshi:

 KURTZ: But where are the stories saying that the government didn’t build the levees [i.e., to protect against the metaphorical financial hurricane] high enough? This didn’t have to happen. It was a failure, to some extent, of federal regulation.

VELSHI: Yes. And those stories are coming out now, and they’re coming a little bit too late. The fact is, this is the same discussion you and I had several months ago about where were people warning about the mortgage crisis. This is just an extension of all of that.

We — there were some people covering them, but they weren’t breaking news.
[…]
Thematic evolutions of stories don’t seem to make it onto TV as easily as they do into some kind of journals, and that’s part of the problem.

Most reporters who have a key representative of an institution central to their beat on the hook would take this opportunity to ask the obvious question. Say: “Ali, why didn’t CNN’s business desk get on this story early? Says here you’re a ’senior business correspondent.’ Did you lack the expertise or the resources or were you guys just asleep at the switch?” *

But Kurtz didn’t, again because he was questioning a representative of a company he worked for. And couldn’t he have at least brought up the other obvious question: How has the nation’s premiere business channel, CNBC, taken on this issue over the last few years? Here again, you get the feeling he didn’t want to address the equally obvious answer: A lot better than the CNN business desk did.

* Free bonus followup question: “In retrospect, Ali, as we sit amid a financial disaster your own network calls the worst since the Depression, did you serve your audience well over the years leading up to this precipice?”

The first graf of a Rolling Stone Q&A with Conor Oberst:

Since the release of 2007’s Cassadaga, Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst has been either touring or cruising around the country in his car. On his new solo disc — which isn’t a Bright Eyes project because it doesn’t feature longtime collaborator Mike Mogis — the Omaha, Nebraska, singer-songwriter reflects on road trips through Florida (”Cape Canaveral”) and Northern California (”Sausalito”). And on “Moab,” Oberst sings the mantra “There’s nothing that the road cannot heal.” To record the set, Oberst decamped to Mexico — musicians, girls and recording gear in tow. “I knew I didn’t want to be in a studio,” says Oberst, 28. “It was beautiful, warm and remote, and they didn’t mind us making noise.”

Emphasis added. I don’t think Oberst has a couple of young children I haven’t heard about. So writer Austin Scaggs seemed to be indulging in some very un-emolike sexism, and possibly revealing it as well.

… in which American Graffiti meets High Fidelity meets Annie Hall meets Hair meets After Hours: A group of New Jersey kids, high on music, lust and an unspoken but positively tribal sense of kinship, spend the night running around a Manhattan so romanticized that you park in front of the door at a hot club show; Electric Ladyland is the setting for not an orgy but rather what I guess would be the first great filmed emo sex scene; and a Port Authority toilet gross-out becomes a gentle, blissfully detoxified ongoing joke. The movie’s main concern is a meditation on Keatsian aesthetics: Is there anything in the world more important than a secret show by your favorite band?

The music industry RIAA’s massive multi-pronged assault on file-sharers and universities—debilitating, pointless, destructive and futile—doesn’t get as much attneiton as it should. One of the few parties with energy enough to track it all is Ray Beckerman, who on his blog Recording Industry vs. the People tracks as many of the cases as he can.

…So now the RIAA is going ofter him, filing a suit charging him with “vexatious” legal behavior. From Wired’s coverage:

Lory Lybeck, a Washington state defense attorney leading a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the RIAA of allegedly engaging in “sham” litigation tactics, said the RIAA’s motion comes from the same organization that has sued about 30,000 people over the last five years for file sharing, some of them falsely. It’s the same organization, he said, that has sued dead people, the elderly and even children — all while using unlicensed investigators.

“This is like irony and irony and irony,” Lybeck said in a telephone interview. “That’s what vexatious litigation is.”

Slate’s Josh Levin has a smart look at the evolving role of the so-called “red band trailer” —i.e., movie previews that don’t have that green “approved for all audiences” screen in front of them. This lets the studios smut it up for kids on the internet, who will not be deterred by an industry-mandated dialog box before the clip is shown. (”Are you sure you’re 18?”)

A real breakthrough will be when the major movie-trailer sites start offering them for download. I couldn’t find any on iTunes or at Yahoo.

Interesting foonote: After the exhibition industry essentially banned them in 2000, the Regal Entertainment Group recently broke ranks and started showing the naughty trailers. Regal is controlled by gay-bashing creationist and tedious moralizing Bush-head Philip Anschutz.

Metallica continues its ineluctable slide into Spinal Tap territory. If the band members aren’t baring their teeth in PR photos (scary Lars!), they’re getting their little noses bruised in PR gaffe after PR gaffe, even if they are not, strictly speaking, entirely the band’s fault.

Now, sound technicians analyzing the group’s new album have found something that is the band’s fault:  Excessive compression in the mix of the band’s new record, Death Magnetic, severely limited the dynamic range of the music fans bought; indeed, versions of the same songs the band sold to the video game Rock Band sound far better. Says mastering engineer Ian Sheperd:

[…T]he continuing arms-race for “loudness at all cost” is now dramatically damaging the music we listen to—even in a traditionally loud, distorted genre like rock. As a result we are given squashed, lifeless and often unpleasantly distorted products to listen to. These are less exciting, less involving, less impactful and ultimately fatiguing to listen to.

There’s a lot of interesting links in his post. A Wire Listening Post story on the controversy is here. My favorite part is where Sheperd quotes from an interview with the band’s James Hetfield, whose comments sound even better if you imagine them intoned with a Nigel Tufnel accent:

I think things came out really good. They’re going to be mixing it while we’re away in Europe. Yeah, and that will be…well,we haven’t done that in awhile. We’ve usually been around for the mixes. I think it will be good for us to step away from it for a while.

And Boston’s not a big college town. Meanwhile, the band is also under attack after the head of its label in Sweden cut off access to a Swedish publication a writer for which had had the temerity to talk approvingly of, and even link to a torrent site that offered, a fan remix of the new record that eliminated chunks of music from each song. (The songs on the album average nearly eight minutes.) According to Wired, the writer, whose work is in Swedish, said the changed version sounded better–as if the band had stepped out of fatsuits.

“The reviewer is referring to a BitTorrent where someone has altered the original songs,” Universal Music Sweden president Per Sundin told another Swedish publication, according to RoadRunner Records. “The reviewer explains exactly where one should go in order to download the file that totally infringes on a copyright. It’s not only an illegal file, but an altered file. The reviewer also writes that this is how the album should have sounded.“

Emphasis added.

Ticketmaster is one of those companies that always got a free ride back in the old media days. Now its position is such that issues that were a scandal ten or twenty years ago—and were almost never reported on in major papers—are referred to in passing.

Right now, Live Nation, formally Clear Channel, has basically fired Ticketmaster as its ticket broker and is building up its own ticketing service. The news yesterday (WSJ story here) is that it got a new client for it—SMG, out of Philadelphia.

That gives Live Nation somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s ticketing business. More on that in a minute. First, consider this from the very end of the Journal story, emphasis added:

Ticketmaster has long-term contracts with venues, giving it exclusive rights to sell tickets. The company makes its money on service charges and other fees. It has been able to maintain its dominant position by paying its client venues a portion of the fees it collects, and by installing proprietary technology that would be difficult to replicate.

The event-ticketing business is a scam from the beginning. We don’t pay a “checkout fee” at Wal-Mart. But the concert business has weird economics. If you’re desperate to see, say, the Police reunion tour, you shell out for the $90 tix and go along with all the additional ticketing, and handling, and delivery fees the ticketing system demands.

You don’t have another way to buy the tickets!

This parasitical position—roughly akin to being allowed to shake down music fans before they enter a concert—wasn’t enough for Ticketmaster. The company’s genius, which should have been illegal, was to jack the fees up even more, and kick part of the money back to the venues and bands. That’s how the company got those “long-term contracts” the Journal mentions. (The company doesn’t mention the band part of the equation, but that’s part of the mix as well.)

In other words, consumers were paying to help Ticketmaster keep its monopoly, mugger-like position. And the venues had no incentive to put the ticketing business out to bid, or find new and cheaper ways for people to get their tickets.

This process was entirely unreported in the mainstream press at the time. (One of the few to look at Ticketmaster in depth was Eric Boehlert, who did a lot of nice reporting for Billboard on the company in the ’90s.)

And now it’s mentioned, matter-of-factly, at the end of a story, as it is in the Journal today.

So as far as the news today, it’s easy to see why Live Nation wanted that business back. Why should it settle for kickbacks? And using its own massive share of the live event business as a starter, it can leverage that influence into deals with companies like SMG.

Two questions:

One, the ticketing business is an artificial construct, but once it’s there, fine. The venues didn’t want to deal with the hassle of printing their own tickets, they farmed the biz out, and consumers got screwed, but at least there was the cover of the poor saps’ having to buy the things through a different entity, namely Ticketmaster. But since Live Nation has taken the business back over, what’s the justification for it? “You can buy a ticket from us, but we’re going to charge you another $15 to buy this ticket from us.”

Two, why didn’t the Journal reporter find out the details of the new ararngement with SMG?  Says the story:

Starting late in 2009, it says, Live Nation will sell tickets on behalf of SMG, a Philadelphia company that manages more than 200 major venues, including the Los Angeles Forum and Chicago’s Soldier Field. The companies say that during the deal’s five-year term, Live Nation will sell the vast majority of tickets to events at SMG venues — at least 25 million of about 30 million tickets. Those sales represent an estimated $50 million to $60 million in ticketing fees.

The story doesn’t explain about the kickback part of the arrangement, or explore why the kickbacks are even necessary.  As for the figures, I assume they are for the entire, five-year period. But I don’t understand the math that produces the “$50 million to $60 million in ticketing fees”; the implication is that the average ticketing fee is $2 or so.

NBC is doing its best to spin the return-to-iTunes story in its favor. Here’s Cnet’s take, which makes it sound like Apple caved:

To get TV shows from NBC Universal back on iTunes, Apple yielded to some demands on pricing and packaging made by the media conglomerate, NBC executives said Tuesday.
[…]
Apple stuck to its guns for a long time, say sources close to the negotiations.

Read carefully and you can see that the sources for the story were exclusively NBC executives; not surprisingly, they tell the story that NBC had originally wanted to lower prices on shows and Apple wouldn’t let it, a situation heroically rectified by the crusading suits at the network:

JB Perrette, NBC’s president of digital distribution, said in addition the company will be allowed to set its own prices on special packages. For example, NBC could elect to offer a best-of Heroes compilation at a price that might offer consumers a better value than buying individual shows for $1.99.

Unsaid is the fact that NBC can’t “elect to offer” a worse value; in truth, NBC had wanted to charge $4.99 for Heroes episodes.

The NYT, in one of its digital blogs, tells a similar tale …

Apple likes to remake the world to its own aesthetic, but when parts of the world assert their natural ugliness, Apple will in fact back down. The latest example is the re-emergence of NBC shows on the iTunes store for download.

… from a similar source:

According to Jean-Briac Perrette, who runs digital distribution for NBC Universal, Apple has now given the network much of what it wanted. NBC can choose from three price points for shows: 99 cents, $1.99 and $2.99. In his product presentation Tuesday, Steve Jobs mentioned the $2.99 price point would be for high-definition programs. But Mr. Perette said the network could use that price as the base price for certain programs, such as two-hour specials.

In that single blog entry, the word “flexibility” is used four times. As we have seen in the past, the word is code for “raising prices.” With the few exceptions noted in that last excerpt, NBC isn’t.

Now, besides the journalistic issues involved in allowing the network to use that “flexibility” euphemism, the reason this matters is simple: The big content companies are obsessed with fighting puny battles on fields that are familiar to them, in this case weaseling incremental (or in this case, much larger than incremental) price increases wherever possible.

The problem is that, bureaucratically, they are not equipped to think in terms of a big picture in a transitional time. Hulu is a step in the right direction, of course, but many other basic mechanical opportunities aren’t being tried.

For example, nearly ten years after it became obvious that digital distribution of media would be the norm, why haven’t the networks created a simple YouTube-like standard for sharing and allowing bloggers to embed video from TV shows? The first five minutes could be free, or the whole thing could be free with attached commercials, or the whole thing could be free in degraded quality—each with one-click $1.99 download available with payment through, say, PayPal that would automatically route the thing into your iTunes or WMP. These could be packaged with the equivalent of whatever the DRM is on iTunes, and in a stroke the networks would be leveraging the power of the net in its favor, rather than fighting, futilely, against it.

Wouldn’t the development of that have benefitted NBC more than a year-long exile from the iTunes Store, where many of its shows were among the service’s most popular?

Nothing new in this AdAge essay about the dumb moves the music industry has been making of late, just a plaintive wish that it weren’t so:

All in all, it’s been a depressing summer for the delusional record industry. We’re seeing a total disconnect between labels’ unrealistic, old-school revenue expectations and what the market can bear. On the streaming-music front in particular, the sad reality is that advertising revenue isn’t, and may never be, there to fully support the music industry’s wishful-thinking profit margins.