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“The biggest attempt at recording theft ever attempted”

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The husband of the late classical pianist Joyce Hatto has apparently admitted to “doctoring” sound recordings issued on his own record label.

William Barrington-Coupe issued over 100 CDs of his wife, who hadn’t performed in public for 30 years, on his label Concert Artists Recordings. Recently Hatto, who died last year, had been rediscovered to great critical acclaim.

However, sound analysis commissioned by Gramophone magazine revealed very strong evidence that the CDs issued under her name were actually the clumsily-manipulated recordings of other performers.

Audio expert and sound restorer Andrew Rose of Pristine Audio told us last week it was “the biggest attempt at recording theft ever attempted”.

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Pot, dial kettle: Closed Skype wants open networks

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eBay’s proprietary VoIP service Skype wants the Federal Communications Commission to change its rules on how cellular networks operate.

It’s demanding that the US regulator extend a 1968 legal decision, which permitted any device to be attached to the AT&T network, to apply to mobile operators. It also wants a new industry body to decide the standards for the networks, and ensure they comply: effectively bypassing the 3GPP (http://www.3gpp.org/), 3GPP2 (http://www.3gpp2.org/) and IETF standards bodies.

“After you”, the operators may well say.

For Skype is a closed system itself, using a proprietary signalling protocol, in contrast to the open SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) family of industry standards. In addition, the Skype client is closed proprietary software – in contrast to the software libre WengoPhone (http://www.openwengo.org/) project, and in contrast to much of the core infrastructure used by VoIP service providers, which is often based on Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/), which is available under GPL.

But is the claim justified?

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‘Hoax’ stuns classical music world

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Joyce Hatto

Gramophone magazine has unearthed what one sound recording expert describes as “the biggest attempt at recording theft ever.”

Thanks to the internet, the formerly obscure British classical pianist Joyce Hatto had become a critical favorite shortly before her death last year.

In 2005, the Boston Globe described her as “the greatest living pianist that almost no one has heard of”.

The Guardian‘s music critic Jeremy Nicholas called the recordings “the most extraordinary recordings I have ever heard.”

“Best of all is her musical imagination, which finds original things to say about the most familiar music,” wrote a thrilled Globe critic.

The problem is, experts who have analysed her recordings say, is that they’re not original at all.

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Unlimited mobile music for £1.99 a week

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In what may prove to be the most far-reaching digital music launch since iTunes, Omnifone today took the wraps off its MusicStation service.

The service gives mobile phone users access to the big four labels’ music catalogs on-demand for £1.99 (€2.99) a week, using a player that runs on mid-range feature phones and GPRS or EDGE networks, as well as high-end 3G phones – which Omnifone reckons gives it access to 70 per cent of the world’s phone users. Indie content will follow, it’s expected, as the indies are in the process of setting up their one-stop licensing arm Merlin, announced earlier this month.

As well as signing up the major four labels – UMG, Sony-BMG, Warner Music and EMI – Omnifone has inked deals with 23 network operators across the globe for MusicStation. The first of these rollouts – Telenor in Scandinavia and Vodafone’s Vodacom in South Africa – are confirmed for launch in Q2, with many of the others following in Q3.

In addition to the mobile-only service, a PC and Mac version of the MusicStation client will be available as part of a premium service costing £2.99 (€3.99) a week. With each plan, there will be no data charges.

Users will be able to receive share playlists, create personalized charts, and receive information about artists, concerts and promotions in the MusicStation player.

Omnifone, then offers a full-on challenge not only to Apple’s iTunes, but quite probably to MySpace too.

“Selling music is a legacy business,” CEO Rob Lewis told us. Lewis believes per-unit pricing is dead and the winners will be companies who offer the best subscription services.

He also believes MusicStation’s willingness to partner with carriers casts the Apple’s iPhone announce in a new light. Cingular agreed to Apple’s terms and disabled over-the-air music downloads to the iPhone – granting Apple exclusivity over acquiring content for the device, which must either be ripped from a CD or else be purchased through Apple’s own iTunes store. Verizon had balked at similar terms.

“iPhone is not good for operators,” Lewis said. “MusicStation is an all you can eat iTunes you can access from the bus, or anywhere.”

Partnering with the operators also gives Omnifone a global roll-out that PC-based companies can only envy, another contrast with Apple’s country-by-country exclusive world tour. Apple launched the US version of the iTunes store in spring 2003, with the UK following in summer of 2004, and Japan more than two years after the original launch. Lewis notes that in each market, 50 per cent of the catalog is local, something ignored by rivals.

So you can see why networks are keen on the start-up: all the music is sent over the networks directly to the phone. But what does it do for us?

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Google – this internet won’t scale

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Google’s TV chief has admitted the internet is crap for TV. Speaking to the Cable Europe Congress in Amsterdam, Vincent Dureau told attendees:

“The web infrastructure, and even Google’s [infrastructure]…doesn’t scale. It’s not going to offer the quality of service that consumers expect.”

Dureau, is head of TV technology at the ad giant. He candidly admitted that his own YouTube video service was part of the problem.

Engineers point to two different problems with today’s internet. The bandwidth is too low, but more acutely, latency and “jitter” mean the quality of the viewing experience is severely compromised. If an email program, or even one of Google’s YouTube’s Flash-based movies is forced to wait for a second, no one notices. But if a movie keeps hiccuping, no one will use the service again.

Adding to the dilemma is the question of who will invest to fix these problems – and who will end up paying for that investment?

Deloitte and Touche’s recently-published Telecoms Predictions report for 2007 contains a gloomy prediction that escaped almost everyone’s attention. Deloitte’s authors touch on the economics of the “net neutrality” debate, with respect to investment, advising partisans to calm down.

“Clearly, something has to change in the economics of internet access, such that network operators and ISPs can continue to invest in new infrastructure and maintain service quality, and consumers can continue to enjoy the internet as they know it today.”

That caught the attention of pundits. The conclusion, however, didn’t.

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On the Web 2.0 bubble

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To London, where the web utopianism has a name (“Web 2.0”) and is a rage amongst marketing and media people. I reiterated a point I had raised two years earlier:

&ldquo”Let’s acknowledge what the Web has been successful at: as a presentation layer. But the Web 2.0 kids desperately want to write system apps on their “global operating system” – only they don’t have the cojones to do system level thinking. Real engineers look at where systems (and humans) fail – their priority isn’t a cool demo. They’re pessimistic. And there’s no place for pessimism at a Web 2.0 conference.”

Have a listen to the MP3, or click below the fold to read the transcript:

Tim O’Reilly had snootily replied that he was unable to respond to “innuendo”-

“… this is yellow journalismi: find the outliers, and attack them to make a point.”

For O’Reilly, infrastructure is an “outlier”.

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Wikipedia defends reality against Stephen Colbert

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TV wit Stephen Colbert has had more fun at the expense of Wikipedia with another deeply ironic prank.

Last year Colbert satirized the project’s dependence on the consensus theory of truth – which for Wikipedians is a feature, not a bug. The project’s guideline “WP:V” states, “The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth” [their emphasis] – and in practice this means that if you can can find a source on the notoriously reliable truth machine called the internet, then cobble up enough votes to support a notion, you win!

On his show The Colbert Report, the comedian seized on news that Microsoft had paid a contractor to fiddle with an entry about open source file formats.

There’s a transcript below to save you wrestling with the Comedy Channel’s user-unfriendly video player, but in short, Colbert urged viewers to amend the entry for “Reality” to read “Reality Has Become A Commodity”.

Viewers obliged, forcing Wikipedia’s version of Reality to be locked down, with administrators – quite wisely – warning of the damage that Californians could do to reality.

Here’s Colbert’s report.

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An interview with Keith Harris

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Keith Harris

Keith Harris was general manager of Motown, has managed Stevie Wonder for 30 years, is currently director of performer affairs at collecting society the PPL and chairman of the MusicTank network at the University of Westminster.

Were you disappointed there wasn’t more public support for extending copyright on sound recordings? When the issue was raised, it was all about Cliff Richard, and no one wants Sir Cliff to get richer…

In my opinion the record industry has absolutely made a rod for its own back. We’ve not really endeared ourselves to the public over the years.

And journalists have found it easy pickings in terms of creating a story about the big bad record company out to get as much money as possible. And you know, a lot of that is because of the way the industry has operated.

The more you get artists who are dissatisfied – and in many cases they’re entitled to be, given the way deals have worked out financially – the more that reinforces that view. But it’s lazy journalism a lot of the time because if you just knock the record company and support the artist, you’re always going to win.

Where the industry’s at fault is that we haven’t really taken any steps to explain the issues.

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Universal exec – say goodbye to the old record co.

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An RIAA board member and executive from the world’s biggest record company has said the old way of doing business has gone forever now.

Larry Kenswil, president of Universal Music Group’s eLabs, might not speak for all of Universal Music, but he does speak for an important part of it. Kenswil today said labels could no longer “count units” but had to license rights.

The eLabs chief’s comments caused a few jaws to drop here in Cannes, but it’s part of a sea change in strategy at UMG. The DRM gurus have departed – Barney Wragg left Universal last summer – and Universal is striking deals with anyryone who can hold a pen and scrawl an X. Towards the end of 2006, MySpace, YouTube and Microsoft all agreed to pay Universal for rights to their catalog – material crucial to the success of their products or services.

“We can’t think of it as counting unit sales anymore,” said Kenswil. “We have to license … and think like the publishers.”

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Yes, we have no incompatibilties

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Savour this irony.

Last week, we learned that incompatibilities Microsoft hadn’t written into its operating system posed a grave threat to users. Last week, we also learned that genuine incompatibilities Microsoft had deliberately written into its operating system posed no threat at all.

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