So it made me very happy to see what Lucas Gonze has been working on with his own music. He has created a dedicated page for a song “Frog In The Well” which adds a tremendous amount of context and value. There’s video as well as audio files, blog posts, sheet music, and background info. This is smart from several points of view and I’d love to see more artists doing this:

1) Additional SEO-able content for your site

2) With the addition of comments, you can create community around one song and further engage your audience.

3) Adding all this value for one song adds an additional emotional appeal to your music. Not only can fans see the amount of care and attention that has been invested on the part of the artist but it broadens their experience of the song and their emotional attachment to it.

4) By using a Creative Commons license and encouraging derivations, the life of the song is extended.

These are just some of the benefits of this type of song – enhancement and I look forward to see what Lucas and other artists will continue to do with this type of experiment.

If you are an artist and are doing something similar, or implement a similar method to Lucas, feel free to drop me a line.

Lucas has also taken this concept a step further and published on his blog a manifesto for the song page which includes ideas for structured implementation of this concept. I highly recommend reading this

Lucas Gonze presents a much more eloquent and well-balanced view of this issue in this blog post, “the business impact of requesting to disable embedding of music videos in label channels on YouTube.” He believes, and I’m sure he’s correct, that such moves are an attempt to gain leverage over portals like YouTube to assist them in negotiating revenue deals and also control of distribution. While Lucas doesn’t like to bash the labels for the sake of it, and is sympathetic to the “constraints” under which they work, I am not so compassionate.

The more I hear about labels trying to negotiate their own cuts etc with the Myspaces, YouTubes etc of the world, the more irritated I become because I believe that the consequences of this are never good for the indies or for music consumers and fans. They are in fact creating what Lucas describes in a previous post as the anti-internet: “Imagine a web in which every relationship had to be negotiated by hand. It would be the opposite of the internet.” Now where’s the fun in that? I’m sure it makes great business sense for them to try and do this – systematically cut themselves in on any successful business model/distribution channel that anyone creates – but I am basically philosophically opposed to what I see as dressing bullying up as business, when the impact will most likely be at others’ expense -whether its fans, or artists outside of their system.

I’m not anti-copyright or anything along those lines. I believe music should be paid for unless the artist/rights-holder says otherwise. But the majors are seemingly trying to fight against the whole evolution of web 2.0 which is characterized by user-preference, customization, collaboration and a plethora of distribution points. The labels are trying to control every point of distribution which would seem to be a losing battle, when distribution is in the hands of the masses. They cannot, by force of will, force the internet to regress to 1.0 where content was closer to being fixed, immutable and controlled by one or two parties. Hasn’t the death of DRM taught them anything? Wasn’t that an almighty waste of resources? The embedding battle seems like a similar fiasco in the making….