June 2000 Archives

This is my first diary from my trip to San Fransisco. I must say that I had a wonderful time.

I really like the city. I have decided that I am going to take an opportunity in San Fransisco to work on some great projects and products. I am finalizing all of this now, so I do not want to talk about it too much until everything is settled. Starting my own business will have to wait for a while, because I felt that I could not pass this opportunity up.

On a different note my two new monitors arrived yesterday with my new laptop. It is going to be fun installing FreeBSD and such onto this beast and get it configured correctly with the new monitors. I will most likely be going to San Fransisco starting July 10th, so I have a lot of things to do in San Diego before taking this trek up north.

I haven't been too on top of the news these last weeks, but hopefully I will still be able to point to some good articles in the next couple of days.

I spend most of my day today working on the computer and watching the MP3 Summit webcast. It has been interesting to see soo many people being at a conference like this without anyone knowing (even after 3+ years) on how the music industry is going to move online. Intellectual Property and how to maintain the property owners rights while providing the consumers with a pleasurable experience is still the sought after solution.

Today Cnet published this article that talks about the MP3.com "open" APIs and comments from the tech community saying that a system is not "open" unless it can be usable by everyone, but that is really what they are meant to be open APIs or Protocols per se. It seems to me the only way this is going to work is to really open up these APIs/Protocols and post the specs in RFC style format (maybe even submit them to the IETF). But if you open up the entire API/Protocol on how to talk to my.mp3.com or any other MSP service, and have it be a standard, it needs to be readily available and usable
by everyone while still have the ability to protect IP owners. This would probably mean some kind of public/private key or username/password scheme to protect who has the ability to access what data if this would be service you would have to pay for. This would probably have a similar issue in the RSS/RDF world of distributing articles
between content providers and general/subject related portal sites.

So in common terms, again, the API is "open", but not open enough! Or it should become at least either open source or an open specification that can then be implemented by anyone who chooses to do so.

MP3.com seems to show somewhat mixed feelings about the entire open source community. While allowing developers (such as myself) to release perl code to CPAN or providing a Linux version of BeamIt with GPL'd source and a closed library. I really wish it would have the ability too come out more and make the "open" be
really Open.

One of the reasons I decided to leave MP3.com was because the company was slowly getting too big for its own good, especially after an IPO where it needs to start worrying about the shareholders rather then its services and consumers. When a company grows at such an insane rate it is really hard to bring the new people up to speed fast enough, while still keeping the same synergy. Our popularity also made it hard to keep up with demand, we were getting soo many new artists joining that it was hard to give that personal care that they all so desperately wanted. People end up falling through the cracks and it can take a very long time (especially in net-time) to get them going again. It doesn't happen on purpose, it simply is caused by growing pains and by demands for attention by different people pulling you all in a gazillion directions rather then focusing on your core goals. Since you are limited on time, you focus on the majority.

Although, I really enjoyed working there and thought it was a killer work environment, it became quite obvious that the company had shifted its focus after IPO. Its main concern became the investors and shareholders before anything or anyone else. It became quite hard to move around terrabytes of music while not disturbing visitors to the site and artists uploading and making sure you did not accidentally leave a file uploaded by an artist in a black hole. It happens; not on purpose, but you can not deny it. It really comes with moving too fast. I am sure a lot of other fast growing businesses have similar experiences.

While still debating the idea of moving to San Fransisco for some of the opportunities that I am interested in, I do have doubts if I really want to leave the San Diego area. In the San Diego Union-Tribune there was an article giving some input to why I am struggling with this. We really will have to see how good the offers will be before I can say that moving up north would be of interest.

Another site of interest that I am not sure people have seen is the Techdeals section of Findlaw.com. It has all sorts of agreements and legal documents about company deals, IP and employment. Check it out.

After reading the responses to Napster/Gnutella: the real
story, I remembered the Steve Albini article and decided to re-share that with you all. Today is a bar-b-que day at La Jolla shores with an old friend. It will be great to see what he has been up to these last couple of years.

After a pointer about an L.A. Times article, I notice different numbers in regards to the settlements. 1/3 cent per stream of a song and 1 1/2 cents per addition to my.mp3.com per song doesn't sound too bad. If they had to pay the 1 1/2 cents per stream as the NY Times article seemed to claim it would have been a lot worse.

Anyways, I have been spending some time getting my servers sorted out and watched the netherlands play soccer against denmark which was entertaining. Time to get some sleep before saturday morning hits.

Fleischers' old home Hits Magazine has an interesting rumor on their site.

"MP3 NEEDS TO JIBE WITH JIVE: The MP3.com
deal with BMG, negotiated last week, does not
include Britney Spears, NSYNC, the Backstreet
Boys or any other Jive act, which means the Music
Service Provider will have to negotiate a separate
agreement with the label.".

They also have more info on the other rumor although it has been said that MP3.com is not for sale.

I am also working on plans to be in San Fransisco part of next week. USENIX 2000 and the MP3 Summit are both in San Diego then, so it will be a busy but productive week. :)

The battle between (c), (p) and the online music space is just beginning. I am not sure who is going to be the winner in this battle, but it seems to me that it won't be the two groups that could use it the most: the artist
and the consumer. The fact that the judge in the MP3.com case ruled that two identical bytes of data (how ever stored) owned by two different people are not-indentical is going to make this playing field one of serious red tape. Although the net is suppose to make life easier and faster, it is going to be slowed down tremendously till it will be faster to hit a brick and mortar store and rip the CD yourself.

Now how is this going to work for other mediums such as E-Books, Videos and such?
And how come in the world of Software you can already see sites that allow you to buy and download the software instantly. Is this doable with software because people go to the actual software companies rather then an online retailer?

The buy-and-download music company Emusic, who I recall spends more then $1000 in marketing to obtain a customer that spends an average of $10 at their site, is not having too much luck helping the traditional folks online. It seems like the traditional folks want to stay out of the space as long as they can while collecting and in the end jump in themselves with the technology that is already build for them.

What makes music so different from any other product (it is a product according to the record labels anyways), it seems that if Microsoft pulled a "Napster" on Netscape to win the Browser War by making Internet Explorer freely available and default on any MS OS.

Aren't book publishers the record labels for books? A similar situation is starting there and unlike microsofts failed MS-Audio, they will now try to conquer the E-Book market with the Microsoft Reader. Now I would think if Microsoft makes the MS Reader free, then expect the Rocket EBook to potentially be Open Source'd in the footsteps of Mozilla to survive.

Just as we have already known, it is really your reach what makes the biggest difference and money can then turn around and totally kill that reach.

The Online music industry is really getting interesting and what is even more interesting is how open source products such as Linux and Apache through the help and dedication of developers and public corporations use are still standing and gaining ground by the minute.

Another view
and opinion on the subject was given by Salon.com.

I finally got connectivity at home again. This will allow me to spend more time online, but I still need to spend a decent amount of time cleaning up the home office. An interesting article appeared on Inside today. It will be interesting to see if this rumor will come true.

After working away at home on setting up the new office, I get my usual stock portfolio SMS page on my cell and find that MP3.com again flew up a few points. I am thinking to myself, what could have caused this another article about rumors to settle with the labels? So first thing I do when I get connected is check my e-mail and hit up the MP3.com Press Pages and there it is; settlement with WMG and BMG.

After reading several articles looking for details on the terms; I gather that a rough $20 mil per label is paid to close the settlement and they will have to pay royalties for every CD beamed into the system plus about a 1.5 cent royalty per download (NYT: cypherpunks, cypherpunks). Not too bad, but that most likely means that this service is not going to be free to consumers. And don't forget the cost of buying all the different versions of the newly released CDs in the first place, they still need to pay the outrageous $16+ a pop per CD to be added to My.MP3.com.

Now the question is what are MusicBank (started by a former Sonique Founder) plans; who now also has a deal with BMG to do just about the same. Also what is their royalty structure like with BMG. So far MusicBank has no real experience on building back-end server architecture, so who knows how much load their solution can handle and how secure and acurrate its accounting is going to be. Also where does this leave MyPlay.com? Only time will tell. CNET has a follow on update on the story with their own viewpoints.

Anyways back to sorting out the last 4 years of paperwork and wiring the apartment with CAT-5. :)

I probably should have said this earlier, but I have officially resigned from MP3.com, Inc and I now am in the process of getting my home office in shape. I am not exactly sure what I am going to do, but I am entertaining many offers and even have thought about starting up my own gig. This should give me some time to work on some open source projects. :-) I will keep you posted.

The current online music industry has adjusted from exciting to a serious legal battle field. Since I have no real interest in politics it has really killed my productivity at the office.

Some interesting things have come out in the last couple of weeks, such as a search engine concept based on the distributed technology of Gnutella, a possible buy out of myplay by yahoo.

I have been think of what would be the next step in bringing music online, but I am having trouble thinking of a solution without a spur of legal madness. So the real question should be about how to build a better server-player relationship. Maybe a new codec such as Ogg Vorbis could help, but what I am really looking for is a better way to organize music using meta data such as MPEG-7 and ID3v2. Enhancing the relationship between the client and server could add much need functionality to the MP3 player world. Simply by implementing some HTTP/1.1 features you could implement an MP3 player that would have forward and rewind buttons or simply have a dragbar that would actually work while streaming.

We also recently launched our WAP-enabled events service, check it out and provide me with feedback.

Since this world has one major factor that doesn't seem to be able to be manipulated (time), I have been thinking about leaving the big corporation, I helped raise a company with a 6 people group of enthousiasts to a 280+ employee public company. I have met and worked with an awesome group of individuals that I will keep in touch with, but I find it might be time to move on and start something new. Hopefully this will give me the ability to have more time to focus on new developments and contribute more to the open source tools I appreciate so dearly.