Love or hate em, the Redmond mob at Microsoft have their hearts in the right place when it comes to spam:

“Not content with merely adding new spam-filtering capabilities to its e-mail software, in the coming year Microsoft also intends to track down and take legal action against spammers, no matter where in the world the junk mailers are located. “

Given Microsoft’s gigantic resources – both financial and technical – this is a welcome attitude, and if genuine, the big time spammers should be concerned.

So why DO so many people download music? Here’s a fascinating analysis and hypothesis about the motivations, psychology and business of music downloads.

“The music industry doesn’t understand the microeconomics of it’s own business. If it did, it would see that it’s business model is not just misguided, but broken- because, DRM or not, the implicit contract it signs with listeners is being broken in both directions.”

Here’s a good example of lateral thinking about the music download issue. An industry group in the USA is suggesting cable internet users pay a flat fee per month, as compensation for accessing music download/file sharing web sites. The fee can then be distributed as copyright payments.

“the new Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) calls on the music industry to drop its fierce resistance to all peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing applications. Instead, the DCIA proposes that the record labels start actively selling their content to all cable modem and other broadband subscribers who use such popular free music file-sharing software as Kazaa.”

Here’s food for thought for live theatre and performing arts managers. In cinema, SMS is now having a substantial impact on sales. Takings for Matrix Revolutions dropped 66% between its first and second weekends, driven, it seems, by the prime market – teen boys – madly SMSing each other that the film sucked:

“The cinema managers tell us that they are seeing the little lights of the handsets go on a few minutes into the movie, as the kids start texting each other”

“…distributors [can] no longer buy success by saturation advertising, because word of mouth now spreads at the speed of SMS. “

Live arts constantly beomans the lack of a promotional budget. They often speak lovingly of ‘word of mouth’, but clearly the challenge is to move that word of mouth into the 21st century.

Apple’s iPod has been a huge success in the last couple of years, its small size, combined with the phenomenal ability to stored thousands of songs on something small enough to fit in a pocket has given it a high profile and bolstered Apple’s revenues.

But it turns out that the not all was well – many people experienced problems with the batteries not holding a charge after a while. Apple didn’t have a replacement battery service, and simply suggested they all go and buy a new iPod. Bit like buying a new mobile phone when your battery goes flat.

One of the purchasers even made a movie about it:

http://ipodsdirtysecret.com/

To Apple’s credit it appears they have heard the message, they now offer a battery replacement service.

Yes tech-head visionaries get knighthoods as well as tired old actors and bureaucrats:

“Tim Berners-Lee, who combined HTML with URLs and came up with the World Wide Web, has been knighted. “

Back to cutting that killer app code….

In the USA new research is suggesting that the music industry’s tactics of launching lawsuits against individuals (including children) might be having some effect:

“The percentage of Americans who downloaded music from the Internet fell to 14 percent over the four weeks ended Dec. 14, from 29 percent in a 30-day sample conducted in March, April and May, according to a telephone survey of 1,358 Internet users conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “

Well it seems the predictions by the music industry of devastation caused by ‘illegal’ burning of songs onto CD have come to naught. Research suggests that tens of millions of home made CDs were given as gifts to Australians in 2003. Yet record sales are hardly showing a blip. “In Australia CD sales through stores rebounded 5 per cent in the first half of 2003. “

And in the USA, one of the loudest prophets of music industry annihilation Stan Liebowitz has recanted. The industry loved Stan when he proclaimed “large-scale unauthorised copying could soon make it obsolete”.

Stan now says “given the enormity of the whole MP3 download enterprise it should be easy to recognise its impact on album sales if the impact is large”.

The Australian newspaper reported yesterday that:

“A computer glitch has caused thousands of Westpac accounts to be wrongly debited, leaving some of the bank’s customers out of pocket by thousands of dollars over the Christmas period.

The bank admitted yesterday ‘thousands’ of deit and credit card transactions had been charged twice, sending many accounts wrongly into debit and leaving the bank’s customers without access to their own funds – some for more than 10 days.”

I went to try and find the story online and my Google search immediately came back with:

Computer glitch strips millions from Westpac accounts

Except that’s a story from September 2003, where it seems Westpac had exactly the same problem:

“Westpac customers had millions of dollars removed from their accounts during the weekend because of a computer glitch.

Angry customers started ringing the bank on Friday night, after finding it had deducted twice as much as it should have from their accounts for automatic withdrawals such as mortgage and utility bill payments. “

But hey, if you can muck it up twice, you can do it three times:

Westpac computer glitch delays $8lm in welfare payments

“About 20,000 people missed out on receiving $8 million in welfare payments this morning following a computer glitch at Westpac Banking Corp Ltd.

Westpac spokesman David Lording said a “technical glitch” involving computer information about the Centrelink and pension payments had prevented money from being put in customers’ accounts across the country today. “

Clearly Westpac is a little unlucky to have two major incidents in the space of a few months, but it’s all little solace to the people affected. In fairness I should point out that the banking sector is rife with stories like this from all around the world, it’s not just Westpac. What would be interesting it to know a little more about the computer ‘glitch’ – was it human error, software bugs, Act of God….?

When will the music companies get the message? Yahoo has released a list of its top 10 searches for 2003. And no Paris Hilton is not number one, nor is Britney Spears or Harry Potter. It’s Kazaa, the music download and peer to peer file exchange service.

Sure Kazaa has been moving towards hosting ‘legitimate’ music exchange, and recently announced the availability of movies (albeit only a couple so far); but by far its biggest marketplace is what the music companies would call illegal music swapping.

You’d think that being the number one most sought after thing on Yahoo might give the music companies something to ponder for the New Year. As a piece of market research – something they live and die for normally – the Yahoo rankings pretty much sum up the issue.

Despite a massive media campaign, issuing law suits against teenagers in the USA, and even securing criminal convictions against three university students in Australia, and generally endeavouring to scare the bejesus out of people, it’s clearly not having much effect. What people want is to swap music, and track down tracks.

There has to be a business case in there somewhere for the music companies, and not just the obvious like iTunes and the other pay per download music purchase web sites.