Tag Archives: music downloads

music industry

17CD John Martyn download set offered for pennies across the web

A recently released 17 cd box set, “The Island Years”, collecting most of the recorded works of singer, songwriter and guitarist John Martyn (who died in 2009) is being offered at download stores from just £1.29 – which is just over 7.5p per CD and less than 0.5p per track.

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The offers, which have been available for several days, are on reputable download stores including Google Play, Amazon MP3 and Rakuten Play.com.

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The physical box is around £150 which suggests that the bargain offers are some kind of mistake, but one that is replicated around the web on different music stores. Did someone at Universal Music mis-tap a number? Or is it a sign of some kind of automatic pricing algorithm, where one store sets a wrong price, and the others replicate it so as not to be outdone?

Or maybe someone is a John Martyn fan and wants the widest possible audience for what is a remarkable body of work? No, scrap that idea.

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audio, music industry

You cannot resell music downloads, says New York court. Bad news for ReDigi

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A New York court has concluded (PDF) that you cannot resell music downloads.

The case is Capitol Records vs ReDigi, a web site which lets you trade in pre-owned legal downloads.

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The argument from District Judge Richard Sullivan is that reselling a music download is impossible, because you cannot transfer your download, you can only copy it:

Simply put, it is the creation of a new material object and not an additional material object that defines the reproduction right … the fact that a file has moved from one material object – the user’s computer – to another – the ReDigi server – means that a reproduction has occurred.

But by that argument, don’t you make a “new material object” every time you copy your iTunes download to a new directory?

Sullivan says:

As Capitol has conceded, such reproduction is almost certainly protected under other doctrines or defenses, and is not relevant to the instant motion.

The concept of “fair use” does not protect ReDigi either, according to the judgement, since it is a commercial transaction and not merely storage or personal use.

This is a decision with far-reaching implications. In essence, it says that once you pay for a music download, your money is gone forever. Your download collection has no resale value, nor can you legally transfer it to anyone else. The only way you might get your money back, oddly, is if your collection were destroyed; I have seen provision in some insurance policies for downloaded assets.

Who is going to stop you from transferring your collection to another person privately? That is different, a question of enforceability rather than legality.

You are better off buying a CD; the used CD market is deeply depressed, but does at least exist. Ripping a CD to your hard drive is illegal in some countries (including the UK, as far as I am aware) but I do not know of anyone being pursued for this, and there is a better argument for personal, non-commercial, fair use.

If the music industry could convert us all to streaming subscriptions, that would make more sense in the digital world. That said, it is unfortunate that streaming services like Spotify pay very little to artists in comparison with download services like iTunes.