Getcha Info!

Right around the time that the CRB issued their royalty rate hike decision, imeem and SNOCAP quietly announced a partnership. Like the rest of the bloggers and press, I was so busy being outraged by the CRB’s decision, I didn’t pay enough attention to this important step forward in the creation of a digital rights marketplace.

Before I defend that assertion, let’s take a crash course in SNOCAP’s history.

Back in 2002, SNOCAP planned to facilitate peer to peer (p2p) networks’ transition from illegal services to legal services. They had some cool technology to do this including digital fingerprinting to identify a song on a p2p network and the SNOCAP Registry, which was essentially a list of songs and their associated rights. For example, SNOCAP could tell eDonkey that an Outkast song was being downloaded and that the record label was OK with people downloading the song if it was protected by DRM and sold for $.99.

Think about that for a second.

SNOCAP can do what Audible Magic does (identifying content on a network). However, instead of focusing their product on infringing content identified in take down notices, they’ve focused their system on helping artists make money from their music…wherever it may end up.

That’s wholesome.

Unfortunately, the p2ps didn’t jump at the opportunity to become retailers, so SNOCAP turned its attention to My Space and the social networks.

The SNOCAP/My Space deal got tons of hype, because, well, it’s My Space. Aside from a huge distribution win, the deal allows independent artists to sell music through their My Space pages. SNOCAP makes money by collecting $0.39 for every download sold (probably less since My Space is taking a slice). They may also end up charging artists and labels an annual fee (from $30 to $100) for using SNOCAP.

Certainly making an embeddable widget that lets small artists sell their music directly to their fan base is a cool feature, but it would be a mistake to think of SNOCAP as a simple retail storefront.

The imeem deal really drives homes the juicy stuff.

Imeem allows it’s customers to build and stream playlists. Using SNOCAP, imeem can make an offer to all of the artists in the SNOCAP registry. In this case the offer was, “let me stream your song in a user generated playlist and I’ll share some percentage of my advertising revenue with you”. Artists can opt in or out of the offer depending on how badly they want the promotion and/or the money.

Doesn’t a marketplace sound so much nicer than those nasty CRB rulings?

On the down side, the majors are pretty likely to uniformly opt out of imeem style offers today. But as the labels become more sophisticated about on-line marketing they may allow their up and coming artists to participate in order to win visibility. Meanwhile, streaming music services will have more levers available to them for mixing new and known artists together in streams to drive down licensing costs. Not to mention that they can protect themselves from copyright infringement claims by keeping unlicensed content off their networks using SNOCAP’s fingerprinting technology. Finally, consumers will benefit, because they can easily discover new music through free, ad supported streams rather than a 30 second sample or paying $.99 for a download.

A skeptic might say that only the crappy artists or artists looking for exposure will be willing to experiment with new licensing models. I’d refer those people to eMusic. The eMusic team has built an impressive catalog of artists who are willing to consider creative licensing terms and has managed to sell over $100 million worth of music. If SNOCAP had as many artists willing to entertain percentage of revenue based streaming, (hello back catalog) the future of innovative streaming music services could be very bright indeed. That said, I’m not entirely sure how the SNOCAP digital rights marketplace coexists with Soundexchange and the PROs in the case of streaming radio.

I’d love to see SNOCAP’s Registry become a viable rights marketplace. Of course, it would be even cooler with built in variable pricing mechanisms, so that consumer demand, not corporate negotiations, determined the final price.

Also a quick shout out. Thanks to SNOCAP’s CTO Dave Rowley, who spent 45 minutes patiently letting me pepper him with questions for this blog entry. If you want to help empower independent artists and be a part of the team that builds the digital rights marketplace, apply for SNOCAP’s open product management position.