Yahoo executive Ian Rogers has had an interesting career: he left graduate school in 1995 to tour with The Beastie Boys, then went on tour with them again in 1998. In between, he helped pioneer online music with a company called Nullcast -- whose music-playing software Winamp was one of the early leaders before it was bought by America Online -- and later wound up at Yahoo Music.
Despite working for a Web giant, however, he clearly sees the downside of the big-portal, top-down approach to digital music. Late last year, Rogers gave a presentation to a music industry group (which he also posted to his blog) about the problems with the way the music business has approached the online world virtually since the mp3 was invented -- namely, with restrictive DRM (digital-rights management) tools, complicated and user-unfriendly services that ultimately failed, and a blizzard of lawsuits.
The problem with all of these approaches, Rogers says, is that "inconvenience doesn't scale." In other words, if you make it difficult for people to find and access and use the music they want, then you will fail. In his presentation, Rogers made it clear that as the Yahoo executive in charge of Yahoo Music -- including a streaming service that the Web giant recently shut down due to lack of interest -- he had no interest in continuing with those kinds of approaches.
So what's the alternative? In a more recent presentation at a music industry conference in Aspen, the Yahoo exec laid out some of what he sees as a solution to the problem. In a nutshell, he says, there need to be better ways of finding and cataloguing (or tagging) different kinds of music -- both professional and "user-generated" content -- wherever it appears online, thus making it easier for people to find, share and buy that music. In particular, Rogers mentioned attempts to create a kind of "semantic language" for music online, including the work being done by Project Opus in Vancouver.
Project Opus was founded by David Gratton, a former securities trader-turned-entrepreneur who now runs a web development company and is passionate about music. Gratton said that he sees Project Opus (and a standard he's calling JAMM) and Ian Rogers' ideas as parts of an "open media" environment where content exists anywhere but can be found and shared easily. The Songbird project -- a kind of music browser based on Firefox -- is also an attempt to try and make that a reality.
Can the music business embrace ways of surviving online that don't involve lawsuits and DRM? Keep your fingers crossed.
