Plaidophile

Today I just got an email from what's left of mp3.com letting me know that although mp3.com is dead, TruSonic (their independent-musician royalty licensing program) is still alive, and invited me to enroll back up. So, I did, and ran into some oddly familiar issues...

Below is the email I just sent to Vivendi's TruSonic division. Maybe someone will actually read it.

12/24/2003 Forgot to mention, they actually responded to me pretty quickly and addressed all of my concerns in my open letter. 'sall good.

Hi, I'm glad to see that TruSonic is still around, even though mp3.com is not. The announcement prompted me to start uploading some of my back catalog to TruSonic, though I'm running into two issues, one technological and one somewhat mroe fundamental.

First, the technological one. Everywhere in the FAQ and on the artist admin form, the instructions say that the bitrate merely must be at least 128kbps - but when trying to upload a 192kbps file (for a song which sounds grainy at only 128kbps) it tells me that the file must be *exactly* 128kbps. Either your upload validation stuff needs fixing, or your FAQ needs fixing. Additionally, it would be nice if you allowed VBR files, as 192kbps VBR sounds MUCH better than 192kbps CBR. In the mp3.com days the justification was that VBR might cause weirdness with buffering, but because TruSonic is ostensibly based on static storage on the client end, I don't see why you don't allow VBR, especially if you're really going to remaster each file to give a consistent sonic energy level.

Now, the fundamental one. In the FAQ, it states that royalties are divvied up based on plays out of a $15,000 pot quarterly. This essentially means that no matter how much money TruSonic gets out of the artists' music, the artists essentially get screwed over. Why not base the royalty size on a percentage of your income instead or, better yet, just give the artists a fixed amount from each license payment of their songs (which would work out the same anyway assuming each play generates the same amount of revenue for TruSonic)?

The way things are worded now, it sounds like as the number of clients and artists increases, the amount of revenue artists get for increasing play will decrease - and this is a major turnoff to many musicians who want to get more than $1/year and a little exposure out of this deal. Why not make your royalty terms more artist-friendly, to actually encourage artists to enroll?

Also, you really need some sort of way for artists to contact you, not just potential clients. It might be in your best interests to treat artists like assets instead of resources, if you want to be seen as a serious alternative to traditional licensing agencies (ASCAP, RIAA, etc.).

Yay.