Download website out of tune with big labels

By PETER GRIFFIN

The country's largest legal music download website, Amplifier, is forging ahead with music video streaming but growth of the site overall is hamstrung by a lack of support from the big labels.

New Zealand music lovers can now stream music videos from the likes of Nesian Mystik and Rhombus straight from the amplifier site, which has been offering music downloads for three years and has now gathered about 3000 tracks from 400 largely independent local artists. The MP3 tracks cost $1.99 each to download.

Rising hip-hop star Scribe kicked off the new video service with a live performance at an Auckland launch party this week.

About two dozen videos can be streamed for free but the quality depends on internet connection speeds.

Few residential users have high-speed connections.

Amplifier has set up a "lo-fi" download stream for those on dial-up accounts. Streaming a four-minute song racks up about 3 megabytes of data traffic, compared with more than 15MB for the higher-resolution stream.

The site was built by web development company Cyberelves and further developed by CactusLab.

Amplifier owner and music industry lawyer Christopher Hocquard said the site was growing but the economics of the service were tight as more commercial local acts were absent from Amplifier at the behest of their international labels.

"It's still very hard. The major record companies still refuse to [get involved]," he said.

"They can't make a decision locally."

Working to hammer out commercial deals for local artists in his capacity as a lawyer, Hocquard said he was inserting provisions for digital content rights into contracts, but they were not being exercised because of the lack of industry-backed download services.

In the United States, Apple has won music industry support for its successful iTunes downloading service, which is still unavailable in Australia and New Zealand. Amplifier was looking for the same type of service but needed to list music from the big labels, said Hoquard.

"When we launched there was no such thing as Napster. Now it's gone full circle and we've got iTunes operating under the same business model."

Sony Music managing director Michael Glading said he understood Amplifier's frustration but he was prevented from striking a deal due to Sony's global licensing policies.

"It's a business we're going to be in, but we've been very slow off the mark.

"Apple is talking to us but it doesn't have a timeframe [for New Zealand]. We're treading water to some extent," said Glading, whose local signees include Bic Runga, Che Fu and Brooke Fraser.

While Telstra and Warner Music have teamed up to offer paid downloads of Warner artists to Telstra's BigPond customers, a similar deal is yet to be struck with internet providers here.

James Southgate, the managing director of Warner Music New Zealand, which has popular act the feelers on its label, said plans were under way for a local service but he could not say when it would start.

Glading had also sat down with internet providers.

"There's been a few meetings and a lot of talk, but no one actually flicking the switch."

Meanwhile the bulk of music downloading happens through illicit file-sharing hubs such as dc.p2p.net.nz, which carries hundreds of gigabytes of songs, movies and software, free for the taking.

"When we don't have a legal alternative it's not ideal," said Glading, who believed Sony was delaying because it wanted to sort out issues of accountability with local partners and was waiting for a service with adequate scale.

"Consumers want it all in one place. If it's Brooke Fraser or Madonna, they don't want to go trawling through sites to find it."

Hoquard said problems with online financial transactions and young people lacking access to credit cards were also limiting downloads from Amplifier, which numbered in the hundreds each month.

Amplifier