Monthly Archives: June 2014

The Pirate Bay must be fought for the sake of exploited musicians | The Sydney Morning Herald

In Australia, there is very little that a musician can do to stop illegal streaming and downloading sites from using their work. These illegal sites make massive amounts of money from ads and nothing goes back to the artists who provide the content. Not one cent.

Sites such as the Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents exploit artists in the worst sense of the word. These illegal sites do not support musicians’ careers. They deprive musicians of the right to have their work valued in a free and open market.

The success of these sites is predicated on taking without paying on a massive scale. In fact, that is their business model. They don’t create anything. I feel infuriated when I see my work and my friends’ work being used in this way by people who don’t give a damn.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD:
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-pirate-bay-must-be-fought-for-the-sake-of-exploited-musicians-20140623-zsiqo.html

2.5 Million P2P Users Worldwide Illegally Shared The Top 60 Video Game Titles | Digital Journal

It’s not just music…

“With most of these games being $20 and $50 or more to download, the loss of revenue from this amount of piracy is huge,” said Kyle Reed, Co-Founder and COO, CEG TEK. “There’s been a lot of debate about whether or not piracy is really an issue for the massively successful video game business, but if publishers like Electronic Arts are losing nearly $30M a day in potential revenue on 13 of their hottest titles, that’s something to be concerned about.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL JOURNAL:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1983503

Songwriter’s Pie Anyone? | Shelly Peiken @ HuffPo

Financially, it’s less and less possible for a songwriter to make a decent living. I know of a few who have contributed to hit songs that are still having trouble paying their rent. I can’t help but wonder about the aspiring up and comer with big dreams and empty pockets, pockets that might still be pretty bare even after their dream comes true. Some reason that if they get their name on a few big hits it will open the door to bigger and better opportunities. They may be right about that but it remains to be seen whether the resulting royalties will allow them to make a down payment or put their kids through college.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE HUFFINGTON POST:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shelly-peiken/songwriting-hollywood-music-industry_b_5509579.html

Artists Take To The Streets to Protest Google/YouTube in NYC | NY Times

Last week, the dispute spilled out into the streets of New York. On Saturday afternoon, a few dozen supporters of the Content Creators Coalition, an artists’ advocacy group, picketed Google’s office in Chelsea, playing New Orleans-style marches on horns and carrying signs like “Economic justice in the digital domain” and “What YouTube pays? Nothing.”

Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with stars like Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, summarized how the larger conflict over streaming revenue affected artists’ careers.

“If we can’t make enough from digital media to pay for the record that we’ve just made,” Mr. Ribot said, “then we can’t make another one.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/business/media/small-music-labels-see-youtube-battle-as-part-of-war-for-revenue.html

Rosanne Cash Testifies Before Congress In Defense Of Artists’ Rights | American Songwriter

I am a singer/songwriter, author and performer. I wanted to be a songwriter from the time I was a teenager. I thought songwriting was an honorable, even noble profession. I believe that songwriting is far beyond just self-­‐expression, but a powerful means of service: we, songwriters and musicians, help people to understand themselves better by helping them to feel— through music. We shine light on the dark corners of the soul. We help reveal the nooks and crannies of our shared humanity. We provide a community for the language of the heart. As Hans Christian Andersen said, where words fail, music speaks.

READ THE FULL STORY AT AMERICAN SONGWRITER:
http://www.americansongwriter.com/2014/06/songwriter-u-rosanne-cash-testifies-congress-defense-artists-rights/

In China Digital Music Services Go After Ad Supported Piracy and Illegal Services.

I’m in China for the next two weeks performing and doing a series of IP and Music Industry events.   I will be occasionally updating readers on my activities. 

Congress Should Ask Digital Music Services Why They Don’t Go After Ad Supported Piracy.

Why don’t services like Spotify go after unlicensed competitors like Grooveshark? Why didn’t Apple or Amazon complain about unfair competition from the likes of MegaUpload? Why don’t the ad supported services like Pandora or Spotify complain about the ad supported piracy that directly competes with their advertising dollars?  This is something that has always puzzled us here at The Trichordist.  Why would otherwise rational business people who are obligated to protect their shareholders interest allow unlicensed competitors to get away with it?   Hell I’ve watched them cozy right up to unlicensed competitors. I’m not gonna name names here but a little people watching at SF Music Tech is quite instructive.  (The FTC or DOJ should try it sometime).

Well we gave these services the benefit of the doubt.  “Maybe no one has really thought this through? So we  back-channelled to one of these companies and asked them to join us in our campaign against ad supported piracy.  They declined.  Why?  Because they claimed they didn’t want to be seen as “anti-consumer.”  Huh?!

While it’s tempting to just call the entire digital music distribution business a bunch of glassy eyed free-culture Kool-Aid drinkers who’ve never grown up and actually  turned a profit, I won’t.  Cause while they’ve never made a profit they aren’t totally stupid.   In fact I believe they are consciously (and perhaps illegally) running a fairly sophisticated racket.

I believe that the digital services have specifically used the threat of piracy to negotiate exploitative deals with artists and rights holders.  Now they can’t come right out and say “That’s a real nice album you got there, I’d hate for it to get torrented” cause that would be illegal.  But they can create a fake scientific corporate study that says the same thing and here it is.

But as a regular reader you know this is just business as usual for these guys. This isn’t really news. What is news, is that in China the services and the content owners have come together to fight the illegal services.  As  China Music Business reports

It is impossible to make a concerted switch into a paying model when there are hundreds of sites with freely available music. While there are definitely fierce rivalries at play here, the key stakeholders are making an aligned move towards addressing this, including setting up bodies like the Alliance of the Digital Music Industry (ADMI), representing both content and service providers.

Holy shit.  Why don’t the western services get this? It’s a no brainer.  Maybe it’s time for Shareholders to ask some questions.

Read the rest here: http://www.chinamusicbusiness.com/article/china-great-digital-music-leap-forward/

Jaron Lanier on Internet and middle class: “We have screwed things up” | Salon

Salon Q&A: Tech visionary Jaron Lanier on Thomas Piketty, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, how to save the creative class

His latest book, published in the U.S. last May, covers an enormous amount of ground in what’s often a personal and eccentric style. “Who Owns the Future?” describes in especially stark terms the Internet’s false promise to artists – “trinkets tossed into the crowd spread illusions and false hopes” — and the larger creative class. “The clamor for online attention only turns into money for a token minority of ordinary people, but there is another new, tiny class of people who always benefit,” he writes on the book’s opening page. “Those who keep the new ledgers, the giant computing services that model you, spy on you, and predict your actions, turn your life activities into the greatest fortunes in history.”

The book received mostly positive reviews, though some objected to his proposed solution – that citizens be reimbursed with micro-payments whenever their personal information led to the generation of revenue. Since people’s Facebook preferences help companies sell, for instance, and the work of human translators provide the basis for online translation programs, these people should be compensated: “A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy, could come about if we could break out of the ‘free information’ idea and into a universal micro-payment system.”

We spoke to the Berkeley-based Lanier about “Who Owns the Future?,” the explosion of surveillance, Amazon’s policies, Kickstarter and his role as a critic both inside and outside the beast.

READ THE INTERVIEW AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/jaron_lanier_on_internet_and_middle_class_we_have_screwed_things_up/

CCC-NYC : International Fete de la Musique day

We’re looking forward to seeing coverage from the event in NYC yesterday.

Google-owned YouTube’s new streaming service has rates so low it will put many indie labels and hardworking artists out of business.   According to the CEO of Merlin (rights licensing organization), “the service that pays the least is the service that’s the most well funded and run by the biggest company in the world: their figures are by far the worst, whether you measure them on a per-stream basis or a per-user basis.”

Support Artists’ Rights by demanding that Google and others:

1.Stop using the copyright reform process to attack artists rights.

2.Cease brokering ads to the corporate black market.

3.Support sustainable pay models for the cultural creators on whom its profits depend.

READ THE FULL POST AT THE CCC-NYC:
http://ccc-nyc.org/2014/06/support-artists-rights-this-saturday-june-21st/

Songwriters Are Losing $2.3 Billion A Year Due To Outdated Government Regulations | BuzzFeed

Right now a byzantine system is in place that not only dates back more than 70 years but also differs depending on the distribution platform. Traditional radio stations, for instance, pay royalties to the composer of a song, but not to the artist or band performing it — known in industry parlance as a performance right — if they are different. Sirius XM only pays royalties for songs released after 1972. Pandora does pay government-mandated royalties to songwriters but has been aggressively lobbying regulators to lower the rate in recent years. Use of music in both professional and user-based content on YouTube and other websites and in TV shows or commercials is yet another category of music licensing, with the difference being that it is free-market-based and not subject to government oversight.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BUZZFEED:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/songwriters-are-losing-23-billion-a-year-due-to-outdated-gov

Privacy Trumps Piracy: Google’s Double Standard | Creativity Tech

Google’s Poor Track Record on Piracy

We reported on the 100 million takedown request milestone that Google sheepishly pushed past earlier this year. Compared with the rapid action the company has taken on European privacy rights, the earlier figure and the lack of action that it represents is even more astonishing.

And it’s not only privacy where Google flexes its significant muscle to disrupt illicit operations.

Since becoming the world’s most popular search engine, accounting for roughly 70% of North American searches and as much as 90% of those in Europe, the company has worked tirelessly to upgrade its algorithm to destroy low quality sites that aim to game Google’s system.

Those sites, it says, devalue its search product and leave users frustrated from a sub par experience. Sounds a lot like poor quality piracy sites that are riddled with malware, doesn’t it? So those sites should really receive similar punishment in the form of demotion or even being stripped from Google’s results. Instead, the company maintains a double standard that now stretches back more than a decade.

READ THE FULL STORY AT CREATIVITY TECH:
http://creativitytech.com/google-privacy-piracy-double-standard/