An extremely important blog to read on issues facing artists and rights holders. These are largely all man made problems (if by man you mean a small handful of tech company lawyers). Digital services create a problem.  Blame it on rights holders  and then the “solution” always seem to require sacrifices for artists. Castle doesn’t say this, but how can the reader not conclude that this is an orchestrated strategy. Take for instance the pre-1972 sound recording issue. The digital services paid royalties on the pre-1972. Then one day they stopped. All at once. As Pee Wee Herman might say “mmmm collusiony.” Then when a solution is proposed it always ends up with artists and rights holders being asked to make concessions on a problem digital services have created.

I’m not a lawyer but the whole fucking thing looks like a racket. By this I mean the trade organizations themselves, DiMA and the MIC-Coalition are behaving like a cartel or conspiracy that encourages law breaking (mass copyright infringement) that results in strong arming artists into lower prices. While these fucks thinks its some kind of game this literally takes food from the mouths of performers and songwriters children.

But here is the really fucked up  thing, if one looks just below the surface there seems to be a single lawyer that pops up over and over again. Nearly every time this racket is executed we find Chris Harrison. DMX, Sirius, Pandora and now DiMA.

What the fuck  did we ever do to you Mr Harrison? Can’t you find something better to do with your life?

So songwriters, performers, engineers and producers the next time you fall a little short and can’t pay that medical bill for your kids. Think about this guy. He’s at the center of the whole racket time and time again.

Read more on Chris Harrison here. 

Read Chris Castle’s excellent Music Tech Policy summary of all the problems tech created for songwriters and performers and how these have been used as leverage against us.