Just an  FYI for all you Trichordist readers.  Yours truly will be performing at the Creative Upstarts Make Your Mark Party.   Hope to see

If you want to come RSVP here.

You think Performers have it bad with streaming/webcasting services?  Check out my performance royalties as a songwriter.  This is why we must end the Government mandates that force us to license our songs to these services at below market rates. It’s a subsidy to multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley companies.

This is all songwriters on the song.  Not just my share.  My share is 1/5-1/2 of this total.  varies by song.

This is total that all  the songwriters earned on my 200+ published songs.    If streaming is the future?  It does not include professional songwriters.   This can not stand.

Medianet Statement reporting Beats and MOG plays.

This is the first of a series of posts in which I will highlight what appears to be statistical anomalies in the reporting of streaming and webcasting income to songwriters and performers.

Here is my songwriter statement from Medianet for plays on the Beats/MOG streaming service for Jan 2014.  Yes MEDIANET the same company that Aimee Mann successfully sued for distributing her songs without permission.   Now for the moment I’m not going to focus on whether Medianet is properly involved in this transaction.  No I don’t have a direct deal with this company however they could have been hired by the streaming service(s) to pay royalties. Another possibility is the company may be involved by requesting a compulsory license (although I can’t find in my records a legally required NOI from the company!)

For right now I just want to point out that the plays Medianet and/or Beats  are reporting are statistically unlikely. Very Unlikely.

This statement purports that the ONLY TWO  songs that were streamed were two songs from Camper Van Beethoven’s 2013 album La Costa Perdida.

Come Down the Coast is reported to have been spun a total of 24 times.

You’ve got to Roll is reported to have been spun a total of 380 times.

If you know anything about the Camper Van Beethoven oeuvre these are not like our…er… um…  biggest hits?  Sure Pictures of Matchstick Men is a cover of a Status Quo song so that wouldn’t be on my statement and Take The Skinheads Bowling is administered by Wixen so I don’t get the statement directly.  So I can’t compare this to my two biggest singles.  But even without knowing the spins on those two singles these reported plays seem unlikely.  There are many many more singles and fan favorites that have historically garnered many spins.
Digging deeper,  Come Down The Cost and You’ve Got To Roll weren’t singles, licensed for commercials, placed in soundtracks,  they were likely to be listened to in album sequence.  As a result if you look at any songwriters catalog you will see that track 1 (in this case Come Down the Coast) is always spun more often than track 3 (in this case You Got To Roll).  Further all my other statements from this time period do not show You Got To Roll  being spun more than Come Down the Coast.

Finally it’s highly unlikely that these were the only two Camper Van Beethoven Music songs spun on the service.

This leaves us with 3 possible outcomes.

1.  The statement is correct and there has been a drastic change in the popularity of Camper Van Beethoven tracks after 30+ years.

2. Beats Music and/or Medianet are not properly tracking on demand spins.

3. Beats Music and/or Medianet are just making up these statements out of thin air.

I’m not a lawyer but as a civilian it seems the last two possibilities  imply varying degrees of fraud.

I encourage other songwriters to examine their statements from Medianet, Beats (also their wholly owned subsidiary MOG).   If other songwriters are seeing these same anomalies we need to do something about this.

Also I call upon Beats “Artists Advocate” Dave Allen and CEO Ian Rogers  to publicly explain what Beats reported to Medianet?   After all Beats music promised to share their data with artists!

So why don’t I audit these companies?  Well?  Funny story.

As a songwriter the US Government bars me from auditing these streaming companies if they requested a compulsory license.   Read that again.  The US Government gives these Corporations a right to use my songs without asking my permission but as an individual I am barred from auditing them!  So even if they are making this shit up I have no way of finding out.  Chilling.

Photo BitTorrent.  Parody, Commentary and Criticism by Trichordist Staff.  This would be a hilarious Kickstarter project, right? Imagine this billboard  along the 101 after you come off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco.

San Francisco is known as a bastion of liberalism and progressive politics. It’s also home to many strident libertarian advocates of free speech and an open and robust internet.   That is why we find it appalling that the San Francisco based BitTorrent operates a development facility in  Belarus or as we like to call it “Little North Korea.”  We have to assume that the coders who work at this facility–like all residents of Belarus–do not enjoy anything like what the international community would consider to be meaningful civil rights.  Belarus’ Internet and media are severely censored.  There have been mysterious deaths of journalists  and by any measure Belarus is one of the most repressive regimes in the world.  The Belarus Government has gone so far as to ban clapping in public.  I’m not kidding.

Here is a recent job listing confirming the existence of the development facility.

This is sheer hypocrisy coming from a company that spent a small fortune putting up billboards that said things like

“Your Data Should Belong To The NSA You“

BitTorrent should be ashamed of its behavior.  Further, I think that BitTorrent’s Matt Mason–who has recently conducted an apparent public messaging push to “legitimize” BitTorrent–should explain to artists why BitTorrent indirectly supports such a repressive regime.   Finally, everyone should check to see if their pension funds invest in the venture capital funds that back BitTorrent and consider whether this matches your ethical and political sensibilities.  According to BitTorrent’s website these are their main investors:

Accel http://www.accel.com/

DCM http://www.dcm.com/

DAG https://www.dagventures.com/

Read more about oppression in Belarus.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/07/belarus-inside-europes-last-dictatorship

http://www.rferl.org/content/uzbekistan_iran_belarus_media_censors/24567209.html

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/politics/world-leaders/130803/europe-last-dictator-belarus-lukashenko

Electronic Frontier Fondation disagrees.  “*&#$&^@!!!!”

So let’s see…. Human Rights are interfering with our freedoms?  Help me out here.  I guess you have to be a lawyer to understand this logic.

RELATED:

Universal Declaration of Human Rights – Article 27

The Human Rights of Artists

Google pretends to care about human rights | Vox Indie

If you haven’t seen this, someone has opened a “parody” of a Starbucks in Los Feliz.  The FAQ posted at the store claims that it is “fair use” and protected by “parody law” (whatever that is.)  While this may turn out to be simply a “dumb” marketing strategy or clever piece of performance art we can’t help but notice quite a few Copyleft buzzwords.  Also the specific Weird Al song mentioned should raise some eyebrows among copyright lawyers.    So regardless, intended or not we are certain this will be Tech/Copyleftblog fodder for the next two weeks.

http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/02/08/42085/dumb-starbucks-coffee-shop-opens-in-los-feliz/

So might as well  have a little fun and guess who will be the first tech/copyleft blog to cover this “spontaneous” event.