Author: Trichordist Editor

Trichordist Editor

Songwriters Are Losing $2.3 Billion A Year Due To Outdated Government Regulations | BuzzFeed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http://www.buzzfeed.com/peterlauria/songwriters-are-losing-23-billion-a-year-due-to-outdated-gov

by Trichordist Editor

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/

by Trichordist Editor

Musicians fear they’ll take a beating | Winnipeg Free Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Recording artist Zoe Keating only needs to look at her earnings to zero in on why she has misgivings about Apple Inc. buying Beats Electronics.

The cellist made $38,196 selling downloads on Apple’s iTunes last year, along with about $34,000 from three other download services. By contrast, five streaming outlets, from Spotify to Pandora Media, netted her just $6,381.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE WINNIPEG FREE PRESS:
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/music/musicians-fear-theyll-take-a-beating-261411471.html

by Trichordist Editor

YouTube’s DMCA Abuse and Indie Labels: How Google is Blowing it for the Honest People

* * MUST READ * * From Music Tech Daily

Music Technology Policy

In a speech at Canadian Music Week, Beggars Group Chairman Martin Mills was not only right, he was prescient:

Google, the parent of YouTube, [is] one of the companies that have made billions on the back of [the DMCA notice and takedown,] a statutory provision intended to protect ordinary people acting innocently.

Google has now refined the DMCA to a tool to leverage its anticompetitive activities.  Here’s how it works.

1.  Google opens the YouTube platform to unauthorized “user generated content” and says to artists (literally in this case) “Does yuse wants to play whack a mole or make some dough?”  This is called the notice and shakedown.

2.  Google then jams a settlement down the throats of major labels and sticks it to everyone else.  Publishers are next.

3.  Google pays the lowest royalty online with a big advance to majors and spaghetti statements to everyone else that probably…

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by Trichordist Editor

If Google can get rid of personal data, why can’t it purge the pirates? | The Guardian UK

Critics say that if search engine knows of illegal activity, it shouldn’t help to send business its way

Google’s decision to allow users to easily de-list certain personal information from search results has infuriated a film and music industry that argues the internet giant should act as decisively to help squash digital piracy.

On Friday Google bowed to an EU privacy ruling, dubbed the “right to be forgotten”, launching a webpage where European citizens can request links to information about them be taken off search results.

The move came a day after Google had been lambasted for not doing enough to curb online piracy in a report by David Cameron’s intellectual property adviser, Mike Weatherley.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/01/google-personal-data-digital-pirates

by Trichordist Editor

End internet piracy and bring Google to heel | Sydney Morning Herald

Our Attorney-General George Brandis is attempting to reform our copyright law. Meanwhile Google, one of the multi-national companies attempting to avoid paying tax here, is lobbying in Canberra to stop this, by putting forward the following six fundamentally misconceived arguments:

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD:
by Trichordist Editor

Congress moves against ad-supported piracy | The Hill

How surprised would you be if you went to your local Honda dealer and bought a car, but when you tried to register it you were told it was stolen property?

What if you went to Target and bought a blender, but when you filled out the warranty card you were told it already belonged to someone else?

Things like this don’t happen, right? Companies like Honda and Target are respectable merchants who would never encourage the distribution of stolen property. Right? Wrong. They do. So do companies like Kraft, Lego, and the makers of Claritin. Every day.

It sounds insane, but Honda, Toyota, Target, Kraft, Lego, and Claritin are spending gobs of money every day to finance theft – whether they know it or not.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE HILL:
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/technology/209193-congress-moves-against-ad-supported-piracy

by Trichordist Editor

“Successful” Licensing Models and the Opt Out: Music Licensing Study Comments

Music Technology Policy

The U.S. Copyright Office is conducting a “Music Licensing Study” as part of the government’s overall review of the U.S. copyright law with an eye to potentially overhauling the entire copyright system.  (See “The Next Great Copyright Act” by Maria Pallante, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office and the nominal go-to person for the U.S. Congress on copyright issues.)  The Copyright Office has received written public comments on questions posed in its Notice of Inquiry and is also holding public Roundtables in Nashville, Los Angeles and New York  (in that order).

The speakers at the Roundtables are by invitation only although the roundtables themselves are open to the public.  We understand that the Roundtable participants will be invited to submit written reply comments at some point after the conclusion of the last Roundtable.  The Nashville Roundtable is over and the Los Angeles Roundtable begins…

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by Trichordist Editor

Artists Will Receive Nothing from the $3 Billion Beats Acquisition, Sources Say…| DMN

The three major labels secured an equity share in Beats Music as part of their licensing agreements with the service. But according to multiple sources close to those negotiations and Beats’ subsequent sale, artists on those labels will receiving nothing at all from the roughly $3 billion acquisition by Apple.

The reason is that acquisition earnings aren’t tied to actual sales or streams, and therefore are not accounted at all to label artists. “They will get nothing,” one industry attorney flatly told Digital Music News, while insisting on anonymity.

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/06/09/artists-will-receive-nothing-3-billion-beats-acquisition-sources-say

by Trichordist Editor

Swimming Against the Stream: Musicians Fight for Their Worth in the Internet Era | SF Weekly

The cops were getting lots of calls. Drivers were worried. There was a woman walking down the road — the narrow part of Highway 1, just north of L.A. And she was pushing a baby carriage.

When the cops found her, it turned out she was not a crazy person. She wasn’t even a mother.

She was a musician on a mission.

The woman was Suzana Barbosa, a longtime Toronto singer and leader of the band Lumanova, who had lately become fed up with the state of the music industry. She’d had it with the paltry amounts paid to songwriters and performers by streaming services like Spotify. She’d had it with our culture’s preference for glamorizing starving artists instead of paying them decently.

Barbosa was so fed up with the music business that she decided to walk some 400 miles, from Los Angeles to the Google campus in Mountain View, to publicize what she sees as an existential threat to the world’s independent musicians.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE SF WEEKLY:
http://www.sfweekly.com/2014-06-04/music/beats-apple-unsound-spotify/

by Trichordist Editor