Author: Trichordist Editor

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

Van Dyke Parks on How Songwriters Are Getting Screwed in the Digital Age | The Daily Beast

Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic. Spotify (on par with other streamers) pays only .00065 cents per play.

There’s less support for all the arts today, and the blade gets duller with every cut in arts funding. It degrades dance, opera, even academia and, significantly, the art of journalism. As a result, in the U.S., public opinion suffers from what we call “infotainment.” That’s a genre of media news that is not informing, entertaining, or remedial. And it’s a direct result of a vacuum of patronage (and by patronage, I don’t mean just Medici-style sponsorship but the willingness of all arts consumers to pay for what they listen to, read, and watch, and for the industry to fairly recompense creators).

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE DAILY BEAST:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/04/van-dyke-parks-on-how-songwriters-are-getting-screwed-in-the-digital-age.html

by Trichordist Editor

T Bone Burnett’s plea: The piper must be paid| LA Times

Fans can still hear the work of America’s musical pioneers, thanks to online and mobile services. Through downloads and streams and services such as Pandora and Sirius XM Radio, these giants’ recordings continue to captivate and influence young musicians, singers, songwriters and producers.

Yet some of these same companies have made the decision to devalue the music of these artists for their own profit by not paying for it. In doing this, they devalue the substance of their own medium. For the last 20 years we’ve witnessed an assault on the arts by the technology community — especially when it comes to music.

This devaluation is troubling because music is not only the creation of people who make this art for us; it is how they earn a living. Music is how they feed their kids and provide for their futures.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE LA TIMES:
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-80409552/

by Trichordist Editor

No, Silly, Piracy is Theft | DevTopics

A classic, with illustrations.

A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie.  You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others.  But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket.

So when you pirate music, video or software, you are stealing income from the seller.  You are receiving something of value without paying for it.

READ THE FULL POST AT DEVTOPICS:
http://www.devtopics.com/no-silly-piracy-is-theft/

by Trichordist Editor

File sharing is alive and well, to the tune of 300 million users a month | GigOm

Surprise: P2P isn’t dead, after all. 300 million users swap files via BitTorrent every month, according to new numbers from media intelligence startup Tru Optik, which estimates that every month, more movies and TV shows get downloaded by file sharers than are sold on iTunes, Google Play and Amazon together.

And we’re not just talking about users in countries where media would otherwise be inaccessible. Users in the U.S. download more movies, TV shows, music and software than any other country, according to Tru Optik. The only exception to this rule is video games, where users in Brazil are more active than their U.S. counterparts.

READ THE FULL STORY AT GIGAOM:
http://gigaom.com/2014/05/28/file-sharing-is-alive-and-well-to-the-tune-of-300-million-users-a-month/

by Trichordist Editor

Music Piracy Is and Should Remain Illegal | NoisePorn

The problem is not that the music industry is refusing to change with technology and culture. In fact, I find it spooky that the notion of revamping the system to pander to those engaging in criminal activity is even being uttered. The problem is that we’ve become a society that excuses douchebaggery as a sign of the times; an “everybody’s doing it so, whatever” phenomenon. And, instead of enforcing logical rules (i.e. prosecuting the wrongdoers), we justify the despicable and conjure up excuses for their behavior. Maybe they weren’t hugged enough as children. Or maybe the music industry is being unfair by trying to profit from what some think should be free and accessible to everyone. We then, as if stricken with Stockholm Syndrome, develop a completely warped sense of empathy toward the culprits; bending the fist of justice until the finger of blame points back at the industry and its still bleeding wounds.

READ THE FULL STORY AT NOISE PORN:
http://www.noiseporn.com/2014/05/music-piracy-remain-illegal/

by Trichordist Editor

Google/YouTube Said to Be Threatening Censorship Of Artists Videos | The Guardian UK

There is an interesting story breaking in the UK’s Guardian about negotiations between indie labels rights organization Worldwide Independent Network (WIN) and Google’s YouTube.

“Music industry trade association the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN) has accused YouTube of strong-arm negotiating tactics trying to force indie labels to sign up to the new service.

WIN, which represents independent labels worldwide, claims that YouTube is approaching labels directly with a “template contract” and threatening that if they do not sign it, all their music videos will be blocked on YouTube.”

Bring on the black out? How ironic would it be that Google would resort to content blocking as the champions of an open internet and freedom of speech online.

We can see it now…

This video has been removed by Google who chose not to compensate the creator fairly for their work. Sorry about that ;-(

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/22/indie-labels-youtube-subscription-music

by Trichordist Editor