Matt Labash is one of the great journalists writing today.  His extraordinarily insightful piece, Through A Google Glass, Darkly is yet another example of why the guy should write a longread.  (You know, a book.)

Labash documents his initial experience with Google Glass as a “Glass Explorer” and it is both funny and sad which of course makes the funny parts even funnier and the insightful parts even more meaningful, kind of like Studs Terkel meets H.L. Mencken in a movie based on a William Gibson novel directed by Stanley Kubrick.

But–and no MTP reader will be surprised by this–the part of Labash’s piece that really caught my eye was this encounter with a Google flack:

Weirdly, my own trust rating already seems to have taken a hit with Google. In the middle of reporting this piece, I get an unsolicited email from Chris Dale, who heads Glass’s communications…

In case you didn’t believe there was a reason why YouTube executives were booed at this year’s MIDEM global music industry trade conference, you may find this reporting from the Music Tank meeting in London this week as reported by Complete Music Update:

Last night’s MusicTank debate…was…generally optimistic….And though the debate was technically initiated by Thom Yorke’s Spotify-bashing of last year, the DSPs were generally portrayed as good partners for artists and rights owners. With perhaps one exception – any DSP bashing last night was reserved for YouTube.

The Google-owned platform is an important partner for the music industry everyone agreed, but the music community’s relationship with the content giant – skewed by the firm’s opt-out rather than opt-in approach to dealing with rights owners – needs to change.

There has been a real swing against YouTube in the music community in the last year, with growing resentment…

BLANCHE

Whoever you are…I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

From A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams

Songwriters earn a sizable percentage of their ever decreasing income from mechanical royalties.  Until the last few years, mechanical royalties were almost always licensed under direct licenses to record companies that incorporated by reference the statutory license provisions of Section 115 of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act and the corresponding regulations.  Section 115 is a direct–and almost word for word–descendant of Section 1(e) of the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act.

Why so little change in nearly 70 years?  Until 2000 or so, nobody used statutory licenses except in the rarest of circumstances.  Instead, the statutory license became something like the Uniform Partnership Act or the Uniform Commercial Code.  It could be used for reference but was often–almost always–modified in a direct license.

The main point that was added in these…