As is well known, Über is as close to Google as 1 is to 2. So, if there’s any silver lining in the Über corporate power grab going on in Austin right now over a ballot measure to bring Über drivers in line with background checks on taxi drivers, it’s that all the world can see just how […]
Don’t forget that Google faces EU charge over Android ‘abuse of dominance’ http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36092441 Google doesn’t need any more bad publicity.
Peter Mensch gave voice to what many in the music business believe as reported by the BBC:
“YouTube, they’re the devil,” [Peter Mensch] told a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the music business. “We don’t get paid at all.”
He said the site’s business model, in which artists make money by placing ads around their music, was unsustainable.
“If someone doesn’t do something about YouTube, we’re screwed,” he said. “It’s over. Someone turn off the lights.”
YouTube’s reaction? It’s not them, it’s the labels, the “gatekeepers”. YouTube pays high royalties for music, it’s that it’s not getting to the artists because it’s being siphoned off by “gatekeepers”. According to YouTube’s Chief Business Officer–the Suit of Suits–Robert Kyncl:
“There are middle-men – whether it’s collection societies, publishers or labels – and what they do is they give advances and they want those recouped. So it’s really hard when there’s no…
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As YouTube founder Steve Chen said of infringing CNN videos on YouTube: “[I] really don’t see what will happen. what? someone from cnn sees it? he happens to be someone with power? he happens to want to take it down right away. he gets in touch with cnn legal. 2 weeks later, we get a cease & desist [takedown] letter. we take the video down.”
The Pinto Gap
Google frequently defends what I would call the “Pinto Gap”–Google’s business practice named after the notorious Ford Pinto model with the exploding gas tank. Why the “Pinto Gap”? Because one would have to believe that Google has determined, just like Ford, that the cost benefit of programming their search algorithm to play whack a mole with artists profits them more than “doing the right thing.” One day we may find out if there is a “Pinto memo” at Google.
Recall that the reason Ford was nailed so badly for products liability on the Pinto was that it turns out that Ford knew that the Pinto gas tank was dangerous and would probably explode. Ford made a horrendously cold-blooded decision to put the Pinto into commerce anyway. Why? Because during the gap between the time that Ford put the car into commerce and the…
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A must read Hypebot guest post by Keith Bernstein, Crunch Digital Founder that reprises the important themes he raised in his inspirational presentation at the invitation-only closed-door meetings on music-tech solutions held last fall.
The best solution is a direct licensing service that connects digital music services with music publishers, which would allow streaming services to effectively and efficiently obtain the licenses they need and make sure they have all the data they need to report royalties – this will help shield them from future problems. Such a licensing service would act as an administrator to the digital streaming service and as an agent to the music publishers and songwriters – and be able to update song ownership information, essentially functioning as a back office to make sure everything was running smoothly. Currently, Crunch Digital has built a database of a majority of US music publishing copyrights that are in use among digital services and they keep their data fresh with updates coming from the music publishers they work with. As an independent company that is not tied to a trade organization or a PRO, Crunch is in a position to provide a direct licensing solution for streaming services that will work for all parties involved.
Read it all here: “We Know Compulsory Licensing Is “Broken” – Here Is How To Fix It“
There are a few recurring red herrings in the coverage about the Spotify lawsuits that I thought we could examine.
1. Sorry We’re Not English: Hooray Henry! Spotify is a European company, so it should come as no surprise that one of the most common red herrings we hear is that there’s something wrong with the US because we don’t do things the way the rest of the world does and that makes it inconvenient for Spotify. So that’s our fault, you see. And we might agree if it weren’t for the nondisclosure agreements that prevent some of the European societies from even telling their songwriter members what the rates are. (See Jonathan David Neal’s groundbreaking guest post of his interview with Andrew Shaw from the PRS about their YouTube deal).
While there may be other aspects to the UK and European system of licensing that commend themselves…
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It’s important to remember that David Lowery could have just sued Spotify over his own catalog. He didn’t do that. He brought a class action for the good of all songwriters who get overlooked and disrespected by Spotify and that’s a lot of people. I don’t know Melissa Ferrick, but I would bet the same could be said of her.
The plaintiff who can’t be bought off is a defendant’s worst nightmare. This is particularly true in David’s case because in addition to whatever money damages the class may be awarded, David is also asking for an injunction to require Spotify to bring in an independent third party compliance examiner to fix Spotify’s massive failure to identify copyright owners.
That injunction is probably more fear-inducing than whatever the payment might be, because that will once and for all fix the problem and eliminate the slush fund–or force Spotify to stop exploiting uncleared tracks. Make no mistake–unpaid royalties are a source of interest-free loans.
Why do I think that Spotify is most afraid of someone they don’t control getting inside the company and looking under the hood?
Read the rest David Lowery is Spotify’s Worst Nightmare from Music Tech Policy
You’ll probably have read a lot about how the Lowery, Ferrick and Yesh Music cases against digital services show how “broken” the music licensing practice is in the U.S. As usual, instead of focusing on protecting songwriters and helping them actually get paid, the government is focusing on more bureaucracy and making life easy for tech companies. Because that’s what bureaucracies do–after all, why does the Navy’s Army need an Air Force?
The U.S. Copyright Act produces no incentive for anyone to actually pay royalties–mostly because there is virtually no chance that anything bad will happen to a scoff law who just ignores their obligations under the Copyright Act. Why? Because the government puts the enforcement burden on songwriter who can ill afford to bring a copyright infringement case on their own. And, of course, anyone who does is mocked in the tech press as a “copyright troll” as…
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There’s another list circulating of some well-known artists who are not signed up for SoundExchange. There’s always an implication somehow that this is the fault of SoundExchange as opposed to a failure on the part of the artist’s managers, business managers, accountants or lawyers.
Newsflash: SoundExchange can’t force anyone to sign up as a featured artist. It is the role of the artist representatives to encourage their clients to get this done.
Newsflash: It’s EASY to sign up. In fact, it’s never been easier.
Newsflash: Joining SoundExchange is one of the only ways a US artist can collect foreign performance royalties for sound recordings.
Affiliating with SoundExchange should be on the top of every representative’s new client checklist–right next to affiliating with ASCAP, BMI or SESAC. If the manager failed to get their artist/songwriter client affiliated with a PRO, or let a PRO just sit on money they’d collected it…
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“And if they could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?”
The Allegory of the Cave by Plato, line 515b2.
David Lowery is leading a class action lawsuit against Spotify for failing on what appears to be a massive scale to do three crucial things: license rights, pay reproduction or “mechanical” royalties for songs it exploits, and fix Spotify’s deeply flawed song licensing and essentially nonexistent mechanical royalty accounting systems for the future. Songwriter and recording artist Melissa Ferrick has separately brought a similar class action.
It’s A Mystery
We now have a legal response from Spotify to give us some idea of how Spotify wishes the world to view its excuse for its massively flawed song licensing practices. And here is what it boils down to–because there has never been a “global rights…
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It’s hard to believe that an artist has to go through what Kesha has been through, but there it is. We’ll have more on this in coming days, but this post by @morayati is one of the better ones that summarizes the problems with the case.
One of the problems with the “savior” approach to A&R is that people lose sight of the reality that regardless of how effective the producer is, regardless of how great the songs are, hit records are a product of hundreds of people working their fingers to the bone to make something happen–starting with the artist. That includes everyone at the record company, the managers, booking agents, the entire team. And the producer. If you have that team and those resources behind a great artist, that producer may prove himself to be not that critical a component to the artist’s career after all.
Why Sony is allowing this to happen at all, but especially when the public is on a collision course with Sony Corp (aka “Big Sony”) is a mystery. They could do the right thing now or wait until Tokyo tells them to.
Even looking at it from that cold-blooded commercial point of view, it’s certainly not worth compromising your personal ethics over the A&R savior-du-jour.
Some reporting questions for the Kesha court case
The key quote from the Kesha/Dr. Luke court battle, which has just taken a dispiriting turn, is this, by judge Shirley Kornreich: “My instinct is to do the commercially reasonable thing.” A lot has been written, rightly, about what a chilling statement this is, and there’s been a lot of talk about how best to support Kesha.
The Trichordist 
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