Mikey’s Not Here

If you remember the old “Life” cereal ads, they featured kids who didn’t want to eat Life cereal because it was “good for you” so who would like that?  Test it out on “Mikey”, the hyper critical eater—”Give it to Mikey, he hates everyhing!”  And surprise, surprise, Mikey likes it.

So it is with Spotify.  Mikey may eat it, Mikey may even proselytize about its wonders of valuation, but Spotify is not only not good for you, it’s actually bad for you.  The good news is (maybe) there’s something every artist can do about it.  Unless, of course, they listen to “Mikey”.

Here’s the proposition:  From a financial point of view, Spotify’s payable royalties are neglibible–marginally better than a pirate site.   (See “Streaming Price Index“) Spotify is, of course, a licensed service and it is encouraging to see investment pouring in to its coffers.  Make no mistake–we’re…

Technology may change but principles do not. A society that encourages the creative spirit is rare in history and worth defending. The internet and digital technology have opened up many new opportunities for artists, but it has also opened up new opportunities for those who wish to exploit those artists.

We offer for discussion a set of principles as a guide for companies and policy makers to keep in mind. It is our hope that these principles will help build a sustainable online creative ecosystem, one that benefits creators, innovators, and the general public alike.

1. FAIR AND ETHICAL LABOR PRACTICES: RESPECT WORKERS’ RIGHTS
A fair and ethical internet is built on the respect and protection of the rights of individuals to determine who benefits from their labor and creations.

Since the rise of digital utopians in the 1990s, we’ve unfortunately seen many very old arguments surface as to why…

Fact number one.

Unlike Google’s YouTube, Apple’s Itunes Store does not have a piracy problem, nor does it have an unmanageable issue with DMCA notices. This is often explained that this is because Apple does not allow user generated content from just anyone, therefore there is a barrier to entry that prevents such issues. But this is simply just not true, anyone can upload an album of music to Itunes using any one of the third party aggregation services such as Tunecore or CDbaby. And yet, there are not (as far as we know) hundreds or thousands of DMCA notices and content take downs on Itunes per day, as there are on YouTube. So why is this? In a word, intent.

If Apple, Spotify, Amazon and virtually every other legal and licensed distributor of digital music can put into place, the checks and balances that are capable of managing these…

By David Lowery

Can you imagine the outrage if leading voices in Corporate America started advocating that we abolish all individual private property rights? Citizens could no longer own any property. All property would be collectivized. Citizens could no longer profit by creating and owning things. Further what if these same corporate voices used the justification that private property rights were hindering their ability to innovate?

We’d all laugh. Or man the barricades. This would never happen, right?

Well it is happening. This is exactly what many in the tech blogosphere are arguing we should do in the cyber-economy. These faux revolutionaries are arguing that Intellectual Property and the Internet are incompatible so in the name of “freedom” Intellectual Property must go. In the cyber economy ALL property is intellectual property. This means these folks are advocating for no private property in cyberspace. What does that sound like? Depending on…

Notice that Cohen never–never–acknowledges that his uTorrent application powers an advertising supported piracy model or even that there is an advertising supported piracy model.  People download music for free from Facebook and Myspace.

Right.

Also note that he says all the BitTorrent employees are in San Francisco–that doesn’t include the development team in Belarus, I guess.

By Chris Castle

Given the plight of Chinese poet Zhu Yufu today is a good day to think about the human rights of artists. The human rights of artists is a different concept from intellectual property rights, such as copyright. Intellectual property rights are created by national laws, and the human rights of artists are recognized as the fundamental rights of all persons by all of the central human rights documents to which hundreds of countries have agreed.

These rights resonate in a number of international and national documents, but a good international agreement to consider first is the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that was ratified by the United Nations General Assembly on December 16, 1966. It is important to remember that human rights are fundamental, inalienable and universal entitlements belonging to individuals, individual artists in our case. As a legal matter, human rights can be distinguished from intellectual property…

Pandora and Sirius have decided to stop paying performance royalties to artists, producers and background performers who recorded before 1972–in other words, the creators of the greatest music that influenced us all and their heirs.  Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Buddy Holly, Jack Teagarden, and everyone in 20 Feet from Stardom. Just to name a few.

This is due to a gotcha in the US copyright law–the Pandora loophole–that supposedly does not extend the SoundExchange royalty to recordings made before 1972 because the U.S. did not adopt federal copyright protection for sound recordings until 1972.  The only problem with Pandora’s position is that there are lots of Members of Congress still in office who passed the 1995 and 1998 laws that created the SoundExchange royalty–and there is no Member of Congress who thought that they were creating a loophole so that Pandora…

When Garth Brooks was at his peak the last time around, I remember a story about him that stuck.  Garth visited the sales teams at some of the biggest retailers along with his label sales executives to discuss the set up for one of his albums.  After they’d all visited for a bit, Garth asked the label execs to leave the room and he stayed with the retailer’s sales teams.  “Now tell me what you wouldn’t tell me if they were in the room,” he said (or so the story goes).

That, you see, is a business-savvy artist.  This isn’t for everyone, but if artists are interested in their business, this is exactly the kind of thing you should do.

So it’s not surprising that Garth Brooks has held his records back from digital distribution all this time.  Apple wanted to commoditize his albums by forcing him to sell on…