CCC-NYC.ORG | RALLY & CONCERT FEB 25 2014 feats David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Mike Mills, John McCrea, More!

About CCC-NYC

The New York City Chapter of the Content Creators Coalition is a new group united with the national CCC behind the idea that creators of cultural content need to join forces in order to ensure fairness and dignity for artists in the digital age. If the past fifteen years has taught us anything, it’s that artists cannot depend on industry professionals or journalists or fans to advocate for them—we must speak up for ourselves.

The group is enacting bylaws and seeking nonprofit status so we can operate and address these issues over the long-term.

Statement of Principles:

1) We believe in an Artist’s Control Of Their Work; that it’s the right of any creator of cultural content to choose when, how, and whether their work is distributed for commercial gain, monetized with advertising, or otherwise exploited.

2) We believe in the Ability to Opt-Out of services; the right of artists, writers, and other creators of cultural content to refuse, individually and collectively, to participate in business models that threaten our livelihoods.

3) We believe in Fair Pay; the right of content creators to a fair share of the wealth our work generates.

4) We believe in Collective Representation; the right of all creators of cultural content to aggregate our power to protect our livelihoods and our art forms.

Join Us!

If you are a NYC area creator of cultural content and would like to get involved, please contact us at cccnewyorkcity@gmail.com (or the form below). We want you at our meetings and events. You can also follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

If you are outside the New York area, please visit the national CCC website: www.contentcreatorscoalition.org.

7 royalty cheques that’ll make you lose your faith in the music industry | AUX

How little does the music industry pay artists? Shockingly little. Spotify, the dominant streaming music source in the U.S., is leaking money. They reportedly dole out 70 per cent of their revenue to royalties, and while that number seems high, consider this: each song stream pays an artist between one-sixth and one-eight of a cent. One source claimed that, on streaming music services, an artist requires nearly 50,000 plays to receive the revenue earned from one album sale. Ouch.

Indeed, things are getting dire. And here are seven examples of how bad things can get.

READ THE FULL STORY AT AUX:
http://m.aux.tv/news/100455-7-royalty-cheques-that-ll-make-you-lose-your-faith-in-the-music-industry

Google pretends to care about human rights | Vox Indie

It’s not the message, but the messenger–a hypocrite to its very corporate core.  If Google as a company truly believed in “human rights” why does it continue to disregard the rights of artists at every turn?  Perhaps those who doodle for Google might want to review the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 27, paragraph 2) which includes this passage:

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Why is Google so keen on “fair play” and the rights of athletes to compete, but when it comes to artists, not so much?

READ THE FULL STORY AT VOX INDIE:
http://voxindie.org/google-lgbt-olympic-doodle-opportunism

Washington Turned a Deaf Ear to Artists’ Rights Until One Guy Wrote The Words “I Respect Music” on an Index Card and Showed It to the World | Digital Journal

The Washington beltway turned a deaf ear to artists’ rights until one guy, one activist, wrote the words “I Respect Music” on an index card and showed it to the world.

Now, thousands upon thousands of music makers and music lovers are standing together and making history by adding their names to a petition that is not only shaking up the music world, it’s shaking up Congress.

To sign the petition, please visit http://www.irespectmusic.org.
#irespectmusic

READ THE FULL STORY DIGITAL JOURNAL:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1729302

Jean Michel Jarre: ‘Artists are the collateral damage of the tech giants’ | The Guardian UK

The ‘monsters’ of Google, Facebook and the tech giants need to work with musicians, the electronic music star said, to develop new ways of protecting creative property.

Jean Michel Jarre has called on music artists to work with the world’s most powerful technology companies, urging them to explore new ways of making money for their work.

“We are the people creating the future – not manufacturers of computers or cables. We are the extraordinary,” Jarre told the Guardian. “[The lack of enforcement of] intellectual property is not just a problem for artists from Europe and America – it’s a global problem . It’s one of the strongest elements of what democracy is all about.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN UK:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/jean-michel-jarre-smartphone-google-creators

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If the Internet is working for Musicians, Why aren’t more Musicians Working Professionally?

The Music Industry’s YouTube Problem | Music Ally

“Google are not music people, and that scares me.” This single quote from Colin Daniels, of Australian independent music firm Inertia, summarised a whole conference worth of anti-Google unrest at this year’s Midem, which spilled over onto YouTube too.

Whenever a YouTube exec appeared in a panel session, they were put on the defensive about the company’s approach to music and creators, often by pointed questions from audience members – and on one occasion, angry heckling.

After the last year of Spotify taking constant flak over streaming’s value to artists, at Midem that company was being praised – “everyone there are music people,” said Daniels before making his Google comment in a session on indie label strategies – while YouTube (and, more surprisingly, Facebook) were being attacked.

Music good, Big Tech evil. We’ve been writing about this clash for years now, but it was more open and more emotional than we remember at any previous Midem. Yet we also found a more positive, if challenging takeaway from this year’s conference: the music industry can shed its victim status and make these Big Tech platforms work better for rightsholders and creators.

READ THE FULL STORY AT MUSIC ALLY:
http://musically.com/2014/02/07/music-allys-midem-recap-the-music-industrys-youtube-problem/

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Jean Michel Jarre: ‘Don’t forget that us creators are the smart part in a smart phone | MTP

by Helienne Lindvall

At this week’s Midem music conference in Cannes, France, I sat down with electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre, whose career as an artist and composer is now in its fifth decade, having broken through internationally with his groundbreaking Oxygene album in 1976. Last year, he took over the presidency of CISAC, the global body for authors’ societies, after the previous president, Robin Gibb, passed away – and so his Midem “visionary talk” went under the headline Fair Share for Creators.

Jarre:

“We should never forget that in the smartphone, the smart part is us creators. If you get rid of music, images, videos, words and literature from the smartphone, you just have a simple phone that would be worth about $50. Let’s accept that there’s a lot of innovation in the smartphone, so let’s add $100 for this innovation – the remaining $300-$400 of the price should go to us.

So we should sit down and talk to all the telephone companies and computer companies selling hardware, the companies carrying the content on the internet, such as Facebook and Google. We need each other, so at the end of the day we have to find the right partnership. We are talking about a business partnership, not a tax, and this shouldn’t affect the consumer.”

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW AT MUSIC TECHNOLOGY POLICY:
http://musictechpolicy.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/jean-michel-jarre-dont-forget-that-us-creators-are-the-smart-part-in-a-smartphone-by-helienne-lindvall/

David Byrne Wants Performance Royalties On Commercial Radio | Stereogum #irespectmusic

Byrne points out a bill in the House Of Representatives, sponsored by Jerry Nadler of New York, that would bring artist royalties into federal law. He further clarifies that digital and streaming radio services such as Pandora already pay artist royalties. Independent and college radio stations would not be affected either — just the stations that make money playing music. He also links to a petition about the issue. And at the outset of his piece, Byrne says he’s been meeting with a small group of musicians and writers about forming a creatives union. Read the full essay here.

READ THE FULL STORY AT STEREO GUM:
http://www.stereogum.com/1648771/david-byrne-wants-performance-royalties-on-commercial-radio/news/

RELATED:

http://irespectmusic.org

Please sign the petition at Irespectmusic.org to support artist pay for radio play

U2 Manager Paul McGuinness on Artists Rights and Piracy

What needs to be done is simple, take the sites down and keep them down. If the pirates can manage to replace their sites instantly with legions of bots, Google, with their brilliant algorithm engineers can counter it.

We need the technology giants like Google to do the things that labels, the publishers, the artists, the writers repeatedly ask them to do. They need to show corporate and social responsibility. Take down the illegal sites, keep them down and clear the way for the legal digital distributers like iTunes, Spotify, Deezer, the new Jimmy Iovine Beats service, which promises to be a very serious competitor. Those services now exist, it is no longer acceptable to say that the music industry is not available, not making its wares available online.

We’re all aware in this room that subscription is now replacing downloading — legal or illegal — but we do need those mega corporations to make a genuine effort to cooperate and feed the industry that has been so good to them.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BILLBOARD:
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/global/5893877/u2-manager-paul-mcguinness-receives-billboards-industry-icon-award

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If Spotify is saving Swedish music sales, why aren’t indies celebrating? | The Guardian UK

It’s often hailed as a model for the future of digital music, but the reality is that many smaller labels can’t survive on streaming

When Swedish independent artist/producer/songwriter and label owner David Elfström Lilja checked his admin page on Phonofile, his distributor, the other day to find out how much he had made from his latest single Worlds Collide in its first few weeks of release, his heart sank. For 18,035 streams he had received 8.70 SEK (£0.80). Meanwhile it had sold two copies on iTunes, for which he received 36.37 SEK (£3).

“No one can say that streams don’t cannibalise sales, cause I can’t imagine those streams wouldn’t have generated at least a few sales [if people couldn’t stream it unlimited times],” he reflects.

It’s worth noting that 2013’s 5% rise of music sales in Sweden represents a slowdown, as sales rose by 13.8% in 2012. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Sweden that doesn’t know about Spotify by now, so perhaps we’re getting closer to the point where the market is saturated, when all those willing to pay for it are already paying (the company recently dropping listening limits for free users is not exactly helping to push people towards paid subscriptions). And yet revenue levels are nowhere close to where they were in the early noughties.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE GUARDIAN:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/jan/30/spotify-swedish-music-deles-streaming?