Category: the future of music

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

U2 manager: ‘Google is the greatest theft enabler on the internet’ | Music Week

Discussing piracy, McGuinness suggested Google isn’t dealing with illegal links because “they don’t want to”.

“There are some vested interests that could help a lot more than they are doing,” he explained. “Google is the greatest theft enabler on the internet, when I Google YouTube music there are multiple opportunities to steal it.

“I don’t think the industry takes [Google’s] promises to take things down when they get a notice sincerely. They take it down but the bots replace them immediately. I don’t thinks it’s beyond the ingenuity of those clever people at Google to deal with that, but I don’t think they don’t want to.”

READ THE FULL STORY AT MUSIC WEEK:
http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/u2-manager-google-is-the-greatest-theft-enabler-on-the-internet/058534

by trichordist

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

DMCA “Take Down and Stay Down” Is The Logical Solution to a Flawed Loophole [VIDEO]

Earlier this week Digital Music News reported that Google is getting over 1 million DMCA take down requests per DAY! If this isn’t the single greatest illustration of the failure of the DMCA to protect artists and creators we don’t know what is.

No matter how many notices can be sent, or the standardization and efficiency in doing so, the volume of infringement far exceeds any rational ability to combat the flood of infringement.

The only logical solution is to fix the DMCA whereby when a valid notice is sent and complied with, that the infringing content can not be re-uploaded again, and again and again as we detailed in our post “The DMCA Is Broken.”

These videos below illustrate the issue, both present testimony from the Congressional hearing on March 13, 2014.

https://vimeo.com/94514834

 

We’d also like to thank Congresswoman Judy Chu for acknowledging and entering into congressional record our post by Chris Castle on how to address these issues with the DMCA. Video below.

You can read that post here:

Safe Harbor Not Loophole: Five Things We Could Do Right Now to Make the DMCA Notice and Takedown Work Better

 

 

by Trichordist Editor