GOOD WORKS : Artists help homeless on ‘Compassion Through Action’ | American Live Wire

Artists understand giving for a good cause. Here’s one example for this Holiday Season.

Artists have united to help the homeless with a new digital-only charity compilation album titled Compassion Through Action.  Released this week on Bandcamp.com, the ten-track collection is the first of a two-volume set.  The project is essentially a group of select songs “curated for the purpose of assisting the work of Compassion Through Action, a Los Angeles based homeless aid organization.”

The digital release was produced by L.A. native singer-songwriter Manda Mosher.  Mosher, one of the organizers behind the “Sandy Hook: A Benefit Concert”, was moved into action once more.

READ THE FULL STORY AT AMERICAN LIVE WIRE:
http://americanlivewire.com/artists-help-homeless-compassion-action/

RELATED:

BUY/DONATE : Compassion Through Action: A Benefit Album Vol. 1

Compassion Through Action Event Details Dec 15, 2013 

by trichordist

Want to Protect Speech? Strengthen Copyright | The Illusion Of More

If we want to strengthen free speech; if we want a hedge against invasions of civil liberty; if we want to speak truth to power, then we must continue to empower those who speak the truth and do so openly and professionally. To put it whimsically, a great bulwark against tyranny would be a class of unusually wealthy poets. As Congress resumes the process of copyright review in 2014, we should seek not to weaken these laws on an assumption of their irrelevance in the digital age, but to strengthen them on the grounds that they are more important than ever.

READ THE FULL POST AT:
http://illusionofmore.com/speech_strengthen_copyright/

by Trichordist Editor

Bloomberg ALMOST get’s it right about Spotify and Streaming… ALMOST…

Bloomberg almost gets it right. While Megan McArdle correctly identifies the problem with Spotify in the context of current market economics she fails to recognize the source of the downward pressure on online music distribution, Ad Funded Piracy.

Lou Reed and Dead Kennedys Go Public Against Ad Funded Piracy with Facebook Posts

As we have said many times, we don’t object to streaming as a business model, we only object to the poor revenue and compensation economics that these services currently provide. In other words, the economics of music streaming are a direct symptom of the larger disease of Ad Funded Piracy – this is why we hope to see more artists speaking up about the actual source of the problem as pirate sites are a for profit business that do not compensate artists at all.

BLOOMBERG:

In other words, while the cost side has improved, the revenue side has gotten worse even faster. People simply aren’t willing to pay very much for recorded music anymore. If you’re an artist, and especially if you’re a record label, that’s very bad news. Naturally, some artists want to shoot the messenger, blaming Spotify for their paltry payments. But Spotify is not the problem. The market is the problem. Spotify is just the messenger telling them what the market is now willing to pay for their songs.

We have a suggestion for any streaming music company executives who should happen across this post – if you really want to help musicians, why not start educating the media and musicians about the cause and source of why streaming economics are really so bad, Ad Funded Piracy.

Let’s join forces and aggregate the power of the community to restore a fair, ethical and balanced marketplace to music so that artists, songwriters and performers can have sustainable careers, and you too.

READ THE FULL STORY AT BLOOMBERG:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-09/spotify-isn-t-why-musicians-can-t-make-a-living.html

RELATED:

Google, Advertising, Money and Piracy. A History of Wrongdoing Exposed.

Over 50 Major Brands Supporting Music Piracy, It’s Big Business!

by trichordist

Internet firms ordered to block file-share sites | Irish Independent

THREE major music companies have been granted orders which will allow internet service providers here to block access to a file-sharing website as part of efforts to prevent “wholesale copyright theft” on “a grand scale”.

None of the defendants objected to the orders and the judge described them as “innocent” parties whose co-operation with a protocol aimed at preventing illegal downloading of copyright material indicated they realised the illegality and dishonesty involved in such activity and did not wish to be privy to it.

Several other ISPs – Eircom, Meteor, Magnet, Sky and Imagine Telecommunications – had indicated in correspondence with the music companies they were prepared to block the websites voluntarily provided the court made a blocking order to that effect against any ISP.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE IRISH INDEPENDENT:
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/internet-firms-ordered-to-block-fileshare-sites-29803417.html

by Trichordist Editor

French court orders search firms to block pirate sites | BBC

A court in France has ordered Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to block 16 video-streaming sites from their search results.

The court said the sites broke French intellectual property laws and were “almost entirely dedicated” to streaming content without the owners’ permission.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo must now take measures to ensure the blocked pages cannot be found in a list of search results.

ISPs, including Orange and Bouygues Telecom, will also have to prevent users from being able to access the sites.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25185819

by trichordist

Get Ready For The Streaming-Music Die-Off | ReadWrite

We’ve been saying for a while that we’re not opposed to music streaming as concept so much as we are about the revenue models and royalties. We’ve offered our criticisms that the math just never really adds up, even if you scale out Spotify to it’s logical conclusion.

We’ve also offered our suggestions for how these streaming services could offer a more robust and diverse environment to both artists and consumers. Looks like we’re not the only ones seriously questioning the economic validity of these models.

The streaming era is the next music industry ice age.

Beyond their broken business model, these companies share a lot of dubious promises to investors, shareholders and artists. Rdio hopes to get in the black by luring in more ad-supported subscribers. Spotify promises that when it scales up to 40 million paid users—it’s currently at 6 million—that artists will get paid five times what they make from the service today (the math works out, but that 40 million figure is a big “if”). Pandora, unprofitable and crippled by royalty fees as its user base grows, promises that mobile ad revenue can offset the revenue it’s hemorrhaging.

READ THE FULL STORY AT READ WRITE:
http://readwrite.com/2013/12/06/streaming-music-competition-pandora-rdio-spotify#awesm=~opsnA43Lt7QuiQ

by Trichordist Editor

Police crackdown on pirate site ads | BBC

“Operation Creative is being run… to really get to grips with a criminal industry that is making substantial profits by providing and actively promoting access to illegally obtained and copyrighted material,” said Supt Bob Wishart.

The scheme encourages offenders to change their behaviour so that they are operating within the law, he added.

“However, if they refuse to comply we now have the means to persuade businesses to move their advertising to different platforms and, if offending continues, for registrars to suspend the websites,” he said.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25299593

by trichordist

David Lowery: Silicon Valley must be stopped, or creativity will be destroyed | SALON

Below is just one excerpt from the interview with the always insightful David Lowery in Salon.

Silicon Valley’s making money off the work of others. David Lowery is on a crusade for copyright, fairness and art

SALON : People sometimes use the Industrial Revolution metaphor. They talk about how factories replaced the artisan and the farmer, and it took decades for things like child labor, dangerous working conditions, and pollution and all the stuff that industry brought to Britain and the U.S. to be eradicated, or made humane and sustainable.

LOWERY: But whenever anybody — I mean, you’ve just brought up David Allen, and we’ve just posted this idea on my Trichordist blog that we should have an ethical, fair-trade Internet, but you’ve got people like David Allen saying you can’t have that. That would be like in the Industrial Revolution saying, “You can’t have a non-polluting factory; you can’t have a factory that doesn’t have child labor; you can’t have a factory that’s safe to work in.” Of course you can!

We’re the ****ing masters of our own destiny, we pass the laws for this country, we create this country, we decide what kind of a society we’re going to have — not the Internet. And, besides, the Internet is coded by humans. We can make the Internet do what it needs to do. I’m a technologist. I program computers. This is what I did before I played in bands.

There is nothing deterministic about the Internet. Basically, what these people are saying is that this is the first technology whereby we must change our principles to match the technology — that’s what these people are saying. Do you want to live in a world like that, with these people running it?

READ THE FULL STORY HERE AT SALON:
http://www.salon.com/2013/12/04/david_lowery_silicon_valley_must_be_stopped_or_creativity_will_be_destroyed/

by Trichordist Editor

16 Artists That Are Now Speaking Out Against Streaming… | DMN

We’re seeing more and more artists speaking up and speaking out against the unsustainable economics of the exploitation economy. We also hope more artists will also be speaking up about the Ad Funded Piracy that creates the downward pressure to justify these bad business models.

There used to be one band with the courage to do this sort of thing: Metallica. Now, there are dozens of high-profile artists, with outspoken critics like David Lowery and Thom Yorke leading a previously-unthinkable level of protest against streaming and content devaluation. Here are just a few of those voices that emerged in 2013.

READ THE FULL POST AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/12/02/artistspiracy

by trichordist

Aimee Mann Wins First Round of Digital Music Lawsuit | Billboard

In July, Aimee Mann brought a noteworthy lawsuit over the possible existence of a massive amount of unlicensed music being streamed online.

In the cross-hairs of Mann’s multimillion-dollar legal claims was a company called MediaNet, originally backed by EMI, AOL, BMG and RealNetworks before being taken over by a private equity firm. MediaNet is essentially a white label that has served up more than 22 million songs to more than 40 music services, including Yahoo Music, Playlist.com, eBay and various online radio services.

Mann sued the company for allegedly infringing 120 of her songs, saying that a license agreement signed in 2003 expired three years later. There was also hint that she wasn’t alone. Her lawyer told The Hollywood Reporter at the time that the lawsuit served “as a call to other artists to follow the lead set by Radiohead and Pink Floyd to put an end to the unlicensed, uncompensated use of their music by online services.”

In reaction to the lawsuit, MediaNet maintained it had a valid license. On Friday, however, a California federal judge punched a big hole in this defense.

READ THE FULL POST AT BILLBOARD:
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/5812305/aimee-mann-wins-first-round-of-digital-music-lawsuit

RELATED:

Aimee Mann Exploited by Russian Brides, Wells Fargo Bank and Nationwide Insurance

by trichordist