Slaves of the Internet, Unite! | The New York Times

A familiar figure in one’s 20s is the club owner or event promoter who explains to your band that they won’t be paying you in money, man, because you’re getting paid in the far more valuable currency of exposure. This same figure reappears over the years, like the devil, in different guises — with shorter hair, a better suit — as the editor of a Web site or magazine, dismissing the issue of payment as an irrelevant quibble and impressing upon you how many hits they get per day, how many eyeballs, what great exposure it’ll offer. “Artist Dies of Exposure” goes the rueful joke.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/slaves-of-the-internet-unite.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

by Trichordist Editor

Swedish Artists Are Now Threatening Legal Action Over Streaming Royalties… | DMN

The origin of the outrage is telling: Sweden is widely regarded as a model country for streaming and access, thanks to massive adoption and recovering recording revenues. The threatened suits suggest that not everyone is celebrating or, more importantly, enjoying the early spoils.

Regardless of the locale, the issue comes ahead of very difficult juncture for Spotify. Mega-artists like Thom Yorke continue to raise uncomfortable questions about paltry payouts, but more perilous questions are dangling on the financial side. Recent financial figures show an unsustainable level of cash burn at Spotify, and potentially serious problems attracting more capital as a result. And after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars, Spotify is getting dangerously close to depleting its funding tranche.

READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/10/25/swedishartists

by Trichordist Editor

YouTube Awards Tarnished by YouTube Hate Videos and Jihadi Recruitment

YouTube, Just Like Television? What network broadcasts hate and jihadi recruitment programing?

Music Technology Policy

Google has a lot of excuses for why they profit from piracy, but what is inexcusable is how YouTube profits from hate videos and war porn.  It is difficult to understand how Lady Gaga and other artists slated to perform on the “YouTube Music Awards” would be able to turn a blind eye to this evil, no matter the fee and no matter how much “promotion” a media giant like Google can bring to bear.

The Problem from Hell is Easily Solved

johnny rebel youtube

What is difficult to understand about YouTube’s hate problem is how Google could just ignore it–particularly when these videos no doubt violate some policy that Google pays lip service to.  Fortunately, the Anti-Defamation League has compiled a list that Google could easily use to enforce violations of their dormant terms of service when it comes to hate speech.

I tried YouTube searches by picking a few names from…

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by Trichordist Editor

@natgeo and @geico sponsor beheading videos on YouTube…yes, real ones

Just Like Television?

Music Technology Policy

beheading

[Editor Charlie sez: Here’s a recent “content warning” video embedded from YouTube:

So YouTube makes it look like they are screening violent videos, but all they are really doing is grabbing users email addresses to sell them other stuff and preserving Google’s monopoly over video traffic by allowing grotesque videos to drive traffic to YouTube through referring sites.

 

YouTube–the #1 music destination online–is also the home of all sorts of grotesque videos, monetized by YouTube and Google.  Try searching YouTube for “beheading” and you’ll get the idea.  544,000 search results all available for streaming directly into your home, right now, all over Internet television.

Not only is YouTube available at home, but it’s also linked to Google’s education apps, government apps, and by the Android.  And these are not just an odd video here and there, these videos account for millions of views.

Some of the beheading videos…

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by Trichordist Editor

Study Finds That Piracy Is Growing Rapidly and Becoming More Profitable… | DMN

Streaming services may be paying you pennies, but at least they’re lowering piracy. But what if that isn’t true?

At present, there are three major types of piracy ecosystems that are used worldwide: they are BitTorrent, video streaming, and direct download cyberlockers.

The vast majority of BitTorrent sites make money through advertising.

So the piracy sites that we’ve focused on for this study are very much driven by profit: they are generating revenue from advertising, they are generating revenue sometimes from premium subscription fees. And obviously when enforcement shuts these sites down and or shuts down their payment processors, it’s hitting directly at their revenue streams.

READ THE FULL STORY AT DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS:
http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2013/10/21/studymediapiracy

by trichordist

Do these companies really want their products promoted aside “Free Find and F**k” ads? | Vox Indie

Ads for Adidas, Acura, Bertolli, Crest, Charmin, Domino’s, Ford, Geico, Hellmann’s, Lowe’s, Panera, Papermate, PG&E, Post and more share space with sex ads.

Ad Industry Best Practices?

The ad industry and ad service providers have made a show of agreeing to voluntary “best practices” agreements to fight ad-sponsored piracy,  but despite their talk and White House support, not much has changed.  Take a look at the graphic below…What kind of  industry “best practices” do these ad placements represent?

READ THE FULL POST AT VOX INDIE:
http://voxindie.org/#sthash.vEKTxQ2V.dpuf

by Trichordist Editor

As Downloads Dip, Music Executives Cast a Wary Eye on Streaming Services | New York Times

As sales of CDs plunged over the last decade, the music industry clung to one comfort: downloads continued to sell briskly as people filled their computers and iPods with songs by the billions.

Now even that certainty seems to have disappeared, as downloads head toward their first yearly decline.

So far this year, 1.01 billion track downloads have been sold in the United States, down 4 percent from the same time last year, according to the tracking service Nielsen SoundScan. Album downloads are up 2 percent, to 91.9 million; combining these results using the industry’s standard yardstick of 10 tracks to an album, total digital sales are down almost 1 percent.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/business/media/as-downloads-dip-music-executives-cast-a-wary-eye-on-streaming-services.html?_r=1&

by trichordist

New Study Shows Up to 96% of Megaupload Files Are Infringing

A new study from North Eastern University is getting some attention and it’s interesting how some people are spinning the numbers, so we decided to take a look.

“For Megaupload (MU) the researchers found that 31% of all uploads were infringing, while 4.3% of uploads were clearly legitimate. This means that with an estimated 250 million uploads, 10.75 million uploads were non-infringing. For the remaining 65% the copyrighted status was either unknown, or the raters couldn’t reach consensus.” – Torrent Freak

Simple Math : 31% + 65% = 96%

by Trichordist Editor

Breaking Bad Creator : “Piracy Is A Problem… We All Need To Eat and Get Paid”

In a recent BBC interview Breaking Bad’s creator Vince Gilligan has been quoted talking about the effect of internet piracy on the show.

Piracy is “ultimately a problem and will continue to be a problem going forward,” Gilligan said. “Because we all need to eat. We all need to get paid.”

It’s been reported that the show’s final episode was illegally downloaded over 500,000 times in 12 hours of the first pirated copy turning up on piracy and torrent sites. Many have seized on Gilligan’s remark that piracy helped the popularity of the show.  That’s highly unlikely as those seeking the illegal copies, were seeking them as demand for the show grew from conventional marketing. These people were opposed to paying for the show from the many outlets where the episodes were legally available like Netflix and Itunes. Gilligan clearly understand the impact…

“The downside is a lot of folks who worked on the show would have made more money, myself included, if all those downloads had been legal.”

Many piracy apologists and proponents are quick to suggest (incorrectly) that not every illegal download represent a lost sale, but we disagree and here’s why. Looking at the links below you can quickly see that the piracy sites are monetizing the access and availability of the illegal downloads with advertising. Additionally some sites even charge greatly discounted transactional fees via dubious payment processors.

Simply put, piracy is about infringement as a business model. Every illegal download generates revenue for the pirate sites and ad tech companies, none of which is “shared” with the creators.

Zero Dark Thirty, Best Picture Academy Award Nominee, Exploited by AT&T, Verizon, MetroPCS, Nissan, H&R Block, British Airways, Progresso, and more…

by trichordist

Spoof Ad Campaign Responds to BitTorrent’s Recent Billboards

The BitTorrent Billboard advertising campaign story has taken an interesting turn spawning a satirical response spoof banner ad campaign appearing on sites such as Grooveshark, Mashable, MediaFire and Rollingstone.com. The banner ads read “All your content are belong to us” and “Instead of paying artists, we spent money on banners.”

Clicking on the faux ad banners lands on the site RightTheMusic.Org that presents internet piracy fun facts such as “Worldwide, 432.0m unique internet users explicitly sought infringing content during January 2013” and provides an additional click through the source of the quote.

AS REPORTED ON AT TORRENT FREAK:
http://torrentfreak.com/angry-artists-attack-bittorrent-with-spoofed-billboards-131018/

AS REPORTED ON AT SOFTPEDIA:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/BitTorrent-Banners-Trigger-Spoof-Campaign-from-Angry-Artists-392769.shtml

AS REPORTED ON AT ADLAND:
http://adland.tv/node/156152#Zrk6olusqTDT7IBX.99

by Trichordist Editor