It's all music and IPR today...
Yes, we go on a lot here about Trent Reznor (amusingly, we're not even especially big fans) but for good reason: no-one else in contemporary popular music is quite as vocal (and articulate), visible and imaginative in their engaging with the new recorded - and, increasingly, live - music business. In this intelligent and honest post on the NIN forum, Reznor explains his take on the whole practice of ticket scalping (or, for the UK, touting) - and the somewhat furtive role of promoters and artists in it.
At the other end of the, er, hard rock spectrum, meanwhile, it looks as though a Guns N' Roses/Chinese Democracy uploader may well go to jail for his misdemeanors. The interesting thing in this Register articleis the disparity between the RIAA's calculation of lost revenue and the CIA's, the latter coming in at a third of the former. (We're sure NN Taleb would have something to say about either calculation. We're also pretty sure that whatever the true figure, Chinese Democracy's poor sales are the result of several phenomena, among them an audience which has moved on and an media environment which has rather more distractions than in the late 80s. Oh, and that it's a piss poor piece of work.)
The World Service's excellent Business Daily took an appreciative and intelligent look at Spotify this morning.
We are loving ThuYou, Israeli collage artist & musician-composer Kutiman's video project, essentially an EP of pieces made entirely from (utterly unrelated) clips on YouTube. It's a thrilling piece of appropriation-art, an essay in creative IPR-abuse... but, perhaps rather more significantly, a collection of joyful funk pieces and soul ballads. Check the CREDITS link to see a creative attribution at work. Lovely.
This excellent and clear-thinking/straight-talking editorial in the Telegraph takes apart the push from the European record industry to extend the copyright term in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years.
Wall Street Journal Europe reports that Guy Hands has stepped down as CEO of Terra Firma in the face of investors' anger over the EMI, well, fiasco.
And finally, a bit after the fact, I'm afraid, but here's Norman Lebrecht reflecting on Dutch station Radio 4's free Bernard Haitink downloads and how they rather show up the BBC's "capitulation" to the UK record industry in the wake of Radio 3's Beethoven downloads success/scandal (delete as your standpoint dictates... you know where we probably stand).
Simon
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