<!–[if !mso]> <! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } –>

The Obama Nation and Others

Celebrate the New World Order

===========================

And so it begins.

Never in my life can I remember a presidential inauguration with such fanfare and international rating.

Sure, here in the US we’re all excited, but I had the very good fortune to be in Europe when the swearing-in took place. I say fortunate because I was positioned to see this historic time from the viewpoint of a much older and more refined culture.

Amsterdam is the kind of place where you can meet new people to talk about old times; people you have never seen before and probably never will again, yet there is a connection. Feelings replace thoughts; the Zen of the City’s canals and rhythm of American culture’s long entangled roots, overwhelm and seduce. The USA grew from Dutch seeds. Their template was the launch point of our laws and many of our values. True we have grown apart over the last 300 years. In more ways than the Dutch realize (see below). But the bond is still there.

And it was in these bars that I watched as the proletariat raised glasses to America’s new leader as if he was their own. I was invited to sit with strangers and drink till wee hours. For the first time in eight years it was cool to be an American traveling abroad. Those of you who’ve toured during the Bush administration I’m sure know what I’m writing about. For so long there was a sense of shame but now, with Obama, I felt that for once, at least in the eyes of our father’s culture, we had finally done something right.

Now, none of this of course means that Obama will be a great president. That is something he has yet to prove; the hope we’re all high on will not last but a year if we don’t see progress. But like the Europeans, I want America to win again, to lead again; to be in sync with our grandfathers across the pond.

But enough romance—

EUROSONIC

==============

Will The Dutch SXSW Be The End

Of Holland’s Music Scene?

Thousands huddle in now smoke-free clubs of a small city outside of Amsterdam called Groningen to see their favorite European groups, while outside bone-chilling temperatures force shelter to be a high priority. I loved it. Eurosonic and Noorderslag are the SXSW of the Netherlands and offered great acts that we know almost nothing about in the US. My favorite was Alain Clark and his hit “Father and Friend”, He, like, many hope to cross over and place a footprint on Yankee soil, but due to new Dutch laws may never get the chance.

Recently the Dutch Consumer’s Union won a victory in court and as a result, a new law has been passed that allows illegal P2P sharing of music. You still can’t steal anything else, like an apple off a grocery cart, or an idle bicycle, but music in the form of a digital file is fair game for those who don’t receive enough Government dole to afford music.

Record companies are outraged as are artists, and the debate rages on in Holland: is giving into public ignorance about the value of copyrights true social progress? In my view it’s a disaster.

It’s one thing to a turn the other cheek about a law, like, for instance, J-walking in New York, or copying of music for personal use, both of which are not prosecuted for the sake of practicality, but to legalize them would be another mater entirely. Legalization creates a judicial foundation and in this case one that will polarize Holland’s music community against the rest of the EU, other Berne Convention countries and mostly, the US.

So what? So the US and the UK and most of Europe will think the Dutch are weird—what else is new? I’ll tell you.

While France, the UK, most of Europe and the US have all moved in one direction in regard to copyright law–that is, a more conservative direction and one that has inspired ISPs and labels to work together–Holland is giving a carte blanche license for its citizens to steal music. I have not read the actual law but the way it was explained to me is this: you can legally download music from a site like Limewire, but to upload it is still illegal.

Of course, this creates the conundrum; for every downloader there must, by definition, be an uploader. So someone is always breaking the law in this transaction, but now the penalties and standard of justice for the person on the receiving end has taken a real hit.

The Dutch Consumers Union is very proud of this achievement. Their job is to protect the consumer’s rights. Their position on file sharing is that it seems wrong to punish someone who doesn’t know that he is committing an illegal act. So, in this case ignorance of the law is not no excuse. (Sorry for the double negative,.)

When pressed to respond to why a person, in this day and age, doesn’t KNOW that he is breaking the law with downloading, the Union’s response is rather flaccid and akin to, “many sites look legitimate.”

I won’t waste bandwidth deconstructing this logic, I think many of you can see that it’s ridiculous, but now, in Holland, it’s the law. So in addition to being a safe haven for junkies, Holland may also be taking a copyright position directly behind third-world countries like Iran and China.

How will this affect their music scene? Well, I admit that I’m speculating here, but it seems to me that ISPs, who have seen the light and recently begun co-operating with the RIAA and other agencies to prevent illegal P2P, will soon be fully aligned with content companies. In fact they have already begun to see the music companies as their clients and future allies (but probably never friends). Once they are aligned with the content industry I see little chance of the US/UK/Euro world doing business with a country that has laws that are flagrantly and diametrically disrespectful to ours. And of course if history repeats itself (and it tends to) we tend to embargo such countries as a demonstration of our dissatisfaction.

This could well mean that Dutch bands will not be allowed to tour or distribute in the US/UK. How sad would that be? And the real bitch of it is that the Dutch Government has just gotten the approval to distribute millions of Euros, earmarked for bands to help stimulate growth in the local music markets.

So with one hand they are enabling new bands and artists only to create legislation that will imprison them forever in Holland with the other. How tragic, how–how-you say– European.

Moses Avalon

Sphere: Related Content

The Lawsuits Are Over. An Era of Co-Operation Between ISPs and The Music Trade Could Begin.

Moses Avalon

Already 2009 promises to be another great year for the music business.

In case you haven’t heard, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has convinced ISPs to work with the music companies to address online copyright infringement constructively.  To read the story in Computer World or Yahoo, it’s been spun as the RIAA is changing its tune and has suddenly grown a soul because they agreed, in exchange for co-operation, to stop filing lawsuits. But this is more tech bias from a news media seduced by gadgets. Here’s the inside dope, from actual inside sources.

The Attorney General clearly siding with the RIAA, has urged ISPs to adopt a “graduated response program” that would include sending offending subscribers copyright infringement notices from the RIAA. The graduated response program would also provide for a series of escalating sanctions that, upon repeated notices of infringement, would include suspension of the account in appropriate circumstances.  Additionally (or in exchange, depending on your viewpoint) the RIAA has agreed to stop filing NEW lawsuits against grandmothers and other P2P enthusiasts, but continue the already existing ones.

TECH SPUN HISTORY

Naturally, the tech-whoring media has gotten it backwards again! It’s not the RIAA that’s backing off or changing its tune, it’s the ISPs. Everything these articles are saying is supposedly a “new position” for the music business, has actually been the major label’s position all along. Working with ISPs was the RIAA’s proposal back in 2001 when the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was negotiated and signed into law.

But the tech world reneged, starting with Verizon, who refused to give up the information of a rampant infringer to the RIAA. Verizon won in court, despite the fact that the law was on the side of the music trade. This new precedent spread like a cancer to become the public policy of ALL ISPs– that we don’t cooperate with inquires from content companies when it comes to giving out private info about our users–even the ones who are breaking the law.

Can you imagine if they took this stance with the Department of Justice? They’d be pummeled. But our little $8 Billion-a-year industry?The ISPs knew that the music industry didn’t have the war chest to litigate and anyway, everybody hates record companies, right?

So, what has changed as of this week? Why are ISPs suddenly deciding to play ball? It’s real simple: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. And who’s our common enemy? The Man! One thing ISPs and the music trade have in common– we hate government regulation. In this case, that comes down to the big fear all IPS have: the government forcing their so-called “Net Neutrality” and their “dumb pipes” defense to regulation.

WHAT IS A “DUMB PIPELINE” AND WHAT DO I SMOKE IN IT?

There is not yet a clearly-agreed-upon definition of “Net Neutrality.” In this context, it means the FCC (or some other Government agency) creating legislation or policy that would require the ISPs to treat all data the same. In other words, an ISP by law would not be allowed to treat the data of an email any differently than the data streaming from an MP3 or file from any other provider.

Since music doesn’t clog the pipeline with our small files, ISPs could not be bothered with complaints by the music trade to self-regulate. However, to appear neutral, they can’t say yes to one group (like movie or defense industries—who would kick their butts) and ignore the other (like the music industry). Thus the “dumb pipes” position is what they adopted. It suited their agenda to be able to say “data is data” and we can’t regulate it, we’re just a pipeline with no brain. The so-called “dumb pipes” argument is what allowed Verizon to win their argument against the RIAA even when they clearly violated the DMCA.

But starting this year, with agreements reached with mobile content companies and Network TV shows using the net for exhibition, ISPs are seeing their business model evolve and have decided that their place in the future is best thought of NOT as “dumb pipes”, but rather as content deliverer. To use an analogy, they no longer want the public to see them as the truck that delivers the film canisters to the movie theater, but rather as BOTH the delivery truck and the theater itself!

So, being “neutral” is the last way they want to position themselves. Movies and audio/visual content take up a great deal of bandwidth and ISPs want the liberty to discriminate between different types of data and charge more for those that are high profile– like movies. Under Net Neutrality/dumb pipes argument, they would not be able to, and to defeat the augments now brewing on Capitol Hill (arguments the ISPs initiated BTW) they need support of, guess who… Yep, the content industry.

That be us.

If they are going to be in the content business, they will need friends. Friends like the music industry and the film industry. Friends that right now they don’t have.

So, who is sucking up to whom?

NEW SOUL?

The RIAA transitioning from one form of deterrents to another is not a “new position,” And they are not suckering up to anyone. The graduated response program is mealy the logical next step in the music business defending its rights. Now, instead of suing a household, the RIAA will simply notify the ISP. The ISP will then notify the user. Each warning will carry a more severe penalty, until the message gets through. Aside from being more civilized than lawsuits, it’s far cheaper for the RIAA.

Surveys have shown that 70% of people who received notices from ISPs stopped infringing on copyrights. That was a UK study. We’ll see how it goes over in the US.

So, to all the tech-whores out there spinning this as the RIAA finally “growing a soul” as one article put it, please shut up! You either don’t know what you’re talking about or you’ve drunk the ISP soup. Maybe you live in Silicon Valley and you’re trying to sell your house or something else that requires you to snuggle up to the Tech booty. The truth: business makes for strange bedfellows and this “new deal” (to which no details have been ironed out) is not a new position for the RIAA/major labels, et all. It’s one we’ve been jockeying for, for some time.

It’s the ISPs who’ve grown a soul - Music has always had one!

Mo out.

Sphere: Related Content

Conventional Wisdom Challenged: Are Albums Due for a Comeback?

Boy, it seems that everywhere you look there’s another story about how CD sales are down and digital single sales are the new wave. What if that turned out to be a fallacy? Think of how many curmudgeon bloggers would be disappointed; how many so-called journalists and Billboard “reporters” would be discredited. You’d have a sea of people back-pedaling their statements of the past two years. You know who would not be in that crowd. You. Not if you’re one of my readers.

If you’ve been keeping up with the fact threads I follow– y’know, dumb stuff that I use to come to my conclusions, like annual reports from Big Four record labels (or Big Three, depending on how you look at it) and Big Box retailers, you’d get a very different picture than the nay-sayers who substitute real data for their own opinions based on who knows what– their anger management sessions, I guess.

Here’s a video of what I’m talking about:

Fact: CDs and albums are far from becoming roof-shingles. Furthermore, I predict that labels and artists will begin truncating “single rights” to stores like iTunes and Amazon within the next year. Why? There are many reasons, but the most apparent one is people like to pay less for music. $9 for 13 songs beats 99 cents for a single. Sure the tech-whores like to retort that the public doesn’t want to pay $9 for only one good song. But this presumes the entire album sucks – all the time! What surveys are they using other than their own personal taste?

This story in Red Orbit tells it all.

Albums DO sell if they are good. But is this a new lesson? No. Labels and artists have known this for decades. Additionally, the entire music business economy is based on the Album configuration. Publishing advances are totally designed around albums. Can you imagine trying to negotiate a publishing advance when the label says “We’re not going to print any CD Albums, just post a couple of singles on digital stores?” Absurd! There would be nothing to base the advance upon. No advances means no flow of capital and most of us who passed High School Economics know what that means. (BTW -I failed that class.)

Want another reason? Albums are cool! It’s a cohesive, 50-minute vision of sound. Singles were created as an economic reality to selling Albums, not a substitute for them. Tech-Masters like Steve jobs don’t care about the integrity of music. No human who invented the best way to buy, catalog and steal individual tacks can be a real fan of modern music! I remember trying to get my mother to join the iPod generation by telling her that it could hold her entire classical collection. She responded, “But it cuts up the symphony into little bits. You’ve not supposed to listen to a symphony that way.” [iTunes used to treat movements like singles and wouldn’t play them seamlessly.]

I was ashamed. My 70 year old mother “got it” before I did: music is about creativity, not the technology you play it on. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is a music-hater, even if they don’t know it inside. They have sold their souls to the Tech gods if they truly believe that artists should start making three-minute singles and forget about their Album vision just because it’s more convenient.

Music lives! Albums live! And now the sales numbers prove it.

Mo out.

Sphere: Related Content