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AzOz Blog -- November 2006by George Ziemann November 2 -- It seems as if we're going to run out of fish. I never really liked fish. It always tastes, well, fishy. I only like fish that is so bland that it doesn't taste like fish. Sorry, I think I just had an Andy Rooney moment. November 3 -- A good clue that you've decisively won an argument is when you hear the other side adopt your initial stance. I've always thought that compressed versions of music or movies are merely advertisements for the commercial versions. The RIAA and MPAA have consistently said, "No, it's piracy. You're stealing our stuff." The RIAA has constantly told us how unfair it is that people are making money from music and none of it finds its way back into the hands of the artists. The MPAA went to far as to make little mini-movies (that we were forced to watch if we paid to see a movie) about how this hurts all the people that make the movies. You know, the screenwriters, camera operators, scenery designers and the et ceteras all the way down to the ticket takers. Look what they're saying now (from Fox News):
Four years ago, downloading was "theft," according to the copyright police. Now it's "for promotional purposes". Without changing their behavior, the pirates have been promoted to the marketing department. They've been working there all along. November 4 -- Here's a news flash for you from Nashville -- "Clear Channel programmers haven't been risk-takers." Payola does that to you. Political ads are driving me crazy. I long for the times when Jack (from The Box) or the Geico gecko could brighten my day with commercial icon humor. I'd rather watch the Michael Jordan vs. Kevin Bacon commercial repeatedly at every break than have to sit through one more damn 30-second display of lying hypocritical political hate-speeches. On a brighter note, Carl, Cara and I haved named our project Lazy Tiger. Not so much because we're getting ready to tour or anything as much as the fact that I didn't want to have a button that said "Some Stuff that Carl, Cara and George Are Working On" over on the music page. So when Lazy Tiger appears, that's us. I was kinda partial to Radioactive Snails for a band name, but only because Dave Barry suggested it. This brings me to the independent band of the day announcement, also from Dave's blog.
The Ringtone and Common SenseNovember 6 -- Yeah, I know, it's really cute to have your telephone play what you think is clever for a ringtone. But if you're buying ringtones, clever is a word you shouldn't use too often. Eliot Van Buskirk and Sean Michaels over at Wired point out that people are paying $4 for a ringtone. Considering that this ringtone is only a small fraction of a song you'd think at least twice about paying $1 for and you can make your own ringtones for free, you can see why the industry is ready to put the clamps down on this. What Buskirk and Michaels wrote about is the RIAA's recent legal maneuver at the Copyright Office to make sure they don't have to pay songwriters more than 9.1 cents for each sale. November 6 -- If you live in Virginia and you get a call from Montana or California telling you that your polling place has changed for tomorrow's election, don't believe it. Cheaters never prosper. November 7 -- The first Lazy Tiger tunes have appeared on the music page, along with the Jenn Hartmann tunes from I Admit.
November 11 -- Examples of poor behavior abounded this week, led by Kayne West's bad sportsmanship over a fan-voted award. This was followed almost immediately by Faith "I Was Just Joking" Hill's performance at the country awards. But the winner of this week's contest surely must go to Axl Rose, who altered his usual three-hour-late disrespect of the audience to completely refusing to play when he couldn't have alcohol onstage. President Bush made a serious effort at bipartisanship this week, going as far as to wear a blue tie while requesting more surveillance powers. November 16 -- "The U.S. government has promised that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience very low food security." Amidst much PR fanfare, mp3.com announced it was "re-opening its servers" to musicians, as if its the same company it was when Universal killed it three years ago. Went to look at it. Saw that it required Windows Media Player, which seems to ironically satirize the very name of the site. I knew Microsoft's alleged iPod killer, Zune, wouldn't be compatible with iTunes. When word came out that it wouldn't work with audio files Microsoft previously branded as "Plays For Sure," well, that was just funny. As M$ gets ready to roll out its much ballyhooed Vista operating system, I now hear that Zune isn't compatible with Vista either. If that's not entertaining enough, Universal Music is going to get $1 for every one sold. One dollar. The price of one song. Because everyone that buys one is certainly a pirate, according to Universal CEO Doug Morris. And one dollar will fix everything. So let me get this straight, are we talking about the very same "pirates" who have (according to Morris and the rest of his pals in the RIAA) decimated the music industry by "stealing" billions of dollars a year from the record labels? Now they're lining up to buy a device that's incompatible with everything? Universal apparently thinks so, hence the dollar tax. But hey, there's a bright side. When the tens of dollars start stacking up, they're going to take half of it and distribute it equally among their artists (or at least apply it against the balance the artist still owes Universal). Unfortunately, I don't think it will be enough to help any artists that are experiencing low food security. Neither will this -- According to Wired, "Budding musicians who want to make an impression online don't need to download fancy software, set up a website or scour MySpace for potential friends. In fact, they often don't even need to know how to play a single note." Because we need more November 28 -- The citizens of Arizona passed a new law this year, banning smoking in all restaurants. The reason is, of course, to eliminate second-hand smoke. I don't know if anyone thought this all the way through or not because once this law takes effect, breakfast is pretty much going to suck. Take away second-hand smoke and you've got to take away bacon, ham, and sausages right off the bat. Flame-broiled burgers? Salmon? Barbequed ribs? Doesn't matter if it's hickory or mesquite, that's definitely second-hand smoke. Flaming entrees? Out of the question. That .38 revolver strapped to your hip inside the restaurant? Perfectly legal as long as it's in plain sight. But burn a batch of biscuits and you've got yourself a real problem. ------ The rumor mill says that someone wants to buy EMI. I don't know why, but unless it's someone like Mark Cuban or maybe even Paul McCartney buying it, I wouldn't expect anything to change. November 30, 2006 SoundExchange -- There are still more than 7600 artists on SoundExchange's list of people who they collected royalties for and can't locate. Deadline for claiming these digital performance royalties is December 15. If you don't claim them, SExchange gets to put it in the "black box" and spend it on whatever they want. One might question how SExchange earned the right to collect royalties for all of these people, many of which were dead before the "service" was created. The knowledge that it was created by (and is still run by) the RIAA should answer most of those questions. 7600 artists. That's a lot of musicians, if you consider that these are performance royalties and every "artist" is an act, often with three to six people in the band. As you look at SExchange's list, some of the acts have an asterisk (*) indicating that some, but not all, of the performers (or their estates) had claimed their royalties. The royalties in question were collected between 1996 and 2000. Theoretically, the organization has collected more royalties for the same people in the six years since and will continue to do so into the future. If no one is going to collect the royalties for Sugarloaf, then "Green-Eyed Lady" ought to be fair game for exemption from digital performance royalties. If the money will NEVER go to the artist anyway, they shouldn't be allowed to keep collecting it. Zune -- Not that I care, but Wired has stumbled upon the news from September wherein someone figured out that Zune's DRM violates the conditions (or at the very least the spirit) of the Creative Commons licenses some of us use to make it clear that the music files are not illegal to download, upload, sideload, share or otherwise propagate. Public Domain -- While I get the impression that it's not a done deal quite yet, it appears as if the UK will keep its 50-year copyright limitation, which means "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" will go into public domain on September 11, 2012. But there's a twist, which I expect to launch an entire new set of court cases. The Beatles released two albums in the UK on the Parlophone label. The first was titled Please Please Me. According to the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, this album was recorded in one 13-hour session on February 11, 1963. Before the year was out, a second LP was released, With the Beatles. This follow-up LP contained "I Saw Her Standing There" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which made teenage girls in the 60s pee their pants and scream incessantly. The copyrights for these albums would expire during 2013. In 1964, Capitol Records released Meet the Beatles in the United States, a duplicate of Parlophone's With the Beatles. Under U.S. laws, as we all know, copyright does not expire until the Second Coming when God smites all the record label execs with bolts of lightning, which I sincerely hope is broadcast before the electrical grid goes down. 2013 is the same year that artists can start reclaiming their work from the record labels. Between work-for-hire disputes and the obvious clash over whether the UK's copyright expiration is valid in the United States, the lawyers are already seeing the dollar signs. Provided any major labels still exist. |
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