Author Archive

Deleting Music is a two-person job

September 14th, 2011 · · The book No comments - Tags:

Steve

I had a great chat with Steve Lawson last night. He’s one of my partners in New Music Strategies. You may know him as @solobasssteve.

Steve has moved from London to Birmingham and is now basically my neighbour – which is great, because although we chat to each other all the time on the internet, now we can sit down and do some solid work together more often – and one of the things we’ve decided to collaborate on is this project: Deleting Music.

It’s something that’s important to both of us, and although it’s been a bit of a ‘back burner’ project for a while now, a couple of things have happened recently that mean a collaboration would be a good and timely idea.

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Copyright extension is anti-music

September 12th, 2011 · · Copyright One comment

Regulators at the European level have voted to extend the copyright in sound recordings for a further 20 years. In so doing, they have more or less condemned the vast majority of music to the dustbins of history.

This Wired UK article explains:

But a government-backed, independent review of copyright doesn’t agree. A 2006 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property said, “The European Commission should retain the length of protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights at 50 years”

In its conclusion, the review says, “it is our view that a term extension will likely result in a net loss to UK society as a whole”, arguing that while retrospective extensions would line the pockets of the largest record producers, money to individual performers would be minimal and the cost to the consumer would be massive.

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Not content to merely delete their own catalogue…

August 25th, 2011 · · Hubris No comments

My friend Simon Grigg is something of a music industry legend in New Zealand. Club owner, label manager, promoter, artist manager, punk pioneer, dance music pioneer, DJ, radio personality… You may have heard a song he released on his independent record label once, called ‘How Bizarre’.

These days he lives in Bangkok doing all manner of interesting things, but he still dabbles. On his blog this week, he talks about an email he received from Google…

Last year – whilst hunting through junk – I found a disc of old punk video footage. Amongst it was the video in that YouTube clip. I contacted the band members and, with their approval, uploaded it. I guess I thought I was in the clear. Nothing on that video actually came from the album, and even if it had done so, I had written approval from the band, who now own the copyright in all recordings.

Warners have never owned it. Ever. Never.

Unfortunately Warner Music Group don’t see it that way. Without any proof, legal right, paperwork or substance, they’ve claimed the rights to that (and another similar Toy Love video uploaded with permission) and, according to the letter, they have the right now to run advertising with the video if they want. In other words, they’ve stolen the clip’s copyright from Toy Love and are now asserting a right to profit from something they don’t own.

Piracy is a good word for that. It has currency these days.

The whole post is worth a read. He’s rightly angry.

Both Warner Music and Sony Music Entertainment have asserted copyright ownership of things they do not have any claim to, and have gone about removing it, taking away public access to it, and attempting to profit from it through advertising revenue where it is available.

This is not an administrative oversight. This is a business strategy. They’re not just deleting their own music through neglect – they’re actively seeking and destroying everyone else’s wherever they think they can get away with it.

Orsii meets Jazzman Gerald

August 12th, 2011 · · Endangered Music One comment - Tags:

My friend Orsii from the Little Miss Sunshine show on Laid Back Radio talks to Gerald from Jazzman – a man who collects the rarest and coolest of records from around the world and makes them available through his reissue label – always with the artists’ permission, and often as a result of great personal effort and a good amount of detective work.

Amazing stuff contained within. Listen and enjoy a whole lot of things you might never otherwise hear.

This is the furthest reach of the stuff I’m talking about on this site, incidentally. This is the stuff that is being deleted, and without heroes like Gerald – none of it would survive at all. It’s not all this great of course, but some of it is.

Restoring lost albums for cash

August 8th, 2011 · · Reissues, Restoration No comments

I was reading an article in the Australian publication ‘The Vine’ this morning. A meandering piece about music in the digital age, apps, music formats, archives and reissues. It’s worth a read if you have ten minutes to go for a leisurely mental stroll.

This bit leapt out at me:

Gil Matthews is probably best known as the drummer for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, but he has also built a solid business giving many classic Australian albums new life on CD. Since 2005 the label Aztec Music has released about 60 titles, each with high-quality packaging and a 28-page booklet, creating a business with a yearly turnover of about $250,000. ”There are an incredible number of titles we could release if we had the time,” says Matthews. ”If we had a catalogue of 300 titles, this would be close to a million-dollar business.”

Each release is a painstaking process, requiring Matthews to go back to the ageing master tapes — or even vinyl if tapes are unavailable — and restore them for the digital format. ”Sometimes it can take 40 hours alone to remove all the clicks and pops from the original source — it’s almost a labour of love,” says Matthews.

It sounds like the kind of labour of love that might economically justify opening up the vaults, seeing what’s in there and figuring out if there is, in the first instance, a commercial imperative for reissuing back catalogue that major labels have more or less locked away to rot because they don’t feed the new release, promo, popstar machine.

Yes there is some healthy activity in the area of reissues (both physical and digital), but these tend to be the perennial moneymakers and still-active artists that can leverage big money at corporate levels of turnover. But cottage industry outfits like that of Matthews could be more than sustainable on the number of units that less well-remembered artists might sell – and not only would this create economic value, grow the industry, put more music in more hands and return money to artists… but it would also rescue some significant works of cultural heritage from inevitable decay.

Of course, for this to work, licences would need to be worked out, vault inventories would need to be made available, and – ideally – copyright laws would need to be changed to include a use-it-or-lose-it clause that would incentivise the major labels to maximise the value hidden in their own coffers.