Plenty of people complain about how pop music sounds formulaic and that several boy bands seem to be manufactured with minimal variations between them. Someday soon, though, computer algorithms might create more pop music than humans can even attempt to compose. Here are just a few steps towards a world filled with machine-made music.
Erin McKeown, a wonderful musician who has been very involved in some discussions on copyright and internet access -- and who was especially helpful in the fight against SOPA -- recently wrote the following thoughtful, heartfelt piece concerning the emotional roller coaster of having someone copy your work, and how all of this relates to copyright law.
I always knew my song "Slung-lo" was a hit.
It just took longer than I expected.
"Slung-lo" came out on my 2003 album, grand (Nettwerk). It found its way to the Brittany Murphy masterpiece "Uptown Girls" and into episodes of "Roswell", "Gilmore Girls", and "Privileged". It also found its way into a Tesco F&F commercial, which ran in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2008. Though not a hit by any means, it was a remarkably long life for a song that came out in 2003.
And then last year, I received two separate emails through my website pointing me to this video for a song called "Touch The Sun" sung by the Czech artist, Debbi. (editor's note: we tried to embed the official video for this song, but Sony Music refuses to allow an embed on the song).
"Have you seen this?" both emails asked. I hadn't.
From the first moment I heard "Touch The Sun," it was as clear to me as anything that someone had taken the DNA of my song "Slung-lo" and turned it into another song. At this point, my lawyer wants me to make very clear that IN MY OPINION, THIS IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.
I don't want to spend a lot of time technically breaking down the two songs, but I'd like to point out a few things. Among the many substantial similarities between them, check out the lyrical content (weather as metaphor for happiness), the almost exact song structure (solo verse, band verse, double-tracked vocal in the chorus...), and the vocal cadence in unison with the descending instrumental line in the chorus. I could go on.
Debbi's "Touch The Sun" isn't the proverbial "kid in the bedroom with a laptop" who remixes pop culture and makes mash-ups to show how alike we humans really are. No, it turns out the song was written for a commercial scale beer campaign by the giant European alcohol company Metaxa, which itself is a subsidiary of the global beverage conglomerate Remy Cointreau.
And it is a hit. A huge one. Debbi was the runner up on the Czech version of the "Idol" franchise. The song won "Song of the Year" at the Czech version of the Grammys. The original video that was sent to me has almost a million hits. A quick search of YouTube reveals karaoke versions, animations, "how to play versions," and plenty of people in their bedrooms playing the song and singing along. The beer ad with the song aired across the Czech Republic more than 1200 times in September of 2010. That's about 40 times a day.
So, after all this time, "Slung-lo" is finally a hit.
The easy part of this story is that I work with an amazing publishing administrator, Duchamp, who has stepped in to help me. We've retained Czech council who have been in contact with Metaxa, Debbi's record label (Sony!), and the Slovak production house that produced the track. All have denied any infringement, declined to settle, and at this point, court proceedings have started. My lawyers estimate that this could take anywhere from one to five years.
This spring Remy re-launched the ad campaign across all of Europe.
By the way, the writers are Tomas Zubak, Peter Graus, and Maros Kachut. Let's #kony2012 them.
Actually let's not.
Instead, I want to talk about the whole host of emotions this experience has brought up for me, and the way it's forced me to confront and articulate my beliefs about copyright.
After watching the video for the first time, I was certifiably apoplectic. I was physically shaking with anger. How dare they! I wasn't so much angry at Debbi -- who, from what I eventually read, really just sang the damn thing -- as I was at the writers. They had to know what they were doing, I fumed. I mean, the song was just in a commercial there. They had to know about it. How dare they!
And then I felt small. I'm nobody, I thought, so they probably figured they could get away with it. It's not like they ripped off Beyonce. Just small-time me.
And then I felt defeated. I've always wanted to have a hit like "Touch The Sun". And I thought I wrote one in 2003. It was such a great disappointment to me that no one noticed. There will never be enough people to notice me, I thought.
And then, I would find myself dreaming. Maybe I'll get a settlement. Maybe it will be large enough to make all my problems go away. I'll be able to pay for my new record. I'll be able to afford the best marketing and publicity money can buy. And then there will be some left over to buy a house. My life will change!
Finally, I disconnected. I couldn't tell very many people about what was happening, and the feelings were overwhelming me. Ok, I thought, I'll just let the lawyers do their lawyer thing. This is why you pay them. I am powerless. Breathe deep and exhale.
Very early in the process, my lawyers asked me what I wanted to be the goal of my settlement. Did I want 100% of the money made? Did I want a flat fee? How much? Did I want a public apology? Did I want to let it go? Did I just want credit?
These questions became a spiritual exercise. I began to think that how I answered them said something about who I was as a person.
I believe that creativity is an unpredictable, mysterious process. I often have no idea where a song comes from. Other times I am more aware of the hard work. It is not always an easy thing to know where influence ends and mimicry begins. But there is also a way we recognize ourselves in the faces of our children, and a gut instinct that tells me when I am hearing my own musical fingerprint.
I thought for awhile, and decided I would like 50% of all the monies made so far, and 50% on everything moving forward. I didn't need a public apology. I think this is fair, not punitive, and given the current copyright law system and options available to me, a reasonable request.
Now I just have to wait one to five years to see how it turns out.
Recently, I've ended up doing a lot of advocacy and policy work around copyright. This isn't because I am a copyright crusader, for or against, but because the issue gets tied up with so many other things I care about: media access, fair compensation for artists, creating a sustainable music business.
I actually hate to talk about copyright because, once it's brought up, it just seems to take over any conversation. Most of the time I feel like that conversation then becomes counterproductive. People throw around complex legal principles. The jargon resembles a foreign language. Often, the emotions get so heated that a room ends up divided at just the time when we need to work together. I've also noticed that most of the people crowing about copyright aren't individual copyright holders. They're groups of people who make money from the business of policing and administering copyright.
In my advocacy, I want to talk scale. I want to talk relationships and power structures. I want to talk about technology. Copyright is part of this, but it's not the whole enchilada. I've come to think that current copyright law is like an immovable boulder in the middle of a rushing river. It's not likely to change, so I'm going to have to work with it, as it is. And not let it stop other important work.
Yet here I am facing a difficult situation where copyright is the main issue.
I recently watched Kirby Ferguson's "Everything Is A Remix" series and found it really helpful to understand the feelings that came up for me around "Touch The Sun." In part four, Kirby makes the observation that we humans are easily and freely influenced and inspired by the world around us. However, when we feel like something has been taken from us, we get very angry and indignant. Our anger is as natural and essentially human as is our borrowing or being influenced.
Really how I feel about copyright is this: can you please just ask me? I am so easily found. One or two clicks, a badly mangled combination of "erin" and "mck" will get you to me. Let me know what you're doing. Let's talk. Take some time and connect with me. I know this is imperfect. Sometimes in the creative economy, there just isn't time. But how about we try?
I'd also like us all to acknowledge that the current copyright system, the unmovable boulder in the stream, rather than protecting rights holders and acting as a deterrent to infringement, is in its very complications a shelter for those who use others' material without permission and an obstacle to those who would like to legally use or remix content. Whether it is done consciously or unconsciously, nefariously or in communal bliss, given the complicated, arcane process, the myriad hoops to jump through, the length and cost of the process, who can afford to participate?
So Tomas, Peter, and Maros, I won't assume your motives in turning my song "Slung-lo" into "Touch The Sun." Instead, I'll say this: if you asked me, we might have worked something out. When I found you, we might have worked something out. Who knows, maybe we could have advanced the conversation around copyright and made a radical contribution toward a different type of economy. Instead, it will drag on in court. And I will fight it in court as long as I have to. But this could have gone another way. And for that, I am sad.
Erin McKeown is an internationally known musician, writer, and producer, releasing 8 full length albums in the last decade and spending an average of 200 nights a year onstage. She has appeared on Later with Jools Holland, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, NPR, BBC, and has had numerous film, television, and commercial placements. She's even written a song via text message with her friend Rachel Maddow. Lately, she has added mentor and activist to her resume. She is a board member at the Future of Music Coalition and a 2011-12 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Visit her website www.erinmckeown.com for more info and to join her mailing list.
Special Thanks to Mike King, Andy Sellars, my lawyers, Lawrence Stanley and Vaclav Schovanek, and Erik Gilbert at Duchamp for their help researching and proofing this post.
In a short article discussing how European antitrust officials don't appear to be too keen on Universal Music buying up EMI, and turning Universal Music (already the largest music label) into a truly dominant player in the market, there's this little tidbit:
Unnamed sources at Universal have briefed journalists that the competitive threat of digital piracy means consolidation should be permitted. Critics have pointed out that the merged entity's 40+ per cent market share would make it the king-maker for digital music services – and that no service would then survive without Universal's catalogue.
We were just discussing how the labels were looking to turn the screws on Spotify to try to wrench even greater profits out of the still unprofitable company. But really, when you put these two sentences side-by-side, it just shows how ridiculous the major labels -- and particularly Universal Music -- are today. Because of "piracy," it needs to be able to merge to create an even larger aggregator of back catalog music... to restrict that same music from appearing on new and innovative digital music platforms, unless those platforms pay more than is reasonable.
Get it? Universal Music's response to piracy is to create more piracy and limit innovation. The geniuses at the company (and, remember, this is the company whose former CEO once admitted that he was too clueless to even hire someone who might explain how modern digital technology worked -- and who not only didn't get fired for this admission, but was able to leverage his cluelessness into a new job running Sony Music last year) are basically saying that the only way they can compete with "piracy" is to so dominate the market that any company offering a music service has to do a deal on their terms, or not include its catalog. In other words, it wants veto power (and the power to extract ridiculous and unsupportable rents) on music service innovations.
Of course, that's a really stupid plan for a bunch of reasons, but let's call out the two big ones. First, the company's problems are not caused by "piracy", but by a stubborn unwillingness to adapt to a changing market. Second, restricting innovation in the digital music space will actually increase the amount of infringement, by (1) making it unprofitable for most companies to be in that space and (2) limiting true innovation and the necessary competition among services that leads to the kind of new innovations that consumers want. Instead, it'll just drive them to go back to what works: open infringement.
One thing I've always found especially fascinating about the topic of digital technology and its impact on creative industries is the way different artistic communities react. In music, this often plays out along genre lines: the hip-hop community, for example, has a very different view of internet and copyright issues than the classical music community. Thus it's always interesting to hear genre-specific opinions on these topics, where broad debates get replicated in microcosm, and interesting parallels appear.
So I'm looking forward to a new five-part web series called On The Record from the heavy metal website Metal Injection (found through the Metalluminati blog). Among the handful of topics the episodes will explore is the question of how the internet has affected heavy metal, and based on the trailer it looks like this will feature heavily in the series:
The reactions from artists and journalists—or at least the ones highlighted there—are broadly positive, and will be familiar to Techdirt readers. The heavy metal world is an interesting venue for this conversation, since for many people the genre is best-known through Metallica, its pop ambassadors, who are famous for suing Napster and being one of the first bands to take a vocal anti-filesharing stance. It's hardly surprising that their views aren't representative of the broader metal world, but as someone who knows very little about that community, I look forward to hearing from its more progressive members.
Back in 2009, we wrote about the crazy situation in which ASCAP, the giant US collection society will funnel money from indie artists and pay it to big rock stars -- which seemed incredibly unfair. It's just one particular part of the royalties that ASCAP pays, but it's still clearly a case of taking from independent artists and giving money that they should be paid under the system and giving it to the most successful artists. The short version of the story is basically that, to make its own life easier, ASCAP just pays those performance royalties to the top 200 grossing tours in the US, and every other touring musician is more or less screwed -- unless you can convince ASCAP that you play "serious music."
Very successful independent musician Zoe Keating, who has had multiple run-ins with the unfair practices of collections societies giving money she's owed to major labels, just came across this same issue and wrote a blog post about her experience:
After a concert, there is this thing called “doing the settlement”. This is where the artist or their representative meets with the promoter, goes over the financial outcome of the night in relation to their contract…and gets paid.
Sometimes the contract is for a percentage of the gross revenues, but more often for me, I get a guarantee and maybe a percentage of “net” if it was a positive number. The line item deductions that go into the calculation of net are things like sound & lights, staff, venue rental, advertising, insurance, etc. There tend to be many line items in the calculation of “net” and I can’t help but notice that one of them is ASCAP.
For example, at one concert I played last month the gross ticket sales for the night were $9336. Of the many expenses deducted that night, one of the items was $86 to ASCAP.
What is this? This is the nightly portion of a license fee that the hall pays to ASCAP for the permission to perform music by ASCAP artists in their venue. My compositions are registered with ASCAP, so I should get this money eventually, right?
Wrong.
I remembered that when I’ve played in the UK I listed all the songs I played on something called a PRS from and gave it to the venue. Six months or so later, I got a check for the percentage of the night’s revenues due to me according to the PRS formula for that venue.
Thinking that maybe instead of placing the burden on the venue, ASCAP puts it on the artist, I called ASCAP to see how I should go about claiming these concert royalties.
The customer service representative on the phone said there was nothing for me to claim. He informed me that ASCAP pays out performing royalties only to the 200 top-grossing concert tours, as determined by Pollstar. They also pay royalties for “Live symphonic and recital concerts”, whatever they are (he said I don’t qualify for those).
In other words....
Every day, thousands of venues are required to pay a percentage of their gross ticket sales to ASCAP who then gives that money to... let’s look here on Pollstar and find the highest-grossing concerts for 2011....U2, Taylor Swift, Kenny Chesney, Lady Gaga, Bon Jovi, etc.
Yup. The thing is, I actually would have thought that Keating, whose music is usually classified as "classical" would have qualified for that "serious music" exception -- because back in 2009, we were told that applies to classical music. But now it appears they're limiting that to "live symphonic and recital concerts" and telling her she doesn't qualify for that either.
But, really, this seems borderline criminal. There is simply no way to describe what's happening here other than ASCAP taking money that is owed to independent artists and giving it to the most successful artists in the world instead.
Keating then discusses how, in researching this, she came across a separate program which appears to be something of a lottery for independent artists for herself:
Looking online, I found an ASCAP program that I didn’t know about. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate for this incredible distribution of wealth to the wealthy, ASCAP has something called the “ASCAP Plus Cash Awards”. What are these amazing “awards”?
“For over 50 years, these special awards have recognized writer members each year for substantial performance activity in media and venues that are not included in performance surveys, or whose works have unique prestige value. The program has also been an inspiration to members just starting out to persevere in advancing their music careers. More than 4,200 songwriter and composer members of ASCAP received Plus Awards in their January 2012 disbursement…”
You have to submit an application to ASCAP to qualify for consideration (which I just did). The gist of it, as far as I can tell, is that if you are the winner of this black-box calculation ASCAP will make a special award to you of a portion of your own money. Awesome! I’ll let you know if I “win”.
Of course, we've written about this "program" too -- such as noticing in 2010 how ASCAP was bragging about bringing in more money than ever... at the very same time it announced it was massively cutting payments to those who qualify for this mysterious ASCAP Plus program.
I know that lots of musicians swear that ASCAP isn't like the RIAA, and that it really is about helping artists, but time and time again, we see that it really just functions to perpetuate the system that only rewards the biggest artists, and causes significant problems for the smaller artists. From examples like the stories above, to ASAP's aggressive efforts to shut down any and all open mic nights unless coffee shop owners pay up, ASCAP has successfully been screwing over independent artists for quite some time. It's a real shame and something that organization should work on. As Keating notes, it is possible to do this in a much more fair manner, such as the way PRS handled the exact same situation in the UK (though, obviously, PRS has its own issues).
Perhaps, rather than focusing on attacking Creative Commons, EFF and Public Knowledge -- three organizations that have done amazing things for independent artists, ASCAP should focus on actually paying those artists what they've earned.
Over the last few years, collection societies have become ridiculously aggressive in trying to get just about anyone to pay up for playing music. The results have been rather crazy, with auto garages being told that they have to pay up because the mechanics out in the garage had the radio on loud enough that customers in the waiting room could hear it. Ditto for a police station where some officers had a radio on in the back, but which some of the public could hear in the front. Then there was the demand that a grocery story pay up because a shop assistant sang while stacking cans. And the craziest of all: the time when the owner of a horse stable was told to pay up because her horses liked listening to music.
A lot of this comes from the simple fact that these collection societies are really just trying to squeeze as much excess revenue as they can out of any location they can find. It's gotten to the point where the "copyright investigators" are really sales people, and are given incentives just like a sales person. They have revenue targets with bonuses for extra revenue they bring in. This gives them incentives to do all sorts of crazy things... like randomly calling up small businesses and if they hear any music in the background, demanding a license.
Thankfully, it appears that the EU Court of Justice is pushing back on some of that. It recently issued two rulings about royalty collections -- but unfortunately it seems like the two rulings conflict with each other in some ways. In one, it is determined that a dentist's office does not need to pay a royalty because patients don't go to the dentist for the music:
Finally, it cannot be disputed that, in a situation such as that in the main proceedings, a dentist who broadcasts phonograms, by way of background music, in the presence of his patients cannot reasonably either expect a rise in the number of patients because of that broadcast alone or increase the price of the treatment he provides. Therefore, such a broadcast is not liable, in itself, to have an impact on the income of that dentist.
The patients of a dentist visit a dental practice with the sole objective of receiving treatment, as the broadcasting of phonograms is in no way a part of dental treatment. They have access to certain phonograms by chance and without any active choice on their part, according to the time of their arrival at the practice and the length of time they wait and the nature of the treatment they undergo. Accordingly, it cannot be presumed that the usual customers of a dentist are receptive as regards the broadcast in question.
Consequently such a broadcast is not of a profit-making nature...
Of course, you could make the identical argument about music playing in all sorts of places. But, at the very least, it certainly suggests that the music playing at an auto mechanic's garage or a police station are not subject to royalty collections under EU law.
But then there's the other ruling. The exact same court. The exact same panel of judges. The exact same day. Very different ruling. This one involved a hotel, and the question of whether or not music playing in the hotel rooms is subject to collections. And here, the court comes to the opposite conclusion, and says that the hotel must pay.
In a press statement, the Court said that since music in hotels is broadcast to an "indeterminate number of potential listeners" and is "of a profit-making nature" hoteliers are liable for royalty payments. It added that broadcasting music constitutes an "additional service which has an influence on the hotel's standing and, therefore, on the price of rooms."
I'm having difficulty figuring out the difference here. The article linked above notes that these rulings hinge on "the concept of public" which is based on "'an indeterminate number of potential listeners and a fairly large number of persons,' alongside the question of a profit motive." However, it seems like a total judgment call in either case as to whether or not there is a "fairly large number of persons" and just where "the profit motive" comes into play. Both dentists and hotels have a profit motive, and both play music in part because of that reason. But it's arguable as to whether or not the music has a direct impact on actual profits in either case. In the end, the pair of rulings just seems to leave everything a lot more confused, rather than clarified in any way.
Music lawyer Chris Castle has a talent for totally missing the point and then failing to make one of his own. In a recent blog post, he launches an attack on Michael Geist based on a completely incorrect interpretation of a statement he made to a parliamentary committee in 2010. Geist's position will be familiar to regular Techdirt readers:
The truth is that you can compete with free content if you provide value. One of the really exciting things about the Internet is that we’re seeing innovators coming up with all kinds of different ways where they can add value and entice the customer too.
We have heard this trope before. If only the artist provided something of value—besides the music. Because the music is of no value because it is "free"—that is, it has no value because it is widely stolen and has become devalued, so the artist now has to “add value” to the music.
If Castle has heard this before, then he should know that there is a bit more nuance to what free-culture proponents mean when we talk about adding value. Perhaps this is our fault for failing to handhold him through all the basic economic concepts that lead up to this position, and for using "added value" as a convenient shorthand for "additional scarce value". But really, if Castle wasn't so bent on condemning Geist, he could have figured it out for himself: nobody is saying music has no value. That would be a ludicrous claim: people love music, and it has exceptional value, but it is also non-scarce and non-rivalrous, meaning its price inevitably falls to zero. But smart artists can use music to build a brand, and an audience who will pay for other, scarce things—and that doesn't just mean t-shirts. It doesn't even have to mean something tangible and concrete: access, convenience and authenticity are all abstract scarcities that people value a great deal, and all can serve as excellent reasons to buy.
Castle also decries the fact that, supposedly, nobody cares about songwriters when discussing new models for artists. Of course, songwriters have an extremely valuable scarcity at their disposal: their ability to write new songs. That ability has plenty of value to musicians, producers and labels, which is why songwriters can pull impressive rates up-front. Why do they and their children deserve to receive ongoing payments for work that is 20, 50 or even 100 years old? Good songwriters are in high-demand, and they can parlay the success of their last song to get bigger, better commissions and charge higher rates. You don't see architects asking for royalties every time someone walks through the doors of a building they designed—they, like professionals in virtually every other field, know they have to keep working if they want to keep making money.
Next, Castle brings it all back to the supposed "tech oligarchy" and their "monstrous behavior," using some blatant weasel-wording and factual inaccuracies:
Make sure you add something of value, because the music and the songs are valueless, so why should Isohunt or Limewire or Megavideo pay the artist for them. All that subscription and advertising revenue that Megavideo and Google made off of piracy? That compensates these innovators for providing the promotional opportunity because obscurity is the artist’s biggest enemy, right?
Wrong.
No, not wrong. Is Castle really denying that obscurity is the first and most important hurdle for an artist to overcome? It wouldn't matter if people were buying CDs for $100 each—if they haven't heard of you, you aren't going to make any money. Of course, he also glosses over the fact that Megaupload did pay artists—the ones who embraced the service as a way to sell directly to their fans. Meanwhile, those who feared it handed a potential revenue stream to the pirates. Even more amusing is his lumping together of Megavideo and Google, as if they were essentially the same thing despite being so different that there's barely any comparison.
Castle's post is full of statements like "once again" and "we've heard this trope before." Maybe next time he hears it, he should actually make the effort to understand it, instead of wasting his time railing against ridiculous straw-men.
We always hear stories about how copyright has to be protected to "protect the artists," and yet time and time again we learn that some of the biggest name artists will often copy directly from each other without credit or payment. It's the way music is made. In James Boyle's excellent book, The Public Domain, there's a really fantastic chapter giving plenty of examples of this in practice. However, Rob Hyndman recently pointed us to another such example, found via Wikipedia, but backed up via its sources of course. The discussion? It's about where Michael Jackson's famous song Billie Jean came from. Turns out, Jackson himself admitted to copying the bass line directly from a Hall and Oates song:
According to Daryl Hall, when Jackson was recording “We Are the World,” Jackson approached him and admitted to lifting the bass line for "Billie Jean" from a Hall and Oates song (apparently referring to Hall’s "I Can't Go For That (No Can Do)" from the 1981 album Private Eyes): "Michael Jackson once said directly to me that he hoped I didn't mind that he copped that groove."
Of course, the really amusing part? Hall responded to Jackson... by telling him he had done the same thing himself to get that bassline in the first place! "It's something we all do," Hall later explained.
Indeed. And yet, under today's laws, it's still considered infringement, and we still hear people looking down on "remixing" or people who create works in this manner, by building on the works of others. And yet, this is one of the most successful pop songs of all time. And the bass was a big part of that. Elsewhere in the Wikipedia article, there's a discussion of how the producer of the song, Quincy Jones, hated the song, and specifically the bass line. Yet Jackson insisted that the bass line was the key to the song, and the two of them fought over it until Jackson won. And the bassline was completely copied.
It's stories like this that make us wonder how people can say with a straight face that copying something can't help to create something new.
Last week we wrote about WZRD, the new album from KiD CuDi on which he went in an entirely different direction from his usual style. That's the kind of thing that makes big record labels nervous (they'd prefer artists just keep churning out variations on their first success) and CuDi's label Universal Republic was no exception. After the release, CuDi took to Twitter to vent:
Ok so just a heads up, my weak ass label only shipped 55k physicals cuz they treated this like some indie side project tax right off. So i apologize on behalf of my weak ass major label. And I apologize for the lack of promo, again, my weak ass major label. They tried to rush me thru this so i can just give em another MOTM, but guess what? Fuck that, next album is WZRD. MOTM3 on hold til 2014. who mad??? not me and @DotDaGenius. So its def gonna be tough to find one in the stores guys, I'm sorry about that.
Apparently fans were prepared to make the effort, because WZRD debuted at #3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. This is especially funny in the wake of RIAA CEO Cary Sherman's recent interview, in which he claimed record labels were needed to "separate the wheat from the chaff" and "designate who is worth promoting and marketing". It seems the legacy gatekeepers aren't quite as good at curation as they think—at least I bet Universal is wishing they'd gotten a few more copies of WZRD out there, and put some promotional weight behind the project. Maybe, if they'd put a little faith in their own artist, they could have had a #1 on their hands.
With Newzbin2 getting censored in the UK, BPI -- basically, the UK wing of the RIAA -- has been looking to have courts order many more sites blocked, with The Pirate Bay being target number one. Dan Bull, the UK-based musician who we've written about many times for his consistently awesome songs about the music industry, file sharing, copyright laws and the like has now put together another wonderful song, called Bye Bye BPI. You can watch it here:
Like his SOPA Cabana song, Dan had a bunch of his Facebook followers participate in the video by taking pictures of themselves with the various lyrics. This time, since the song is about why musicians don't need (and don't want) the BPI, he sought out musicians to take part in the video, so everyone you see is a musician who doesn't need BPI. Yes, they're mostly amateur musicians, but the point of the video is that it's misleading to suggest that BPI supports musicians. It supports a tiny percentage of musicians. The rest get along just fine without, and wish that it wouldn't muck around with the technology everyone else uses.
Oh yeah. It's also worth noting that Dan's got a new album coming out, which (of course) you can download for free. You can also buy it to show that you support the artists you like.
* Bonus points if you can spot our own Leigh Beadon in the video somewhere.
