FYI Roundup From the Web and Webmail

Facebook To Add Voice Functionality Soon
Beds Are Burning Reconstructed For Climate Change Petition
EMI Intentionally Put Digital On Hold To Sell Compact Beatles Discs
Joan Baez – The Telegraph Interview
How Music Became An Industry: On ‘Selling Sounds’
Direct To Fan: Offer, Focus & Aquisition
Paul Mills Receives Helen Verger Award
Miles Davis and Gil Evans Perform â€œConcierto de Aranjuez (adagio)â€
Female Stars Gang Together To Hit Back at Kanye West
Audio Feature: Every Beatles and All You Got To Do is Click, Naturally
Broadcasting: CBC TV Free iTunes Downloads…

FACEBOOK VOIP – IT ProPortal: Facebook users could soon be able to enjoy having high fidelity voice conversations with their friends and other members on the social networking platform, as the website is reportedly adding â€œvoice chatâ€ to its offering in the coming few weeks.

The new voice chat feature will be incorporated by Vivox, a Boston-based firm that specialises in offering integrated voice service for video games and virtual worlds,Â according to CNet.

The service, which is presently in its closed beta version, will enable millions of
Facebook users to have high-quality conversations with the other members of the website.

The users will just need to have a plug-in, and once itâ€™s installed, Facebook chat will be available to any third-party app that requires the voice chat technology.

BEDS ARE BURNING – By Peter Cashmere, Undercover: The Midnight Oil classic `Beds Are Burning` is getting a reconstruction by 55 international artists. garrett Record label The:Hours have recorded the song as a â€œmusical petitionâ€ as part of the tck tck tck campaign for climate justice, aiming for a positive outcome in Copenhagen in December.

A new â€œsupergroupâ€ version of the song is being recording to raise attention of the global warming crisis, but the song will not include original singer and now Australian politician Peter Garrett. The song will be released as a free download on October 1 during Paris Fashion Week. â€˜Beds Are Burningâ€™ was originally written and recorded by Midnight Oil in 1987 as a protest song to give land back to the aborigines. Watch the teaser for the song here

COMPACT DISC STILL RULES – Financial Post: EMI has sent 5m remastered CD recordings by The Beatles to retailers as it looks to the band that helped define the rock and roll album to stem the formatâ€™s decline in the age of the single track download.

Advance orders indicated that (last) Wednesdayâ€™s re-release of all 14 UK Beatles albums, covering UKâ€™s output, was on track to be â€œthe biggest catalogue reissue ever conducted in the history of the music businessâ€, Ernesto Schmitt, head of EMIâ€™s global catalogue business, told the Financial Times.

The first 50,000 box sets of mono versions of the recordings have sold out, at a price of $269. â€œThatâ€™s a pretty courageous price point at a time when everybody wants music to be free,â€ Mr Schmitt said.

…The remastered catalogue, not available online, could relieve a slide in the

popularity of CDs, which has dragged US album sales down 14.5 per cent for the year to date, or 31.1 per cent below 2007 levels.

By holding out from online stores such as Appleâ€™s iTunes, EMI will ensure that sales of full albums are not undermined by hits such as â€œHey Judeâ€ or â€œLet It Beâ€ being made available individually.

EMIâ€™s four-year effort to re-release the catalogue is also a test of efforts by Guy
Hands, its owner, to rethink the marketing of physical albums, which remain the industryâ€™s biggest source of revenue.

JOAN BAEZ INTERVIEW - The Telegraph: Joan Baezâ€™s haunting delivery, striking looks, po-faced idealism and much-chronicled love affair with Bob Dylan defined the American folk-music scene in the 1960s. Yet as she prepares for a British tour she explains how she doesnâ€™t dwell on the past.

…The Hotel Viking is one of the grandest in a town of grand establishments. It was where Baez stayed when she first appeared at Newport, and again in 1963, when she returned with Bob Dylan â€“ the queen and her crown prince, prowling around the hotel pool cracking a 20ft black leather bullwhip which a friend of Baezâ€™s had given Dylan as a joke. ‘Ah, yes, the bullwhip. We were pretty good with that.â€™

Baez gives a slight smile. Dylan, whom she famously loved, Woodstock, where she performed, the 1960s, which she helped to define â€“ all of this is in the past, where Joan Baez does her best not to dwell. ‘I think Iâ€™m trying to strangle people into coming up to the present so much of the time, because people tend to live aeons ago,â€™ she says.

A figure of dignified, simple elegance, she is dressed in black trousers, a brown silk sweater and an ornate turquoise necklace. Her steel-grey hair is neatly cropped. She has huge brown liquid eyes that seem to hint at some perpetual, unseen amusement. For many years Joan Baez was in psychotherapy, and has recently become an avid meditator â€“ 20 minutes a day every day â€“ and her rosary of sandalwood beads is around one wrist (on the other is a silver bracelet stamped with Nelson Mandelaâ€™s prison number, a memento of her appearance at his 90th birthday celebrations last year). The practice lends her a tangible calm and serenity, as if she is hovering a few inches above the irritations and preoccupations of daily life. ‘Pretty damn serene,â€™ she agrees.

At the age of 68 Joan Baez is enjoying something of a second summer in her career. There was a time in the early 1990s, she says, when she believed it was all but over. While she retained a loyal following in Europe, in America her record sales had plummeted to the point where she could not even find a record label. ‘Everybody said, â€œOh sheâ€™s great, a legend,â€ but they did not want to sign me. If weâ€™d sent out demos of what I was doing and put â€œYoung woman songwriterâ€ on it, weâ€™d have had a better chance than putting â€œJoan Baezâ€ on it.â€™

With the advice of her present manager, Mark Spector, she began to rebuild her career, connecting with a younger generation of songwriters such as Natalie Merchant, Ryan Adams and Mary Chapin Carpenter. An album last year, Day After Tomorrow, produced by Steve Earle and featuring songs by Earle, Tom Waits and Thea Gilmore, became her best-selling record since the 1970s and won her a Grammy nomination.

SELLING ‘SOUNDS’ – Los Angeles Times: Among the fascinating examples of early music-industry advertising reproduced in “Selling Sounds,” the most striking is a 1913 image that pairs a photograph of legendary tenor Enrico Caruso, costumed for “Aida,” with one of his Victor Red Seal recordings. â€œBoth are Caruso,” the text reads, adding that the owner of the disc hears the singer in his own home “just as truly as if you were listening to him in the Metropolitan Opera House.” For author David Suisman, this identification of a living, breathing person with an inert hunk of shellac that encodes his voice isnâ€™t merely a clever promotional ploy, but an emblem of a century-old transformation in the ways that we understand, experience and consume music.

Subtitled “The Commercial Revolution in American Music,” Suisman’s book (Harvard University Press) focuses on the 1880s through the mid-1920, a period that saw the growth of sheet-music publishing from a printer’s sideline to a wildly profitable New York-based industry, the rise of the player piano, and its displacement in American homes by the even more easily operated gramophone. These innovations made professionally composed and performed music available to a wider range of Americans than ever before.

At the same time, music increasingly became something to be passively appreciated rather than actively made. (This story could have been different, if Edison’s wax cylinders, which allowed convenient home recording as well as playback, had won out over Emile Berlinerâ€™s disc technology.) Suisman also emphasizes the extent to which regional and vernacular sounds were crowded out by the centralized distribution of mass-produced scores (and later records), though he notes that the new technologies would later preserve the folk traditions of players and singers who didnâ€™t or couldn’t notate their songs.

Even the category of “popular song” was a child of commerce. Though individual songs had become “hits” since the days of American minstrels and the English music halls, it wasnâ€™t until the 1910s that the writers and publishers of Tin Pan Alley organized their production and promotion into a consistently profitable enterprise. As the lengthy narratives of older balladry gave way to short, catchy choruses meant to be remembered in seconds and forgotten in weeks, these commodities formed the cornerstone of what could be called, for the first time, an American music “industry.”

DIRECT TO FAN – Mike King, Hypebot: Anyone that has been following music business trends for the past few years is likely familiar with the high profile direct to fan campaigns (campaigns that focus on the monetization of an artistâ€™s fan base directly) that Cash from computer Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, Imogen Heap, and others have been involved with recently. As Mike Masnick put it in his 2009 NARM Keynote, the recipe for effective direct to fan campaigns can be boiled down to: Connecting with Fans (CwF) + Providing a Reason to Buy (RtB) = $$$.

Makes sense, right? The difficulties arise when you consider that there are 5 million bands on MySpace, all of which are vying for the consumerâ€™s attention. Itâ€™s easy for NIN and Radiohead to connect with fans, the skepticsâ€™ note, as they have had years of major label support and hundreds of thousands of existing followers to work with. How can a developing artist in this climate differentiate themselves from all the other bands out there?

The answer can be slightly more nuanced than Masnickâ€™s formula above, and to me, is based on a four key elements:

1) setting up an effective offer page on your site that is tailored to your marketing goals and where you are in your marketing cycle,

2) expanding your digital touch points through creative fan acquisition techniques,

3) integrating your online and offline marketing towards the same goal, and lastly,

4) once youâ€™ve created your groundswell of support and fans, integrating effective 3rd party digital and physical marketing, sales, and distribution (such as Tunecore) outlets into the mix. Letâ€™s illustrate these elements with two examples.

PAUL MILLS: Veteran folk music producer Paul Mills received the 2009 Helen Verger Award during the recent Ottawa Folk Festival. Each year, the festival presents the award to an individual who’s made a significant, sustained contribution to folk/roots music in Canada. Past recipients include Bruce Cockburn, Colleen Peterson, Kate and Ann McGarrigle and Willie P. Bennett.

Mills has been an integral part of the Canadian folk scene for more than 30 years.Â His first bands were rock groups called the Statesmen and The Viscounts. From there, he went on to perform in folk music groups such as The Balladeers, The Windy Sprinkle and The Paisley Giraffe. In the mid-sixties the vibrant folk music scene of hometown London, Ontario began to make an impression, shaping his musical tastes and sealing his future in music. When friend Victor Garber became the first one in his circle to master the finger-style approach to guitar playing, Mills decided to specialize in the style that he would further develop and eventually mark with his own creative stamp.

During his Western University days in London, it was music that kept him busy at night. He frequented Smales Pace, a local coffeehouse, where he hung out and played with the likes of Stan Rogers, Willie P. Bennett, David Essig, David Bradstreet, Doug MacArthur and Laura Smith, to name a few.

Since that time, Mills has gone on to produce more then 140 albums, working with artists such as Stan Rogers, Ron Hynes, and Sharon Lois & Bram. Mills is a founding partner of Borealis Records, a company that distributes and promotes Canadian folk/roots music.

The-Sound-of-Miles-Davis SKETCHES OF SPAIN – The Delete Bin: Listen to this extended arrangement of the second movement of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigoâ€™s â€œConcierto de Aranjuezâ€, as featured on the landmark 1960 album Sketches of Spain. The arrangement features Gil Evansâ€™ orchestra with jazz pioneer Miles Davis playing trumpet, improvising around Evansâ€™ charts.

Recorded at the tail end of 1959, and released at the beginning of the next decade, it marked something of a new era, like Ornette Colemanâ€™s Shape of Jazz to Come that same year.Â Arguably unlike the Coleman record, the Evans-Davis collaboration produced music which is highly accessible as well as challenging to the expectations of listeners.

But, is it jazz?

The idea that sparked the project was the sounds and feel of Spanish folk music and culture.Â Davis had explored these types of textures with his â€œFlemenco Sketchesâ€.Â Yet in working with an established piece, Davis was faced with a new challenge.Â He would need some expertise to pull it off, possibly outside of his own skill set as a jazz player. to this extended arrangement of the second movement of Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigoâ€™s â€œConcierto de Aranjuezâ€, as featured on the landmark 1960 album Sketches of Spain. The arrangement features Gil Evansâ€™ orchestra with jazz pioneer Miles Davis playing trumpet, improvising around Evansâ€™ charts.

GIRLS SLAG KAYNE WEST – The Daily Record: Girl stars blasted back at kayne Kanye West last night for trying to ruin Taylor Swift’s night at the MTV awards.

Pink, Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson slammed the rapper for storming the stage as the teenager picked up her award for best female. Swift, one of the US’s biggest selling stars, landed the prize for You Belong With Me.

But West ran on and told the crowd the award should have gone to Beyonce.

Last night, Pink branded West “An idiot, a waste and a toolbox”.

She said: “It is the one time I would have really, really wished I won as I had this amazing Alexander McQueen purse with brass knuckles on it.

“I honestly do not think it would have happened if I was up there.

“I just think he is an idiot, he is a waste, he is a tool box. I think he is getting what he wants as people are talking about him.”

When Beyonce took the stage to receive her best video prize for Single Ladies, she invited Taylor back on stage to “have her moment”. The 19-year-old joined her and finished her interrupted speech.

Kelly branded West a “sad human being” on her blog.

She wrote: “What happened to you as a child? Did you not get hugged enough?

THE BEATLES AUDIO/VIDEO COMPENDIUM: Just click on the title of the song you want to hear and see a video-clip with attachedÂ info related to that particular song.

BROADCASTING: SONY Board tips Ann Marie Mediwake has resigned from Global and could be re-surfacing at CBC Newsworld…Congrats to KX96 FMâ€™s Pete Walker who won Music Director Of The Year at the CCMAs…Joytv 10 in Surrey, BC pink slipped GM Terry Mahoney and General Sales Manager Gary Milne,Â Managers at Joytv 10 will now report directly tosenior staff at S-VOX in Toronto. S-VOX also owns Vision TV.

Five CBC TV show finales – Being Erica, Little Mosque on the Prairie, The Tudors, Heartland, and The Border – are available as free downloads on iTunes…

Rogers Communications has filed a submission with the CRTC in advance of November’s hearing on the structural reform of the Canadian television industry, vociferously opposing fee-for-carriage of over-the-air TV stations.Â One of Rogers arguments is that fee-for-carriage would create an irritant on the trade front between Canada and the U.S., stating that, “U.S. border broadcasters would also demand carriage fees if fee- for-carriage were to be implemented.”Â Rogers release

Meanwhile, the CBC has joined the foray, siding with the other two Canadian networks in support of the fees to prop up local television.

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