FYI Roundup From the Web and Webmail
- Finkelstein Mngt Seeks New Media Manager
- New Anti-Spam Bill Threatens Computer Privacy
- Squaring Parody With Canada’s Copyright Laws
- Vevo partners with Arab Emirates Digital Media Firm
- Regulations Silencing Brit Pubs
- MJ’s Afterlife A Goldrush of Excess
- Terry McBride Explains the Future of Music
- A Nation Of Attention Whores: America’s Obsession With Fame
- A Prescriptive Essay That Could Save Print
- Of Course Recorded Music Has Value
- Tech Outsmarts Hollywood In Selling A Convincing Story
- Made In Jamaica, A Dancehall Documentary
- A Gripping Doc Shows How Music Has Given Hope To Kids In Caracas
- Sony Centre Renovations Finally Underway
- Tools For Indie Acts To Navigate New Business Models
- Paul Quarrington Wins $20K authorial Matt Cohen Prize
Advertisement: Toronto-based music company involved in artist management and music publishing seeks Marketing & New Media Manager. For more information, e-mail info@finkelsteinmanagement.com.
COMPUTER PRIVACY – Michael Geist Blog: C-27 is the draft Canadian anti-spam bill 
that comes out of committee today. The opposition Liberals have proposed amendments which appear to have been drafted by copyright and telecom lobbyists. They would allow for surreptitious installation of computer programs and – even more outrageously – would allow copyright owners to secretly access information on users’ computers.
The bill contains an anti-spyware provision, yet the Liberal motion would allow for the collection of personal information on a computer without authorization if the collection is related to a “investigating a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the laws of Canada.” Note that that is private sector surveillance, not the police.
On top of these provisions, the Liberals have also tabled motions to extend the exemptions for telecom providers including allow telecom providers to engage in a host of activities – right down to scanning for and removing computer programs – without permission. Links to contact the relevant MPs with your comments
PARODY & THE LAW – by By Glenn Kauth, Canadian Lawyer: By definition, parody involves the imitation of someone else’s work. So how do you square that notion with copyright laws that by their nature restrict such mimicking?
That’s a key question in a case likely to make its way to trial in the Supreme Court of British Columbia between CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc. and two Vancouver residents, Gordon Murray and Carel Moiseiwitsch. It stems from the 2007 publication of a fake Vancouver Sun that mocked the alleged pro-Israeli bias of the paper and its parent company, CanWest. Now, after dealing with a long list of procedural motions, Canwest Mediaworks Publications Inc. v. Murray is set to see Palestinian rights activists Murray and Moiseiwitsch face allegations in court of copyright and trademark infringement, as well as the tort of passing off.
The case comes as the federal government gets set to take yet another stab at revamping Canada’s copyright laws after it wrapped up consultations last month.
VEVO - Press Release: Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment’s YouTube-powered online premium music service will launch in December with a third partner, the United Arab Emirates-based Abu Dhabi Media Company.
The announcement was made today by UMG’s Doug Morris, SME’s Rolf Schmidt-Holtz and VEVO’s Rio Caraeff along with ADMC Chairman Mohammed Khalaf Al Mazroui and CEO Edward Borgerding.
VEVO is now formed as an independent and fully funded entity with the three companies as founding shareholders. Terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
“This global partnership flags Abu Dhabi Media Company’s commitment to establish a leading position in the digital media industry. It is part of an integrated approach to expanding the global digital presence and brand portfolio of Abu Dhabi Media Company, and it illustrates our partnering approach with innovators in digital media services and technologies,” said Al Mazroui on joining UMG and SME to create VEVO.
“It’s a credit to the music community, and to the global opportunity that VEVO represents, that we have been able to attract such a solid investment partner with the vision and track record of Abu Dhabi Media Company,” commented Caraeff. “Abu Dhabi Media Company brings to the venture important funding support and a team with enormous global media experience and insight, and we look forward to working with them to seize the many opportunities ahead of us.”
“VEVO fits our vision and goals perfectly, as we are expanding our capabilities and continue to build the market for digital entertainment around the world. VEVO will redefine the way premium music video entertainment is consumed, created and shared in a global community of music audiences,” said Borgerding.
“We’re now entering a new exciting phase in the digital media industry in the region and we’re determined to be at the forefront of it”, added ADMC Executive Director Ricky Ghai. “With VEVO there’s real opportunity for incredible growth, as both brand advertisers and consumers are looking for new premium video experiences online.”
BRIT PUBS SILENCED – The Guardian: It’s no wonder there is a decline in pubs and restaurants hosting live music – the 2003 Licensing Act is incredibly confusing, costly and unnecessarily bureaucratic.
The Musicians’ Union is organising a demonstration next Thursday with the actors’ union, Equity, in London’s Parliament Square. The event is being held on the same day that parliament is holding a debate on licensing and live entertainment, and the MU wants the government to rethink the 2003 Licensing Act in an effort to stop the decline in venues hosting live music.
It used to be that artists toured to promote their albums. These days, because of the decline in revenue from recordings, artists are being advised to release albums to promote their tours. But before bands can play arenas, they first need to hone their craft in small venues. Most jazz and folk artists (and many singer-songwriters) often rely solely on playing bars and restaurants.
But after attending a MusicTank meeting on Tuesday, which featured Andrew Stud (chief inspector of the Metropolitan Police), Lord Tim Clement-Jones (spokesman for culture, media and sport) and the managing director of the Noise Abatement Society, I’m amazed that so many venues manage to put on live music at all.
The Licensing Act is incredibly confusing, costly and bureaucratic – with copious forms for the venue/promoter to fill out. Everyone on the panel, including the Met, agreed with that. The widely debated Risk Assessment form 696 even requires promoters to submit personal details, including the addresses and birth dates, of the artists performing (after public opposition, the question on what genre of music would be performed has been dropped, as it was said to unfairly target “urban” music). The Met says it’s “in the interest of public order and the prevention of terrorism”. Stud claimed that not all venues need to fill out form 696, but many promoters and venue owners I spoke to said that they’d been told differently by the local police and council. This supports Lord Clement-Jones’s statement that the Act is open to widely different interpretations by local authorities.
IN DEATH DOTH HE PROFIT – The Guardian: You would hardly know Michael Jackson is no longer with us. Certainly, it is a long time since he has been so successful. Just a few months after his death, the King of Pop has a new single, a major movie coming out and new accounts of his life hitting the bookshops of America.
It seems that the period of mourning for the tragic star’s untimely death, apparently due to an overdose of painkilling medication, is well and truly over. But the period of cashing in on his talents has only just begun. Paradoxically, it has already reaped the sort of success and rewards that eluded Jackson in the final years of his life.
Few stars have had an afterlife so high-profile as Jackson has had since he was declared dead in a Los Angeles hospital on 25 June. His song This is It is getting huge radio airplay. A movie about his preparations for his doomed farewell concert tour could end up becoming one of the biggest hits of all time, with some forecasters predicting it will make $250m in its first five days. He has been nominated for four American Music Awards. Half a dozen books have been released or are pencilled into publishers’ autumn lists. This Halloween, as America dons fancy dress for the biggest party night of the year, the most popular costume is expected to be Jackson.
TERRY McBRIDE – by Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun: “Content is not king, context is king,” says (Terry) McBride. “The movie business is stuck on content is king.”
McBride cites the video game Rock Band as an example of a simple idea that became fantastically successful. The original concept came from rock musicians releasing their multi-track stems for fans to do mixes.
“Two smart guys went, ‘Hey, what happens if we do that within the context of a video game?’” says McBride. “Boom! A billion-dollar business gets created out of nowhere because some artists were creative.”
WHEN RADIO WAS KING - American Radio Tales by Bob Shannon: The 1990s began with deregulation fever. By 1994, when Republican majorities were elected to both houses of Congress,media consolidation was a foregone conclusion and a little more than a year later, on January 3, 1996, the 104th Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and sent it on to PresidentBill Clinton for signature.
Merger mania began with a bang. Medium size companies swallowed up smaller ones and big companies, with venture capital money, ate up the mediums. Eventually, only the big boys were left standing and since those at the top of these conglomerates were, more likely, accountants instead of broadcasters, radio rapidly became a real estate business. As a result, educating, informing and entertaining the public became a thing of the past.
This book was written because radio people, more often than not, tell their history in bars, not on paper. The stories they tell aren’t about industry wide initiatives, results and consequences, they’re more personal: about places they worked, people they knew and things that happened along the way. Between the lines a picture appears of a time gone by, one that will never be repeated, when radio was an important part of American life, disc jockeys were stars, and their listeners cared about them.
Today, as the first decade of the 21st century is coming to a close, the definition of media is changing at a pace that’s almost unrecognizable. It’s an exciting time, with unlimited possibilities and opportunities for re-invention. But, it would be sad to forget, or worse yet, to never know what came before and how and why it set the stage for the future.
Believe it or not, once upon a time a young boy named Paul Harvey dreamed of running away to “join the radio.”
As it turns out, he wasn’t the only one.
That’s what this book is all about.
SAVING PRINT - by Jason Pontin, Technology Review: …The most important publishing platform of the future will probably be lightweight, thin, flexible screens that use electronic ink. That’s because the editorial distributed to such screens will be as interactive as that on today’s websites yet retain the fonts, graphical design, and illustrations and photographs of traditional media (a wonderfully rich visual grammar that art directors labored over for centuries). But publishers must not become fixated on platforms; they must regard them as mere distribution channels favoring different kinds of content. Again, publishers should offer their readers as much choice as is reasonable. Over the next decade, they should distribute editorial content to personal computers over today’s Web, to small devices like the iPhone, to larger devices like Amazon’s Kindle, to electronic-ink devices as they emerge, and to print publications (at least for a little longer).
Printing and physical distribution are expensive. For as long as they still print and mail publications, publishers should do it less frequently. Monthly magazines can be printed bimonthly; weekly magazines can be printed biweekly; newspapers can print on weekends only.
MUSIC HAS VALUE – by Chris Ovenden, The Peer: I’m getting fed up hearing that music has lost its value – to pirates, the internet, goblins or what have you.
Of course recorded music has value! What it lacks is price. It is the nature of the internet to lubricate communication, and it turns out that the apparent correlation between value and price is completely dependent on a certain friction in the marketplace. If it takes no effort to bring something to you then the actual price of that good is zero. This would be equally true if we could summon bananas to us at will from plantations on the Ivory Coast. It would be tough on the growers, but in a frictionless market they could no longer realise the value they had put in tending the plants. Of course such banana-summoning is clearly theft by any definition that has meaning today, but if we all suddenly had this Harry Potter-like power, what – short of a sudden outbreak of global altruism – could be done to stop it?
Music may have been the first sector to experience this effect, but it’s not alone. And since the whole issue of music copying is fraught with emotion, consider instead the market in news. The internet has actually increased the value of news by making it both more immediate and longer-lasting, and by giving readers everywhere the ability to interact with and discuss it.
THE FAME GAME - by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon: It’s easy to believe — misguidedly, perhaps unconsciously but nevertheless resolutely, that getting enough hits on YouTube or followers on Twitter or the biggest brass ring of all – a shot at reality TV! – could lead to something lucrative. After all, it works for some people – people who appear to have remarkably few redeeming qualities. And if your house is in foreclosure and your company just downsized, fame not only looks slightly better than bank robbery and amateur porn, but it also seems weirdly attainable. It’s the crazy, frequently delusional and often downright dangerous dream of easy, big money. It’s a lottery ticket.
The average person’s chances of winning the lottery, by the way, are about one in 20 million. And in the meantime, 6-year-old Falcon Heene, whose dad went into defensive overdrive on CNN over what his son meant by saying he “did it for the show,” vomited twice on national television this morning when confronted with the same question.
TECH OUTSMARTS HOLLYWOOD – by Matthew Belloni, THR, Esq: Iger Walt Disney Co. chief executive Bob Iger believes technology companies are winning the PR war at the expense of Hollywood, and the result could make it tougher to police illegal activity online.
Iger made the comments during a keynote chat with talent attorney Bruce Ramer today at the annual Institute on Entertainment Law & Business presented by USC Law School and the Beverly Hills Bar Assn.
“New technology is great, but it has to be used in a responsible way that respects the talent and the investment in creativity,” Iger told the luncheon crowd of 600–a record for the annual event, according to Ramer. “I don’t think our industry has been as effective as it needs to be on the subject. The tech industry is doing a better job of articulating excitement around technology than we are about how a business that is so vital to the United States is potentially in peril.”
MADE IN JAMAICA, A new documentary by director Jérôme Laperrousaz, Made in Jamaica, shot on the streets of Kingston and the beaches of Jamaica, starts with the murder of Bogle, one of the leading stars of dancehall. Reggae is the sound of the Caribbean nation’s ghettos and is said to be Jamaica’s blues, telling of the people’s hopes and dreams. The doc includes performances and interviews with Gregory Isaacs, Bunny Wailer, Tanya Stephens, Toots Frederick, Elephant Man, Bounty Killer, Third World and Capleton.
HERE & THERE: The 2nd annual Victoria, BC Rifflandia Music Festival sold out before the first band took the stage, and while festival organizers maintain that there were fewer tickets than the overall capacity of all the venues (all 2,500 of the $60 wristbands were sold), it was the admission lines that quickly took the spotlight … Music management company, 19 Management, has devised a one-off, free promotional newspaper to be disributed to 50,000 commuters in and around London, England this Thursday (22 October) to promote the release of Estonian pop star Hannah’s first UK single … The Future Of Music Coalition has put together some handy tutorials on new business models for musicians that can be downloaded here …
The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts has finally confirmed renovation and 
restoration plans that will see a revitalized theatre open in the fall of 2010 to celebrate the building’s 50th anniversary. The theatre,designated a historical site by the City of Toronto, will undergo major renovations and restorations starting this month. The project will eliminate a number of architectural ‘interventions’ added over the years, restoring the elegance and grandeur of Peter Dickinson’s original O’Keefe Centre, which opened on October 1, 1960. Iconic features such as the theatre’s marquee canopy and York Wilson’s lobby mural “The Seven Lively Arts” will be preserved. Restoration of the wood, brass and marble that were hallmarks of the original facility will be undertaken, along with audience seating and flooring upgrades, new washrooms, re-configured lobby spaces and significant mechanical and electrical system changes …
Toronto writer and musician Paul Quarrington has won the Matt Cohen Award, a $20,000 prize awarded by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. The Matt Cohen Award — In Celebration of a Writing Life is presented to a Canadian for a body of distinguished work in poetry or prose. It is named for the late Canadian author Matt Cohen and has been awarded since 2000. Quarrington will be presented with the award at a celebration called “Paul Quarrington: A Life in Music, Words, and on Screen,” part of Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors. The tribute, which is to be held on Oct. 24, includes speakers such as Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Alistair MacLeod, and Paul Gross, as well as a performance by the Rheostatics (who will reunite for the event) and Quarrington’s own band, Porkbelly Futures. Quarrington, who was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer last May, wrote candidly about his health and his reaction to the diagnosis in saturday’s edition of the National Post
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