- All You Need Is Dosh: Wringing Profit From the Beatles Catalogue
- How the Apple Corp. Played the Harmonix Game
- Today Could Be Annie Leibovitz’ Last Picture Show
- High-School Converts the Printed Word Into An E-Book Library
- $60B Video-Game Market Could Go Up In ‘Cloud’
- Understanding the Relationship Between the Web, TV and Mobile
- Stop Being An Agency and Start Being An Agent of Change
- New Book Tells the Story of Syd Nathan’s King Records
- Ludacris TeamS Up With Auto Dealership To Give Cars Away
- The Making of TAPE – Setting Up A Label (Part One)
ALL YOU NEED IS DOSH - The Daily Mail:Â In the words of Marty Bandier, chief 
executive of Sony/ATV (the music publisher that controls the Beatles catalogue): ‘The fourth quarter [of this financial year] will belong to The Beatles.’
It’s unlikely that this scenario wasn’t elaborately painted for ‘the Shareholders’ as they debated the pros and cons of turning themselves or their late spouses – literally – into cartoons of their former selves.
But times are tough for the record industry. So what else to do, when sales dwindle to nothing, than to become a virtual character and get kids to fork out a small fortune to perform bad karaoke version of your songs?
A quick scan of eBay reveals that you can pick up a half-decent acoustic guitar, a Beatles songbook and a guitar tuition DVD for less than £100. I know which I’d rather my child was holed up in the bedroom with this winter.
And for those sceptics who wonder what John Lennon would have to say about all this?
Actually, you don’t have to wonder, because Yoko knows: ‘John would have been very excited about the Rock Band concept and very happy with how the music and the visuals of The Beatles were represented.’
Phew, that’s a relief. That’s the thing about the dead, though, they make great ventriloquists’ dummies. You can get them to say absolutely anything. However, and despite Yoko’s assurances (and let’s face it, she knew him better than me), I still wonder.
Imagine no possessions.’ Imagine all those non-possessions now fully compatible with the PlayStation, Xbox 360 and Wii console.
Is this the last penny to be wrung out of the Beatles corpse? I wouldn’t bet on it. The Sex Pistols (well, it was their svengali Malcolm McLaren, actually) called their posthumous, pointless compilation of singles and b-sides Flogging A Dead Horse.
Where is such blazing honesty now when we need it most?
APPLE CORP: - The Guardian: Harmonix began in 1995 as a concept at MIT’s Media Lab. Its first clients were theme parks, and it entered the domestic market with a computer mouse that could also serve as a musical instrument on primitive games. Rock Band was only launched at the end of 2007, but already its retail sales in north America have exceeded $1bn, and gamers have downloaded more than 40 million songs for $1.99 each. As the company’s co-founder Eran Egozy said recently, the delivery of rock music has just entered a new phase. There was vinyl, the cassette, the CD, digital downloads and now there is the downloadable digital interactive computer track. “It’s a launching point for how we see the future of music evolving.”
Harmonix has competition. Guitar Hero, made by Activision but originally developed by Harmonix, was launched in 2005 and has since sold more than 25 million copies, making it the market leader. But with the Beatles in its stable, Harmonix believes it has pulled off the ultimate coup.
Songs by the Rolling Stones and the Who were already on Rock Band, but neither of those bands were controlled by the byzantine structure that is Apple Corps Ltd, the company that has handled all of the Beatles’ creative activity since 1968. But Apple has always had a canny eye for the innovative and the lucrative, and a neat way of relaunching the
Beatles for each new generation (the last time it was the exhaustive Anthology project in 1995). The main problem was not the concept but the technicalities. “Apple said to us, ‘We don’t even want to talk about this any more unless you come up with a solution to separating out some of the earlier songs,’” (senior vice president of MTV’s games division) Paul DeGooyer remembers.
ANNIE LEIBOVITZ – LA Times : 59-year-old (celebrity photographer) Annie Leibovitz soon could lose control of her life’s work, for the very reason she needed money, and fast.
Leibovitz faces a deadline (today) to repay a $24-million loan from a New York art-finance company. Art Capital Group advanced her that sum last year after the photographer, in “dire financial condition,” as court papers put it, posted as collateral basically everything she owns — not only her two homes but “every photographic image ever taken by Ms. Leibovitz,” according to the lender.
She isn’t the first creative person to mortgage intellectual property. Lennon and fellow Beatle Paul McCartney dealt their song publishing rights and pop star Michael Jackson, who bought them, later used their catalog, and his own hits, to secure more than $200 million in loans. Representatives of singer David Bowie reaped $55 million for him in 1997 by turning the revenue stream from his old songs and recording masters into bonds — “Bowie Bonds,” they’re called.
Meanwhile art collectors, galleries and artists themselves have embraced ways short of selling to convert the framed beauty on their walls into liquidity. Artist-director Julian Schnabel used a Picasso he owned for 20 years to secure financing to develop top-of-the-line condos in Greenwich Village.
Even the esteemed Metropolitan Opera in essence hocked the Chagall murals in the lobby at Lincoln Center, using them as collateral for a $35-million loan.
But Leibovitz’s deal with Art Capital goes well beyond such arrangements. It could result in the outright sale of her photo copyrights to a party who might decide it’s better to market her images in lots of 1,000, or on postcards, not the fine-art limited-edition approach she has embraced.
In a separate story and adding more misery to Leibovitz’ life, an Italian shutterbug says pop photographer Annie Leibovitz ripped off his portraits of two Italian landmarks and claimed them as her own in a limited-edition coffee calendar.
The New York Daily News reports Paolo Pizzetti sued the financially troubled celebrity shooter for $300,000 in Manhattan Federal Court Friday, claiming she infringed on his copyright on two photos he took last year.
The Italian shutterbug says pop photographer Annie Leibovitz ripped off his portraits of two Italian landmarks and claimed them as her own in a limited-edition coffee calendar.
PAPERLESS LIBRARY – Boston Globe:Â New England prep school in Massachusetts is shedding its 20,0000-book library in favour of a new digital library. The new $500,000 learning center will have 18 Kindle and Sony e-book readers, flat-screen TVs, a built-in coffee shop, study cubicles able to use laptops, and similar perks unavailable in most school libraries.
VIDEO-GAME MARKET – Bloomberg: The next major video-game platform may be no platform at all.
For the last three decades, the pattern has been the same: Every few years, the major game-console makers — these days, Sony Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Nintendo Co. — come out with newer, slicker players.
Now OnLive, a Silicon Valley startup, is about to begin large-scale testing of a system that, if it delivers on its promises, may break the cycle and usher in a new era in a video- game market estimated at $21.3 billion in the U.S. and more than twice that worldwide.
The idea is to run games in “the cloud†— distant servers connected via the Internet — and stream them to your television or personal computer with as much speed and power as if they were running locally. The service, which has been demonstrated publicly but so far only tested internally, is about to open up for a wider public beta trial next month, and scheduled to officially launch this winter.
TECH RELATIONSHIPS – The Guardian: Almost all technology companies receiving media attention at the moment focus on developing services that aid the consumer end of this relationship – iTunes, Spotify, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. However these services fail to provide sustainable revenue back to the creators. The inconvenient truth is that they exploit the relationship between creator and consumer, and any revenue generated is split between the services and content owners and never reaches the creators.
An industry paradigm based on preventing income from reaching the original suppliers is unsustainable. As a result, the global music industry is visibly approaching the critical point of failure.
AGENT OF CHANGE – Advertising Age: When Chrysalis ended the recording contract of big-in-the-’80s rock group Marillion, the band used thousands of e-mail addresses they had been collecting at gigs and the band’s website to ask their fans if they’d pay upfront for a new album. The fans obliged and, by maintaining their publishing rights, the band made a tidy profit. They did the same thing when it came to touring. Fans told them where to tour and so they pre-sold tickets to finance gigs. Now the very people who fired Marillion want their advice. I think we can guess where their leader singer told them to go.
KING RECORDS – The Sacramento Bee: There are times that no matter how daunting the task, you have to do it yourself.
Music writer Jon Hartley Fox found himself in that position when it came to writing “King of the Queen City,” a comprehensive history of King Records. The 240-page University of Illinois Press book by the Sacramento writer will be available Thursday.
King Records, a Cincinnati-based independent label active in the 1940s and ’50s, was one of the most influential record companies in American musical history. King’s legacy includes first recordings by “Soul Brother Number One,” James Brown; significant records by bluegrass legends the Stanley Brothers; and what many consider the first rock ‘n’ roll record, Wynonie Harris’ 1948 version of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” Those artists are only a sampling of the most racially and musically diverse roster imaginable. King recorded blues, rockabilly, bluegrass, R&B, Western swing, gospel and country. The label, founded and run by businessman Syd Nathan, covered all genres equally.
FREE CARS: Grammy-winning rapper Ludacris has teamed up with an Atlanta-based dealership to give away 20 cars to people in need, the Associated Press reports. Ludacris, 31, said he was moved after reading thousands of essays by people struggling to buy vehicles they required to get to work or find employment.
“To be efficient, you need some transportation of your own to get there. That’s why I wanted to give back to those who need it,” explained the rapper, who has sold 17 million records domestically.
TAPE – The Independent: My name is Daniel Cross, I run a London based music consultancy called Record-Play, and together with two friends, Aaron Horn (music producing son of Trevor Horn) and Jo Maeva, (carpenter by day on Harry Potter sets and musician by night) we have set up a record label called TAPE.
The music industry and the way we consume music is changing comprehensively and even if you don’t care you will still be aware of its spiral into oblivion. Indeed you would be right to wonder why anyone could be bothered applying themselves to setting up shop in one of its most derelict plots when:
1. There is no money to be made from selling music recordings, music is free, isn’t it?
2. There’s towering stacks of stress, admin and ego-management
3. There costs are prodigious and in the short to medium term mostly irredeemable
4. If indeed you are lucky enough to find that any of your artists gain popularity there’s every that they will be swept off to perceived greener pastures at some faceless major.
Be that as it may over the next 4 weeks – as we build up to the 24th September, which is our launch night at 93 Feet East, Bricklane, London and the release show for our first two EP’s – I am going to use this blog to explain the practicalities (read hassles and admin), the human element (i.e dealing with musicians) and share some of the delights (i.e free stuff). This week though lets start with the rationale behind whatever could have motivated such potential folly.
Well, there are a range of potential reasons for setting up TAPE, it could it be the vanity and aspiration for potential notoriety. It could be the endless merchandising possibilities. It could be the authentic will to help musicians in a business capacity, supporting in production of music that you love and want to feel a part of. Or, that you hear something so good, that you feel that you have the capacity and ambition of doing something radical like release it yourself and sharing it with the world…
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