I mean besides the facts that he’s got incredible musical talent I don’t, he can pull off dressing like a fruit while I can’t and he’s a Jehovah’s Witness while I won’t even let them into the house?

Well, he can say things like “the internet is over”, and nobody blinks an eye.  The interview continues without any snickers.

That’s power.

In my opinion, you have two types of people that make a statement like this.  First, you have the person that is out of the loop enough to only be aware of something if it’s in the headlines.  Once it’s dropped to normal usage levels and is no longer talked about by people with nothing better to do than regurgitate the hot topic of the minute, they assume that it doesn’t exist any more.  All of the people that a few years ago said “blogging is dead”, “IRC is dead” or “facesitting is dead” obviously missed a memo. They don’t see it in the headlines any more, and they don’t personally utilize the technology any longer, ergo it’s dead. As we all know, these things still exist, they’re just no longer hyped.  Those that use the hype as their tool to gauge a technology’s usefulness are the type of people to use an on-off switch method of determining the popularity of something.

Then you have the person that says something is dead because they very much wish it were. Prince falls into this group. He wishes the internet is dead, so it’s dead.  You see, Prince sued various sites around the web a few years ago in an effort to keep people from seeing him prance around in purple leotards without paying good money to do so. Like many aging pop icons, he views the internet as the cause of his descent into obscurity. It’s not that he got so batshit crazy for a while that people really didn’t want to think about him, much less listen to him.  It’s the fact that a Youtube video of some drunk coeds had a soundclip of 1999 as the background music that has caused him to lose a mad amount of cash.

In spite of the reason he’s doing it, you have to feel kind of sorry for him.  He’s like your granddad that yells at kids to get off his lawn or that people are driving too fast around him.  Providing he doesn’t sue me for anything, he’ll continue to get nothing but pity from me, as I can totally relate.

Facebook and Twitter are dead.

Man, it seems like these guys have hit the bottom of the barrel.

Hehe, just kidding. Now they want to get paid for the 30 second previews used to sell their music.

Although the purchasing public continue to fund them, the recording industry doesn’t let appreciation get in the way of suing the very same people that line their pockets.  This though, surprised even me and I’m not shocked by much that they do.  Charging people to listen to a thirty second clip so you can sell them an overpriced album?

Fantastic!

Beginning around Halloween, they’re going to release 44 songs, again all will be available for free.  For those that wish to support the band, they will package them in 4 song EP’s, totalling(if my math can be trusted) 11 albums you can buy.

I really hope they consider a boxed set, as Paypal is likely to freeze my account for suspicious behavior if they make me buy each EP separately.

I totally support them and don’t want to be the one to cast derision towards any group that steps away from abusing their fans but I have to admit that I’m more than intrigued to see how they decide to market a 44 song release spanning months.  It’s what I would consider at the very least an eclectic method of music marketing.

that he wouldn’t receive any money from the reissues, released on November 2,

“Morrissey does not approve such releases and would ask people not to bother buying them. Morrissey receives no royalty payments from EMI for any back catalogue, and has not received a royalty from EMI since 1992.”

and in case you’re not clear on his stance:

“Morrissey last received a royalty payment from Warners ten years ago and, once again, he would ask people not to bother buying the reissued LPs or CDs.”

After reading the article, it’s clear that the people with the warm-fuzzies just aren’t paying attention.  Morrissey doesn’t give two shits about EMI and Warner suing your dead relatives and pets.  He’s just not getting any more money from it, so he asks that you please buy an album that he will make money on.

The long and short of the issue is this.  All of you that are posting and commenting in regards to artists being trodden upon in this, just give it a fucking rest.  They signed the contracts with their eyes wide open.  The labels have been fucking the listener for a long time and the artists that signed their rights away further empowered them to fuck us harder and in larger numbers.

If it weren’t an RIAA supporting label, I’d buy the albums he’s not making money on and toss them.

Well, I sure wouldn’t keep them.  Have you ever heard a Morrissey song?

A man after their own heart.

Which reminded me of when the RIAA stated that lawsuits against the consumer were dead, kaput, no more and finally no longer endorsed or condoned by the RIAA.

You can probably use the same grain of salt for both statements.

That’s beside the point.  During my search, I found this fantastic article. In it, the CEO of EMI Records laments that while he knows that a divide exists between EMI and it’s customers, he’s not sure what he can do to lessen that gap.

You guys remember that about a year and a half ago, EMI was taken over by some hip non-industry types and things were going to change!  They stated that they would cut(or altogether end) funding to the RIAA because they didn’t think suing their customers was the way to sell an album.  ars technica went so far as to speculate that it might be the end of the RIAA.

So what happened during that time?  Well, they sued every entity that they could think of.

Seriously.

I’m not shitting you.

It’s mind boggling really.

But it’s the truth.

It’s really quite impressive that a group of people that foretold the death of the old system ended up not only embracing it, but damned near rewriting the book on it. See, they go after innovators.  Entities that are trying to change the face of music delivery.  If it’s groundbreaking, you can almost rest assured that EMI is suing the group that brought it to you.

And in spite of all of this, Mr. Leoni-Sceti isn’t sure what he needs to do to to make things right.

I promise not to tell if you don’t.

Well, the Pirate Bay is no stranger to being attacked.  Christian Engstrom, part of the pirate party decided to sit down and pen a thoughtful piece, concerning what he’s fighting for, why it’s important to everyone and what could turn the train wreck that is copyright and IP around.

Rick Carnes, head of the Songwriter’s Guild, wrote a rebuttal, which is a fantastic read.  Not because his points are interesting but because he completely twisted almost every single thing Christian wrote and then addressed the new points, that Christian never made.  The fun part is that he did it so transparently that it makes him look like a bit of a tool.

The best part of the piece though?  We find out that a man that failed at making a living as a songwriter is the head of the SongWriter’s Guild.

Well, it seems that the SIIA wanted to update it’s message and is rolling out a sequel. This time, instead of using the game developers to bring tears to your eyes, they’ve taken a slightly different approach. This version shows one person becoming a prison bitch and inking jailhouse tattoos and another getting their mom tackled by the SWAT team because of their downloading.

The first PSA made you aware of the fact that piracy would lead to the early demise of the digital age. Hopefully, the second one will tackle that little hiccup in predicting the future before they send little Billy to the bighouse for making a copy of S.T.A.L.K.E.R..

It’s a great time for the software development community to begin trying to scare the shit out of their customers. After over 30,000 lawsuits, the RIAA has actually won in one case, and big! The movie association has been labeling their viewing clientele as thieves for a few years now and it seems the time is finally right for the software developers to take of the gloves and join the party. I know they’re already well into development, but in the spirit of doing my part to prevent the collapse of the digital era, I wanted to offer a verse to them, provided under the CC license, of course:

Go ahead and make that copy
Set it up as a share
Give a copy to your friends
See if we care.

When the men break down your door
and lay your mom out on the grass,
It’s just a little while until
you’re in prison, taking it in the ass.

Don’t copy that floppy
Don’t copy that floppy

A couple years ago, he got his ass into a sling by releasing a mashup called the Gray album, which took The Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album and stuck them in a blender.  EMI wasn’t very impressed and sued the shit out of him.  Since then, he’s popped up in the news ticker for continuing to piss off entities protected under the RIAA’s umbrella.

Well, he’s released a new album, this time in cahoots with Mark Linkous, of Sparklehorse.  Putting both DM and Mr. Linkous together on an album puts you at risk of overdosing on brooding alt hipness. I own a few of Sparklehorse’s albums and must say that this one follows closely stylistically behind the others, which may explain why the mp3 shows Sparklehorse as the artist, not mentioning DM anywhere, at least on the copy I have.

Remember when I said that he’s a favorite target of the RIAA?  Well, in an effort to save himself a lawsuit, he’s releasing the album sans music. He’s going to release a case with artwork and a blank cd-r.  You can of course do anything you’d like with the cd-r.

Regardless of whether it’s solely an attempt to keep from losing everything he owns in future lawsuits, an attempt to get some free publicity or a mix of both, it’s welcome to see.  The more music that gets passed around via alternate methods to the tired and broken system that the labels use, the more comfortable people will be with it.  Hopefully there will come a day when people don’t find a release like this to be newsworthy, but commonplace.