E-Dribble

Charging users that embed Youtube videos with music in it although they’re already charging Youtube for the same videos? No sweat.  Have the gall to consider a cellular phone ringtone a public performance?  These guys do.

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!

Morrisey would like to ask you not to purchase the boxed edition of his music being released by EMI.  All of the listener-rights blogs picked it up and ran with it as another example of an artist championing the rights of the listener. From the linked article:

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.”

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Found this in my referers today:

A man after their own heart.

Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA has chimed in to let us know that DRM is dead, kaput, no more and finally no longer endorsed or condoned by the RIAA.

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.

I was utilizing the various tubes of the internet 2.0 to find some new music a few nights ago when I came across “Cage the Elephant”, some Kentuckians that transplanted to the UK.  Man, some seriously fantastic music(check out “No Rest for the Wicked“).  I knew I needed the album, so I checked to find out who their label was.  It’s getting tougher to plow through all of the faux-hip sounding names that the publishers are using to hide the real owner, but eventually  I found it to be Sony BMG, so I bought a used copy.

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.

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Regardless of who you side with, you can not argue that the music industry’s relationship with their customers is in the crapper.  If you’re like me, you view this as a good thing.  Even if you’re not though, you can’t really be wondering why, can you?  In times when Warner will force the removal of audio in a satirical youtube viral vid, you can be sure that they don’t have much of a sense of humor about anything any more.  They’ve run out of things to sue over, so they just throw hail mary’s where ever they can.  Lyric and chord/tablature sites, people with radios turned up too loud, parents of kids that might have shared songs, some guy that chose Gn’R of all bands to leak tracks of….  It’s truly comical the lengths to which the whole industry is going to completely decimate their relationship with the people that put them in their Beemers and Versace.

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Who remembers this video by the SIIA? It was an early attempt to thwart software piracy and came complete with a goofy but charming and endearing rapper, interviews with game developers that tipped the nerd scale and finally, a game that fit on a single 1.44 floppy disk. It spent almost 10 minutes explaining to you that the game development community couldn’t make more games if it didn’t get paid for the game that you were copying onto your floppy.

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DJ Danger Mouse is one of those guys that everyone knows but don’t know they know.  He’s produced albums for The Gorillaz, Beck, he’s half of the Gnarls Barkley project and he’s been tapped by a bunch of musicians for a dose of hipness.  He’s like The Timbaland of non-shitty music.

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.

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In December of 2008, the RIAA first told Congress and then the world that they were through with lawsuits against the end user.  It had served it’s purpose, but things were changing, people knew theft was wrong and they no longer had to resort suing dead people, pets and infants.

Since their congressional and public declaration, they have sued hundreds more.  62 cases have been filed in April alone.

Keep it up, guys.  It makes me smile inside.

Tanya Andersen was one of those people you heard about in recent years…  she was a disabled single mom being sued by the RIAA.  The RIAA did everything they could to destroy her but it didn’t work out the way they had hoped.  She was a likable person, the judge didn’t happen to be on their payroll and they had no evidence.  So, after a couple of years of trying to put her in the pokey, they dropped the case.

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