And a message we can all agree on Let yr local copylefter know when their shit’s been pulled

And in other news, Greenpeace is looking for video remixes to shame HSBC who as well as being the World’s Shittest Bank also invent in Indonesian deforestation with companies like Sinar Mas despite greenwashing adverts saying how much they love trees. A Sinar Mas subsidiary was what that KitKat Nestle spoof ad was about so they want similar to shame HSBC who invests in Sinar Mas – the best videos will be shown at Glastonbury!

Might be a good way at getting back at HSBC and their lack of customer service/trust too.

Also they are running a BP logo redesign competition which would also be of interest to those adbuster cultural remixers out there:

Third act: Our hero Captain Obvious travels to Ancient Greece and Babylon in search of Dionysus, Apollo, Silenus and Bacchus for a Bacchanal and to Xanadu where did Kublai Khan a pleasure dome erect (trans: a right royal knees up).

OK it’s not as pretentious as it sounds, but then again not many bootlegs contain quotations from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Dionysus, Babylon, Geoffrey Palmer AND Ian McKellen? Actually it’s a party record containing the new Scissor Sisters track ‘Invisible Light’ which is obviously a rip of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘Welcome to the Pleasuredome’ – even down to the speaky bit. So I’ve reunited them via the Thomas Shumacher and Fruitness mixes of FGTH, and the Siriusmo and original mixes of Invisible Light in two parts.

First is the shorter radio* mix without the intros, slightly different structure at 4:40 – enter stage left the Silenus in Shorts mix:

Captain Obvious – The Light of Pleasure (Silenus in Shorts mix)

And the finale is my homage to the ZTT production team and their long extended DJ mixes I grew up with, usually including quotations (hence the Birth of Tragedy from the Fruitness mix – but both songs mention Dionysus/Bacchus too interestingly) so this at 7:33 is the Dionysus vs Apollo full length DJ mix.

Captain Obvious – The Light of Pleasure (Dionysus vs Apollo full mix)

Coming to an orgy near you…hopefully

* if I ever got played on radio that is…hurrumph. Actually the first Captain Obvious track was played on German radio on Mash Up Your Boots radio – thanks Dr Waumaui / Morgoth!

(created with FAT’s great Google Tag script – love the ZEVS style one too)

Apparently Google has deleted entirely several music blogs entirely for infringement of copyright – even the ones that posted tracks with permission from the record label, artists or management.

I commented on this Guardian article, thought it bore repeating (and extending) here – shame the comments devolved into the sad ‘HANG EM COS THEY IS PIRATES’ rantage and many didn’t bother to actually READ the article.

Thing is, very few blogs nowadays post ‘illegal’ tracks. They get sent to them by pluggers and managers and even the artists themselves. If you have an email from the PR company saying ‘can you post this track?’ then why is it suddenly a) illegal and b) killing the music industry when the very industry is asking for blogs for free promotion?

This blog gets these ALL the time…I rarely ever post single tracks here, not ‘legal’ ones (mashups yes, but they almost never can be legal) but I still get deluged by these people. So I’ve expected to get hassle, never have in over 5 years (one polite request for a takedown from management – not a DMCA cos I’d just laugh), but I do self-host and use WordPress, which to be honest if you’re running a blog on Blogspot or Blogger you are a fool, and should at very least have daily backups for when a post get pulled, or crosspost to another backup blog. Also only 3 of the 100 top blogs run on Blogger – note that more than a 3rd use self-hosted blog software such as WordPress or Movable Type. No-one trusts free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot (or even WordPress.com) for precisely this reason…it’s not like we haven’t been here before (but a few posts is different to an entire blog).

I do feel like Tangina in Poltergeist saying to the poor spirits still using Google and other free hosted blogs – come into the light! Come into the light! Really self-hosting is the only way to go if you are serious about blogging, also it makes the DMCA process less automatic and harder – hosting companies won’t be able to pull individual posts – you’re a paying customer who they don’t want to lose so will usually ask you first unless it’s something criminally illegal (child porn, wares etc), you can backup easily, and can separate your domain from your host so you can setup elsewhere easily if you do get the site pulled – but that is rare because to be brutally honest record labels aren’t going to expend that sort of lawyer time and energy. especially when at the click of a button some untrained oik can file a DMCA request on a hosted site.

I DO think there should be more transparency in blogging…far too many veiled PR and re-cooked press releases and dodgy dealing behind those script fonts and pictures of zero-size models. I’d rather people said ‘yes this was officially sent to me’ than pretend to be guerilla and underground and oh-so-radical (and ironically get burned for it). It would reveal the double-standard of the industry so clearly – they WANT DJ whitelabels, they WANT mashups, they WANT podcasts to play their music, they WANT blogs to blog it…but then when the official spotlight comes on then they pretend they didn’t. It’s bullshit. I’ve had industry A&R peeps tell me they court unofficial remixes – why do you think they release acapellas and instrumentals?

Blogging is exactly the same…they want the underground niche cred and free promo…but don’t want to officially admit that, or blame their online/viral PR company. Hypocrites indeed.

With all of that said – Google shouldn’t get off the hook…they are being evil again (such a surprise). The bloggers were unwise but putting out DMCAs for people posting THEIR OWN music? Same thing happened with the YouTube debacle – Warners and other companies putting out DMCAs to their own acts who wanted to post the videos. Google does need to sort out some way of checking if the bloggers have permission, or at least act within their OWN guidelines and give the bloggers warning. Until then, I strongly advise anyone to avoid Blogger and Blogspot and boycott them.

And in other news, we can +5 Warners in the ‘Suckiest Stupidest Copywhore Record Company OF ALL TIME’ stakes (head and head with EMI, folks!) cos they just decided there’s no future in streaming music services like Spotify.

Either a) trying hard to not be in the charts later this year b) thus wanting to go bust due to more head-in-the-sand policies c) want to win the much envied Radio Clash SUCKAR award (it’s a standing golden statue of Gary Glitter and Lars from Metallica in a ***CENSORED*** position). Who knows.

Rave music was my first love…and it will be my last. Music for the future….music made to last

I started making music in 1990 so this challenge is a return to my roots – literally. Inspired and for the GYBO Prodigify Me Remix Challenge, Here’s a very Prodigy ‘inspired’ (ie. you might recognise the siren LOL) original tune I did in 1991, remixed for 2009.

I even had to run an Amiga emulator to fetch it out, Workbench and all – yes Amiga MED (pre OctaMED!) 1991, Renoise 2009 shizzle 8 bit samples in effect! WOOH! Err…

It’s very silly, and you can play spot the vocal sample – and yes I was doing darkcore in 1991, purely by accident LOL. Blame a certain kids film. Most of the tunes I did in 90/91/92 embarass me, but I was writing them with Kirk and James so we had a lot of fun…but this is a rare time to hear one. And it was released on an not-so-great Amiga demo so many years ago.

RavEvil (2009 Prodigify Me Remix) is here. Enjoy!

Readers of Radio Clash will know what Warner Media Group did to my Neon Sex People video mashup on YouTube (NSFW – audio and text contains a ‘message’ for WMG and uses music from a great unsigned artist Playgyrl Slim). Annoying, especially as Depeche Mode USED to be on EMI and somehow have transmogrified over to the dark side of WMG – and it’s definitely a transformative and non-commercial use but mashups are still in a grey area.

You might have wondered why all the silent videos on YouTube – they are the victims of this ‘fair use massacre’.

The staple of YouTube amateur musical media, covers – they should be alright, right?

Wrong:

Warners as well as other ‘content owners’ have been using the ContentID system to identify tracks that use their content – fingerprinting technology – but it doesn’t count for fair-use, remixed usage, comment or background use – other owners just share the ad revenue and leave the content in place – but not Warners – but it seems not even covers or remixes or mashups avoid the chop.

As it says in this EFF article:

And while today it’s Warner Music, as more copyright owners start using the Content ID tool, it’ll only get worse. Soon it may be off limits to remix anything with snippets of our shared mass media culture — music, TV, movies, jingles, commercials. That would be a sad irony — copyright being used to stifle an exciting new wellspring of creativity, rather than encourage it.

It’s clear from the Warner Music experience that YouTube’s Content ID tool fails to separate the infringements from the arguable fair uses.

This lack of separation is worrying; various IP and video bodies have said how derivative amateur works, covers etc. are not the problem and for such use as background music should be allowed as otherwise it has a freezing effect on culture, with landgrabs and fences put up everywhere around even the simplest folk song or melody (see the infamous Happy Birthday case which is…you guessed it, Warners! Interestingly this might actually be also public domain as it was published before 1935 by others without copyright notice).

So EFF are asking for examples of your Warners-pulled videos on YouTube – not full music video rips but works that have original content in them (whether that applies to mashups I don’t know – remixes maybe).

In other news, in a case of Pop (Industry) Will Eat Itself, even if you’re signed to Warners you are not safe – Warners is also taking down videos posted by their own artists – such as Moby (who was quoted as saying ‘If it was up to me they’d all be up there and they’d all be free. But, at present, it’s not up to me, it’s up to THE MAN. In the future that will hopefully be different.’) Freezepop, Death Cab for Cutie. Amanda Palmer, Dresden Dolls, and Emiliana Torrini. Nice.