Interesting what you read sometimes. Logic fight!

That YouTube Uk video pulling rights thing that starts tonight?

Yes it’s all YouTube’s fault, they are teh evil and deserve a quick thrashing:

The body, which represents music publishers, added: “Google has told us they are taking this step because they wish to pay significantly less than at present

oh not it isn’t, it’s PRS’s fault, they are teh evil and deserve a quick thrashing:

Mr Walker told BBC News the PRS was seeking a rise in fees “many, many factors” higher than the previous agreement.

Hmm they can’t BOTH be right can they? Whatever happens I’d not piss on either if they were on fire…PRS are evil and have cease and desisted me back in the day; YouTube pulls my videos. Die.

Really despite the articles online slanting against YouTube it does look like that old 1-2 ‘it’s shiny! it’s on t’internets! WAH I WANT MORE MONEY, FATHER!’ scam again. Looks like YouTube doesn’t want to play ball. Looks like I hate both of them.

There really is space for a decent video site with a lot more users that doesn’t attack it’s userbase – but then again bodies like PRS are the problem and not the ‘squish squish darling’ emotional ‘why don’t you think of the poor starving artists’ drama they make out. Very few artists make anything from their work, partly because of the byzantine and labyrinthine organisations like this wasting their money on playing one-upmanship games with YouTube, or pestering bloggers and mashup artists like that old wascal get-off-your-milk-and-drink-your-horse Web Sh3rrif. So the next one will have the same problems too, as people migrate, comes successful and like radio the industry tries to destroy it. Really we need to change the law to make modern-day copyright pedants like this history. They help no-one, least of all the artist.

Can you hear that Fergal?

Just got this email from Pandora (the online streaming intelligent ‘learning’ radio site)

hi, it’s Tim,

This is an email I hoped I would never have to send.

As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the
U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming
in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a
solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently
with the rights organizations to negotiate an economically workable license fee.
After over a year of trying, this has proved impossible. Both the PPL (which
represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music
publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high
to allow ad supported radio to operate and so, hugely disappointing and depressing
to us as it is, we have to block the last territory outside of the US.

Based on your email address, we believe you may be listening from the UK. If you are
in fact listening from the U.S., please disregard this email. It continues to astound me and the rest of the team here that the industry is not
working more constructively to support the growth of services that introduce
listeners to new music and that are totally supportive of paying fair royalties to
the creators of music. I don’t often say such things, but the course being charted
by the labels and publishers and their representative organizations is nothing short
of disastrous for artists whom they purport to represent – and by that I mean both
well known and indie artists. The only consequence of failing to support companies
like Pandora that are attempting to build a sustainable radio business for the
future will be the continued explosion of piracy, the continued constriction of
opportunities for working musicians, and a worsening drought of new music for fans.
As a former working musician myself, I find it very troubling.

We have been told to sign these totally unworkable license rates or switch off,
non-negotiable…so that is what we are doing. Streaming illegally is just not in
our DNA, and we have to take the threats of legal action seriously. Lest you think
this is solely an international problem, you should know that we are also fighting
for our survival here in the US, in the face of a crushing increase in web radio
royalty rates, which if left unchanged, would mean the end of Pandora.

We know what an epicenter of musical creativity and fan support the UK has always
been, which makes the prospect of not being able to launch there and having to block
our first listeners all the more upsetting for us.

We know there is a lot of support from listeners and artists in the UK for Pandora
and remain hopeful that at some point we’ll get beyond this. We’re going to keep
fighting for a fair and workable rate structure that will allow us to bring Pandora
back to you. We’ll be sure to let you know if Pandora becomes available in the UK.
There may well come a day when we need to make a direct appeal for your support to
move for governmental intervention as we have in the US. In the meantime, we have no
choice but to turn off service to the UK.

Pandora will stop streaming to the UK as of January 15th, 2008.

Again, on behalf of all of us at Pandora, I’m very, very sorry.

-Tim Westergren (Pandora founder)

This is not an unusual occurence – If I go to MTV the video streams are blocked cos I’m from the UK, and it seems Pandora is following suit. In this digital age the record companies, industry bodies such as BPI/RIAA and collection companies such as PPL and MCPS-PRS seem to want to put the genie into the bottle. They would love to reinstall the cultural apartheid that existed before the internet with ‘zones’ (like DVD, I’m sure if they could do that with DRM they would) and country-based markets, and restrictive practices and a legal minefield that make streaming, podcasting et al difficult, rather that embracing the cross-country and cross-market opportunities that exist today, and accepting that internet streaming does not have the same commercial clout than broadcast radio and is not broadcasting in the traditional sense.

Really they are shooting themselves in the foot, because UK artists and music won’t get the opportunities overseas and vice versa because blocking the cross-pollination via demanding high royalty rates – which tbh are mostly eaten up by the agencies themselves – will prove bad and uncreative for the traditional music industry; and those who want to create online will move to CC and self-publishing models, because if more podcasts and streams go non-MCPS/PRS/RIAA it won’t be viable to join those associations – in fact it’ll be commercial death, at least on the Net. But it’s sad because Pandora is a great service and I heard some great music via their intelligent suggestion system, and it’s going to be only the big companies like Yahoo and MSN who will be able to afford those rates, so the whole of internet radio will become like mainstream podcasting a reflection of the takeover by large conglomerates like ClearChannel….large, bloated and boringly commercial, promoting the latest bland urban cack like Souljah Boy and Umbrella rather than anything specifically niche or related to these local markets….

Related, I heard a stupid conversation last night on Radio 3 proposing that intellectual thought would ‘go global’ in 2008, more stupid inane middle-class chatter from the likes of Jonathan Miller; but we don’t want ‘global’ thought, we need local action and thought; but not so local to restrict the cross-talk from other localities. Global does not always equal good; you need to apply to local to the global, rather than what these corporates are doing which is applying the global to the local.

As mentioned here before Open Right Group (podcasters might know them as Suw Charman spoke at the PodcastCon in another capacity) have been lobbying the Government and the Gowers Review, commissioned by the Treasury, into not extending the current UK copyright laws

Cliff Richards and others were lobbying to extend musical copyright from the existing 50 years, to “95
years or even ‘life plus 70 years’” according to the original Open Rights Release the Music press release. Now according to The Times and others, this has been not recommended by the review; interestingly according to The Times the review recommends relaxation to help musical innovation and creation:

“The report suggests that exemptions to copyright law should be allowed for “transformative works”. This would permit the use of copyright material in new and creative ways, so long as it did not detract from the value of that material or offend artistic integrity. It calls on the EU to amend the law to allow for that exception.”

Now although the example given in the article is about hiphop; the interesting thing is if “tranformative works” applied to mashups and cutup culture, and the effect across the industry if these suggestions are taken on board by the government? At the moment bodies such as the MCPS-PRS look down on what it calls ‘unlicensed interpolations’; but if sampling is (preferably) allowed in the same US ‘Fair Use’ provision, or at least made less painful, that would be a great step forward…interesting that the Gowers Review recognises the issue that here in the UK the copyright law is way behind the US in this regard.

EDIT: Open Rights Group has just put up their press release in response…I agree with them about the restrictions to ‘transformative work’ – all parody should be allowed, who defines what is ‘offensive’?

And not offending the artist gets into the same sort of jumble we have now, where apparently all Outkast remixes have to be approved personally by Andre 3000 (a friend working at SonyBMG told me that once)!
The other interesting related news via a Second Life interview with Warners CEO Edgar Bronfman (thanks to Andy Churchill to alerting me to this) is that Warners are looking into letting people mashup their back catalogue:

AP: Taking a question from the audience, McLuhan Ennis asks: “Can you give a description of the what you describe as middle ground? Say, within the context of a mash-up, what would be an example of fair use?”

EB: It’s our hope we can find a way to generally license much or all of our content for users to adapt in any way they see fit. We want people to use their creativity to take our content and do what they think is an interesting thing.

And there is discussion in the GYBO thread that Universal* is doing likewise – so the concept of the legal mashup – would that take the fun out of it? Certainly as I said in the thread mashups are far, far, far away from being mainstream. Music industry is all about the money, and things that’ll make money get released/cleared quickly. Average of 2-3 years to release is not quick, in the case of the handful of legal mashups that have been cleared and released…

* interestingly last year or so Universal opted out of using PRS and now uses another rights-company, a Dutch one I think…I wonder if it partly was because the PRS as discussed at PodcastCon is positively stone-age and inflexible in it’s approach, compared to other rights companies? And the PRS apparently won’t let the rights-owners give their own songs away for podcasters to play for free, which if true is positively silly and autocratic…

As I said in RC#99 I was interviewed by Gill Mills and Rob of TOTP at PodcastCon, along with Night Nurse Show and many people attending the event, and the results are up on Podshow’s site (or here’s the direct link to the 200Mb file). Watch to see Natasha fall over and the sign revenge between me and Scott of the Night Nurse Show…if they kept those bits in!

Thanks Rob and Gill!

Also now up is some non-Flickr pix from Christian of Documentally including ones of me and Stefan from the Night Nurse Show – I spoke to Christian at the event and he seemed like a really nice guy, I was pestering him for pro photographer tips as he goes around the world as a photo journalist.

Oh and by far the best write-up of PodcastCon2006 (yes 2006, not this Marty McFly time travelling I did in my blogpost!) is this one over at Blog Relations. Although I don’t feel it was one body providing the us vs them (no not even Podshow whose low chilled profile was a masterstroke, and worked well) but there was that vibe of old media vs new media….

And I see that Mark Hunter and a few others I’ve heard commenting about the music panel questions still focusing on music we can’t (officially) play and that we should focus on the music we can play – I think when either the legal wrangles over ASCAP, RIAA and MCPS-PRS are sorted, and/or big viable alternatives to the mainstream route that bands and artists take starts luring serious talent away, then that conversation will change.

I mean The Shakes are great, and will be big, but 99.9% of the podsafe music I hear doesn’t make me want to throw away my CD collection just yet…

Team Stealth Disco,
originally uploaded by SmudgyPixels.

Wow…it’s 7pm Sunday and I’m still feeling the aftershock of the PodCastCon 2006!

Overall I had fun but had mixed feelings about the conferences themselves – more fun, interesting interactions and conversations was had out of them than in, sadly.

I arrived at 12pm – with jetlag from San Francisco flying in at 8:30am the previous day I was unlikely to make the 10am start! The Night Nurse crew had been and gone, and had gone down the pub…it was a ll slightly weird since I crashed the Web2.0 conference in SF and this was a different scale, although similar in some ways with the amount of podwhoring and people trying to sell you stuff…

In full flow was the business conference, I’d missed the creative conference (where apparently many people were scoffing at Brad Gibson’s assertion that all podcasts have to be 30mins or less, everyone I spoke to mentioned it interestingly without me asking…wish I’d been there to point out my 3,000+ subscribers feel differently!). The business conference seemed pretty boring, which wasn’t really a surprise since I don’t run Radio Clash as a business, with one of the speakers droning on about Gardener’s Weekly I left pretty soon after. I was looking forward to the Citizen Journalist and Music conferences that afternoon though.

Met up with the Night Nurse Show in the pub, who were in full argument sorry team discussion but it was good to see Natasha, Stefan and John even though John and then Natasha disappeared shortly after due partly to the excesses of the night before, but also the unengaging nature of the conferences themselves.

Rob from Top of the Pods (and in his new Podshow capacity) was there interviewing people with the really nice Gill Mills (who does Freelance Hellraiser’s podcast and is an old friend of Grant McSleazy – small world!) and I spoke to them later about Radio Clash and licensing and mashups, which you might see on the Podshow PodcastConUK page (no I’m not signing before you ask!)

Had fun disrupting the Night Nurse interview with a “HELLO MUM!” sign and Scott did likewise with “I AM A GAY!” on mine…along with the Stealth Disco video crowd, media guerilla disruption seemed to be the order of the day in an event packed with corporate and advertising messages.

So lunch over it was the Citizen Journalist conference – something I wanted to see because of John Buckley of Dissident Vox was chairing. Although Chris Vallance from the BBC (Radio 5) was entertaining, I found this disappointing because they’d gotten old-media names to speak about citizen journalism, which focused on audience participation and old-media using citizen journalists, rather than what most of us do which is bypass the old broadcast media and produce our own shows.

With all the panels far too much talking from the panel and not enough audience interaction, and when there was interaction, many of the people asking questions were either re-iterating previous questions, doing veiled plugs bigging up themselves or taking far too long and rambling. Several of the questions I was thinking ‘and what is your point?’ - in fact one of the best moments for me in the Music conference was when the guy from Magnatune bit back at the Nokia guy’s veiled plug for Loudeye and impenetrable consultese (‘what’s your value chain?’) with a barbed comment – I was one of the ones who clapped…it was bollocks and against the ethos and clear-speaking of podcasting.

This raises an organisational issue with the conference – it was very difficult to get to ask a question even raising your hand several times, others raising their hand later seemed to get asked before you (you can’t physically keep your hand up for 5-10-15 minutes!) and some of the questions should have been kept short or vetoed by the chair as being answered before (think of Question Time and how David Dimbleby interrupts to see what I mean, it’s not ‘polite’ but it keeps things moving).

A request for next year, if PCCUK2007 happens is maybe use an unconference format or have chairs who have more experience of moving things along (this is not a criticism of John Buckley or the other chairs, I spoke to him after and it was his first time and he did a great job; he did try and move it along but I think the format made it difficult, as well as him being the lone citizen journalist and having to hold up that corner too – in my former life in consultancy I was trained that the chair (or facilitator as they call them) shouldn’t really have to speak apart from helping the proceedings along, or have to provide an alternate view, the audience/panel should cover those bases).

After was an open session, and later some folk from Jimmy Golding (not my bag) and after chatting to Adam Curry outside with Scott (he came out for a smoke with Gill, he remembered us from the Bricklayers Arms earlier in the year) then the music conference chaired by Martin of Green Dragon, I was really looking forward to this, but it turned out mostly to be a velied plug for the Podsafe Music Network and to frighten people with scare stories about being sued by the PRS…again I wanted to ask a question and couldn’t, because I have been C&D’d by the MCPS-PRS in the past as a bootlegger, but also not had any hassle with Radio Clash (touch wood) and knew this to be total crap from my experience and others in the bootleg/mashup community who have had likewise…but again I was overlooked or missed.

Donna from Amplifico did talk very interestingly though on the effect on podcasting on her band, which was cool, and I liked John Buckman from Magnatune who knew his stuff and wasn’t afraid to bite the said Nokia person and then talk about how ringtone and mobile music providers have either ripped labels off or not provided them with stats like iTunes does! But not really podcasting related…
Nicole Simon from Cruel To Be Kind raised a good question about GEMA, the German rights body that is causing a lot of aggro to musicians and DJs in Germany, but otherwise it got dogged down in a podsafe-lovein and talk of PRS, ASCAP and SESAC et al, mostly scare stories for commercial bodies, which doesn’t apply to free non-profit music podcasters.

Actually that was the tone of the conferences, very fixated around making money, or old media bodies, or plugging various projects that the actual discussion suffered I think.

After the conferences was a great band called The Shakes who although David Bowie might have a few questions about their podsafe hit ‘Liberty Jones’ (‘All the Beautiful People’ anyone? Sorry you can’t take a bootlegger anywhere, I know!) were a quality band, with a funny frontman who could seamlessly work over any technical issues and have fun with it…very Long Knives spiky power pop/punk, which is quite big at the moment, and reminded me of Franz or Maximo Park in places…not as finished yet but I reckon they’ll go far just on their lead singer alone…

And then was the showing of the stealth disco video which I’d already been given a sneak preview of and saw them do Rob (I appear in the background at the 2min mark) and the last one with our Scott live! WOO! Very funny…

And after the best part – the pub! I think a lot of people were like – ‘who are you?’ but then talking them quite a few were listeners and fans – so shout outs go to Tom of Archaeocast, Linda from Philadephia who liked the Ivor Cutler show, Nicole Simon of Cruel to be Kind, Conrad Slater (dressed like a space victorian pimp, you’re a strange guy ) of Spain films and also got to meet Phillip Holland aka Twinkelboi who was a great laugh (and when he becomes a famous superstar my one claim to fame is that my podcast was the first he ever listened to )! He was interviewing a drunken me and Scott and we suggested he interview Adam Curry – he was scared but we put him up to it, and he did! Also he filmed me getting back at RegularJen and Scott for the Stealth Disco – which hopefully will be posted at some point…also finally got to say hello to CC Chapman and Phil from Bitjobs, somehow we always manage to miss each other at these events!

I’ve also had a drunken flashback – myself, Twinkelboi and Scott recorded a podcast in the pub for Top of the Pods with Rob…oh dear I wonder if that will ever see the light of day? It was rather, err, rude…t’was just before the Wives and Girlfriends of Podcasters one…
Sadly according to this post that 3 of the gang are not doing this next year cos of aggro and the work involved…so thanks for this event guys, it must be a lot of work!

I think if 2007 does go ahead, I’d add that the corporate/company product encroachment of the event (not talking about the sponsors, but the conferences) spoiled the conferences for me…an unconference or BloggerCon approach would work better for me, but probably wouldn’t be acceptable to sponsors…it may be an unsolvable problem, but the endless plugging from everyone (rather than just talking to me about their shows or work or services, which would be fine) got to me…you do disservice to an important forum like a conference by using it as a blatant advertising tool…it’s vulgar and rather easy to spot, be it in a question, a panel member, or conference theme.

Photos are available here from CC Chapman and Neil Ford and others: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/podcastconuk2006