Well last few months have been fairly busy until now, especially May which some of these date back to – well back in May saw the release of Foolklegs 2 – I LOVED the first one, the idea of taking Folk music and mashing it with modern music, mostly from French bootleggers, which also gave it another cultural twist.

Favourites from this is Granpamini’s Incantation-meets-East London ‘Dizzee goes Peru‘ and my one to watch Elocnep who’s Darkness vs Lily Allen video I posted here and is also from this (not sure where the folk is in that, but anyway great tune) but he/she (?) must love Buraka Son Sistema as much as me as my favourite track from this whole collection is “Love kalemba or hate kalemba” which is Lady Sovereign vs that Angola/Portugese collective. Great stuff, and I expect great things from Elocnep – and will be featured on the next Radio Clash.

Now the next one again I came a little late to, and sadly the first I heard the compilation those nasty people at PRS (boo! hiss!) had Cease and Desisted it, and yes it’s our friends at EMI again, so boos all round. The compilation in question is Bootrospective, the Pet Shop Boys compilation produced by Dan Mei and Marc Johnce under the DMF collective with several other bootleggers. And it’s rather good, I think both of them are fairly new to mashups but do a great job here, as well as CjR who like Elocnep is definitely One To Watch, putting Heartbeat with Jacko as “Bad Heart” and making a funny if apparently rather unintentional comment on the death of MJ (and funnily enough a friend suggested a similar combo the day after Jacko’s death) – and Clive$ter & StabinCabin but mostly it’s a Dan Mei and Marc Johnce gig.

Best tracks as well as the CjR are “Did You See Me Moving Along” which obviously knows that Bloodhound Gang based their Discovery Channel on the b-side to West End Girls (that BBC Shopping theme) and matches it with another Pet Shop Boys track to good effect, “Unforgiven Rent” which marries Metallica with ver Boys and shouldn’t work but does and “Land Of Stupid” Genesis meets the Pet Shop Boys.

Where to get this as DMF and folks have pulled all links? Well I’ve poked around and found some kind soul has uploaded it to Mass Mirror and Mediafire. (And if the PRS or EMI are reading this, go fuck yourselves – I doubt Neil nor Chris are opposed to mashups from seeing their live shows and *ahem* other stuff I know, Chris I’ve heard especially liked DJ Magnet – Love Comes Running Up That Hill Quickly and these are of similar quality – maybe you should check with the artists FIRST before flexing your DMCA muscles?).

Lastly a new find via Soundcloud (I am on there as MutantPop and have started the Mashup group which seems surprisingly healthy, if rather odd in places!) but not odd is this great cutup track by musician and composer Neil Rosenberg in the vein of Dickie Goodman, The BranFlakes and Twink, cutting up kids records, preachers, auctioneers and old jazz records – recommended:

(and he liked my “Stripper Jackson” which for a musician to rate anything I do is a serious compliment for little old non-muso me

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?

I’m sure about 3 people on the planet have had this problem but after nearly a year I GOT EMAIL ON MY p990i! Can’t they make it so you just press a button and it configures itself? We are in the 21st century people! Not got send with Gmail to work yet, despite what it says below, but download does work….anyone let me know if they got send to work.

Here are the bits of info I found copied in case they go away:

Gmail settings on the P990i

Just sucessfully set up gmail on the P990:

Get the base settings from gmail here.

Messenging > Settings > Email accounts
Add a new gmail.

Account name: Gmail
Your name: anything
Connection type: POP3
-Inbox-
Incoming Server: pop.gmail.com
Username: username@gmail.com
Password: your password
Download restrictions: anything
Receive using group: Preferred group (your working inet connection – wifi or gprs)
-Outbox-
Outgoing Server: smtp.googlemail.com
Use Smtp authentication
Use Inbox login details

Then under Advanced in the menu option:
-Incoming-
SSL
995
NO secure password authentication
-Outgoing-
SSL
465
Use MIME encoding

Away you go..

And for Dreamhosts, follow the guide for Unix Evolution – all the others are useless

Set it to IMAP. If you’re POP3 can’t really help you…

example.com is your domain name.

• Email Address: user@example.com (this tripped me up, all other email clients just need ‘user’)
• IMAP Server (Incoming): mail.example.com (port 143 has optional TLS encryption, or use port 993 with SSL encryption) – TRANSLATION: TLS – use port 143
  
• SMTP Server (Outgoing): mail.example.com:587 (port 587 has optional TLS encryption, or use port 465 for SSL encryption) TRANSLATION: TLS – use port 587
• User: user@example.com

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…