Posts by Simon Grigg
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This is a European standard - I imagine it's a leftover from the Dutch.
Ahh, I assumed it was something like that. There are plenty of Dutch hangovers including the almost universal pre-digital invoice numbering system. An invoice will be issued with a number along the lines of INV 2009/VII/HDL/04/KPN/02 which is utterly untrackable in most accounting systems. But then, few use them anyway, relying more on the fact that labour is so cheap it's easier to hire 15 people to work in the office and do it all by hand.
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You get very used to having at least $50 in your pocket, and a couple of coins in case you can't break the note.
And then you have Indonesia, whose banking system (and banking security) exists in never-never land. I had to pay a fairly large sum recently (USD$6700) to the car finance company when I sold the vehicle. In Indonesian terms it was Rp66,700,000 (actually to be precise 66.700.000 as they, for some odd reason, invert commas and full stops..plays havoc with software). I went to the bank and asked if I could have a bank cheque or the like....bemused silence. So how do I pay this? Tunai (cash) she said.
Thus I was given a large brown paper bag with 1334 Rp50,000 notes to walk the streets of Denpasar with.
No-one blinks at the idea (or the insanity of all those zeros). People buy houses with cash and only 1 in 5 Indonesians has a bank account, which may well be smart given the relentless banking scams which mostly seem to be accepted business practice for the rich and powerful.
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Simon, that is simply staggering.
There is so much more, the controlled composition clause in US recording contracts, for example, which effectively says that if the record company owns does not own the publishing then the amount paid out in the US on sales is reduced by 25%.
This is, in NZ terms, utterly illegal (I've always wondered that since recording contracts between NZ acts and multinational recording companies always contain this, but are stated to be subject to the laws of NZ, whether it's enforceable..no-one has tried that I'm aware of).
But, yeah, radio play revenues are not subject to a performer royalty in the US for American or foreign acts. The dollar value of this revenue stream, denied to copyright creators, over the years is also simply staggering. It's piracy on the part of the US media conglomerates, who, throughout most of the last century owned the record labels and the radio (CBS, NBC etc) and are now (Clear etc) immensely powerful.
And we are being dictated to from what moral high ground?
And Cameron, yes, although there has, after legal action on the part of acts, been some small reluctant movement on this, but nowhere near the amount likely due which is arguably a 50/50 artist / label split on miscellaneous income pursuant to most contracts.
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The amusing thing about the above comment is that consumers will vote with their feet.
It's of interest that the US, where mindboggling and ludicrous settlements have been sought by the industry and awarded against small offenders by the courts, is the one nation whose recording industry is still struggling revenue wise (Warner Music posted yet another loss today). Whilst the world outside the US has shown growth this year the US has had yet another decline over the previous 12 months. Clearly the stick is not working as they wished it would.
Then, as I said earlier, the US is often seen as a non-mature royalty market. There has been some chatter this week that Lady Gaga only has $167 from a million plays on Spotify (ignoring that argument made by some that she needed to factor in her sales as a result of that), which is exactly $167 more than she made as a performer from US analogue airplay, unlike every other territory of any size on the planet (the media conglomerates using the same exposure argument to counter the current Performance Rights Act before the Senate to rectify this).
One wonders, given that the US is so copyright creator unfriendly on many levels, in the music industry at least, why they are allowed to drive the ACTA?
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They'll probably outsell Michael Jackson this year, and dude DIED.
And are now the biggest selling act of the 2000s which is just odd......
That said, I wish I was able to access one of those wee things, but really.....$280?
And Paul says odd things about the internet and piracy (from Cameron's link and the Guardian story it links to):
And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed. If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that."
The 320kbs and FLAC files of the remasters were online a week before 09.09.09, ripped, I guess, from all those promo CDs floating around. Doesn't seem to have substantially hurt the 4 million or so sales of these over the next month or so.
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Waaay too much guitar solo wankery.
For all my sins, real, imagined and future, I found myself at a Deep Purple gig at Western Springs circa 1975, having won three tickets on Radio Hauraki. Richie Blackmore had already moved on to bloated solo pastures and Tommy Bolin (RIP) was in the band. 20 minutes into Smoke On the Water's guitar solo we left.
I was later told by the one of us that opted to stay that it had some way to go...
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Justified to myself on the grounds that at $10/CD I wasn't giving some part of the big four excessive sums (yes, that is why I don't buy music). Now you're telling me that, quite likely, the artists got none of the money :/
It depends..some is legit budget or mid price stock. It's usual practice for a wholesaler to, after a period, put a release into a mid price or budget catalogue, so, using an Auckland example, those tables of $10 CDs you see outside Rhythm Records in Ponsonby and elsewhere, are legit, (reduced) royalty generating items (although labels are shocking at actually accounting to the acts..I saw a Fats Domino interview a while back where he said he'd not had any accounting from EMI since the 1970s...so all those Greatest Hits and Rock'n'Roll collections you see out there simply don't exist).
It's when you go into the warehouse and see bunch of fairly substantial albums cheap, or see a wall of major label releases at a silly price in JB HiFi you can quickly work out what's what and that they exist as retailer inducements from wholesalers.
And, yes, the crazy silly priced DVDs I'd guess.
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that leakage within the music industry's distribution systems was responsible for greater recordable losses than "piracy"
Or shall we talk about how majors regularly mark down stock by acts and then give it away as free 'bonuses' or 'deletions' to retailers, thus avoiding any artist royaties but encouraging large orders from the retailer of the new release often by completely unrelated acts to the ones who just had their royalty stream snipped off. That's where most of the stuff in the cheap bins comes from, or those specials....
Piracy has many levels.
But maybe we are leaping into another thread best left behind...
Would you consider a couple of tracks, in their entirety, to be an actual fair use?
Sure
And the album really didn't suck....
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People want songs; some pay, some don't.
Yep, agreed, and I'm thoroughly against the wholesale dissemination of whole catalogues online..really fuck you. I came across an NZ based blog recently that had a whole album that I control up there for "preview purposes". If it had been a track or two, more power to them, but the whole album sucked, so I arranged for a take-down notice.
But drawing the line is hard. I love the blogs full of those long lost indie 45s that have never appeared anywhere and are unlikely to, and happily would allow my old 7"s to appear on such, as I have. I think most acts and independent labels feel the same. Majors, of course, have a very different attitude and have teams of lawyers taking down things they don't even own, or have no intention of ever releasing again, to the detriment of the act, the writers, society and everyone else. And once again, fuck you to that attitude, which I see as worse than some misguided fan posting a whole album on a blogger site.
But what worries me is that these corporations are becoming, and see themselves, as the gatekeepers to our culture, and things like S92a and ACTA allow them to do that, especially as they are driven by that most corporate driven nation, the US (and I'll hand you back to Mr. Bono now).