Posts by Russell Brown
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Now, Pepper is a record that lost something in translation to CD. Within You, Without You should never come after Mr. Kite.
Things might be looking up ...
2009 CD remasters
All 13 original UK studio albums by The Beatles and Past Masters, Volume One and Past Masters, Volume Two will be released newly remastered sometime in 2009 on CD. The 2009 remasters will replace the infamously poor quality 1987 remasters. Mojo Magazine's Mat Snow was invited to hear 10 remastered tracks from 1968's The White Album and stated that they were "Better even than we'd hoped."
From Wikipedia.
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Back on something resembling an actual topic, John Armstrong's big ol' benefit-of-the-doubt bag for Key must be fairy light by now.
See: National cycleway no joking matter:
If the Prime Minister has erred, it has been in being too enthusiastic about the idea of a "national cycleway" when it would be better termed a "cycle network".
The sheer scale of a national cycleway captured the imagination. But the end result was people getting the wrong end of the stick.
What Key's critics should not underestimate is his determination in his role of Minister of Tourism to get some kind of scheme up and running.
The critics may scoff at the concept, which is already being described as "John's Folly" or Key's version of Think Big - a reference to National's white elephant energy projects of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
But make no mistake. Key is deadly serious about this. Something will happen, simply because as the Prime Minister he has the power to make it happen.
Wouldn't the simpler conclusion be "Prime Ministers shouldn't just make shit up and announce it"?
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That was certainly the intention, at the start. Then Paul slipped in "When I'm 64" and it all went to pot. Well, not really, still one of the greatest albums, but what the hell was he thinking!
It would be interesting to know which Beatles songs have raked in the most publishing revenue over the years. I bet that song is up there ...
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They forgot the quotation marks there. They must be about to crack.
And an initial capital too. Just a slip, I think; perhaps the dreaded copy and paste at work.
They do say "open software licensing" (in quotes) where I fear they mean open source .
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Of course. Ridicule is what I live for! But 'you ruined this important discussion with your dumbass pop culture' is a turn in the conversation I dig somewhat less.
A whole new turn for the PASBSG meme! This is so cool.
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I guess this is a good time to note again that I think APRA is an admirable organisation, especially in the very large percentage of its revenue it redistributes to its members.
But they don't half do some politicking to those members.
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Don, had you continued you might have felt a little less irritated (and seen past your own blinkers?)
He kind of had a point: that was quite a declaration to make in your first sentence, and one that hardly bears scrutiny.
My problem is more the way the way the document is written undermines the good faith in the "stay tuned, we're working on" part.
Apparently, a licence under CC is not a licence -- it's a "licence", in quotation marks as if it's not a real licence. This usage appears throughout the document, and it's irritating.
Also:
"Under a CC Licence, creators give up certain of their hard-won exclusive rights for free, forever. "
"Once a CC “licence” is applied to your work, it cannot be revoked."
"You sign away rights in that work, forever, for the whole
world, for free.""You cannot later change your mind."
You know, I think we got that part.
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Hey, it's all sweet again.
Wall Street hearts the Obama bank plan, markets around the world shoot up.
And US home sales rise at their fastest pace in six years.
Whatever were we worried about? ;-)
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(I refuse to haiku)
I'll take limericks.
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Paidcontent continues to deliver the best reporting on the PRS-YouTube dispute. This story, Why YouTube’s PRS Spat Is Just One Battle In The Coming Online Music War is particularly useful. It explains the maths problem for everyone trying to deliver music streams and pay the rate PRS wants:
**No one’s making enough to pay for music:** Music licensing is a complex landscape that confuses even many whose livelihoods depend on it. In short, PRS’ online license asks services to pay whichever is greater—either up to eight percent of their gross revenue, a per-track fee of between 0.05 pence and 0.22 pence or a per-subscriber fee of between £0.20 and £0.60 a month, depending on the particular service. The license was mandated by the UK Copyright Tribunal in 2007 after being agreed to by PRS, the BPI, Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks, Napster, Sony, iTunes, MusicNet and the mobile networks.
That would be fine for the many new online services that have launched and reached massive traffic since the license was created—except (and here’s the real story), most of them are finding it hard to earn the money PRS wants for these so-called “minimas”. “Fundamentally, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is not making enough money off YouTube,” Mulligan said. “Video advertising is nascent at best and YouTube is way behind the curve on that.” In other words, the license was inked before YouTube and others took off, before they’ve had a chance to find a workable business model, and before many of the original signatories went and changed their music initiatives.
Purdham: “If it was just eight percent of revenue, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the minimas kick in to scale. We’ve gotten to 500,000 users in just over 90 days and average visit time is 30 minutes—when you scale it up to the number of plays that YouTube and we have, the numbers become very significant. You’re talking about roughly a penny a stream for on-demand streaming. The question is, how do you make your money? Can you match that cost of playing to the revenue your business can make?”
To support that penny a stream, Purdham said We7 would need to sell ads consistently at £10 per thousand impressions, but it’s currently making between £1 and £12. Assuming Spotify, which has claimed 250,000 UK subscribers, is paying PRS’ on-demand streaming rate of £0.60 per subscriber per month, it could be billed £150,000 per month by PRS—but the per-track fees work out much higher. That’s why Purdham and others are trying targeted techniques to earn higher rates, but that, too, is in its infancy.
Emphasis as per the original.
In other words, the rights fee is derived from the income the stream generates, and that comes from the ad delivered along with it. The service providers' contention is that the rate per ad impression isn't viable alongside the fee PRS wants.
The "Comes With Music"-style deals for mobile phones have been much easier to negotiate because the phone companies sell a pricey piece of hardware, and can build an appropriate margin into the cost of the phone and their deals with mobile network operators.
PRS does have a bit of a rep, and in New Zealand APRA has been notably reasonable in establishing fixed rights fees for, say, internet radio.
Collecting societies will have to decide how much they value those online services, and whether they want to do without them. Interestingly, the same story notes that PRS is facing stern competition for the right to collect -- from other collecting agencies in Europe, from major labels themselves, and from new artist-owned collecting societies.
The risk for PRS, APRA and the others is that they start to lose business because copyright owners decide they want to do their own deals.
One interesting example of that is the way that an artist can't license some works as Creative Commons and remain an APRA member. It's one thing to say that APRA won't protect your CC content -- why should it? -- but APRA requires an exclusive licence on all an artist's works, so you can't CC a couple of songs even if you want to.
There' s a hostile and somewhat patronising summary of Creative Commons on the APRA website.
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