It's me playing guitar for my band WALKEN at our CD launch 18th October 2002.
A whole bunch of new images of moi playing in my band.
Looks like we're half way to the self tuning guitar. The self tuning piano tunes by heating and cooling the strings. Excellent for those hot nights under hot lights were your carefully tuned acoustic suddenly sounds like Bob Dylan.
Via everywhere (link via Scripting News) we discover that some important artists' recordings copyrights are expiring in the European Union. Namely early Elvis recordings and various popular European singers you've never heard of. RIAA and the other vocal copyright extenders are having a massive public whinge about the likely hood of "pirated" recordings flooding the market in the US (and obviously everywhere else).
Thing is... these copyrights everyone is talking about are on the "recordings" not the "music". As in, Elvis (should he still be alive) still owns the copyright to "Hound Dog" or "Crappy traditional ballad re-written number 349" but the recording he made of that in 1950 (released on good old quality 78 vinyl) can now be freely copied and sold for profit. Should RecordCompanyX re-release Elvis' number 1 hits re-mastered in lovely CD format with a million pages of inner sleve, you can't freely copy that.
The New York Times article goes on to discuss "bootlegging" of the Greek soprano, Callas. For years a record company "Diva" has been releasing bootlegged live recordings of Callas to an adoring public. In a move that shocked even me, EMI has now been officially releasing these "bootleg" recordings.
I recently discovered etree and the etree archive at The Internet Archive. They are keeping full CD quality (ie. losslessly compressed SHN, not MP3) recordings of live concerts by artists who have given permission, like Tenacious D. It's the sort of thing fans have been doing for years, recording concerts, lovingly converting their cruddy old tapes to CDr, then SHN to ensure this recording lives forever. etree rocks for organising this...
Interesting thoughts of the day:
- Even though Tenacious D have given permission for thier concerts to be recorded and archived... what if when they cover say, The Beatles (as they always do), and this is recorded and put online. Technically they're making a Beatles song free to download, even though it's a crap cover by two guys on an acoustic with some words changed amusingly. How does that work?
- Also... say a band like Faith No More agreed to this sort of archiving and everyone put tons of effort into archiving shitting old cassette audience recordings from 1987 onto etree... only to find out that FNM soundboard recorded all of their gigs on DAT but won't release them because there is "no market". It could happen.
Why won't these bloody copyrights expire so all of this history can be looked after by those who care.