Photos of the night as posted on InTheMix (I love the net). And some more photos of Underworld at The [Melbourne] Big Day Out the day before.
Lots of old news today, clearing out my emails to self.
Apparently APRA is asking for a levy on blank CDs to cover their use to pirate music. I thought we already had such a levy but I believe after a bit of research this is only on cassette tapes. The levy would be about 3 to 10 percent. They even talk about a way to claim the levy back if you can proove your CDr usage wasn't for CD pirating. Guilty until prooven innocent. I buy hundreds of CDrs a year and the majority of them are for music but that music is mine, as in my bands music. Last time APRA asked for such a levy it was knocked back because it was seen as a tax. While the government is in US buttlicking mode maybe it'll get through this time.
The music industry is dying apparently and everyone knows it. That's what Charles Mann reckons anyway. Choice quote from the Wired article (the bolding is mine):
Why, when most industries are using technology to slash costs, is Michael Jackson running up $30 million in studio bills? Or, rather, why is Sony Music letting him? Career protection. By using the hottest producers and recording studios, executives can deflect failure ("We got the Neptunes, what else could we have done?") and allay their fears artists will blame them for a flop ("That track would've got some air, but the Suits wouldn't shell out $50,000 to clear the Zeppelin sample"). Because the costs are billed against the musicians, there's little incentive to save money.
Australian CD sales fell 5.5 percent last year [The Age]. No break of CD albums vs. CD single though. Same article has DVD sales up almost 300%. APRA admits that CD piracy not the cause of CD sales drop [smh].
Been looking a lot at archive.org and other projects like Project Gutenburg and have seriously thought about making a donation to archive.org (given I've download Gigs of Tenacious D concerts it's the least I can do). These kinds of services are exactly the sort of thing I want all over the net (but nicely centralised and searchable please ;p). But then, I've been thinking a librarian (or archivist) would be a funky job so what would I know.
Been looking at short(ish) courses I might like to do part time. One is in Sound production etc. Typical 3 month (6 month part time) course is $3000. Ouch. But then the full course (18 month) gets you qualified enough to get jobs mixing for TV, radio, gigs etc. But then, you can learn a lot just turning up and watching...
Copyright is extended again. Salon rants about it. I heard an idea recently (via Scripting News?) that maybe we should just go back to 14 year copyright lengths and come-down hard-core on any copyright infringment in those 14 years. That'd give us every up until almost the end of the 80s completely copyright free. It'd me no downloading/sharing of "24" episodes but you'd be able to download Transformers, Astroboy, any old episodes of your fav TV show, any movie made in the 80s and less (Terminator, Aliens, Die Hard). And lets not forget the music. I think I could deal with that.
The original idea of copyright was to allow the owner to create something and have exclusive rights to market that something and make money from it until the term of the copyright ran out. Why have it run out at all? Because if copyrights run out those who create have to keep creating in order to keep making money, thus having a bunch of cool stuff always being created and marketed and sold, making everyone have a steady supply of cool stuff and the government stuffed with tax. Now it's possible to create something really funky (like Mickey Mouse for example) and live off the money made from that idea for ever and ever. Not really the point of the whole thing...
As a musician I can see problems with this of course... copyright start-time would have to be from publication date. What is publication? Putting it on the internet would have to count. Which would mean that the copyright for my band's single "Glory" started two years ago. We've only 12 years to make money from it... Good. Glory is old, we've already put it bottom of the setlist fodder. The only reason we play it every gig is because we're trying to sell singles. If we wern't selling singles we probably wouldn't play it. A good band should be writing new stuff year after year after year... and being choosy about what they publish...
Which could get messy with stuff like the internet archives etree archives (archives of live concerts taped by fans). That would mean the second you play it live it's taped by a fan and "published" on the net, thus starting your copyright from the day it's played live, something i'm less happy with... but it's still 14 years. FOURTEEN YEARS. That's 2 thirds of my life. If I havn't got around to making money off something I've created in that time you don't care enough to try...
Unless you do the band thing as a hobby and make your real money doing random IT stuff for random IT company. Would be nice to pump all your time into the music and promotion. If only a company would pay for all of that and ask you to pay it back from the profits and ... ;p