Hard News by Russell Brown

Naughty DRM have been recently challenging/claiming NZ clips on YT they don't manage rights for/distribute - ie. you're an artist, you've put your own video/song ( your publishing and master rights ) up there and next minute DRM has flagged it as theirs. And everything else you have up there. Which damages the artist's record with YT. Maybe it's a bot that does that accidentally, but it's pretty shit.

Ooooh that Massonix. Really. Feel your loss!

Naughty DRM have been recently challenging/claiming NZ clips on YT they don’t manage rights for/distribute – ie. you’re an artist, you’ve put your own video/song ( your publishing and master rights ) up there and next minute DRM has flagged it as theirs.

Interesting. That very clearly should not be happening. I'll follow that up and report back. Feel free to email me with specific instances.

Having been spending some time this week with a youtuber thanks to Going Global (free gig at galatos on Saturday www.goingglobal.co.nz) I learnt some stuff -

Its not just music companies using youtube to monitize / take down / or leave be various content - all the major film studios do too with their movies uplaoded in googles backend for reference, most clips over three minutes come down, anything under depending on the film/studio/rights holder are, like, music claimed and the rights holders wishes applied - its all pretty clever or not depending on your tech is magic view...

Anyone can do this with their content, plus if you are an uploader you get all the analytics and other magic stuff to help you work out the best means to metatag and optimise your content (youtube is just a search engine) - easier to do so via a aggregator like DRM as they have better systems, relationships and deals course you give them a cut of the revenue as the tradeoff

interestingly what youtube is seeing is collaborations between creative types, ie musicians and entertainers to further optimise views and thus money. Musician works with a comedian for example, makes clip and both parties rally their respective audience to gain views and with luck/strategy push the clip further - some would say hope it goes viral at this point... I won't.

I got the Lorde email but it all got too hard - more clicking, account setups and waiting... left to them with the inclination, I'll wait for a time I can just pay to see her, if the US doesn't claim all her time.

I too hope Peter Jeffries doesn't make this a one off, no interest in Palmer but Peter oh my!

DC tinged disco, why not? https://soundcloud.com/blucu/derrick-carter-lovebox-rbma-forum-london

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to be specific but I know of two instances in the last couple of weeks where local artists have had their entire YT catalogue unrightfully claimed.

Great to see that Chills clip again, I can remember the mess and fun of it being filmed at Chris (and Barbara’s) home-based Hakanoa Studios (and up the road in the shopping centre on Richmond Road in Grey Lynn).
I don’t think it even got played on the telly more than once (if at all) due to the technical glitch that let light across many of the frames – but Chris managed to use a lot of it.
Happy that my watching it again might benefit Martin, at last.

Here’s some other pics of even earlier (US) Rock n Roll legends…

Some other interesting things
(via boingboing again):
Car creates music!
and
the Kickstart funded 'I have your heart' clip
by illustrator Molly Crabapple and others...

The Androidss would return from Auckland for weeks at a stretch and once – up against The Swingers across town at the Hillsborough Tavern – not only packed The Gladstone, but set a record for the bar take that was never bettered

All due to the band?

All due to the band?

Just the drummer.

If Psy gets $1 million from 1 billion plays, does that mean the artist who gets 100,000 plays gets $100. In which case, 89,402 plays is not quite equivalent to an evening performing at a pub?

I'm not dissing the system, but I wonder if we won't work out better ones at some future point in this digital age.

I too hope Peter Jeffries doesn't make this a one off, no interest in Palmer but Peter oh my!

I recall seeing at another defunct (for now anyway) venue (the old Dux de Lux), Roy Montgomery, Dribbling Darts of Love and Peter Jeffries on the same bill. Nothing beats Electricity on a good day!

And Russell, great overview of the Gladstone! It certainly was a bit rough at times late in the early '80s with the bootboy contingent often intimidating and looking for 'action'. On a much brighter note, the Saints (sans Ed Kueeper) really came alive in closing their set with Know Your Product.

BTW is Graeme Jeffries still active with the Cakekitchen?

I know I put this up last week!
But this time you could own this piece of New Zealand history by simply following this link … and joining the fun of on line auctions…
;- )

I wonder who, if anyone, gets the view money from You Tube for things like this?

Clever new Raiza Biza, Diaz Grimm and Jay Knight Feat. Campbell/Key samples: https://soundcloud.com/jay_knight/jay-knight-diaz-grimm-pilots

BTW is Graeme Jeffries still active with the Cakekitchen?

Yes indeed. I had a letter from him recently with a bunch of new stuff. His last album was http://www.discogs.com/Cakekitchen-Calm-Before-The-Storm/release/4659129 which is quite wonderful.

Re DRM and YouTube. They are aware there have been a few glitches. When it happened to a track owned by a third party on a comp of mine they reversed it immediately and apologetically. Other acts on various compilations are just happy to be getting finally paid on video play after having had nothing from YouTube in the past. I think the reasonably wide and quite passive licensing of the site’s content is a win-win mostly for all parties.

As an aside, APRA too license YouTube although up until now that’s just been the official channels but I understand that’s changing to embrace all content.

Understand Simon - but if they're doing it in a blanket style (using bots?) that's not really cool and it's a disturbing model. There are clear rights visible on these YT channels, and answering these challenges - case by case - is a real stress and time waster.

Apropos of nothing at all, I just picked up a copy of Beat groups & courtyard parties by Gordon Spittle from 1996 at Slow Boat Records. Looks like a lovely little book I shall enjoy reading.

Then there’s the case of Spotify, which apparently pays less than 0.4p per stream. A song that receives a million streams therefore gets around £3800. Hardly any song, other than current top-40 pop or classic-rock back catalogue, can expect to get that sort of play. So, paradoxically, we end up with a system of remuneration for musicians that’s far more hostile to the non-omnipresently-popular and mainstream even than the pre-internet music business, even though it’s still largely controlled by the same people. As ever, this is not the shining internet future we were promised.

On another note entirely, however (and I know this contradicts pretty much my entire comment above), look! Siltbreeze just released a Victor Dimisich Band retrospective. Download those "Native Waiter" MP3s today!

Understand Simon – but if they’re doing it in a blanket style (using bots?) that’s not really cool and it’s a disturbing model.

Yep, agreed, but from what I understand those were mostly teething problems. The licensor interface now gets you to specify what should be covered so hopefully that's resolved. Blanket claiming - which is what the majors have been doing for ages - is simply unacceptable. I still have stuff claimed by Sony that they have no rights to.

Blanket claiming – which is what the majors have been doing for ages – is simply unacceptable

That's how Mushroom got started wasn't it?

On another note entirely, however (and I know this contradicts pretty much my entire comment above), look! Siltbreeze just released a Victor Dimisich Band retrospective. Download those “Native Waiter” MP3s today!

Yay.

So, paradoxically, we end up with a system of remuneration for musicians that’s far more hostile to the non-omnipresently-popular and mainstream even than the pre-internet music business, even though it’s still largely controlled by the same people. As ever, this is not the shining internet future we were promised.

Well, it's more hostile to them making a living from a mass market. But getting published is definitely way, way easier than it ever was. And if the outcome of the mass market becoming pointless for most musicians is that more musicians end up doing gigs because they have to to pay bills, is that really so terrible? And they can get to their 20,000 fans at minimal cost, their songs are out there, and everyone can watch them any time. I think you have to buy into an idea that the world owes musicians a mass market to think this is the end of days for musicians. It's just that the strange model of the mid thru late 20th century of mass-production making fortunes for a lot of people has collapsed. Now it's a much more tiny number than the tiny number it was in the first place.

Jotted down some thoughts on the Lorde show in a new post.

Interesting post.

I assume the pre-vid video ads on YouTube get a different rate (for artist and host) to the static pop-ups?

Seems to me there’s a few ways artists and YouTube management could get together to finesse this to the advantage of both parties (although not necessarily to the advertiser). I tend to listen to a lot of music on YouTube, mostly because it’s very easily accessible and there’s a certain mental inertia in switching over to Soundcloud or whatever. Usually I play it in the background while I do something else. Judging by the upload patterns of users, I’ll confidently say I’m not the only one who uses it in this way – there’s thousands of music uploads with no video, just a single still image: single tracks, full albums, DJ mixes, etc. There’s also thousands of user-generated playlists where the single vid track automatically jumps to the next one (sometimes with a vid ad in between, sometimes not).

Now, presumably a single 3-4 min track will currently attract the same ad rate as a 1-hour album for the pop-up? But the pop-up only appears once. It would be easily technically possible on a non-video image track to have multiple pop-ups appearing at intervals, or multiple pop-ups at once. Users already generate something similar for thier own on-screen comments with links. On a non-video track it’s minimally invasive, and if it’s part of a playlist and on in the background, the user possibly won’t even notice them as the tracks play sequentially. It does sound a little counter-intuitive, but so did the million dollar homepage (admittedly that had the advantage of novelty at the time of launch, and it’s copycats are struggling, but on YouTube you won’t need thousands of click-throughs on a single link on a single image to make it viable).

On a side note, the most annoying thing about music playlists on YouTube is when a playlist in the background does get interrupted by an overly intrusive ad. Note to advertisers: music fans are not homogeonous. This is annoying: “oh hai, I see you like music! Slayer! Cool! Would you like to listent to some Justin Bieber? How about some Katy Perry? No? One Direction then!” Sort your algorithms.