SONG CONTEST BLOG

Adding insult to injury, the founders of The Pirate Bay have been promoting a scheme in protest of the recent ruling against their questionable P2P music service and to spite the law firm representing the plaintiff.  Distributed Denial of Dollars (or DDo$) is a method of attacking the victim with many micro-payments which, in turn, causes disproportional transaction fees and an overload in administration for the recipient.  This gets very interesting… and equally absurd from here.

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A Swedish court has sentenced the four founders of The Pirate Bay for one year and ordered them to pay damages to the tune of $4.5m after the most high profile filesharing crackdown since Shawn Fanning’s Napster came to ruling.  In spite of the hefty punishment, The Pirate Bay website, a BitTorrent search platform (BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer program used for uploading and downloading files), contains video footage of the founders’ amusement by the verdict, which they intend to appeal.

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On demand music streaming service, Spotify, has been on my radar since the company announced a distribution deal with CD Baby in the first week of February.  CD Baby, the leading force in independent music retail and digital music distribution, represents more than 175,000 artists which account for over one million tracks, all of which are now available through Spotify’s lightweight music streaming application.  This licensing deal marks the ‘long-tail’ trend in music availability and consumption, and celebrates the access independent artists have today to mass audiences through pioneering music services, many of which had treated indie talent as nothing more than an afterthought after securing major label catalogues.  Under the aphorism of “access not ownership”, the Luxemburg-based company has been growing exponentially since its €15.3m venture capital injection in October 2008 and, in turn, joining an elite group of legal music experience providers such as Pandora, Last.fm, TheSixtyOne, and others, which have found success in catering to music consumers through a balanced and worldly music library whilst reserving significant real-estate for up and coming artists: a pop-culture and grassroots music mix that appears to be paving the way for a new industry.  A spot in Spotify’s limelight is not yet available directly for small acts and labels but CD Baby has certainly lowered the barrier of entry.  Thank you Derek or, rather, Disc Makers for making this possible…

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Google’s VP of Content Partnership, David Eun, said that YouTube “is not screwing the labels, and, if anything, needs to partner more closely with them”, in response to Warner Music Group’s demand that YouTube remove every video from WMG’s catalogue.

Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in an all-stock transaction.  It has since been working closely with record labels and independent rights owners on a number of mechanical royalty models for balanced and mutual content monetization, at which point, it struck a ‘blanket license’ deal with Warner.   However, Warner has not been able to re-negoatiate terms with Google who, resultantly, had to remove videos under WMG’s authorship or which contain copyright associated with WMG’s publishing.  As this amounts to a great many clips which are now ‘unplayable’, YouTube, the world’s largest video portal, can no longer claim to provide “infinite choice”, at least under the music category which will no longer include Madonna, REM and Eric Clapton, to name a few.  Quite a blow. 

The feud has snowballed and YouTube users are documenting their frustration on the video portal.  Here’s one version I enjoyed watching:

And from the victim’s perspective: