There’s a reason Prince made it onto Time’s 100 Most Influential Celebrities list.  His musical legacy is easily apparent, and his opinions are still making headlines.  Recently, the purple-clad eccentric has endured great scorn for his statement, “The Internet’s completely over.”  Just so you know he’s serious, Prince has banned his music from YouTube and iTunes, shut down his own website, and announced his newest album 20TEN will only be distributed as a free CD inside the British paper the Daily Mirror (much to the chagrin of my wife and sis-in-law, huge fans).

After blasting online music distributors, Prince calls the technology itself a fad that’s on the way out:  “The Internet’s like MTV.  At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good.”  Obviously, he’s out of touch; MTV was a diversion, not a tool that expanded the potential accomplishments of virtually every business and individual in the world.   Nor were millions of people physically addicted to MTV and its content.

 Though his statement is demonstrably false, there’s something to the sentiment behind it.  I’ve rarely bought mp3s online that I could buy on a physical format for two reasons:  first, lower sound quality (to bring the file sizes down, they remove frequencies and decrease the audio’s resolution), and I prefer the limitation of having to choose and listen to one CD at a time.  Just browsing through a collection of mp3s ripped from the same CDs, I appall myself, getting so easily bored and skipping through music that I find exhilarating when I commit to it.  Despite an age difference of three decades, Prince and I find solidarity in this anachronism. (more…)

Word is getting around that the RIAA seems to be stepping away from lawsuits as a key strategy against piracy.  Lawsuits were never going to be the solution, as other major rights-holders, like those working together through Arts+Labs, will attest.

That’s not to say that we’ve all stopped believing in creators’ rights or that we no longer think piracy is a real problem.  On the contrary: the creative economy depends on creative rights.

We all understand the demand for easy access to inexpensive content, and the people who produce that content – artists, movie makers, journalists, musicians, songwriters and more – are eager to deliver it. But, as it turns out, they want their rights to be respected.

Unfortunately, some consumers get confused about the difference between demand and entitlement. A recent TechDirt screed illustrates this entitlement mentality.  Writing about Joel Tenenbaum, who was sued for pirating and distributing songs online (a jury found that he had willfully infringed copyrights and awarded a judgment far larger than had been asked), Mike Masnick wrote: (more…)

Few shows illustrate how low the state of popular music has fallen than “American Idol.”  While AI regularly finds singers of talent, the songs they feature are mostly chestnuts.  The show also encourages the type of singing that is more at home on Broadway than in small smoky clubs.  The judges put an inordinate amount of focus on vocal pyrotechnics encouraging contestants to test the outer limits of their ranges.  The most exciting news to come out of the most recent season is the possibility that Adam Lambert might join Queen, replacing the ill-considered Paul Rogers.

I would love to see Adam Lambert join Queen.  I already know all the songs.  And that’s a problem.  Singer/songwriters have been moving off-grid since the nineties.  With the demise of the major music conglomerates, innovative talent understands it’s up to them to record and release their own material.  The internet makes this possible.  No one knows the extent of the effect downloading has had on the music industry, but if we are to judge from the reaction, it has been devastating.  The Recording Institute Association of America has brought suits against parents whose children illegally download songs. (more…)