This is a significant development; the landmark case could have dramatic repercussions for the RIAA’s legal campaign against file sharers, since a precedent now exists for the RIAA to compensate wrongfully-sued defendants for their legal costs.
And paraphrasing: Debbie Foster is the RIAA file sharing defendant who took on the organization after it went after her for copyright infringement, the label will likely owe Foster more than $50,000, since the Order allows her to supplement the attorneys’ fees total to include additional time spent on the case.
More bad news for the major labels = splendid!
This would be a good time to introduce Recording Industry vs The People, a blog “devoted to the RIAA’s lawsuits of intimidation brought against ordinary working people”.
The Austinist had been maintaining a list of potential acts playing SXSW. Where their list had just over 500 bands mentioned, a preliminary official line-up was announced today and has well over twice that many acts slated to play this year’s festival [over 1300 actually].
The local region [NS, NFLD, PEI and NB] will be represented by a number of acts including:
Chris Colepaugh and the Cosmic Crew, The Grass, Ruth Minnikin, Nathan Wiley, Windom Earle, Wintersleep, Buck 65, Classified, Mark Bragg Band, and Jill Barber.
They won’t be alone while there there either as a long number of fellow Canadian acts [plenty of east coast connections amongst them as well] will be heading south as well.
Alberta’s
AA Sound System, Cadence Weapon, Shout Out Out Out Out, Smalltown DJs, Social Code, Leeroy Stagger, Chad VanGaalen, and The Cape May
Manitoba’s
American Flamewhip, Hot Live Guys, Inward Eye, Nathan, Scott Nolan, Novillero, Grand Analog, Cara Luft, and Paper Moon
Montreal’s
A-Trak, The Besnard Lakes, Ray Bonneville, Call Me Poupee, The Dears, Angela Desveaux, Grimskunk, Land Of Talk, Lesbians On Ecstasy, Les Breastfeeders, Les Georges Leningrad, Patrick Watson, We Are Wolves, Young Galaxy, Karkwa, The High Dials, Miracle Fortress, Mobile, Shapes and Sizes, Krista L. L. Muir, Malajube, Pawa Up First, Plaster, Pony Up, and Priestess
Toronto’s
Amy Millan, MSTRKRFT, Picastro, The Old Soul, Raising The Fawn, Rock Plaza Central, Justin Rutledge, Ron Sexsmith, Sloan, UNCUT, Apostle of Hustle, Howie Beck, The Cliks, Crystal Castles, The Diableros, Die Mannequin, Luke Doucet, Peter Elkas, Fucked Up, The Golden Dogs, Holy Fuck, Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, and K’NAAN.
BC’s
The Awkward Stage, Castle Project, Gown, Dan Mangan, Carolyn Mark, Josh Martinez, Melissa McClelland, Ladyhawk, Jets Overhead, Lions In The Street, The Mohawk Lodge, Mother Mother, Adrienne Pierce, and Ox.
Ontario’s
Junior Boys, Lynn Miles, Serena Ryder, Jim Bryson, The Tragically Hip, and Tokyo Police Club
The folks at chromewaves announced today something many readers of this blog might be envious of, well at least the other bloggers/readers: a Blogger Curated Music Experience
It’s an event we’re putting on at SxSW this year and it’s looking pretty bad-ass if I do say so myself. We’ve got 32 bands playing over two days and three stages at the Mohawk and Club DeVille in Austin on March 16 and 17 and we’re talking some top-notch talent - mostly hand-picked (or begged) by us.
Freedom to Tinker has a post that for me, succulently sums up the position major labels currently find themselves in regarding DRM and the sale of DRM free MP3s:
Now, they have to overcome history, their own pride, and years of their own rhetoric.
Yesterday Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, threw his hat into the anti-DRM ring. Providing three options
to continue on the current course
for Apple to license its FairPlay DRM technology to current and future competitors with the goal of achieving interoperability between different company’s players and music stores
In 2006, under 2 billion DRM-protected songs were sold worldwide by online stores, while over 20 billion songs were sold completely DRM-free and unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves. The music companies sell the vast majority of their music DRM-free, and show no signs of changing this behavior, since the overwhelming majority of their revenues depend on selling CDs which must play in CD players that support no DRM system.
So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system?
It is possible that particularly Job’s statements are more about posturing than a real desire to see Apple’s closed DRM system challenged.
Regardless, all this anti-DRM hype/movement can’t be good news for Microsoft and Vista’s beefed up DRM measures. Another example of failing at innovation biting you in the ass.
This would have been better only if it had taken place in Halifax and I had been there.
New York Times Review of Never Hear the End of It
‘NEVER HEAR THE END OF IT’ (Yep Roc)
Sloan
There are 30 songs on Sloan’s “Never Hear the End of It,” a playlist that’s part stunt and part statement by a band that has always been equally fond of and self-conscious about pop. It’s the eighth studio album by Sloan, the pre-eminent rock band to emerge from Nova Scotia and one of Canada’s most popular bands for the last decade.
The album connects Sloan’s open worship of melodic 1960s rock — primarily the Beatles, but also the Beach Boys, the Kinks and Pink Floyd — to the recurring, increasingly warped revivals of it. Sloan has absorbed 1970s soft rock and power pop, 1980s new wave and 1990s low-fi indie rock. Recorded in the band’s Toronto rehearsal studio and elsewhere, “Never Hear” is as close to Guided by Voices as Sloan has previously been to the Zombies, Stealers Wheel, Squeeze or XTC.
All four band members are songwriters, and they churn out material as if they’re determined to keep a disappearing style from extinction. The instrumentation — guitars, predigital keyboards, bass, drums — sounds vintage; the most modern style is a glimpse of punk.
In a fictionalized career outlook called “Fading Into Obscurity” the band sings, “Interest in me dissipated/All my methods antiquated,” while suggesting that the music Sloan loves, “had so much potential/To be delicious and still be influential.”
The album is proudly kaleidoscopic. Those 30 songs run between 52 seconds and 5 1/2 minutes long, and even among the short ones, only a few come across as fragments. The tracks are run together so the album works almost as a 77-minute suite. It’s a pop-rock marathon, galloping through songs about romance (“Last Time in Love”), music (“I Know You”), paranoia (“Living With the Masses”), media (“Set in Motion”), despair (“It’s Not the End of the World”) and willed optimism (“I Understand”). Most of the songs stand up separately, but the album’s cumulative effect is even better: a sheer abundance that insists there’s enough pop to give every human concern a tune.
I will be regardless to try and jump start something. But you should too.
I can easily think of well over a dozen bands/people off the top of my head I know in Halifax that could do this in a heartbeat. So you should. Regardless of where you live.
This is the challenge: record an album in 28 days, just because you can.
That’s 10 songs or 35 minutes of original material recorded during the month of February. Go ahead… put it to tape.
To recap:
• This will be fun!
• Ten songs or 35 minutes of recorded material, on a CD, postmarked or hand-delivered by noon on March 1 to:
10 Vaughan Mall, Suite 1
Portsmouth, NH 03801
• Recording can only be done in the month of February – no prerecorded songs.
• All material must be previously unreleased, and we encourage you to write the material during February too.
• Participating bands get their own page on the site, which you can blog to as much as you want. You also get access to the band-only discussion board, where you can swap ideas, resources, etc., and the ability to e-mail and private message with the other participants.
• Participating bands get access to The Sample Engine, where you can actually share samples and tracks for other bands to use, if you like, or download bits that might help you with your project.
• All the completed albums may be put up in the jukebox on the website, if you so choose, so people can check it out; conversely, if you’d rather not share your work with the public, then no one needs to hear it but us.
Write some instrumentals, split up the songwriting duties amongst band members, form an RPM side project, write songs on the piano or clarinet instead of your primary instrument, make that metal album you’ve always wanted to - buy a ukulele! Just do your best to make the best album you can. Be unafraid.
What if every musician you knew put their music first for 28 days?
What if you recorded the best song of your life?
What if the world was never the same?
What’s stopping us? Nothing. February is Record Production Month. You have no reason to say no, and nothing to lose.
It’s on now.
This year you can only vote online so surf on over and take a minute to complete the survey.
We won’t go out of our way to influence your thinking right now [this may change]. BUT we will gladly offer suggestions should you find yourself short of ideas for the minimum number of categories required to have your say count!
Jon Epworth has written one of my favorite Halifax rock songs [it’s kicking off the much mentioned, never heard scenecast that’s coming - I’ve been away for the past few days for a funeral and thus it is delayed yet again - so wait for it, it’s worth it for Jon’s song alone - from the two sessions ep].
Hell it may be one of my favorite rock songs period.
Today Radio3 has selected a song off his latest release wet on wet as track of the day.
So go listen and we’ll have things returned to a regular schedule tomorrow
Cheers
