The View from the Spaghetti Factory

Are you familiar with Audioscrobbler? It’s a little tool that works with your computer’s media player (iTunes, Winamp, etc) and uploads your listening habits to a central website. That way, you can marvel at the number of times you’ve listened to “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep”, while also browsing other people’s playlists and finding new things to listen to. I’ve been using it for years, and it’s lots of fun.

Anyway, the people who designed Audioscrobbler expanded their operation a couple of years ago, creating Last.FM, a cuddly Web 2.0 social networking site combining the Audioscrobbler technology with Facebook-style profile pages, messageboards, personalised streaming radio feeds and the potential to run your own little online record label.

Oh, and then music industry giants CBS bought the company.

Yep, another corporate takeover, and this one cost 280 million US dollars, to be precise. And while Flickr, Myspace and Youtube don’t seem to have been affected too badly by their corporate takeovers, I think I’ll be keeping Last.FM at arm’s length. Via Robert Fripp, here’s an extract from the contract you must agree to if you upload any of your music to Last.FM…

Now, I’d be naive to think that I was going to get rich by uploading any of my tracks to Last.FM, but that’s not the point. There’s an underground music revolution going on out there… or perhaps not.

Remember I was moaning about Universal Music and their blinkered, litigious greed? Well, how about we move up a level through the music industry hierarchy to that noble umbrella organisation, the Recording Industry Association of America…

RIAA Petitions Judges to Lower Artist Royalties (IGN News)

Basically, the record companies (who are, according to the RIAA, truly wonderful because they “drive revenue”) aren’t earning enough money from modern music delivery technologies such as ringtones and downloads. And here’s the shining, crystalline reason for why the RIAA is called the RIAA and not the “Wonderful World of Lovely Music For All” (or something)… they decide to claw back some revenue by paying their artists less. Yep, the people who make the music, without whom there wouldn’t be a music industry.

I give you Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music. For a CEO of a major producer of electronic media, Doug doesn’t seem to be too comfortable with the modern world. First of all, he knows exactly what we’re all doing with our iPods…

It’s not just the little plastic boxes we carry around in our pockets, either. Poor Doug is feeling a bit confused by pretty much everything that young people do these days. So what does he do? He sues MySpace…

The Wired article mentions damages of up to $150,000 *per song*. I had no idea all those MySpace teenagers were doing so much damage to the world Emo economy…