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http://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-paul-mccartney-and-more-push-congress-to-reform-copyright-laws-youtube-fires-back/?curator=MediaREDEF

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After some heated debate through blogs and video interviews, our panellists finally came together to confront the burning issue under the stewardship of moderator Colin Murray. Representing the music industry will.i.am, Imogen Heap, Zoë Keating, Amanda Palmer and Scooter Braun argued the case for greater rights for artists. Meanwhile Spotify's Artists Advocate Trevor Skeet, Vevo's Senior Vice President Nic Jones and Songkick founder Ian Hogarth put forward their case for a better working relationship between tech companies and musicians.

Below you can watch the debate (either in full or selected highlights), check out our exclusive video interviews and research, as well as read blogs from experts on both ends of the spectrum.

Watch the live debate, powered by Google+ Hangout On Air, featuring will.i.am, Amanda Palmer, Scooter Braun, Imogen Heap and Zoë Keating, alongside leading music platforms Spotify, Vevo and Songkick live from 7.30pm GMT. Join in the conversation live using #VirginDisruptors

As the person behind the world's first real YouTube superstar, Justin Bieber, music manager & entrepreneur Scooter Braun knows a thing or two about how tech has changed the music industry. Here the #VirginDisruptors panelist gives us his thoughts on where we're heading...

Spotify and Vevo set for live debate with outspoken artists including will.i.am and Imogen Heap...

Some people believe that tech has killed the music industry, that its current existence is unsustainable. However, others argue that tech is its saviour.

But what do you think?

Has tech killed the music industry?

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Disruptors London: Has tech killed the music industry?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After some heated debate through blogs and video interviews, our panellists finally came together to confront the burning issue under the stewardship of moderator Colin Murray. Representing the music industry will.i.am, Imogen Heap, Zoë Keating, Amanda Palmer and Scooter Braun argued the case for greater rights for artists.

# data[].attributes.body
Has tech killed the music industry? There are enough implications discussed here that, if you successfully integrate them into your essay, can take you up to Excellence.
https://www.virgin.com/disruptors/disruptors-london-has-tech-killed-the-music-industry

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How tidal is affecting change in the streaming business

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How tidal is affecting change in the streaming business

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http://www.newsweek.com/whats-going-between-kanye-west-apple-and-tidal-486550

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As artists, record labels, music publishers and managers line up to lobby the US Congress and the European Union, it might seem as if YouTube is the worst thing to happen to the music business since Napster in 1999. The streaming service, the aggrieved parties claim, is causing a massive "value gap" that is unsustainable. In brief, millions of users watching billions of videos are contributing peanuts towards ad revenue. The video service is also, they feel, building a huge business around their copyrights by gaming the safe harbour exemptions in the law, which mean it is absolved of guilt if its users upload music without a licence and only has to comply if told to take it down.

According to those who oppose the service, YouTube is slowly killing the music industry, one tiny cut at a time. It is anti-artist and anti-copyright, they claim. Meanwhile, every major artist has a channel on YouTube and wouldn't dream of releasing a new record without YouTube involved in its launch.

Although many have a conflicted relationship with YouTube, there is a generational conflict dividing the field. Those in the "old" music industry want to keep things the way they always were, nailing down copyright in every way possible. Yet around them a "new" business is emerging - prescient and whip-smart artists, managers, labels and media organisations - who see YouTube as a facilitator of a creative renaissance rather than a death sentence.

Leeds-based singer-songwriter Hannah Trigwell describes discovering YouTube's promotional potential as "like finding treasure". Six years ago, she started uploading videos of her own songs, all without using her real name, to avoid her classmates finding out what she was doing. It was a stark contrast to the busking she had been doing.

"I didn't have a fanbase at the time and it was difficult to get gigs with promoters because no one knew who I was," she says. "It was obvious to me that unless I was very lucky with the right person coming along at the right time, I was going to have to forge my own journey."

She praises the immediacy of the YouTube platform, whereby she can get instant feedback on songs or works in progress, as well as its global reach. A cover of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car was a success on her channel and the data tools YouTube supplies to all users revealed an unexpected detail: her fastest growing audience was in south-east Asia.

Although Trigwell knows she cannot survive on YouTube income alone, she believes it provides opportunities for profit to be made. "YouTube is definitely my main focus, but it is primarily a promotional tool," she says. "The things that come indirectly from YouTube - the touring and selling merchandise online - would be impossible without it."

Having recently signed a partnership deal with Absolute Label Services - a music marketing and distribution company - she does not see YouTube as a fast track to a traditional record contract. "If the right one came along I would consider it, but I'm not desperate for a record deal as I am a full-time musician right now," she says. "YouTube has made it possible to be like that."

Amid the mounting assault, YouTube argues that it has introduced tools specifically for the music industry, notably "cards" that let owners annotate their videos and create links to ticketing sites, streaming sites and download stores - essentially turning YouTube feeds into sales channels.

"The music industry were our very first partners on YouTube - the first ones to sign agreements," says Candice Morrissey, head of YouTube music partnerships in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "We have a revenue share arrangement with our content partners, so the more they succeed the more we succeed. The more revenues that are created, the better it is for everybody. We hear their complaints about the amount of consumption, but I feel they are maybe not looking at it in the right way or through the right lens. The advertising business model is based on consumption. We want these revenues to grow in the future and we are convinced the advertising model will work for everybody."

Morrissey adds that while she wants the service to be as successful as possible, the industry should not be solely dependent on a single platform. "Even the biggest YouTube stars are developing businesses outside of YouTube - doing a book or making movies," she says. "That makes a lot of sense. YouTube is the focus for them as that is where their engaged audience is."

Traditionally it has been the label that has sat between the artist and the audience, and their business model has revolved around the acquisition and exploitation of sound recording rights: insisting on being paid for every use and refusing to loosen their stranglehold on copyrights.

NoCopyrightSounds (the clue is in the name) was set up in 2011 by Billy Woodford to address a problem for his video games review channel on YouTube. He wanted to use music in those videos, but the only copyright-free music online - on sites such as Creative Commons was - to his taste, not very good. There was also a risk of having a copyright strike against his channel if he used music from a label without paying for it.

His idea was to scour SoundCloud for good copyright-free music and make it available to gamers, and others on YouTube, for free. All they had to do was list the name of the artist and song so any viewers, if they liked the music, could investigate further. "I was just promoting free music," Woodford says of the early days of NCS. "I saw a pretty good business opportunity as no one else was doing it. Still to this day, record labels haven't seen the potential in this."

The business model behind NCS is to use YouTube and YouTubers to build interest in music and for that to be monetised elsewhere. It regards YouTube as the starting point to make money through other channels - primarily via links to Spotify and Apple Music. "The way I have always seen it is people using our music are showcasing it in their videos to potentially hundreds of thousands of people," Woodford explains. "If you get 10% of those people who like the song [to play it elsewhere], it keeps growing like that."

Those using NCS music in their videos are politely asked to list the song details and maybe add links to premium music services - but NCS will not take the music down if the user does not do this. It is largely left to good faith as opposed to the licence-first strategy of labels. "A lot of the big YouTubers always credit the artists," he says. "But I don't want to start bringing licences into it. I just want to keep in on trust that YouTube creators will credit us."

Alan Walker could soon be a superstar thanks to this new ecosystem. He got his break via NCS. The 18-year-old British-Norwegian uploaded his track Fade to YouTube via NoCopyrightSounds and gained huge interest. A rewrite and a remix of the song, as Faded, with a new top line, got him a deal with Sony Music Sweden and the video has now drawn 488m views - about a third of the views of Adele's Hello.

"It struck me as a brilliant way to make music and to market music," says Gunnar Greve Pettersen, Walker's manager and co-writer on Faded. "What Alan had achieved when he was signed to NCS was a big reason why he treated it more like a marketing channel and a way to distribute his music. There is definitely a different approach and strategy within NCS and the other YouTube-based companies [compared with] the traditional music industry. They have completely opposite approaches in how to utilise YouTube and other digital platforms."

Working hand-in-hand with NCS is AEI Group, which has invested in the company and provides infrastructure for it. They both operate under this new way of thinking that cuts free from the traditional approaches that they feel limits the new industry. Diluk Dias, MD of AEI Group, believes YouTube is a godsend. His company looks for music on SoundCloud, tests and builds it on YouTube and then makes money from Spotify streams, downloads and ticket sales.

"You should see YouTube as a platform for engagement and to build a relationship - to pull people into your paid funnels elsewhere," Dias says. He feels YouTube channels have been key in building Faded's popularity. For example, the track features in a video made by tech channel TechRax, in which someone drops an iPhone into a lava lamp. That video has now passed 14m views but was not monetised. Rather, it was seen as a way to extend the track's reach.

"We have not used Content ID [YouTube's copyright identification system] and have not set it to monetise the track," says Dias of Faded. "We gave this piece of content to everyone on YouTube and invited them to distribute it far and wide. We put links to Spotify and iTunes in there and it got to 30m plays on Spotify fairly quickly. It was also doing a few thousand downloads a week on iTunes. We were not concerned about the monetisation [of use on other YouTube videos]."

The track is now on 405m streams on Spotify which means, based on its average per-stream rate of $.0007, it would have generated roughly $2.8m (£2.1m) in songwriting and recorded music royalties. YouTube was seen as pivotal in promoting the track and the thinking is that, without it, it would never have taken off on Spotify.

With its expansive reach and helpful data, YouTube is, in Dias' eyes, more powerful than radio - which the music industry still sees as the kingmaker for hits.

"Radio is now almost the last place [we go to]," he says of how his own company's promotional strategies and priorities have changed. "By the time you have built the record on streaming services and on YouTube, it's already a hit and is already making money for you. For me that is hugely exciting."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Taylor Swift is one of a number of musicians to publicly take on YouTube, calling for better protections against copyright infringement and better pay for artists. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/(Credit too long, see caption)

James Gaster is the founder of Mahogany Sessions, a YouTube channel designed to showcase and break new acts. He believes YouTube has allowed his business to exist but also get to a point where it is big enough to attract brands and sponsors who will help bankroll what they do. The assault on YouTube is more political than is being let on, he says.

"With all the major label contracts coming up for renegotiation it makes absolute sense [to attack it]," Gaster explains. "These are huge businesses run by intelligent people and as much as it's a mud-slinging exercise at the moment, I am hopeful they will reach a middle ground where artists are being [properly] remunerated and YouTube continues to grow its platform and its offerings to artists. YouTube has given us and many independent artists an audience and an opportunity to build a brand. That's allowed us to exercise a business that goes far beyond what's on YouTube."

None of this is likely to change the minds of the major labels, major publishers and the "1%" of pop stars such as Paul McCartney, Elton John and Taylor Swift, who are steadfast in their belief that YouTube must be taken to task. But while their status means they dominate the headlines, their stance does not reflect the industry as a whole. Besides, the music business has never been completely united on any industry change, and YouTube is no exception.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is YouTube wrecking the music industry - or putting new artists in the spotlight?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney leading the charge, it's easy to think the entire music industry is doing battle with YouTube. But, with countless artists and enterprises using the site as a springboard to success, it's not that simple

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As artists, record labels, music publishers and managers line up to lobby the US Congress and the European Union, it might seem as if YouTube is the worst thing to happen to the music business since Napster in 1999. The streaming service, the aggrieved parties claim, is causing a massive "value gap" that is unsustainable. In brief, millions of users watching billions of videos are contributing peanuts towards ad revenue. The video service is also, they feel, building a huge business around their copyrights by gaming the safe harbour exemptions in the law, which mean it is absolved of guilt if its users upload music without a licence and only has to comply if told to take it down.

According to those who oppose the service, YouTube is slowly killing the music industry, one tiny cut at a time. It is anti-artist and anti-copyright, they claim. Meanwhile, every major artist has a channel on YouTube and wouldn't dream of releasing a new record without YouTube involved in its launch.

Although many have a conflicted relationship with YouTube, there is a generational conflict dividing the field. Those in the "old" music industry want to keep things the way they always were, nailing down copyright in every way possible. Yet around them a "new" business is emerging - prescient and whip-smart artists, managers, labels and media organisations - who see YouTube as a facilitator of a creative renaissance rather than a death sentence.

Leeds-based singer-songwriter Hannah Trigwell describes discovering YouTube's promotional potential as "like finding treasure". Six years ago, she started uploading videos of her own songs, all without using her real name, to avoid her classmates finding out what she was doing. It was a stark contrast to the busking she had been doing.

"I didn't have a fanbase at the time and it was difficult to get gigs with promoters because no one knew who I was," she says. "It was obvious to me that unless I was very lucky with the right person coming along at the right time, I was going to have to forge my own journey."

She praises the immediacy of the YouTube platform, whereby she can get instant feedback on songs or works in progress, as well as its global reach. A cover of Tracy Chapman's Fast Car was a success on her channel and the data tools YouTube supplies to all users revealed an unexpected detail: her fastest growing audience was in south-east Asia.

Although Trigwell knows she cannot survive on YouTube income alone, she believes it provides opportunities for profit to be made. "YouTube is definitely my main focus, but it is primarily a promotional tool," she says. "The things that come indirectly from YouTube - the touring and selling merchandise online - would be impossible without it."

Having recently signed a partnership deal with Absolute Label Services - a music marketing and distribution company - she does not see YouTube as a fast track to a traditional record contract. "If the right one came along I would consider it, but I'm not desperate for a record deal as I am a full-time musician right now," she says. "YouTube has made it possible to be like that."

Amid the mounting assault, YouTube argues that it has introduced tools specifically for the music industry, notably "cards" that let owners annotate their videos and create links to ticketing sites, streaming sites and download stores - essentially turning YouTube feeds into sales channels.

"The music industry were our very first partners on YouTube - the first ones to sign agreements," says Candice Morrissey, head of YouTube music partnerships in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "We have a revenue share arrangement with our content partners, so the more they succeed the more we succeed. The more revenues that are created, the better it is for everybody. We hear their complaints about the amount of consumption, but I feel they are maybe not looking at it in the right way or through the right lens. The advertising business model is based on consumption. We want these revenues to grow in the future and we are convinced the advertising model will work for everybody."

Morrissey adds that while she wants the service to be as successful as possible, the industry should not be solely dependent on a single platform. "Even the biggest YouTube stars are developing businesses outside of YouTube - doing a book or making movies," she says. "That makes a lot of sense. YouTube is the focus for them as that is where their engaged audience is."

Traditionally it has been the label that has sat between the artist and the audience, and their business model has revolved around the acquisition and exploitation of sound recording rights: insisting on being paid for every use and refusing to loosen their stranglehold on copyrights.

NoCopyrightSounds (the clue is in the name) was set up in 2011 by Billy Woodford to address a problem for his video games review channel on YouTube. He wanted to use music in those videos, but the only copyright-free music online - on sites such as Creative Commons was - to his taste, not very good. There was also a risk of having a copyright strike against his channel if he used music from a label without paying for it.

His idea was to scour SoundCloud for good copyright-free music and make it available to gamers, and others on YouTube, for free. All they had to do was list the name of the artist and song so any viewers, if they liked the music, could investigate further. "I was just promoting free music," Woodford says of the early days of NCS. "I saw a pretty good business opportunity as no one else was doing it. Still to this day, record labels haven't seen the potential in this."

The business model behind NCS is to use YouTube and YouTubers to build interest in music and for that to be monetised elsewhere. It regards YouTube as the starting point to make money through other channels - primarily via links to Spotify and Apple Music. "The way I have always seen it is people using our music are showcasing it in their videos to potentially hundreds of thousands of people," Woodford explains. "If you get 10% of those people who like the song [to play it elsewhere], it keeps growing like that."

Those using NCS music in their videos are politely asked to list the song details and maybe add links to premium music services - but NCS will not take the music down if the user does not do this. It is largely left to good faith as opposed to the licence-first strategy of labels. "A lot of the big YouTubers always credit the artists," he says. "But I don't want to start bringing licences into it. I just want to keep in on trust that YouTube creators will credit us."

Alan Walker could soon be a superstar thanks to this new ecosystem. He got his break via NCS. The 18-year-old British-Norwegian uploaded his track Fade to YouTube via NoCopyrightSounds and gained huge interest. A rewrite and a remix of the song, as Faded, with a new top line, got him a deal with Sony Music Sweden and the video has now drawn 488m views - about a third of the views of Adele's Hello.

"It struck me as a brilliant way to make music and to market music," says Gunnar Greve Pettersen, Walker's manager and co-writer on Faded. "What Alan had achieved when he was signed to NCS was a big reason why he treated it more like a marketing channel and a way to distribute his music. There is definitely a different approach and strategy within NCS and the other YouTube-based companies [compared with] the traditional music industry. They have completely opposite approaches in how to utilise YouTube and other digital platforms."

Working hand-in-hand with NCS is AEI Group, which has invested in the company and provides infrastructure for it. They both operate under this new way of thinking that cuts free from the traditional approaches that they feel limits the new industry. Diluk Dias, MD of AEI Group, believes YouTube is a godsend. His company looks for music on SoundCloud, tests and builds it on YouTube and then makes money from Spotify streams, downloads and ticket sales.

"You should see YouTube as a platform for engagement and to build a relationship - to pull people into your paid funnels elsewhere," Dias says. He feels YouTube channels have been key in building Faded's popularity. For example, the track features in a video made by tech channel TechRax, in which someone drops an iPhone into a lava lamp. That video has now passed 14m views but was not monetised. Rather, it was seen as a way to extend the track's reach.

"We have not used Content ID [YouTube's copyright identification system] and have not set it to monetise the track," says Dias of Faded. "We gave this piece of content to everyone on YouTube and invited them to distribute it far and wide. We put links to Spotify and iTunes in there and it got to 30m plays on Spotify fairly quickly. It was also doing a few thousand downloads a week on iTunes. We were not concerned about the monetisation [of use on other YouTube videos]."

The track is now on 405m streams on Spotify which means, based on its average per-stream rate of $.0007, it would have generated roughly $2.8m (£2.1m) in songwriting and recorded music royalties. YouTube was seen as pivotal in promoting the track and the thinking is that, without it, it would never have taken off on Spotify.

With its expansive reach and helpful data, YouTube is, in Dias' eyes, more powerful than radio - which the music industry still sees as the kingmaker for hits.

"Radio is now almost the last place [we go to]," he says of how his own company's promotional strategies and priorities have changed. "By the time you have built the record on streaming services and on YouTube, it's already a hit and is already making money for you. For me that is hugely exciting."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Taylor Swift is one of a number of musicians to publicly take on YouTube, calling for better protections against copyright infringement and better pay for artists. Photograph: Kevin Mazur/(Credit too long, see caption)

James Gaster is the founder of Mahogany Sessions, a YouTube channel designed to showcase and break new acts. He believes YouTube has allowed his business to exist but also get to a point where it is big enough to attract brands and sponsors who will help bankroll what they do. The assault on YouTube is more political than is being let on, he says.

"With all the major label contracts coming up for renegotiation it makes absolute sense [to attack it]," Gaster explains. "These are huge businesses run by intelligent people and as much as it's a mud-slinging exercise at the moment, I am hopeful they will reach a middle ground where artists are being [properly] remunerated and YouTube continues to grow its platform and its offerings to artists. YouTube has given us and many independent artists an audience and an opportunity to build a brand. That's allowed us to exercise a business that goes far beyond what's on YouTube."

None of this is likely to change the minds of the major labels, major publishers and the "1%" of pop stars such as Paul McCartney, Elton John and Taylor Swift, who are steadfast in their belief that YouTube must be taken to task. But while their status means they dominate the headlines, their stance does not reflect the industry as a whole. Besides, the music business has never been completely united on any industry change, and YouTube is no exception.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is YouTube wrecking the music industry - or putting new artists in the spotlight?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
With Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney leading the charge, it's easy to think the entire music industry is doing battle with YouTube. But, with countless artists and enterprises using the site as a springboard to success, it's not that simple

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
ANDREAS JOHNSEN RALF CHRISTENSEN HENRIK MOLTKE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Copyright Society of Nigeria OLIVIER CHASTAN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
FRED BENENSON BRIGITTE ALFTER FILIP STRUWE MARTIN VON HALLER ERIK HANSEN SHANNON

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
Amazon 's Retail Revolution Business Boomers BBC Full

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Good Copy Bad Copy (2007) Copyright and Culture Documentary

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A documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers, artists and filesharing service providers.

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'Goog copy bad copy' A documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEKl5I_Q044

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Artist to fan relationship - social media

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Artist to fan relationship - social media

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https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140520000824-101858170-the-relationship-that-exists-between-the-artist-and-the-fan-on-social-networks

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Amanda Palmer: The art of asking | TED Talk

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Don’t make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new relationship between artist and fan.

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Amanda Palmer demonstrates the concept - the art of asking https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking?language=en

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Streaming - youtube can survive without the music industry, but can the music industry survive without youtube?

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Nothing in the music industry happens in a vacuum. Last month, notoriously bellicose artist manager Irving Azoff marshalled the support of 180 musicians to lobby policymakers in Washington to radically redraw the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This was a piece of legislation written in the dial-up and Nokia 5120 handsets days of 1998 but that still governs the way content is circulated in an age of fibre optic broadband and 4G-enabled smartphones. By "revise the DMCA", what they really meant was to nail YouTube to the floor by making it pay more in music royalties while also detonating the "safe harbour" exemptions that mean services such as YouTube are not held liable for any copyright infringements by their users. YouTube argues its Content ID system is so sophisticated today that content owners can quickly and easily identify their music online that has been uploaded by others and either block it or make a claim and monetise it. The rights holders are claiming it is not robust enough and they are potentially losing millions as a result.

Marching in lockstep, more than 1,000 musicians last week wrote to the European commission to demand it clips the wings of YouTube, which stands accused of "unfairly siphoning value" away from recording artists and songwriters. This echoes the record company trade associations - the IFPI, RIAA and BPI - synchronising their bemoaning of the "value gap" that threatens to swallow record labels and musicians. While they all said that it was not an attack on just YouTube, it was clear who was being held up as the biggest offender. This is the music industry's most resolute attack ever against one company and the legislation they feel is failing them. There are reasons to support them as music has been greatly devalued in the past two decades, but there are also problems with how they are going about addressing this.

Wheeling out millionaires such as Taylor Swift and Bono to front campaigns demanding they are paid more rarely gets much sympathy from the public. The paradox is that their fame will get the headlines but equally cause the public to suck their teeth.

The numbers, however, are arresting. The IFPI spelled them out. In 2015, 68 million streaming music subscribers contributed $2bn in revenues to record labels (equal to just under $30 per user) while 900 million users of ad-funded services only generated $634m (or just $0.70 each). YouTube is, with more than one billion regular users, clearly making up the bulk of those $0.70 "consumers" and the record business is arguing this is unsustainable.

Equally, the record companies do not exactly have the moral high ground here as lawsuits over contractual and licensing terms by artists appear regularly. In the 1990s, George Michael sued Sony but failed to break his recording contract, while Prince went to war with Warner Music, going as far as writing the word "Slave" on his face. The rise of digital opened the floodgates even wider. Pink Floyd sued EMI over iTunes royalties in 2010, while Universal Music Group had to pay a settlement of upwards of $11.5m to several artists last year after a class action lawsuit over download rates.

If the record industry succeeds in its war on the value gap it will have to ensure that any windfall is properly passed through to the artists. The labels cannot be seen to be getting paid in wagyu beef while fobbing their artists off with fish fingers.

Much of this war on YouTube can be traced back to "the MTV mistake", which is commonly held up as the greatest bad deal the music industry ever concluded in the US. It produced hugely expensive videos to fill the MTV schedules and because they were powerful promotional tools it never thought videos could be money spinners in and of themselves. Until, that is, the industry twigged that Viacom, MTV's parent company, was building a huge business off the back of these videos by not paying royalties. There is something of an irony here that the music industry is now gunning for YouTube, the company that a decade ago made MTV irrelevant and which Viacom tried, but failed, to sue for $1bn in a copyright infringement case that dragged out between 2007 and 2014.

The industry always swore it would never make "the MTV mistake" again but, like Homer Simpson waving an online law degree above his head, it did it again with iTunes and then again with YouTube.

Music companies have already had disputes with YouTube, with Warner temporarily pulling its catalogue in 2008 and then reinstating it under much more favourable terms. PRS for Music, representing songwriters, did something similar in 2009 and actually renewed its licence again in 2013. This is not their first rodeo but it is hard to muster sympathy when they negotiate a deal and then, only a few years later, say the deal is not the one they wanted. That either smacks of avarice or incompetence.

Yet all this bullishness in the war on the value gap can only ever go so far as they know if they push too hard the victory will be pyrrhic. While labels and artists might wail about how badly they are paid by YouTube and how it is gaming US and European laws to absolve itself of any guilt over copyright infringements, they would wail a lot louder if YouTube disappeared tomorrow.

There is a complex relationship of mutual antagonism and mutual dependency here. Take YouTube out of the equation and the easiest win in music marketing evaporates like a drop of water on a hot hob. Labels and artists will use YouTube to build and target audiences, to debut videos and also present the viewing data as part of the ammunition in their plugging to TV and radio. It is a huge part of their marketing strategy and losing it overnight would be calamitous.

It is no coincidence this is all happening as the three major labels' contracts with YouTube come up for renegotiation. Both sides know that the relationship today might be toxic, but the alternative of pulling all music from YouTube would be worse.

The music industry needs YouTube much more than YouTube needs the music industry - but it cannot bring itself to admit that. Not publicly, anyway. This, for better or worse, is how the field of negotiation is unevenly tilted. YouTube could survive without music, but the hard question the music industry has to ask itself now is if it can survive without YouTube.
Topics

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Rock stars go to war with YouTube at their peril | Eamonn Forde

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Nothing in the music industry happens in a vacuum. Last month, notoriously bellicose artist manager Irving Azoff marshalled the support of 180 musicians to lobby policymakers in Washington to radically redraw the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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In the first weeks of 2000 the founders of Napster were in their office above a bank in San Mateo, California, considering dizzying numbers. Figures scrawled on a whiteboard told how many people around the world had installed their file-sharing application and were using it to download music from each other's computers. As recounted in Downloaded - a documentary soon to premiere at the SXSW film festival, telling the story of a piece of software that came and went and whipped up a new digital music industry in its slip - Napster had 20 million users at the time. Some way from San Mateo, in suburban London I had just become one myself.

I was 17, and the owner of an irregular music collection that numbered about 20 albums, most of them a real shame ( OMC's How Bizarre, the Grease 2 soundtrack). One day I had unsupervised access to the family PC and, for reasons forgotten, an urge to hear the campy orchestral number from the film Austin Powers. I was a model Napster user: internet-equipped, impatient and mostly ignorant of the ethical and legal particulars of peer-to-peer file-sharing. I installed the software, searched Napster's vast list of MP3 files, and soon had Soul Bossa Nova plinking kilobyte by kilobyte on to my hard drive.

"It's difficult to describe to people... how much material was suddenly available," the technology guru John Perry Barlow tells Alex Winter, the director of Downloaded, in his new documentary. Speaking to me on the phone from the US, Winter added: "There was no ramp up. There was no transition. It was like that famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the prehistoric monkey throws a bone in the air and it turns into a spaceship. Napster was a ridiculous leap forward."

They're right, it was seismic. I was part of the web-straddling generation. The internet, when it came in our teens, was welcome, exciting and fathomable, but it changed things briskly and sometimes bewilderingly. Music was something you bought after protracted debate with friends in the aisles of Our Price, and then, suddenly, songs were accessible from home. They didn't cost anything. We were wilfully blinkered, probably, on the exact details of this last point.

I asked colleagues of a similar age what they remembered of Napster's arrival. "The thrill," said one, whose first download was by Smashing Pumpkins, "even when I listened to the music through my mum's tinny computer speakers." Another quickly sought to mine Marlena Shaw's backlist and "couldn't believe it worked". For my part - plundering singles by Artful Dodger, by Semisonic - I have a memory of actually looking over my shoulder. How was this possible? It was as if the door to a bank vault had been left open, no guards in sight.

Getting music off the internet before Napster was tricky, unreliable - as someone remarks in Downloaded, "a colossal pain in the ass". Winter says he had "friends who would spend 14 hours trying to pull a Butthole Surfers song offline. And it would fail. And they would try again. And it would fail."

In about 1998, someone with the username "napster" revealed to those present in an internet chatroom that he'd been working on a piece of software to fix the problem. It would allow people to dip into each other's hard drives, and share their MP3 music files. (The MP3, devised in the mid 1990s, had become the dominant format for digital audio in the emerging internet age, and has pretty much remained so.)

In the chatroom, people scoffed. Share? Why would anyone do that? But Sean Parker, an aspiring entrepreneur, liked the idea. He was 18, skinny, with gelled-up red hair and a tendency to look at the floor when he spoke. Parker suggested they collaborate and he met "napster", or Shawn Fanning, for the first time in person. Fanning was a year younger, an unsmiling boy from Massachusetts who shaved his head against the curled, or "nappy", hair that had earned him his nickname.

The term Napster passed, of course, to the piece of software Fanning was coding. Working on a borrowed PC in his uncle's Massachusetts office, sleeping in a nearby utility cupboard in order to conduct days-long programming sessions, Fanning had a finished product by the spring of 1999. Parker, meanwhile, had wheedled $50,000 from investors, and the pair moved to California. Friends from the chatroom were hired as staff, and Napster was launched in May 1999. By October it had 4m songs in circulation. By March 2000 - when, for my part, I'd already siphoned off a few hundred of those 4m - the Napster community numbered more than 20 million.

By now the heads of the major record labels had gathered for a summit. In the Washington offices of the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA), execs were encouraged to play a game that was informally called Stump the Napster - in other words, try to find at least one of their new singles that wasn't being shared online. All were appropriately horrified and an action was launched against Napster for breach of copyright.

The first year of the new millennium was the first to register a dip in global record sales. That scared the labels, and before long individual Napster users were being sued too, some 18,000 all told. Alex Winter told me he met a woman, in the course of making his documentary, who over a decade later was still embroiled in a multi-million-dollar action. She'd once used Napster to download 26 songs.

"The world had changed [because of the internet] and it was never going back," Winter says. "Well, I have a problem with black-and-white thinking when it comes to big cultural changes. People at the time were saying: 'It's fine for me to take whatever I want. Get over it, grandpa!' And on the other side they were saying: 'This is piracy and you're a criminal.' I don't think either was right. With Napster there was an enormous amount of grey."

Opponents saw no grey. Litigation against Napster came from all angles. The RIAA sued, so did Metallica and Dr Dre. The court battles dragged on and on - long after Parker, millions of users and even Fanning himself had left Napster behind.
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Quick! Get to a computer! There was a weekend in February 2001 that felt like the last days of Rome. In the US courts a judge had found for the RIAA in the breach-of-copyright case, and Napster had been ordered to start charging or else close entirely. There were 48 hours of free music left and I remember the panic, trying to think of tracks I vaguely wanted (Pure Shores, Bound 4 Da Reload) but hadn't yet downloaded (Wild Wild West, Mi Chico Latino). Would there ever be such an opportunity again?

By now the individual songs on my hard drive vastly outnumbered those on the CDs I owned. I had not been using the service cannily, to complete an exhaustive music collection - as Winter had, for instance. He was in his mid-30s that manic February, and remembers booting up multiple PCs to leach off any Coltrane rarities he was still missing.

My approach had always been more of a woozy supermarket sweep, and it meant I'd built up a curious one-track miscellany. At an age by which I should have had a cataclysmic encounter with an album such as Blood on the Tracks, I'd sought out just one Dylan song, The Man in Me, because I'd heard it used to good effect in a film. Very occasionally I was helped to discover an alien band or artist (I remember accidentally getting a cover of Creep by the Cure, hoping for Radiohead, and thinking: hey, this Robert Smith sounds OK...), but by and large my appreciation of music was stunted. When you could download work on a millisecond's whim, there was no bond established. Being free meant no investment.

My experience was not typical. That Marlena Shaw-pilfering colleague told me: "Napster hugely expanded my musical horizons. I felt like one of those mantis shrimps with trinocular vision." Others used Napster to try before buying, something a company spokesman pointed out when the issue of file-sharing was brought before an exploratory US Senate committee in 2000: "A chorus of studies show that Napster users buy more records as a result of using [the software]."

The question was batted about in courtrooms. Were file-sharers really in the wrong? Was Napster? Not a single MP3 was stored on its servers; the software simply enabled users to download from each other. Anyway, might it not be it a good thing that so many people, 57 million users at Napster's peak, were excitedly seeking out music online?

Certain musicians thought so. Wyclef Jean wanted his music to be heard, however it was heard. Chuck D thought of file-sharing as "the new radio". Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins was resigned: "There's no stopping it," he said. "This revolution has already taken place." Peter Gabriel even backed file-sharing software of his own, though the service, unromantically titled WebAudioNet, did not have much impact.

By the summer of 2000, Napster had dramatically expanded and about 14,000 songs were being downloaded every minute. Fanning was a star, sought out at a tech conference by two little-known developers, Larry and Sergey, who told him how much they envied what he'd built. When Time magazine put Fanning on its cover in October 2000, an accompanying article gushed: "[His] programme ranks among the greatest internet applications ever, up there with email and instant messaging."

But the truth was that, for Napster, terminal rot had set in. Sean Parker had been quietly, hurtfully ousted from the company after an email was unearthed in which he referred to file-sharers as pirates, something Napster's lawyers were always careful to deny. Shown the door, Parker asked Fanning for help, but his friend was so weary and disillusioned that he only said: "You're lucky. You can go and do something else." Before long, Fanning left too.

Napster had lost its zest. Rudderless and haemorrhaging relevance, it began a series of doomed manoeuvres. After the court-ordered shutdown, bosses flirted with the idea of reinstating free sharing, but with music that had the lo-fi quality of radio. They gave away free MP3 players. A UK collaboration was announced with Dixons, never the sexiest brand, and by the time Apple was ready to launch its slick iTunes Store in Britain, Napster had a new tie-up - with the Post Office.

As iTunes grew in stature, there was some hope, says Winter, that Napster might hang around as "Pepsi to iTunes' Coke". To that end, the brand was bought up by a succession of different corporations, each hoping to recapture some of its original cachet. Too late - by 2006 the digital music market, spurred into life by Fanning and Parker, was worth £560m but Napster had fewer than 1 million users left. By 2008 the numbers were no longer made public.

An intriguing hint is floated in Downloaded that Napster was not only a sinkhole for investors' cash; it only ever generated proper revenue by selling T-shirts. Fanning and Parker don't seem to have made any money from it, and were left with big legal debts to go with long-lasting frustrations. "They both spent a lot of time just free-falling after Napster's demise," Winter tells me. "I think it's taken a long time for them to reconcile what was actually good about what they did."

Latterly they have thrived. Fanning founded a gaming company, Rupture, which he sold for $30m. Parker partnered with Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook and then invested in the music-streaming service Spotify. He is now a billionaire, and in 2010 was portrayed as a quick-witted lady's man by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher's Facebook movie The Social Network. Not so bad.

"They were like a hydra, two heads," says Winter who has had some experience as part of a double act himself. As an actor in his youth, he played Bill alongside Keanu Reeves' Ted in the Bill & Ted films. "I can identify with having fame really early in a creative partnership, with the stress it puts on a friendship. But both Fanning and Parker were incredibly smart. What they created at 17, 18 - they were visionaries."

Selfishly, I'm glad Napster faded when it did. Though copycat software rose up afterwards, downloading music never again felt cloudless. By the time Napster turned off the tap, I'd left home for university, and had got to know a record shop in my new area. The staff there were mercilessly good at convincing wide-eyes like me that the new Belle & Sebastian was worth paying for, and I belatedly started to consider albums as complete packages, to be listened to from start to finish, to invest in.

Just how pervasive Napster was, for a particular generational slice, became clear to me a few years later. On a long drive through California, I put on a homemade CD of mostly legitimately bought MP3s plus a few old Napster downloads. There were three Americans in the car, and when Steppenwolf's grand road-trip anthem, Magic Carpet Ride, came on we all sang along - sang along, too, when a mechanical blip interrupted the chorus. Nobody could believe it. Years before, on computers thousands of miles apart, we'd all downloaded the same corrupted MP3 and got to know Steppenwolf with blip included.

Napster had weightier legacies. Facebook, iTunes and other towering digital giants have flourished using elements first teased or pioneered by Fanning's software. And Winter's documentary makes clear an authentic regret, these days, from inside the music industry that Napster was not embraced. Even while one executive remembers it as "an ambush... Pearl Harbour", others are damning of the hurry to crush such a thriving online community. Island Records' founder, Chris Blackwell, laments the fact that there wasn't a formal move to reach out to its 50 million users at a time when CD sales were tumbling. The industry might be belatedly wrestling a business model into shape in the online age, but an opportunity to do so a decade ago was probably missed.

Napster, I was surprised to find, lingers on in 2013. If you visit its website, you'll learn that it was acquired two years ago by the music subscription service Rhapsody. Prospective users are sunnily advised that file-sharing is fun, easy and possible on a variety of payment plans. Parker and Fanning, meanwhile, have reunited. They're now at work on a fresh venture, a video-conferencing application called Airtime, which seeks to pair up strangers who have similar interests. An online advert imagines two models, brought together because they're both fans of Skrillex and the film Inception, becoming great friends. Other new acquaintances are shown solving Rubik's cubes together, and duetting on the violin.

Well would it really be stranger than two teenagers, across a few hectic months, teaching the internet to share?
Downloaded (VH1 Rock Docs) premieres at the SXSW film festival in Austin, Texas on 10 March

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As a new film tells the story of Napster, Tom Lamont recalls the incredible sense of liberation he felt as a young music fan, suddenly able to download any record he wanted

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15 years since the start of Napster
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/feb/24/napster-music-free-file-sharing

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MIDI (pronounced "mid-e") is a technology that makes creating, playing, or just learning about music easier and more rewarding. Playing a musical instrument can provide a lifetime of enjoyment and friendship. Whether your goal is to play in a band, or you just want to perform privately in your home, or you want to develop your skills as a music composer or arranger, MIDI can help.
How Does MIDI Work?
There are many different kinds of devices that use MIDI, from cell phones to digital music instruments to personal computers. The one thing all MIDI devices have in common is that they speak the "language" of MIDI. This language describes the process of playing music in much the same manner as sheet music: there are MIDI Messages that describe what notes are to be played and for how long, as well as the tempo, which instruments are to be played, and at what relative volumes.

MIDI is not audio.

MIDI is not audio. So if someone says MIDI sounds bad, they really don't understand how MIDI works. Imagine if you took sheet music of a work by Beethoven and handed it to someone who can read music, but has never played the violin. Then you put in their hands a very cheap violin. The music would probably sound bad. Now take that same piece of sheet music and hand it to the first chair of a symphony orchestra playing a Stradivarius and it will sound wonderful. So MIDI depends on the quality of playback device and also also how well the description of the music fits that player.
MIDI is flexible
The fact that MIDI is a descriptive language provides tremendous flexibility.Because MIDI data is only performance instructions and not a digital version of a sound recording, it is actually possible to change the performance, whether that means changing just one note played incorrectly, or changing all of them to perform the song in an entirely new key or at a different tempo, or on different instruments.

MIDI data can be transmitted between MIDI-compatible musical instruments, or stored in a Standard MIDI File for later playback. In either case, the resulting performance will depend on how the receiving device interprets the performance instructions, just as it would in the case of a human performer reading sheet music. The ability to fix, change, add, remove, speed up or slow down any part of a musical performance is exactly why MIDI is so valuable for creating, playing and learning about music.
The Three Parts of MIDI
The original Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) specification defined a physical connector and message format for connecting devices and controlling them in "real time". A few years later Standard MIDI Files were developed as a storage format so performance information could be recalled at a later date. The three parts of MIDI are often just referred to as "MIDI ", even though they are distinctly different parts with different characteristics.

1. The MIDI Messages - the software protocol

The MIDI Messages specification (or "MIDI Protocol") is the most important part of MIDI. The protocol is made up of the MIDI messages that describe the music. There are note messages that tell the MIDI devices what note to play, there are velocity messages that tell the MIDI device how loud to play the note, there are messages to define how bright, long or short a note will be.There are Program Change messages that tell the MIDI device what instrument to play.So by studying and understanding MIDI messages you can learn how to completely describe a piece of music digitally. Look for information about MIDI messages in the "Control" section of Resources.
2. The physical transports for MIDI
Though originally intended just for use with the MIDI DIN transport as a means to connect two keyboards, MIDI messages are now used inside computers and cell phones to generate music, and transported over any number of professional and consumer interfaces (USB, Bluetooth, FireWire, etc.) to a wide variety of MIDI-equipped devices.

There are many different Cables & Connectors that are used to transport MIDI data between devices. Look for specific information in the "Connect" section of Resources.
MIDI is not slow
The "MIDI DIN" transport causes some confusion because it has specific characteristics which some people associate as characteristics of "MIDI" -- forgetting that the MIDI-DIN characteristics go away when using MIDI over other transports (and inside a computer). With computers a High Speed Serial, USB or FireWire connection is more common. USB MIDI is significantly faster than 5 pin DIN. Each transport has its own performance characteristics that might make some difference in specific applications, but in general the transport is the least important part of MIDI, as long as it allows you to connect all the devices you want use!
3. The file formats for MIDI files
The final part of MIDI is made up of the Standard MIDI Files (and variants), which are used to distribute music playable on MIDI players of both the hardware and software variety. All popular computer platforms can play MIDI files (*.mid) and there are thousands of web sites offering files for sale or even for free. Anyone can make a MIDI file using commercial (or free) software that is readily available, and many people do. Whether or not you like a specific MIDI file can depend on how well it was created, and how accurately your synthesizer plays the file... not all synthesizers are the same, and unless yours is similar to that of the file composer, what you hear may not be at all what he or she intended. Look in the "Create"section of Resources for information about how to create and use different MIDI file formats.
Even More MIDI
Many people today see MIDI as a way to accomplish something, rather than as a protocol, cable, or file format. For example, many musicians will say they "use MIDI", "compose in MIDI" or "create MIDI parts", which means they are sequencing MIDI events for playback via a synthesizer, rather than recording the audio that the synthesizer creates.

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MIDI (pronounced mid-e) is a technology that makes creating, playing, or just learning about music easier and more rewarding. Playing a musical instrument can provide a lifetime of enjoyment and friendship. Whether your goal is to play in a band, or you just want to perform privately in your home, or you want to develop your skills as a music com.....

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MIDI (pronounced "mid-e") is a technology that makes creating, playing, or just learning about music easier and more rewarding. Playing a musical instrument can provide a lifetime of enjoyment and friendship. Whether your goal is to play in a band, or you just want to perform privately in your home, or you want to develop your skills as a music composer or arranger, MIDI can help. https://www.midi.org/articles/about-midi-part-1-overview

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Unsound explores the struggle for creators trying to survive in the age of free.http://unsoundthemovie.com/

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It's certainly nothing new to find out that record labels rarely have the best interests of the musicians at heart (despite their proclivity to claim so -- especially to Congress and the press). However, a new lawsuit (sent in by a bunch of you) that pits Cher and the heirs of Sonny Bono, highlights some of the many ways that labels screw over musicians. In this case, Cher is alleging that Universal Music funneled revenue through international subsidiaries in order to completely hide how much revenue was made on Sonny & Cher music, in order to avoid paying the contractually agreed upon royalties. Again, such charges of creative accounting are legion in the industry, but it's nice to see a lawsuit detail exactly how some of the funny accounting is done. Whenever major record label folks insist that the labels have the artists' best interests in mind, it seems worthwhile to point out these sorts of stories.

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Cher Lawsuit Highlights How Record Labels Screw Over Artists

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It's certainly nothing new to find out that record labels rarely have the best interests of the musicians at heart (despite their proclivity to claim so -- especially to Congress and the press). However, a new lawsuit (sent in by a bunch of you)...

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How record labels screw over artists
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090602/2308085105.shtml

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http://musicconsultant.com/music-news-2015/direct-to-fan-platforms-billy-corgan-radio-format/#.V6fe_Pl96Uk

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http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2010/07/the_root_investigates_who_really_gets_paid_in_the_music_industry/?GT1=38002

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The music industry has identified a rare constituency willing to pay handsomely for music in the digital age: videogame-app makers. http://www.wsj.com/articles/music-industrys-new-revenue-stream-videogame-app-makers-1470562201

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-fan

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Direct to fan http://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/apple-connect-direct-to-fan-gets-the-stage-it-deserves/

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The future of the music industry

https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/175-the-future-of-the-music-industry

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Implication: Streaming and 'The Value Gap'

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/18/youtube-music-industry-artists-spotlight

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jul/24/valu-gap-music-sector-youtube

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"it’s not about major labels, these tech companies are the ones that control everything right now. Major labels aren't taking people’s money anymore, tech companies are taking the money" - NO I.D.
http://ca.complex.com/music/2015/07/no-id-interview-vince-staples-logic

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Pros and cons of signing to a major label vs indie https://bandzoogle.com/blog/major-vs-indie-what-really-happens-when-you-sign-a-record-deal