bob tarantino

Music 03.30.09

This is my new favourite webpage for the day: 2008 US Music Purchases.  Things I learned from the numbers at that page which surprised me:

• Metallica, with over 51 million albums sold, is the 4th highest-selling artist of the SoundScan era

• 5 of the top 10 best-selling artists of the Soundscan era are country artists (Garth Brooks, George Strait, Tim McGraw, Alan Jackson, Shania Twain)

• let me reiterate something: George Strait, who is awesome but whose name is unlikely to pass the lips of anybody currently working in the entertainment/celebrity industry (excluding those elements which focus on country music) is the 6th highest-selling artist of the last 20 or so years

• Alanis Morrissette's Jagged Little Pill is still the third best-selling album of the SoundScan era

• Guess who has the seventh best-selling album of the SoundScan era?  Seriously, guess.  No, really, go for it.  You're gonna get it wrong.  In fact, when I say the name, not only will you be stunned that these guys are in the top ten, you'll be stunned that you had forgotten they existed.  One last chance: seventh best-selling album of the SoundScan era?  F***ing Creed.  Dude, come on.

• Kid Rock, and I swear I am not making this up, was one of the biggest-selling artists of 2008 (taking the 6th slot); not only that, but his album Rock n' Roll Jesus, was in the top five best-selling albums of the year.  Look, I love Kid Rock, dearly, but it really hasn't been the same since the midget died.  If Kid's last album was that succesful, comparatively speaking, this industry is friggin' dying.

The Fragility of Digital Delivery

This story, about YouTube blocking music videos in Britain due to a failure to reach a new licensing agreement with the PRS (Performing Rights Society), which collects royalties in respect of and administers the licensing of the public performance right of songwriters, highlights the fragility of the music delivery mechanism in a digital age: due to the mind-numbing complexity of managing the rights issues involved, any rupture in the chain results in the consumer being unable to access music.  This is a relatively trivial example, since no one exactly *needs* to watch videos on YouTube, but if the great hope of subscription services is ever realized (i.e., listen to (but not be able to download) any music anywhere at any time), it will become critical: one broken-down negotiation and suddenly you can't listen to the music anymore (obviously excluding music you already own and can play on your own).

US Online Public Performance Royalty Decision

The big web-related news late last week was the release of the US federal district court decision which set the license fees that AOL, RealNetworks and Yahoo! have to pay to ASCAP for public performance of musical compositions (a copy of the full decision can be read here).

There is a wealth of information in the decision (despite the redaction of much of the financial information), and it serves as a handy guide to the range of licenses which are in place for public performance royalties.  At page 83 begins a discussion of the "experimental" licenses which ASCAP had been offering to online service providers, which contained a 3% license fee.  Starting at page 93 is a description of the license agreements which ASCAP had entered into with a variety of music users (inlcuding Music Choice (which provides music to satellite and cable TV subscribers), the Big Three US TV networks, commercial radio stations, cable TV stations, and "music intensive" cable TV stations.  At page 98 begins a discussion of the license agreements entered into by the online services with record companies for the right to communicate music videos.  At page 105 begins a discussion of the licenses which have been entered into by BMI (a rival public performance rights society).  Starting at page 116 is the court's conclusion, which makes for interesting reading (well, for an entertainment lawyer - YMMV), as it details all of the factors the court took into account in arriving at its rate of 2.5% of adjusted "music use" revenues.

Glancing through the decision put me in mind of a comment I had started to write about a year ago relating to the then-recent decision by the Canadian Copyright Board with respect to mechanical royalties payable for online music sales.  Mechanical royalties and public performance royalties are obviously rather different, but the opening paragraph of the comment conveys (rather poorly, reading it now), one of the frustrations that I think many in the industry feel:

It took nearly three years to the day, but on March 16, 2007 the Canadian Copyright Board released its tariff decision regarding “mechanical royalties” for online music sales.  To summarize: the royalty is 8.8% of the retail sale price of a “permanent download”, except that there is a minimum royalty of $0.59, unless the song is sold as part of a bundle, in which case the minimum royalty is $0.45; that being said, there is an entirely arbitrary “temporary discount” of ten percent to the foregoing rates for the life of the tariff.  Oh, and this tariff expires on December 31, 2007, so all of this could and likely will change.  And we haven’t even mentioned the other types of online uses to which the tariff applies (“limited downloads” and “on-demand streaming”).  Confused yet?

Which is a long way of saying that it really is a shame that the various regulatory and governance structures in place (and I'll include as a "governance structure" freely-contracted agreements) have been so hard-pressed to make "final" determinations of these issues (I use the quotes around "final" advisedly, since as noted above in the Canadian context, the tariffs expired at the end of last year - and as the Copyright Board noted in its April 2008 decision relating to the next round of hearings to establisht the post-2007 rates, those new rates could be "lower, higher or the same").  SOCAN's Tariff 22A, which covered online public performance royalties in Canada the period from 1996 to 2007 was released in October 2007 - in other words, if you were in a position to be streaming music online in 1996, it would be eleven years before you found out what public performance royalties you owed. 

It's been, what, nine years since online availability of music started becaming relatively widespread (with the rise of mass internet adoption and broadband availability)?  And only it's only in the last couple of years that we're starting to get clarity on what that costs?  Amazing.  And, without getting too melodramatic, tragic. 

This level of complexity and uncertainty is troublesome, since it acts as a retardant to market entrants and does its part to prevent a healthy multiplicty of options in the marketplace.  Having to set aside reserves against a contingent liability (without having any clear idea as to when that liability will crystallize) means that capital is lying idle, rather than being profitably re-invested.  Smaller US players (i.e., those without the financial or legal wherewithal to embark on a fight through the courts with ASCAP) were put in the position of signing the "experimental" licenses - at a rate higher than what the rate court found was fair in the context of larger competitors.  And the decision-makers are still playing catch-up.  When the history of the internet is written, I'm guessing the chroniclers will shake their heads in disbelief at how intransigent both the actors and the regulators were in addressing these issues in a timely manner.

Richie Loses

The decision in the Richie Ramone case can be accessed here.  The short version: Richard Reinhardt (p/k/a Richie Ramone) was a member of punk band the Ramones from 1983 to 1987, during which time he wrote six songs for the group.  Richie argued that his agreement with the band's corporation (Ramones Productions) only allowed the band to exploit his songs by means of physical exploitation (i.e., vinyl albums, cassettes, CDs, etc.) and did not extend to digital methods of exploitation.  Richie sued, inter alia, the band, Apple and Wal-Mart for unauthorized use of his copyrighted compositions.  Richie lost - the court (see esp. pages 14-16 of the opinion) held that the contract on its face contemplated exploitation by means of "all forms of reproduction .... now or hereafter known", which includes digital modes of reproduction and transmission.  Even shorter version: always draft your rights language clauses expansively, and make liberal use of fun phrases like "all methods, media and modes of exploitation, communication, reproduction and transmission", "now known or hereafter devised", "throughtout the universe and in perpetuity" and "including, without limitation".

"melisma for melisma, bromide for bromide"

Jody Rosen at Slate ponders the significance of Mariah Carey:

have learned to cherish Carey's singing for its brute force, blinding technique, and, yes, showboatiness—to place Mariah's vocal "runs" in the tradition of John Coltrane's "sheets of sound," the pummeling drumming of Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, and Eddie Van Halen's "Eruption" (aka the Magna Carta of shredding 1980s guitar solos).

Not analogues that came immediately to my mind, but I still think her live renditions of the Lep's "Bringing on the Heartbreak" from a couple of years ago was pretty freakin' killer.

The Deep Funk 12.31.2007

Damn - been a while, eh?  Belatedly, my favourite songs of 2007.  In no particular order.  I had been aiming for ten, but, um, couldn't think of any others.  Andrew Potter, one of the country's brightest commentators, frowns on year-end "best of" lists because it's "like trying to shoehorn the stream of sense-data into the artificial January-to-December format".  Which is correct, and yet terribly lame.  This is about bringing down the house.  Here goes.

• Linkin Park, Bleed It Out - I like hearing Binnington shred his throat into certain polyp territory, but what really puts this over the top is when Shinoda suppresses a laugh at about 0:17 - like he knows just how good this is going to get.

• Rihanna, Umbrella - one day, someone will do an acoustic cover version of this song that will rule the world.  They just need to eliminate the "ella, ella, ella" bit.  Really.

• Kanye West, Stronger - oh!

• White Stripes, You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As Your Told) - not as strong an album as their previous two, but the best band of this decade keeps crafting perfect pop tunes.

• Avril Lavigne, Hot - in a very deep and fundamental way, I cannot stand Avril Lavigne.  Notwithstanding, this song kicks.

• Matchbox 20 (or however they're spelling their name this year), How Far We've Come - the video also helpfully (if inexplicably) functions as a Democratic Party ad.

• Feist, 1,2,3,4 - yes, the most annoying song of the year, but, hey, you try writing one this good 

• Finger Eleven, Paralyzer - does anyone else remember when this band was called Rainbow Butt Monkeys? Can anyone tell what song they pinched the riff from?

The Deep Funk 12.06.07

The 1980s were a profoundly debilitating decade for the Rolling Stones: not once during those years, and never again, would they be capable of putting together a strong album - it was the decade in which they were reduced to (or returned to being) a strong singles band (it would be in the late 1990s that they would be humbled from even that reduced position).  But those ten years are entirely underappreciated - some of their strongest songs were released.  Herewith, in a unique three-fer, highlights from an otherwise lost decade:

• Waiting On a Friend (actually recorded in the 1970s, but not released until 1981 - featuring a gloriously zonked Ron Wood)

• One Hit to the Body (without debate, a hell of a song - featuring Mick with eyeliner)

• Mixed Emotions (a lost classic - featuring Mick sans eyeliner but inexplicably with that blue and yellow leotard getup (we put up with alot, us Stones fans...))

The Deep Funk 11.18.07

The 15-year old Bob Tarantino contained somewhere inside me just died in a fit of gnarliness: check out this two-part interview of Guns N' Roses from 1987, taking place at CBGB's.  Slash is completely out of his gourd, and still chugging more from a fifth of Jack Daniel's - watching his multiple failed attempts to put on his sunglasses is alone worth the wait.  Steven Adler eventually apparently just wanders away from the table, and Axl comes across as a surprisingly decent guy - at one point he punches the air in apparently genuine joy at the prospect of opening up for Motley Crue a few days after the interview. It's about twenty minutes out of your life, but so worth it.

The Deep Funk 05.18.07

For the long week-end, The Joel Plaskett Emergency's Nowhere With You (sometimes known as the Zellers song, but I prefer to call it the the-fact-that-this-song-was-not-a-massive-worldwide-number-one-hit-is-yet-further-proof-that-the-music-industry-blows song) (oh, you'll need to ignore the fact that the video montage consists of Pirates of the Caribbean stills, and the fact that an entirely different song comes up at the end of the track - such are the joys of YouTube):

The Deep Funk 04.03.07

It's been a while since the last installment of The Deep Funk, but this video certainly warrants attention - we present "White Chicks & Gang Signs".  Awesome.

"still money to be made"

The other day at lunch a colleague and I concluded (hardly an original conclusion, mind you) that while it was inaccurate to say that the music industry was dying, it was pretty close to the mark to say that the iteration of the music industry we've been familiar with for the past forty years or so is retreating.  The evidence seems fairly irrefutable - album sales have been collapsing for more than five years, and digital sales, whatever their growth rate, aren't replacing the lost revenue.  I use the term "retreating" advisedly, and in the sense of a tide - it seems the record industry isn't witnessing the emergence of a new model, exactly, but more something akin to the resurgence of a previous model.  The way we put it over Thai food that day was that the recording industry was beginning to look more and more like what existed in the 1950s and prior decades.

The massive boom years in the music industry of the 1970s through, say, roughly 2001, were characterized by a couple of trends: ever-increasing unit sales of albums and the corporatization of the industry.  The latter had a particularly distortive effect: record labels became profit-centre cogs for publicly-listed multinationals, always chasing the fiscal quarter-end and year-over-year increases which matched whatever arbitrary number some stock analyst in New York or London attached to the ticker symbol.  There's no particular reason why the industry should consist of four or five major labels with branch plants throughout the world churning out projects which sell tens of millions of copies, and it certainly seems that ten years from now that model will be gone or at least will comprise a much smaller portion of the industry.

Album sales are still a huge business, of course, but how the culture andhte market interacts with them is changing.  As I pointed out before, the ceiling for album sales seems to have dropped rather markedly - we don't see very many (if any) albums which move more than 10 million copies in the US anymore.  As an example, Nickelback, probably the most commercially successful rock band in the industry today, which has an absolutely huge album that has been out for almost two years and spun off, what, four hit singles, have sold about five million copies.  Fifteen years ago they would have likely sold twice that number.

So people are still selling records, just not as many of them.  The manner in which records are delivered is also changing: national chains with hundreds of outlets are collapsing, but individual, idiosyncratic record stores seem to be doing okay.  An older model is re-asserting itself: smaller labels, smaller bands, smaller markets.  An artist with big hits today isn't going to be buying private jets and apartments on Fifth Avenue - the time of Mariah Careys seems to have come to a close.  Another analogy is that the music industry is coming to resemble the Canadian music industry: where even the biggest bands are making a nice living, but nobody is buying an island in the Caribbean (viz. The Tragically Hip).  All of which is fine: there's no rule which says that the music industry has to look a particular way, as much as some people who profited from the old model would wish it were so.

Reproduction Tariff

For those interested in how the world of online music sales functions, the Copyright Board of Canada yesterday released their decision on the mechanical royalty rates to be paid by online music sellers.  Nearly sixty (count 'em!) pages of analysis go into explaining how the Board arrived at the relevant results: 7.9% of retail sales price for permanent downloads, 5.3% of the subscription fee for limited downloads and 4.1% of the subscription fee for streaming.  Michael Geist comments here, and Russell McOrmond provides some structural background on how the whole thing works here.

The Deep Funk 03.17.07

Here's another one for the "Things I Never Thought I'd Write" folder: Carrie Underwood rocking the holy hell out of "Sweet Child O' Mine".  No, seriously.

the guy was there, you'd figure he'd know better

My new favourite exchange in an interview thus far this year:

[Warren Kinsella]: Punk rock - rebellion music - always seems to flourish when autocratic rulers are in charge, like Reagan or Bush. Do you agree?

[Paul Simonon:] Or Margaret Thatcher. You can keep going, really.

Oh, come on.

The Ramones - flourished 1976-1980 [Ford, Carter]

The Clash - flourished 1977-1982 [Callaghan, Thatcher]

The Sex Pistols - flourished 1977-1979 [Callaghan]

The Buzzcocks - flourished 1977-1979 [Callaghan]

The Damned - flourished 1977-1982 [Callaghan, Thatcher]

The Dead Boys - flourished 1977-1978 [Carter]

Television - flourished 1977-1978 [Carter]

The Germs - flourished 1979 [Carter]

I could go on.  I'll concede that the Clash enjoyed their most commercial success in the years from 1980 through 1982, but that's about it.  There's a reason why the updated edition of Please Kill Me - The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a copy of which I hold in my hands, spends 374 of its 407 pages on the years up to 1980, and then devotes a total of 33 pages to the years from 1980-1992.  After 1980, what 99% of the popoulation would refer to as "punk" splintered into a myriad of derivative styles, none of which enjoyed any significant commercial attention.  All of the cultural and artistic innovation in (and most of the attention paid to) "punk" occurred from 1975 through 1980 - and if there's another sense in which "flourishing" is being used, I'd be interested in learning of it.  This Wikipedia page and Punk77 (the "77" isn't an accidental reference, by the way) offer good overviews.

I suppose you could make an argument that there was a second wave of punk's flourishing in the 1980s, with acts like Fugazi, Bad Brains and Black Flag, but surely that pales compared to the activity in the mid- to late-70s.  By the time "punk" enjoyed a significant commercial resurgence (with, say, Offspring, Green Day and the slew of Epitaph and related bands) you were well into the 1990s - at which point Bill Clinton was firmly in control of the White House.  The Warped tour started up in, what, 1995?  If anything, what's really interesting about punk is how it seems counter-cyclical to prevailing political trends, at least on the ontology proposed in the interview quoted above.  What's the big "flourishing" of punk post-2000?  One album by Green Day? BIlly Tallent?  Which reminds me of one of the great counter-factuals of rock history: how pissed off would Rage Against the Machine have been if they were releasing albums post-9/11.

The Deep Funk 03.03.07

It's been a while.  Anyways.  While hip hop pretty much owns the patent on the diss track, let the record show that there was significant prior art: "Sweet Home Alabama" was such a devastating response to "Southern Man" that Neil Young's essentially been irrelevant ever since.  History doesn't record who the poor bastard was that prompted the Dandy Warhols' recording of "Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth", but this is as good an example as you'll find of a band too smart to enjoy significant commercial success.

The Deep Funk 02.01.07

You've just released an album which will go on to sell more than ten million copies and you've become one of the biggest rock stars of late-90s rip n' read boom America.  What do you do for an encore?  Sample a Metallica song, gather up a bunch of rednecks, muscle cars, explosions, fur coats, porn stars and your "midget" sidekick Joe C., and let loose with some of the flyest boasts a white guy from Detroit ever did see.

The Music Post

Do the kids still play guitar?  In any event, here's a pretty cool post which lists the twenty greatest guitar solos ever, with accompanying YouTube video.

Which got me to thinking...  a couple of weeks back, Michael Geist provided a link to this information-rich report on the state of the Canadian music market in 2006.  For someone like me, who's a music chart junkie, that report is just south of freebasing (for example, did you know that the third-best selling album in Canada in the SoundScan era (i.e., from 1995 to the end of 2006), was Big Shiny Tunes 2 with 1,232,738 copies sold?  Or that the biggest-selling artist in Canada in 2006 was Johnny Cash?)

Some of the information is a bit difficult to parse (for example, I'm having trouble making sense of the various breakdowns in the "album sales" category - what's the difference between "Total Album Sales" and "Overall Album Sales"?  And why are the numbers different?), but otherwise it's a goldmine.  Geist and Knopf highlighted the fact that "Overall Music Sales" were up nearly 10%, driven largely by a 122% increase in digital track and digital album sales, but by nearly every other measure, the industry saw a decline (even the phenomenal growth in digital sales needs to be set against the fact that the base they started from is miniscule - while a little over a million "digital albums" were sold, more than 45 million physical albums were sold).

I'm pretty agnostic about the future of major record labels.  I'm also a big believer that just because an industry previously saw phenomenal growth and sales doesn't mean it's a bad thing that said industry is now creaking forward.  One of the most interesting aspects of the splintering of the music industry is the cultural fallout: there are fewer and fewer monster hits which everyone knows or (especially) owns.  As one indicator, note the fact that, since Christmas, it has taken the sale of fewer than 100,000 copies to reach number one on the Billboard US album charts (the current No. 1, by Daughtry, sold around 65,000 copies - a pitiful number) - the last time that happened was apparently in 1991, in the midst of a recession which, if memory serves, had the record industry moaning about its dire straits.

Another indicia is the paucity of "Diamond" awards given out by the RIAA for recent albums.  The Diamond certification level marks sales in excess of ten million copies - so, generally speaking, these are the really big monster hits - your Thriller, Rumours, Hotel California, Cracked Rear View, etc.  A quick spin through the list of Diamond certifications (current to July 31, 2006), reveals that of 100 albums which have received the RIAA's Diamond certification, the following decades account for the following number of slots:

1960s - 4

1970s - 24

1980s - 24

1990s - 41

2000s- 7

Nearly seven years into the decade, and only seven albums have hit that level of cultural saturation (well, really only 6 - OutKast's Speakerboxxx / The Love Below is certified at 11 million copies shipped, but it's a double-album, which, on the RIAA's idiosyncratic accounting, counts double, so it's only shipped 5.5 million copies).  It's worth noting that while albums from the 1960s and 1970s had decades in which to reach the 10 million mark, a huge number of albums from the 1990s have done so - but with the turn of the millennium, the number of albums and acts capable of pulling off that feat has declined precipitously.

The Deep Funk 01.09.07

In 1999, the band Buckcherry released a pretty decent rawk album which contained the absolutely phenomenal song "Lit Up", which, if you're in any kind of bar which is worth visiting, will completely bring down the house when it gets played. 

In a somewhat bizarre illustration of the different American and Canadian audiences for music, in 2006 Buckcherry released a song which, if anything, managed to top their previous effort, and was probably the best rock single of the year.  It sorta revived their career in the US; in Canada, nobody heard it.  Here's the completely gratuitous video, which is wicked, wicked NSFW.  I've been unable to find a version which doesn't censor the lyrics, but it's not like reading Pynchon or anything - you'll get the idea pretty quick.  When I was growing up, this was the kind of band I wanted to be in.  Then I went bald.

The Deep Funk 01.05.07

People say the Bee Gees suck.  People don't know.

The Deep Funk 12.24.06

So, we'll be going dark for a couple of days.  To tide you over, here's the greatest Christmas song ever written.  Or at least the greatest Christmas song that appeared in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.

The Deep Funk 12.16.06

And more: Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards cover the sh*t out of Billy Bragg's "To Have and Have Not".

The Deep Funk 12.15.06

The latest installment in our tour of music awesomeness: Weezer's "Perfect Situation".

Video highlight: 3:08-3:15.  You'll figure it out.

The Deep Funk 12.10.06

Based on a very late-night conversation with a number of very fine individuals at the legendary New Ho King (for a strongly dissenting opinion, see Torontoist), I learned a number of things:

• never order the tilapia
• the hot chili-looking things in the spicy shredded beef really are hot chili-looking things, and should not be eaten
• people clearly require my assistance in finding good music

Hence, the inaugural edition of The Deep Funk, you helpful guide to the music you've probably been overlooking.  But no more!  TDF will only deliver songs that are guaranteed to mess you up.  First up, "Bringin' on the Heartbreak" by the Lep - bonus features: this is such an early video that they eventually give up bothering to try and synch the band's actions with the song - at about the two minute mark, nothing matches up.  Also, the drummer still has two arms.

No UK Copyright Term Extension

Following up on something mentioned earlier, the Gowers Report [note: link is to .pdf] in the UK has been released, and recommended that the term of copyright on sound recordings not be extended beyond the current duration of fifty years.  As the CBC reports notes,

Recordings of early Beatles songs like I Want to Hold Your Hand and other British classic rock hits could soon be free from copyright protection, if the government adopts the recommendations of a new report on intellectual property. ... If the government acts on the report's conclusion, sound recordings by artists such as [Cliff] Richards, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones would fall out of copy protection within a few years.

Those statements, while technically correct, are a bit misleading: if the term is not extended and the recordings fall out of copyright protection, it's not like you'll be able to put together your own compilations of Beatles and Stones songs and start selling them.  There are (at least) two copyright interests embedded in the recording of a song: the copyright in the recording itself (subject to a fifty year term in the UK and Canada), and the copyright in the underlying composition.  So, for the song "Yesterday", there is a copyright owned by (most likely) EMI which will shortly expire (well, in 2015, since the song was recorded in 1965), and a copyright owned by Lennon/McCartney (and whoever their publishers are), which will continue for a much, much, longer term: for the life of the author(s) plus seventy years (in the UK - life plus fifty years in Canada).  If you want to use that recording of the Beatles playing "Yesterday", if the law does not change, you won't need a license to use the recording itself, but you will continue to need a license to use the compostion which is embedded in the recording - either way, though, you will need permission to use it.

Sing, It Sister

Inspired by Kathy Shaidle (who notes that Condoleeza Rice will be dining this week with the first lady of country, a woman who once described her look as as "a blend of Mother Goose, Cinderella, and the local hooker"), let's listen as Dolly brings down the f**kin' house with Jolene:

For anyone who's a little frightened by the fierce, the best band of the new millennium, the White Stripes, don't do a half bad job themselves:

Using the Big People Words

People say to me, Bob! What have you been listening to lately?  I say, first, the only song to ever hit #1 in the UK and the Top 20 in the US with the word "f**k" in the title (and chorus), Eamon's slammin' "F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)":

Then, in order to obtain both sides to the story, the even-more-slammin' "answer" song, by the easy-on-the-eyes Frankee, "F.U.R.B. (F**k You Right Back)", which contains the nigh-immortal chorus "Well guess what, yo / Your sex was wack":

UK Copyright Term Extension?

The BBC is reporting that a British independent review panel is set to recommend that the copyright which performers hold in their recorded performances not be extended from the current term of 50 years.  This is to be distinguished from the copyright which composers hold in their musical compositions, which is currently set at a term equal to the life of the author plus 70 years.

British star Sir Cliff Richards has been leading a campaign to secure an extension of the copyright from 50 to 95 years - his earliest recorded tracks will begin to come out of copyright in 2008, and so he will no longer be entitled to receive royalties on their performance or duplication.  A fact sheet setting out the arguments of the British Phonographic Industry for an extension of the term can be found here [note: link is to .pdf document], which essentially turn on the lack of congruency in the terms of copyright accorded to different participants in the song creation process: the composers (and their heirs) are entitled to royalties for the aforementioned "life + 70" term, while the performers themselves are stuck at 50 years.

Canada only recently introduced a similar concept to that which the British are talking about, as part of the "neighbouring rights" reforms of the 1990s.  The current term for Canadian neighbouring rights protection sits at 50 years.

(hat tip: Michael Geist)

Money For Nothing, Chicks For Free

A question that sometimes comes up in my practice relates to the kind of royalties that music acts make when their songs get played on the radio.  This isn't exactly apropos of nothing - Jann Arden achieved a pretty remarkable feat in 2005:

Singer Jann Arden was honoured at the 2006 SOCAN songwriting awards after six of her singles reached radio-play milestones. ... Arden wrote and recorded six of the 11 songs that were played at least 100,000 times on domestic radio in 2005. They were Sound of, Sleepless, Wonderdrug, Good Mother, Could I Be Your Girl? and Will You remember Me?

The phrasing of that piece could stand a little clarification (the songs weren't played 100,000 times in 2005 alone, they had been played 100,000 times over the lifetime of their release, and happened to hit the mark in 2005), but the point remains: that's a hell of a lot of times for a song to get played on the radio.  So... roughly how much is that achievement worth to Jann Arden?

'at's not punk, dis is punk

People say to me "Bob! Where will you be Saturday night?"

I say, here:

Ladies and gentlemen, one night only: The Moods!

(I know it's the Mods.  Trust me, though, that joke is hilarious.  Seriously.)

UPDATE: Further details here.

Mad World

So you've got your YouTube.  You've got those who think that Google, recent purchasers of the site, are about to become the target of innumerable lawsuits for all kinds of copyright and trade-mark infringement claims.  There's also those who argue (with considerable merit) that YouTube has nothing to worry about.  Then there's those who aren't suing YouTube, but rather the so yesterday MySpace.  You figure it out.  Without pronouncing on the ins-and-outs of the legal issues involved, let's just say that any website that allows viewers to check out this song and its accompanying video, on demand, deserves to stick around:

Music Sales

Perhaps inexplicably, Queen's Greatest Hits is apparently the best-selling album in British history.  It's evidently sold approximately 5.4 million copies.  I know the numbers in this post are extremely rough, and don't take account of relative populations through time or different methods of calculating sales, but I think we find something interesting, nonetheless.  Let's say the UK has a current population of roughly 61 million people.  Compare that to the US, whose population is about 300 million, and where the supposedly best-selling album of all time is the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, with 29 million in sales.  So, if we ignore the fact that a single owner of either album might have purchased multiple copies (upgrading, say, from LP to CD), approximately 9% of the British population owns the biggest album in the land, and about 9.7% of the American population owns the biggest album in that land.  I haven't been able to find a quasi-definitive estimation of the biggest-selling album in Canadian history, but it may be telling that the highest level of certification which the Canadian Recording Industry Assocation offers is 2X Diamond, evidencing 2,000,000 copies sold (well, not sold sold - like the RIAA certifications, these are more of a guesstimate of copies shipped).  The question becomes: is a 10% penetration rate the highest that a popular album can expect to achieve?

Chart Stroll 11.15.06

[Herewith, the inaugural edition of a weekly feature - a quick rundown of the new music charts.]

Sources: The Billboard Top 200 Albums; MTV News

The music industry presents us with a number of mysteries.  Who, f'rinstance, the f*** are all those people who are buying Black Eyed Peas and Fergie albums?  Just as puzzling, who is buying the Now That's What I Call Music! series?  The most recent North American edition (the 23rd) will debut at #1, selling 337,000 copies.  The mystery doesn't arise from the quality of the compilation - chart-topping singles are properly popular.  What's confusing is that, based on what we've been hearing from the music industry, compilations should be dead in the water.  Aren't the post-Napster generations supposed to have been intent on stealing all the music they can get their hands on, leaving record companies and artists crying poor?  And what could be more disposable than a singles compilation?  If the "illegal downloading is killing the music business" thesis were true, nobody should be buying compilations: it would be easier and cheaper to just rip whatever singles you wanted and create your own compilations.  But 337,000 copies is nothing to sneeze at - and with the likes of Fergie, Justin Timberlake and Nickelback making up the track listing, we can be fairly certain it isn't the middle-aged tech-wary consumers who are picking up the latest in the series: it's most likely exactly the industry's target market (pre-teens and teens with disposable income).

Josh Groban pops up at #2 with 270,000 copies - also quite a haul for a guy whose ouevre consists of bellowed pop.  It'll be interesting to see how long he manages to stay in the Top Ten - without a huge hit single, I'm guessing it'll be a one or two week run.  Country pop artists take up slots 3, 4 and 8 (Keith Urban, Sugarland and Carrie Underwood, respectively) - although this may just be a blip in light of last week's Country Music Awards show, it's still worth noting that country can command such a big chunk of the upper reaches of the charts nearly fifteen years after the Garth Brooks-fueled resurgence of the genre.

The Dave Matthews Band, one group whose popularity completely mystifies me (overly precious granola ersatz-rock? er, no thanks...), rings in at #10 with a hits collection - but only manages to sell 65,000 copies.  That's bad both for the band, but also for the industry: if you've slipped below six digits and you're not even out of the Top Ten, things are pretty dire.  Oh, and it's only six or so weeks until Christmas.  Sales will tick up after Thanksgiving as stores fill and higher-profile releases come out, but this shouldn't exactly be a slow sales season - the industry seems to have taken an order of magnitude hit.

Speaking of mystery's, here's another: who was possessed to think that a Ricky Martin Unplugged album was a good idea?  It bows at #38 with 28,000 copies.

Kevin Federline's debut drops out of the Top 200, selling 1,200 copies in its second week, for a total of less than 3,000*.  By way of comparison, William Hung managed to sell around 200,000 copies of his debut...

UPDATE: * Lies! Lies! Apologies all around - I mistranscribed my own notes.  Federline hasn't sold less than 3,000 copies, he's sold less than 8,000 copies (around 6,500 in his first week on sale, plus around 1,200 in his second week).  Granted, my mistyping resulted in a, what, nearly 200% error, but even so, the song remains largely the same...

"What makes perfect sense in one musical setting, however, sounds terrible in another"

Jody Rosen delves deep (and I mean deep) into the current status of the musical duet.  It's a lot more involved than you might imagine.

Take a look at last week's Top 40: Fully one-quarter of the songs, and three of the Top 5, are duets.

Read it all.  I consider myself a music geek, but even I was surprised at the number of recent duets - though, as he points out, some barely qualify for the title (Beyonce's "Crazy in Love" was not a duet, no matter how many verses Hova had).  Rosen neglects mentioning one of the worst (in the sense of annoying and yet annoyingly catchy) recent duets - Nelly and Tim McGraw's "Over and Over", which on the weekend managed to insinuate itself somewhere into my frontal lobe due to a stray listen while switching stations, and, as a result of the act of creating that link, now probably won't leave for another couple of days...

The Ill Sh*t

I was a latecomer to YouTube, but I'm pretty sure I can pinpoint the moment I fell in love: finding footage of Axl Rose and Izzy Stradlin playing "Salt of the Earth", off of Beggars Banquet (the opening salvo in the Stones' grand slam of albums), with the Rolling Stones in 1989.

Maybe there's a cooler musical moment out there, but I can't recall one off-hand.