Billy Bragg on wrong side of history, again

Billy Bragg is having a terrible year - having backed the South Bank and its sponsors against the Undercroft skaters, he's now had to apologise to Taylor Swift.

See, when Swift pulled her music from Spotify, Bragg concluded somehow that this was because she was clambering into bed with Google:

"If Ms Swift was truly concerned about perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free, she should be removing her material from YouTube, not cosying up to it," Bragg said.

"Given that this year is the first to fail to produce a new million selling album, I can understand Taylor Swift wanting to maximise her opportunities with the new record – and it worked: she shifted 1.28m copies of 1989 in the first week of sale. But she should just be honest with her fans and say “sorry, but Sergey Brin gave me a huge amount of money to be the headline name on the marquee for the launch of You Tube Music Key and so I’ve sold my soul to Google,” Bragg continued.

"Google are going after Spotify and Taylor Swift has just chosen sides," wrote Bragg. "That’s her prerogative as a savvy businesswoman - but please don’t try to sell this corporate power play to us as some sort of altruistic gesture in solidarity with struggling music makers."

There's two problems here: the first, that Swift's pulling of music from Spotify is unconnected with her selling over a million copies of her album. How dispiriting it is that Bragg assumes her sales are simply a function of a basic supply and demand curve; that it is the scarcity of supply rather than the quality of the experience that has seen 1989 fly off shelves or down wires or whatever it is records actually do now.

The second, more important problem was Bragg's accusation that Swift was acting not out of principle but greed was... well, it was very wide of the mark. Here's his climbdown:

"I want to apologise to Taylor Swift for accusing her of selling her soul to Google," wrote Bragg on Facebook. "I have learned that her music will not now be available on the new YouTube Music Key service, which launched this week."

So, sorry about that. Bragg then launches into an explanation of how he got confused, based on how he'd read in The Observer that Google had used Swift's music at the launch, and then goes into a bit of a ramble about how music being available for free on the internet made him do it.

The time will surely come when content creators have to band together to challenge deals done between rights holders and service providers, details of which are kept from artists and their representatives. If Ms Swift is going to lead that fight for transparency, she will have my full support.

I'm sure she'll be delighted to have your full support, Billy. Perhaps not in the research department.

On the other hand, Bragg did have a good joke to end on:

I would like to add that I will be boycotting the first media outlet to use the headline ‘Bragg makes Swift apology’

It's a good gag, but perhaps having accused a person of selling their soul to Google for a large sum of money requires more than a boom-tish.

Katy Perry: Google News would claim this was an algorithmic coincidence

I think the photo tells us all we need to know, thanks:

Google News giggles at Gaga's jazz direction

Of course, it's just an algorithm pulling an unrelated image from a nearby article, but...

It does look like Google is suggesting GaGa's jazz collaborations are most likely going to end up with the off-brand breakfast cereals and wonky-faced dolls on the shelves of US discount stores.

YouTube, Indies at war

Regardless of the other rights and wrongs, threatening to block certain labels' videos on YouTube unless the label does a deal over a separate product is a bit of an asshatty move by Google.

The BBC understands that even if blocks do go ahead, content from artists signed to independent labels will remain available on YouTube via channels such as Vevo.

Videos which are exclusively licensed by independent record labels, such as acoustic sets or live performances, may be taken down.

Thanks for that, Google. Good to see the not being evil going so well.

BPI use 'right to be forgotten' to bang familiar drum

Oh, here's the BPI, taking the European 'right to be forgotten' and using it as a platform to remind us about piracy again. And again. And again.

That removing links to a specific piece of information is different from blocking piracy sites doesn't seem to occur to anyone:

Critics say that Google drags its feet over carrying out measures such as stripping pirate websites from its search results, yet the move to allow users the "right to be forgotten" proves it can take serious action if it is forced.

"It's 'Don't be Evil' 101," says Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the music industry's trade body, the BPI. "The principle at stake here is when you know someone is acting illegally, you shouldn't continue helping them by sending them business."

That's kind of the point, though, isn't it, Geoff? Because Google does take action when you ask it to:

The BPI made 4.6m requests to Google to remove pirate websites from its listings in the past month alone.

And Taylor even seems to understand that unlicenced music sites are a moving target...

Dealing with Google is often a fraught process, Taylor adds, and the illegal websites reappear in the same, or a slightly different, guise almost immediately after they are taken down.

... but not enough to process that he's expecting Google to know to take down a site before its brought to their attention somehow.

Maybe he should have checked the Google right to be forgotten form before talking about this, as he'd have understood then that all you can do is point to a URL you want quashed and provide a reason why. It's not having a whole category of things (for example, 'anything about Mike Smith') dumped from the index. So wailing 'why can't they treat "pirate" sites they way they treat embarrassing facts from the past' is a wail of a digital ingenue - because they're actually treating those facts based on the way they treat "pirates".

Quadron Quarter-past Quartet: Jeans

Over there on the right, I'm suggesting you might want to buy Avalanche by Quadron.

But do you?

Here, to celebrate Sunday, is four chunks of Quadron, delivered at quarter past the hour. Because theme overkill.

First up, from their Live@Google set, it's Jeans.



More to come at fifteen past twelve.

Spotify stormed: plug-in opens back door

Although Google have rushed to remove it from the Chrome store, for a while there, you could grab a tool which would allow you to download mp3 files direct from the Spotify servers.

The tool has been yanked from the store, but is still floating about on the web; Spotify say they're aware of "the issue" and are working on a fix.

Although you'd still be able to hijack the audio as it passes to your speakers, whatever fix you put in place.

[Thanks to Michael M]

What comeback excited people?

So within a twenty-four hour period, David Bowie, Suede and Jimi Hendrix all came back from the dead with new singles.

Which comebacks excited people? Google Trends, can you help us?



Sorry, Brett. Sorry, the Estate Of The Late Mr Hendrix.

BPI puzzled by Google Play

Google is bringing the music store element of Google Play to the UK. Rather than welcoming another legitimate source of digital music, the BPI is feigning confusion:

The UK's biggest record labels say a new, legal music service from Google "doesn't make sense" because its search engine still helps piracy.

The BPI's [British Phonographic Industry's] chief executive Geoff Taylor, said: "We don't think it makes any sense for them to be doing something which does support artists and then, on the other hand, undermine artists by referring consumers to illegal sites."

This is, in effect, the BPI banging on about the way if you search on Google you can find links to music, some of which might not be officially licenced.

Obviously they're going to carry on chewing away at this - I think we've long since passed the point where the BPI/RIAA is suddenly going to understand online behaviour, and that if people want to snaffle tunes without paying, they will always find where to go.

But just look at the concept: pretending it's not worth being able to sell their products to Google's enormous user base, because it's possible to put 'One Direction torrents' into the search engine and get some results.

It's like Yale saying to B&Q "I don't know why you bother selling our locks, when you have crowbars on sale as well."

Oddly, none of this angry confusion has lead to the BPI taking a principled stand and having its labels boycott the sevrice. Almost as if it can understand the difference between two parts of a very large company, and is just pretending it can't.

Google plans to sue conversion site

Google is going to sue YouTube-mp3.org, according to a letter sent to the site's owner.

As the name implies, the service takes a YouTube URL and spits out an mp3 of the audio track. Given that it's sort-of-copyright-infringey (although not of any copyright Google itself owns, for the vast majority of the videos).

As an extra protection, Google has started blocking the YouTube-mp3 servers, which it could have done quietly without drawing attention to the site and the wide range of similar options.

Torrentfreak suggests similar conversion tools are getting letters from Google; but Google surely knows all it means is people will go back to ripping the audio from videos the old-fashioned way, capturing it locally as the music plays out.

The return of dotmusic, sort of

Remember dotmusic? The one-time online home of Music Week from the days back when the internet was in black and white and closed down at 10.30? Sold on to BT, and then to Yahoo, where all the effort and marketing cash ended up in the service being folded into the now-defunct-on-its-own-right Yahoo Launch? You remember, right?

Lets hope Yahoo kept the paperwork, though, as there's no fewer than four (five, depending on how you count it) companies called dotmusic something or other bidding for the rights to be registraron the soon-to-be-launched .music top-level domain.

.music is part of a massive push to try and create new domain names, partly to stop the crush of demand for the dwindling supply of .com names. (It's doomed to failure, of course - large numbers of .music and other new web addresses will be registered, at great expenses, but research will discover that people trying to guess names will still always plump for .com, and so that's where the real demand will be. You know how you smile indulgently at companies that still use .tv as their main website? It's like that.)

Hypebot has a helpful list of contenders:

DotMusic Inc.
Dot Music / CCGR E-Commerce LTD - founded by Constantine Roussos, who began lobbying to establish the .music top level domain in 2005 and has the edge with the support of TuneCore, LyricFind, CD Baby, ReverbNation, The Orchard, INgrooves Fontana and others in the industry.
dotMusic Limited
Amazon
Victor Cross
Charleston Rd Registry / Google
.music LLC / FarFurther - supported by the RIAA, The National Music Publishers Association, A2IM, Impala and The Recording Academy.
Entertainment Names Inc

I know, it's like suddenly in the middle of 2012 there's something a bit like an ITV franchise round.

The real point of interest here is that the Roussos bid and the FarFurther biddraws support roughly split between internet-native businesses (Roussos) and old-school music endeavours (FarFurther). I think a useful rule of thumb is any initiative being supported by the RIAA is liable to work against the general interests of musicians and audience, and in favour of the multinational companies which used to be the music industry. On that basis alone, lets hope one of the others wins. The RIAA already believes it controls music; let's not let it control .music, too.

Universal claims it can have any video pulled from YouTube. Any at all.

Here's something a bit worrying: a large corporation which appears to have a deal with Google to have any video it doesn't like taken off YouTube:

Your letter could be read to suggest that UMG's rights to use the YouTube "Content Management System" with respect to certain user-posted videos are limited to instances in which UMG asserts a claim that a user-posted video contains material that infringes a UMG copyright. As you know, UMG's rights in this regard are not limited to copyright infringement, as set forth more completely in the March 31, 2009 Video License Agreement for UGC Video Service Providers, including without limitation Paragraphs 1(b) and 1(g) thereof.

Presumably, the idea was that Universal's deal with Google to allow music to which they owned the copyright to appear on YouTube had a clause that could be used to squish edge cases. Maybe Google rationalised it: they'll have to lose the odd parody, despite parody being a protected use in the US, but it's a deal worth doing to get access to the Universal catalogue.

And yet, here we are now, with a company apparently convinced it can have videos taken down at whim.

If I were an evil corporation - let's say, for the sake of argument, Coke - I'd watch this video reminding people of how unionists who organise my labour sometimes end up dead, and get on the phone to my chums in Universal. "Hello? Can you veto any video on YouTube, regardless of if you have any legal reason to do so? Yes? Could you do me a favour...?"

Please Hammer, don't search 'em

For reasons we can only speculate about - tax loss? hubris? the enacting of a bet? the loss of a bet? - MC Hammer claims he's launching a search engine all of his very own.

The rapper-turned-entrepreneur (after some late-90s difficulties) said a search would render not just direct results, but also information on possibly related topics. Its tagline is: "Search once and see what's related."

So like all other search engines, then. But certainly an interesting competitor to Google in about 2001.

The name Hammer has gone with is WireDoo. Unfortunately, that's what you get when a dog eats string, isn't it?

If you haven't done so yet...

On Freddie Mercury's birthday, Google have produced a - naturally - flamboyant Google doodle to mark the day.

Why do people bother with Bing?

Google to announce something

Is Google really going to call its music service Music Beta by Google, or is the service Music By Google and it's in beta?

I really hope it's the latter and the New York Times is just a bit confused. Although baking in the word "beta" to your service name would provide a perpetual get-out clause if anything ever goes wrong.

I suspect that it's the Times being confused, though, as the reporting is a bit off:

Since songs stored by Google will stream from the Web, they are not always as accessible as songs stored on iPods, because people can’t listen to them in places without data connections, like airplanes.

Like some airplanes, surely? In-flight wi-fi isn't that unusual in the US these days.

But this is what you want to know:

Users can store 20,000 songs free, as opposed to Amazon’s service, which stores up to 1,000 songs without charge.

That's, what, roughly forty days of music?

Google coos at Spotify

Given that both Google and Spotify are caught in a perpetual dance with the labels, cha-cha-chaing around when they'd rather be launching in America, perhaps it makes sense that they've apparently been having talks about pooling their resources.

Cnet claims:

Rather than launch its own digital music service, Google is considering whether to partner with an existing service, including the likes of Spotify, to power Google Music.

According to a source with knowledge of the talks, Google has told the labels that it has begun discussions with Spotify in recent weeks, though no agreement is in place.

It might all come to nothing, but it's clearly gone far enough for Google to go semi-public about it. I think that's 'we might go dating, if we can decide between skating or dancing'.

Google should buy the music industry, says Glynn Moody

There's an interesting bit on Techdirt and opendotdotdot pointing out that Google, rather than being disgusted by the labels, could actually buy them. Without breaking a sweat.

It's not a totally original thought - at an In The City at the end of the last century I remember hearing someone pointing out that Bill Gates could buy all four major labels should he wish (assuming the competition laws would let him). Maybe he should have done - that might have given the Zune some leverage over the iPod.

Still, Glynn Moody thinks the thought again:

But that throwaway comment also raises another interesting idea: how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.

How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies -- Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. -- jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis?

EMI and Warners are both up for sale right now, it's true; but it's hard to picture Google and Microsoft setting their differences aside long enough to employ Josh Groban. Nor is it clear why Baidu would want to sink its money into Western labels.

But it's a lovely idea. Unworkable, but lovely.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: The Daily Mail

Last week's Mail story about Adele being destroyed by Google has been turned into a handy inforgraphic by BrokenTV.

Service Outage: Google to wipe GoogleVideo

You've not been able to upload to Google Video for quite a while now; but if you have stuff there it's going to vanish soon. Google is switching off the service at the end of the month and are advising users to take any video they have on the site over to YouTube.

You'd have thought that Google might have been able to automate that process somehow, wouldn't you?

Google: The major labels are disgusting

It's only a rumour, but Wayne Rosso is reporting that Google have lost patience with the record labels.

The majors and the search engine are trying to come to an agreement over licensing for Google's supersecretcloudmusicservice. But even although Amazon have just stuck two fingersup at the RIAA cartel and said that people no more need licenses to store music on a server in a distant building than they do to store them on their own hard drive, the labels are digging their heels in. And Google are disgusted.

On a scale of disgust, at the top, is Warners:

[T]he label’s head of digital, Michael Nash, is said to be convinced that Google should be charging users $30 a year for the cloud. Google, in response, is said to think that is way too much and wants the first 500 tracks stored by users to be free of charge.

Nash is probably blissfully unaware that you can currently store 1,000 megabytes of music, in the cloud, via Google, without payment, right now. (Google Docs will let you store any digital files up to that limit for free.) Charging $30 to do the same thing, with the only difference being that you're paying $30 for it, makes no bloody sense.

Google are, claims Rosso, thinking of giving the labels an Amazon-style response, and launching without their blessing.