Putin is going to take on music pirates

So, apparently, Russia is going to stamp down on piracy by shaming advertisers:

The Russian government has vowed to crack down on the top 100 copyright-infringing sites, in order to shame the Top 100 brands into pulling their advertising from the pirate operations, Russia's Deputy Communications Minister Alexei Volin said this week.

"People need to come to their senses about this issue. Major brands are proud of being white-and-fluffy; so let's publish a list of all those brands that advertise on pirate sites." Wolin said this is the first step, with blacklisting sites also on the agenda.

We know that nothing upsets Putin like the sight of something where it has, legally, no place being - you know, like a Russian army brigade in Ukraine.

It's something of a turnabout for Russia to suddenly worry about music piracy, though - for years, the .ru domain consisted solely of the Pravda website and thousands of collections of mp3s you could buy for a few pence and however much money would subsequently be swiped from your credit card.

Formatwatch: Bono busy inventing something else nobody wants

You've got to hand it to Bono - just days after not realising nobody wanted his rump-reeking new record, even for free, he's coming up with another thing that people are neither seeking, nor requiring:

In a new Time magazine article, the singer has detailed the group's plans to help combat the illegal downloading of artists' music by creating a new file format which cannot be copied.

Unless there's some magic way it doesn't need to pass audio to an output, let me stop you right there Bono and say it doesn't work.

But do carry on.

The aim of the top secret project is to tempt fans to purchase full albums, not just individual tracks, once more so new material will once again become profitable for artists who aren't big on touring.

The problem here, Bono, is that 'bundling stuff into albums' is a thing that was convenient for labels and artists. It wasn't, ever, a thing that happened because music fans went to bed wishing that when they bought six songs they liked, they could get another four tracks they didn't like, and would never play.

Apple have already tried to resurrect the album format once - with the iTunesLP. That was meant to be an "immersive experience" with all sorts of extras which would make buying a bundle attractive again.

Nobody seems to have released one since last November's Justin Timberlake 20/20 Experience.

But, still, good luck, Bono.

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".

Anti-piracy campaign produces list of sites where you can make out like a bandit

The anti-piracy people are publishing a list of websites which offer large swathes of unlicenced music and film:

Here's how the IWL is designed to work: the creative industry bodies provide the initial list of infringing sites, which is then "evidenced and verified" by the City of London Police's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), providing a list of undesirables for advertisers to avoid.

PIPCU claims that the pilot resulted in 12% less advertising from "major household brands" on the identified sites. "If an advert from an established brand appears on an infringing website not only does it lend the site a look of legitimacy, but inadvertently the brand and advertiser are funding online crime," said the unit's boss Detective Chief Inspector Andy Hyde.

Now, obviously, if the list was made public, what the diligent work would have done would be offer people keen to get their hands on an m4v of Anchorman 2 the best places to look.

So they're not making the list public.

That's problematic, though - it means the police are circulating documents accusing websites of criminal activity without allowing those site owners a chance to defend themselves, based on a list originally produced by the copyright businesses in the first place. It's not clear what "evidence" is gathered by the City of London police, and it's surely wrong for police evidence to merely be accepted as proof without testing this in an open justice process.

Sure, 'making it hard for pirate websites to profit' sounds great.

But when you realise that means 'private corporations and police working together to undermine websites on the basis of a secret list' it starts to become a little more sinister.

The Artist Formerly Known As A Litigious Gadfly

Prince had launched a lawsuit demanding millions in damages from defendants, known and unknown, who he believed had been helping distribute unlicenced copies of his music.

It was a move about as popular as his last couple of records, and in the face of a huge backlash, he's backed down. He's trying to spin this as a victory:

On Wednesday, TMZ quoted Prince's attorneys as saying: "Because of the recent pressure, the bootleggers have now taken down the illegal downloads and are no longer engaging in piracy. We recognize the fans craving for as much material as possible, but we’d prefer they get it from us directly than from third parties who are scalpers rather than real fans of our work."

Yes. It's absolutely likely that you'd not have been able to get the links taken down without demanding stupid levels of damages, Mr. Prince.

Iron Maiden visit their non-paying fans

The headline on this citeworld story is a little alarming:

How Iron Maiden found its worst music pirates -- then went and played for them

It suggests that they turned up at the house of a bloke who had downloaded all their albums and then played a gig in his kitchen - which would be scary, and almost certainly lead to being issued with noise violation tickets.

The idea that the stuff you download will be enacted in your living room would probably kill torrent traffic off - especially as far as bukake videos go.

Instead, it's actually a story about how Iron Maiden discovered that their music was being downloaded enthusiastically in South America. Not bought, but downloaded. Rather than follow the usual route of traipsing over to the lawyer's offices, the band (or rather the legally-incorporated company that the band now is) booked flights to South America, and toured the arse out of the continent:

And in a positive cycle, Maiden's online fanbase grew. According to Musicmetric, in the 12 months ending May 31, 2012, the band attracted more than 3.1 million social media fans. After its Maiden England world tour, which ran from June 2012 to October 2013, Maiden's fan base grew by five million online fans, with a significant increase in popularity in South America.

When life gives you lemons, in other words, you should get the data underlying those lemons, and work out how to use them to sell more lemons back to the... oh, you get the point.

[Thanks to Michael M for the tip]

Bing throws 'pirates' off its search engine

Bing has removed "several hundred thousand" search results from its index, believing them to be links to unlicenced content.

A cursory search for, say, "Torrent Monsters University" proves this has had little more effect than removing a few pine needles would diminish a forest.

Bing's user base is out visiting his grandson this weekend, and is unavailable for comment.

"This also available in licenced version" plan

There's something sweet about Comcast's plans to pop up a message when it sees someone downloading an unlicenced track:

As sources described the new system, a consumer illegally downloading a film or movie from a peer-to-peer system would be quickly pushed a pop-up message with links to purchase or rent the same content, whether the title in question exists on the VOD library of a participating distributor’s own broadband network or on a third-party seller like Amazon.

How effective is this likely to be? There's two reasons why people grab torrents - because the content isn't available through licenced platforms; or because it is, but they'd rather not pay.

In effect, this is like trying to do home security by sticky-taping the Argos catalogue laptop page to the top of your Macbook.

Piracy defeated

In a victory against filesharing, sites have been blocked:

Big UK net firms have begun blocking access to two sites accused of flouting copyright laws.

The blocks were imposed after the Motion Picture Association (MPA) won a court order compelling ISPs to cut off the Movie2K and Download4All websites.

Yeah, that'll work. It's not like they'll just g...

However, pro-piracy activists have set up a copy of the Movie2K website in a bid to get around the restrictions.

Damn you, pirates. Couldn't you at least let me finish my cynical 'they'll just move it somewhere else' sentence before you just move it somewhere else.

Still, it's a major victory. People will now know about Movies2K and their giving away of movies for free, right?

That is what you wanted, copyright industry, right?

Here's the Google report on search volumes for terms related to Movies2K - the solid line is based on data, the dotted line Google's expectation of what happens next; it's a relative chart so the top is 100.

As you can see, searching for movies2K had been falling over the year so far - but the intervention of the MPA has really turned that frown upside down for the pirates.

Well done, everybody. Even King Pyrrhus is thinking you've reset the bar for empty victories.

(By the way, don't you love the way the MPAA drops the second A when it goes on foreign trips?)

Romney joins the Pirate Party

It's not unusual for political candidates in the US to get themselves involved in copyright bother, but Mitt Romney is taking things to a new level.

This isn't the embarrassing tshirt using an uncleared font.

Oh, no.

Romney actually owned shares in one of the biggest dodgy video sites in all of the Internet, Youku.

Yes, having sent China so many American jobs, Romney also helped underwrite Chinese piracy.

If he does win in November, at least the RIAA and MPAA lobbyists will know Mitt understands how people make money from unlicenced online content.

Where be pirates?

The BBC got quite excited by the MusicMetric Digital Music Index. Very, very excited, although it somehow neglects to mention in the BBC News report that the MusicMetric work has been done apparently as part of a BBC project. The MusicMetric page does reveal the link:

As part of the BBC BitTorrent trend visualisation we have released the largest ever public data set showing trends in music on BitTorrent around the UK.

I say "reveal", although it doesn't really explain what that might mean.

On a different page, the BBC does start to suggest there could be a link:

The data, collected independently by Musicmetric and seen exclusively by the BBC, is believed to be the biggest analysis of its kind to be conducted.

If it's a BBC project, then you'd expect the data to be seen exclusively. Although MusicMetric have published the data under a Creative Commons licence so it's not that exclusive.

If the BBC is commissioning work like this, why would it pretend it's just some stuff that happens to be out there?

Anyway, that BBC excitement. There's excitement over the sheer volume of downloads in the UK:

Globally, the research suggested that the UK is a significant player on the world stage as a country of illegal music downloaders.

The country was placed second in the world in terms of pure volume of illegal activity, with Musicmetric logging 43,263,582 downloads in the first six months of this year.

The US topped the list, with 96,681,133 downloads tracked in the same period.

Italy (33,158,943), Canada (23,959,924) and Brazil (19,724,522) made up the remainder of the top five.

However, as the reports point out elsewhere, in many countries the most-torrented artist is Billy Van, who has made a choice to share his music via BitTorrent. So these figures, clearly, don't track "illegal music downloaders" at all; they mix up licenced and unlicenced downloads. And that's before you have to swallow hard at the conflation of all "illegal" downloads and activity solely on the torrents.

If the language is vague, the figures seem suspicious, too. Really? Britain is the second best at torrenting, although outstripped only two-to-one by the US?

It might be true, but I'd be more keen to accept that data if this had come from a different place - British survey finds British people (second) most active could be down to the methodology, or a cultural bias. Would a team sat in Lahore have found identical data?

When we get down to a town and artist level, things get cloudier still:

The data suggests that Ed Sheeran - with his album + - is, so far this year, the most illegally downloaded artist in 459 of the 694 cities, towns and villages covered by the research.

No. No, it really doesn't. The data tracks the most - let's use their terms - illegally downloaded albums and, certainly in the data released, that's all.

So you can say that if you take this data, +- is the most torrented album, but you can't say anything about artists. (For example, if just over half of people downloading +- download two Pink albums, too, Pink would outstrip Sheeran as most popular artist, but that wouldn't show up on this data.

And we're talking about tiny, tiny numbers here - Sheeran "won" Bath with just 57 copies snaffled; that was 0.01% of all the Bath torrents. That's pretty slim figures to build a claim on.

That's even if you accept this town-level data at all. The internet is tolerably good at knowing what country you're in, but anyone who has seen the attempts to localise adverts for dating sites and that one about the woman with the strange old trick to look younger will know, when it comes to guessing your town, the internet has all the pinpoint accuracy of a NATO strike.

So when the BBC claims:

Unlike the most recent boat race, Oxford (8,511 downloads on average per month) and Cambridge (7,217 downloads) find themselves pretty close in the piracy stakes.

It's possible all those downloads could actually have been located in Bedford.

So, pretty much dubious claim stacked on category error set upon rather thin data. Still, it's a news story, kinda, right?

The BBC Online reporting, though, is better than that spotted on South Today by icod:

lookyfrog.us/1qzvcdzmmgvbuu…

— iCod (@icod) September 17, 2012

Yes, that was Sheeran being called a "naughty boy" for, erm, having been the victim of downloaders.

Harriet Harman somehow blames piracy for the deficit

Harriet Harman has suggested that the government really should do more for the unicorn industry. Sorry, copyright industry:

"The Government's emphasis on cutting the deficit crushes out their ability to engage with innovation."

She said Britain needed an equivalent to Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama's tsar in charge of regulating the internet, in place of a plethora of UK agencies with overlapping responsibilities whose job is to protect copyright. Google and other providers should be involved in making sure music is free on the net only when artists want to give it away – as they sometimes do – and not because it has been stolen, she added.

"Young people are massively connected with music. They not only want to use the music but they want to actually work in the music industry, many of them. Many of them want a future in the industry. Therefore the industry must have a future. That means public policy action, not just standing back and saying 'we are too busy to do any of this; we're just going to cut the deficit and let the free market rip content off from creators'. Every day they don't act, money is haemorrhaging."

Naturally, the "money" that is "haemorrhaging" is a bit like all the money that just needs benefit fraud to be stopped to end to release. In other words, it doesn't really exist.

If Harman really wants to help create a new generation of musicians, she might want to argue for a benefits system that allows young artists to develop instead of forcing them to work for free for Tesco.

[Thanks to Michael M]

SOCA seem to think they're an education body

Yesterday, you'll recall, the Serious Organised Crime Agency closed down a website and slapped up a dire warning:

A takedown notice warned visitors who have used the site to download music they could face up to 10 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine.

Soca said music posted on the site was "stolen from the artists" and may have "damaged careers".

A man has been arrested for fraud and bailed pending further enquiries, police told the BBC.

"Soca targets organised criminal enterprises profiting from the exploitation of the UK public and legitimate businesses," the agency said in a statement.

"Much of the music offered for download by the RnBXclusive.com website was illegally obtained from artists, leading the industry to attribute losses of approximately £15m per year to the site's activity."

Is it really the job of the police to accept at face value what are clearly made-up sums of loss of money?

Today, The Inquirer spoke to SOCA asking them about the threats of ten inside:

When asked to explain the somewhat dramatic threat of 10 years in prison for those who visited the web site, the spokesman said, "If you download music that has been illegally obtained, you can be accused of fraud, if you are deemed to be part of the conspiracy to defraud."

We put it to him that most users would have unknowingly downloaded the allegedly illegal content anyway, and he admitted that the web site splash page was aimed at "warning people about how they use the internet."

Warning people about how they use the internet? This, supposedly, is the part of the police which deals with the most serious threats to life, limb and liberty; all of a sudden, they're worrying about a few dodgy R&B tracks and offering educational tips to people about "how they use the internet". Seems, at best, a questionable use of our money.

Record labels pirate football game

Oh, dear, major labels - don't you realise that copyright theft is a SERIOUS CRIME? Do we need to send Britney Spears over to remind you that illegally streaming a football game at a VEVO party is no different from stealing a CD from a store? Tut. Tut. Tut.

TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid saw ESPN streaming from an unlicensed feed:

My hunch is that the team hooked up a computer to the TVs throughout the venue so that they could accomplish this synchronized star-caressing — then, rather than rework their entire setup just to play the football game for a few hours, they opted for the easier route and looked for a stream on the web.

Which perfectly underscores everything wrong with the media industry’s approach to piracy. They’ve long made out pirates to be lawless thieves who think they’re entitled to receive everything for free.

But the reality is far less black-and-white. Sure, there are some people who will duck the bill when they can — but many of them were never going to buy the content they downloaded in the first place. And a huge swath of ‘pirates’ are driven to their ways because it’s easier to stream or download something via an illegal site, not because they’re averse to paying for content. Stick a bunch of DRM and ads in front of the media they’ve already paid for, and they may opt to go with the path of least resistance next time.

VEVO stutter that, you know, it's probably not them:

As for who actually decided to play the stream, or why, VEVO says the public had access to the computer being used so they can’t say for sure who exactly was responsible. Which is dubious (and almost certainly spin) — there was clearly someone actively controlling the computer, because they refreshed it when the connection stalled, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a random attendee who was taking the helm. Must have been one of those nasty pirates.

Now, remind me: what is the attitude of the music industry when someone says that somebody else must have been using the computer at the time of an illegal download? Like in the case of Patricia Santangelo, when the RIAA insisted that because she owned the house the computer alleged to have shared unlicensed files was in, she was liable.

I'm sure VEVO executives will be handing themselves in at the local cop shop. After all, piracy is a serious crime. They will want to be punished to the full extent of the laws their colleagues have had created.

Megaupload: Too big for its reboots?

Megaupload has been around for ages. Why, then, did the copyright industry suddenly decide it had to act?

Shauna Myers ran an interesting post on her Google+ page. Linking to a DMN story, Shauna suggests it was less about what Megaupload had done, and more about what they were about to do:

I present to you... MegaBox. MegaBox was going to be an alternative music store that was entirely cloud-based and offered artists a better money-making opportunity than they would get with any record label.

"UMG knows that we are going to compete with them via our own music venture called Megabox.com, a site that will soon allow artists to sell their creations directly to consumers while allowing artists to keep 90 percent of earnings," MegaUpload founder Kim 'Dotcom' Schmitz told Torrentfreak

Not only did they plan on allowing artists to keep 90% of their earnings on songs that they sold, they wanted to pay them for songs they let users download for free.

"We have a solution called the Megakey that will allow artists to earn income from users who download music for free," Dotcom outlined. "Yes that's right, we will pay artists even for free downloads. The Megakey business model has been tested with over a million users and it works."

Using the criminal justice system of two nations in order to crush competitors? Could you believe a record label possible of such behaviour?

[Thanks to Michael M]

Piracy actually not that bad, but let's say it is

There's some interesting figures in the IFPI report into digital music, reported by Music Week. You remember piracy, don't you?

According to Nielsen/IFPI figures from November 2011, the percentage of internet users accessing at least one unlicensed site monthly stood at 27% in Europe and 28% worldwide – with around half using peer-to-peer networks.

That doesn't really sound very much, does it? Over 70% of internet users not even visiting an "unlicensed site" (whatever that is) at all.

But that's averages. What's happening in piracy hotspots?

In some countries, the rate of usage of illegal sites is far higher than the global average - for example 42 per cent and 44 per cent respectively in the major markets of Spain and Brazil (Nielsen/IFPI).

So, even where it's bad, fewer than half the people online visit a site which holds unlicensed music.

And America? How are things in America - a country where piracy is apparently so rife, we came within an ace of having SOPA destroy the free internet?

NPD data included in the IFPI report shows that 16% of the US internet population were using infringing P2P sites in Q4 2007, down to just 9% in Q4 2010.

Meanwhile, the average number of tracks downloaded from P2P services dropped from 35 to 18 in the same period.

All this, surely, is brilliant news for the entertainment industry, right?

Music Week isn't so sure:

However, levels of global music piracy won’t bring comfort to labels.

Really? They're relatively small, and appear to be declining. Why would they not take comfort from that?

Let's nip over to the IFPI site, where Frances Moore, CEO, is looking at the figures. Is he happy?

As we enter 2012, there are good reasons for optimism in the world of digital music. Legal services with expanding audiences have reached across the globe and consumer choice has been revolutionised.

Well, that's great news. Treble clefs all ro... oh, hang on. He's looking cross. Why is he looking cross?

"Any complacency now, however, would be a great mistake. Our digital business is progressing in spite of the environment in which it operates, not because of it. In 2012 the momentum needs to build further. We need legislation from governments with coordinated measures that deal with piracy effectively and in all its forms. We also need more cooperation from online intermediaries such as search engines and advertisers to support the legal digital music business."

Moore is, you'll spot, telling a whopper here. His organisation's own figures show that even with their gross over-estimation of piracy, it's in decline - mainly despite, not because of, the work of the labels and their chums in the movie industry.

(Actually, should the labels be worried? Even without any comeback, even when it's available for free, people are scooping up less music.)

To the untrained eye, it might look like the RIAA and their client organisations have bought themselves a fire engine; now there's no fire, rather than getting rid of the uniforms and hoses, they're running round going 'I think I still smell burning'.

They passed from being entertainment companies into copyright farmers long ago; now, it looks like they're going to be permanent copyright lobbyists, too.

Just like the old days

I suspect the RIAA will be secretly delighted at having been included on Anonymous' attacks on various copyright industry sites; they've been so long eclipsed by the MPAA in the 'trying to shore up a business model that no longer exists' lobbying that they'll just be delighted anyone bothered to take them down.

I'm picturing the RIAA trying to look cross while thinking "oh, this is like the good old days when our site was booted offline every three or four days. We've still got it..."

On a more serious note, the loss of Megaupload is a shame; it was one of the most usable of the filesharing sites. What the US government has done, at the behest of the people who pay for the comfy seats in their offices, will take no unlicensed content off the internet. It simply removes a useful tool for the rest of us.

Tom Dickins takes on SOPA

As part of the internet sort of went dark yesterday ("I can turn something called javascript off to see Wikipedia. What's javescript, thought? I know, I'll check Wikipe... nooooo...") Tom Dickins made his own protest, sending an open letter to remind Congress that the copyright industry doesn't actually speak for everyone who makes things:

This is the economic reality of being a musician in the 21st century. The people who can and want to spend money on your music, will. The people who either can’t or won’t spend the cash will ALSO support you! They will rock up to your gigs, spread the word to their 100 friends and it will ripple outwards and reach unfathomable distances. The possibilities are so much greater now compared to the days when it took being signed to a big label to get you on Video Hits.

To underline the point, he also made his music available for free as well.

Norton my watch: Madonna meets Graham

The most useful thing about last night's Madonna appearance on the usually quite-good Graham Norton chatshow was it demonstrated how well the regular format works. All the guests, on stage for all the programme, makes something watchable.

Madonna, though, didn't have to share. This, in itself, was distracting. Why was Madge given the sofa to herself? Was that an offer from Norton's side? That seems unlikely; stars bigger and better than Madonna have squeezed in alongside others.

So was it a demand from Madonna, or her people? Was the cost of getting her on the show an edict that she wouldn't be sitting alongside, say, Nick Knowles and Mark Watson for the duration?

If so, it was a terrible deal for both sides. Shorn of the usual dynamic, Norton's show dragged like the late-period Jonathan Ross on in the same slot used to. For Madonna, she visibly relaxed and her performance improved when she did get some team-mates - the stars of her Wallace Simpson film were brough on towards the end. Madonna, and the viewers, were thankful for the assistance.

Oh, and what a film she's made. If the two tiny clips from WE had been chosen to try and fight against the early notices, they didn't choose well. Clip one was all spinning headlines and newsreel establishment, like the worst sort of wartime potboiler; the second featured stilted dialogue, horrible editing and a ballroom of people dancing to different music from the one on the soundtrack. The suspicion is that Andrea Riseborough took the role as a bet to see if her acting could breathe life into anything; the sense is that she's lost that bet.

Madonna was unintentionally hilarious when talking about making the film, suggesting that she was worried that she might somehow upset the Royal Family by telling a story about the former King. Odd, given that she did so much research it never occurred to her that ITV's 1978 Edward And Mrs Simpson series might have been the point where the Windsors figured that the tale was in the public domain.

There was an awkward sequence with two Italian fans who create Madonna dolls; to be fair to the pop star, I think she was trying for ironic, warm amusement but - curiously unable to show emotion on her face - she spent most of the segment staring at these two men who clearly adored her as if they were gun-toting simpletons.

Being mainly designed to try and drag WE out the dumper, there wasn't very much about music; everyone pretended they hadn't already heard the MDNA album title and pretended that it was a clever rather than desperate idea.

They did touch on piracy, though, Graham and Madge clumping through what sounded like a prearranged trot through 'these people say they're my fans but they access my music illegally' set-piece. This was the biggest failure of the hour; surely, surely, any organic discussion of piracy where a millionaire announces that she's had a bloke thrown in prison for the "criminal offence" of having one or two of her tunes before he should demands some sort of follow-up question. Or at the very least, a cheeky 'if he's heard the song before the production goes on, surely he's suffered enough?'

Instead, this looked like a handing of a chunk of primetime BBC One to a businessperson to push a certain political line on piracy which went totally unchallenged.

The big question, then: Madonna on the show, a new album in the offing - what sort of song did she do?

None, of course. Emili Sande was dragged on to do the performance. Madonna is Madonna. You don't think she's going to sing for her supper, do you?

BPI almost sound upbeat; fall back on to wailing about piracy

Half a point for making the effort to the BPI for trying to make their New Year press release about 2011 sales sound slightly upbeat:

MUSIC SALES SLIP IN 2011 BUT DIGITAL SINGLES AND ALBUMS GROW STRONGLY

In the past, that headline would have been written the other way round, splattering the silver lining with the mud of despondency.

Does this mean the BPI is slowly coming to terms with the new world; accepting that they're lucky to have emerged out of the last ten years with any sort of business at all?

Nope. Much of the press release is given to the usual wailing about the nasty pirates. Chief Executive Geoff Taylor starts it off:

“British artists continue to produce incredible music that resonates at home and around the world. But while other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our Government is taking too long to act on piracy, while weakening copyright to the benefit of US tech giants. The UK has already fallen behind Germany as a music market. Unless decisive action is taken in 2012, investment in music could fall again – a creative crunch that will destroy jobs and mean the next Adele may not get her chance to shine on the world stage.

Yes, god forbid that the government doesn't do as the BPI orders, lest the music industry lose out to American owned tech companies. Which would be a tragedy for the Japanese and American owned music industry, of course.

Taylor isn't an idiot, and he knows that it's probable that Germany's music industry has benefited not from any magic measures against piracy - "ooh, those umlauts are too hard to force through a torrent filter" - but from having had (for much of 2011) a stronger economy. Germany is a larger economy; it's got lower unemployment and lower inflation and the average German earns more than the average Brit - surely its surprising that it took so long for the UK to fall behind Germany in terms of music purchases? Taylor isn't an idiot. So why does he allow a news release to be circulated that makes him sound like one?

Tony Wadsworth, who chairs the BPI, also has something to say. The second paragraph of his thoughts at this magic time of year focuses on piracy:

“Led by Adele, Jessie J, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and others, records by British artists in 2011 achieved both critical and commercial success both at home and around the world. But the challenge of sustaining this performance against a backdrop of chronic piracy means that Government action remains absolutely crucial for British artists and their labels.”

Adele again. In fact, Adele had the whole of Tony's first paragraph just dedicated to her success:

“The spine-tingling performance by Adele at The BRIT Awards 2011 fired the starting gun on her incredible and well-deserved year of success. Her achievements are phenomenal – the biggest-selling album this century, the best seller of 2011 by miles, her debut album also making the year-end top five, not to mention her fantastic success overseas

As the press release points out, Adele's sales aren't just the impressive for this one-eighth of a century; they're just impressive, full stop:

Adele’s 21 reaches 3.8m sales – the biggest-ever selling album in a single year.

Unfortunately, this does tend to fire a big hole in the heart of Geoff and Tony's demand that something must be done about piracy to save the music industry. Despite all this "chronic" piracy going on, Adele's album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

So, how come Adele's album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed 'Adele 21 free' into Google they'd die?

Nope. The success of Adele's album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

Now, it's possible that in a world without torrentsearch, Adele might have sold more copies still of her record. But even so, she has sold more copies of 21 than any album has ever sold, even before home-taping killed music.

The conclusion has to be that if we don't see other records selling in large numbers, it's not because of chronic piracy, but chronic releases.

Look at the other names Wadsworth throws around - Jessie J, who is alright in a Nookie Bear Sings The Black Eyed Peas way; Coldplay, an act who can't even hide their own boredom with their music most days; Ed Sheeran, a singer so devoid of charisma promoters regularly close down his live act mid-set because they simply don't notice he's on stage. And these are the acts that Wadsworth picks out as the marshmallows in the box of Lucky Charms.

Since they're bobbing about on a sea of singing squadie spouses and ten year's worth of build-up of Cowell dung, you can see why Wadsworth felt that was the best he could do. There's people who will always be excited by music, but for big sales you need to get that ripple of connection, of interest, beyond those people and out into the wider public. The people who will buy an album from time-to-time, if it's a better way of spending their money than a computer game, or a bottle of wine, or a chip supper. With the best will in the world, Olly Murs is never going to win a struggle with a pickled egg and a can of Irn Bru.

It's not piracy. There's no need for the government to legislate. Unless the action they take is to pass a law forcing major labels to introduce quality control.