Singer accepts money to sing for airline; unhappy at airline promoting this

Megan Washington landed herself a sweet gig just over a year ago - she did a corporate to mark Qantas' 90th birthday, trilling I Still Call Australia Home.

Everyone's happy, right?

Not quite. Qantas have been using video of the song ever since, and Megan's angry about that. So angry, she's launching a lawsuit:

Ms Washington alleges the use was unauthorised, and claims by promoting the song as they did, Qantas misled the public into believing the airline had her approval and support.

You can see her point. There might be some people who are untouched by cynicism enough to think if someone gets up and sings a song for a corporation's birthday, that they might in some way like that corporation. Rather than just being paid to shill.

The whole thing is particularly complicated because, since her turn at Qantas' birthday, Washington has taken on a role promoting Virgin Australia. It's unclear if she approves and supports them any more than she did Qantas. Perhaps we'll all find out in court.

Virgin closes in Paris

Who knew - besides the French - that there was still a chain of Virgin Megastores in France?

Not for much longer, though, as the Parisian flagship branch is closing and management are struggling to come up with a plan to keep the other branches going - although it admits this will involve closures and downsizing, even if they can pull it off.

The unions are, understandably, unhappy, blaming the owners - Butler Capital - for not having adapted quickly enough.

Although it's lovely to put the blame on a private equity group (Butler own all but 20% of the company; the other 20% is held by Lagardère, who bought the shops from Branson's Virgin back in 2007), it's selling records in a shop. It's increasingly hard to see how that can work as a mass-market proposition.

Universal get more time

As the Universal takeover of EMI gets caught up in regulators' worries about monopoly, Citibank have offered Vivendi longer to complete the deal.

The cash was supposed to have changed hands by September; now, to give time for the company to work out how to offload enough parts to keep everyone happy.

Hilariously, Richard Branson is talking about buying back Virgin:

"Richard Branson and Virgin have been assessing how to get back into recorded music business for many years," said a spokesman for Virgin Group. "The potential disposal of Virgin Records by Universal Music offers a wonderful opportunity to recreate a dynamic independent label in the market."

For many years? He can't have been assessing how to get back into music for more than five years, as up until 2007 Branson was part-owner of V2. Which was, erm, sold to Universal.

(It's worth noting that when Branson founded V2, he only owned 5% of it; the rest was held by Morgan Stanley. I know, imagine a record label mostly owned by a bank. Crazy, huh?)

While it might be fun for Richard to buy back Virgin, the failure of V2 should be evidence enough that he doesn't have a magic touch. And V2 was founded in 1996, when the music business still bore a superficial resemblance to the one in which Branson thrived in the early days of Virgin. And while the Virgin Group had a retail network.

However much people might want to believe that Beardie back at Virgin Records is a Leno-returns-to-Tonight story, it's much more likely to be akin to that awkward couple of episodes where Bet Lynch went back to Corrie, look confused and was swiftly written out again.

Virgin have a magic illegality-detecting machine

I'm not sure that it's entirely a heartwarming idea that Virgin are running a secret tool to inspect four out of every ten customer's internet streams to spot "illegal" files:

Jon James, Virgin Media executive director of broadband, said, “Understanding how consumer behaviour is changing will be an important requirement of Virgin Media’s upcoming music offering and, should they become law, the Government’s legislative proposals will also require measurement of the level of copyright infringement on ISPs’ networks.

“Detica’s CView technology potentially offers a non-intrusive solution which enhances our understanding of aggregate customer behaviour without identifying or storing individual customers’ data,” he added.

It's not entirely clear how having someone look at what you're doing online is "non-intrusive". Even if the intention is to keep it anonymised, there's a question mark over how anonymous you really can make such studies.

It's also not clear how, exactly, this data will detect 'illegal' files - by which we're presuming they mean unlicensed files. How - if the data is anonymous - would Virgin even begin to be able to tell if the data they're looking at is being used with or without permission? Do they have some sort of magic detection box?

The Virgin returns? Branson plots return to UK radio

He's got a couple of years to come to his senses, but ages after he flogged off Virgin Radio, and a few weeks after that network was forced to change its name to something Absolutely Bloody Awful, there's reports that Richard Branson is plotting to bid for Classic FM's licence when it comes up for renewal in 2011/2012.

Oh, it gets better, though: Kelvin MacKenzie is also involved, according to PaidContent. Kelvin MacKenzie. The man who, on Question Time last week, suggested that you could disprove global warming because 99% of scientists agree it's happening, while a year ago 99% of economists agreed the economy would continue to thrive. You wouldn't put a man with that degree of flawed logic in charge of restacking the shelves in a Virgin megastore, never mind in charge of an FM rock network, would you?

Leto: Don't look at my dirty pants

Poor Jared Leto. It's clear that his band have been hit with the lawsuit from Virgin as a reminder across all EMI artists that there are new rules in place, and Guy Hands is not Guy Handsoutmoneywillynilly.

Even so, that's no comfort for Jared, who must now battle the forces of Virgin and fight for truth. To the MySpace, Jared:

We had been signed to our record contract for 9 years. Basically, under California law, where we live and signed our deal, one cannot be bound to a contract for more than 7 years. This is widely known by all the record companies and has been for years. In fact, so aware of it are they that they desperately try to make deals outside of California whenever possible. It is a law that protects people from lengthy, unfair, career-spanning contracts. This law also gave us the legal right to explore other possible opportunities.

He has right on his side!

Yes we have been sued by EMI. But NOT for failing to deliver music or for 'quitting'. We have been sued by the corporation quite simply because roughly 45 days ago we exercised our legal right to terminate our old, out of date contract, which, according to the law is null and void.

We terminated for a number of reasons, which we won't go into here (we'd rather not air any dirty laundry) but basically our representatives could not get EMI to agree to make a fair and reasonable deal.

He's not going to air dirty laundry, but can he just stress that it's EMI being unfair and unreasonable? Not to go public with it, especially how UNFAIR and ROTTEN EMI are.

If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of 2 million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we. And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren't they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still 1.4 million dollars in debt to them is even crazier. That the next record we make will be used to pay off that old supposed debt just makes you start wondering what is going on. Shouldn't a record company be able to turn a profit from selling that many records? Or, at the very least, break even? We think so.

Leto was 26 and had worked in Hollywood for a good few years when he signed the deal - sure, anyone can get screwed by a label; but if Leto can't get a decent deal, then what hope does a small band have?

That, and other issues, like the new regime at EMI firing most of the people we know and love, wanting to place advertisements on our website, EMI owning 100 percent of the masters of our record...forever, and basically having a revolving door of regimes at the company made it easy to not want to continue as is.

I may be being unfair to Leto here, but I'm not sure I heard a single murmur from him before about the new EMI regime until they started to sue him?

FYI Virgin/EMI was not required to make this lawsuit public or to list such an egregiously and stupendously large amount of mullah. In fact, they were not required to set any price even close to this. We did not want to take this public, but we felt it best to explain our point of view to you, our
friends and fans, in hope that you can better understand our point of view.

This laundry, which we won't wash in public, we didn't want to be here washing this stuff. Leto seems to be accepting here, in passing, that Virgin did have a right to list some sort of demand for cash. And how did Leto expect them to issue legal proceedings without it being public? In some magical Harry Potter style invisible courtroom?

We would always do our best to avoid a fight, but sometimes it's important to stand up for what you believe in. We hope that by doing what's right we can help to change things for the better, for ourselves and possibly others.

Cry God For Jared, Mars and the ones who aren't Jared Leto in the band! We must stand up for what's right, albeit in this case it's breaking a contract with a record label.

It's interesting to note, though, that despite EMI treating the band so badly, they're still advertising the albums for sale on their MySpace. That's awfully good-natured of them.

Still, it can't be long now before victory is theirs. They have appealed to their fans, through MySpace, and the complex niceties of Californian contract law, surely, won't be lost on them...

♥Britt-nee♥ [sm] [echelon] happy b-day joe!

oh my gosh! 30 million!!! dude, thats freakin crazy! and what the heck is a regime? you said it like 3 times and i was like what is that? haha. i know ur probably not even gonna read this but i just wanted to see if you would tell me what it is.
[...]
Rachel[Gates]

switch to warner bros. they are better.
[...]
Blue Hippo[wootoow]

that is most definitely a lot of money.....thats stupid......well at least you aren't quiting so that is awesome though......wootoow

It might not be much, but Guy Hands hasn't even got people wootoowing for him.

That's a million dollars a second

Virgin Records are suing 30 Seconds To Mars, claiming that Jared Leto's side-project has broken the terms of its contract.

The band allegedly signed a three album deal in 1999 and have conspicuously failed to deliver on it, complains the label. Leto, of course, could drop off another record and then Virgin really would have something to moan on about it.

The business hopes to get thirty million dollars in return for the breach of contract - presumably much more money than they've invested in the band, though. And if they have been stupid enough to piss that much away on them, they deserved to lose it.

Injunction unction, what was your function?

Back in April, the BPI warned that if the Internet Service Providers hadn't signed up to the three-strikes-and-out policy by the 18th, they'd be issuing an injunction. Of some sort. Against somebody.

If that was meant to be the big threat to bring the ISPs into line, didn't really work, did it? Indeed, it just made the BPI look like the sort of bully who is all huff and puff but without any blowing your house down. Surely there must be someone there who understands that it's not conducive to positive negotiations to threaten the other party if they don't agree.

It's now looking like even the BPI are giving up on the three strikes idea - David Jennings points out that the first agreement between the BPI and an ISP is a little less strict:

Four months on, and it's interesting to see how a BPI deal with the Virgin Media ISP is being reported. The deal is for an "education campaign" that will see users who share files illegally receive, not a warning or a disconnection notice, but "practical advice on how to prevent internet account misuse, links to legitimate sites and the potential dangers… of viruses and spyware." This last quote is from Music Week coverage, which hails it as "a giant leap forward in [the BPI's] efforts to stop illegal file-sharing on the internet by signing a landmark deal" (my emphasis). I don't know about you, but after all that sabre-rattling, sending out letters politely informing criminals (in heavy quote marks) that there are alternatives to crime seems like quite a comedown.

It's also worth noting that the ISP they've done the deal with is Virgin, one of only two UK service providers to have a major interest in a serious content creation business (the other being B Sky B), and thus perhaps with a bigger interest in the question of unauthorised content.

Gordon in the morning: Yes, yes, Virgin, tee-hee

Gordon giggles with delight this morning, as Russell Brand may-or-may-not have had sex with an air hostess who works for Branson's airline:

Now Brand beds a Virgin

Do you see what he did there?

Actually, what has he done there? Just because you work for Virgin doesn't make you a Virgin, either in fact or in title. Gordon's not a News International, is he? If you had a relationship with a burger bar manager, you wouldn't think "well, now I've had sex with a McDonalds", would you?

Mind you, at least you can see what he was trying to get at, which is more than you can say for the headline on the report about the NME Awards:

Klaxons gong-goed in States

What? What does that even think it's meant to mean?

Smart then manages to miss what you'd thought would have been the most important part of the evening for him - when Ronson joined the stage invasion and fell over, he said "this'll be in The Sun tomorrow, won't it?" Somehow, Gordon managed to miss it.

Virgin offers to take three strikes for BPI - perhaps

Last summer, Tiscali attempted to be handmaiden to the BPI by introducing a "voluntary" agreement whereby it disconnected customers when told to by the music industry. It dropped the scheme quite quickly when it transpired that although the BPI is happy to pay lawyers it wasn't prepared to put its hand in its pockets to cover Tiscali's costs.

Now, Virgin is offering to try another pilot for the BPI:

In a statement today, Virgin Media said: "We have been in discussions with rights holders organisations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favour a sensible voluntary solution."

A spokesman promised that customers will be told when any trial begins, but couldn't say when that will be.

Although, to be fair, that sounds a little like 'ISP makes willing-sounding noises in a bid to keep the pretence of voluntary system alive' rather than a desperate desire to rush ahead.

And why would they want to rush ahead? B2fxxx reports that the recent European Court of Justice ruling in the Promusicae case suggests that throwing people off the web to protect copyright holders is almost certainly a breach of European Law.

Inside EMI

There's a wonderful piece in today's Telegraph by Robert Sandall, who was at Virgin a decade ago, explaining just how badly run EMI was. Virgin refused to be part of its parent company:

Round at ours, EMI was spoken of, if at all, in the same dismissive tones as real commercial rivals such as Sony or Warners. Contact with the corporate HQ, only a couple of miles away in West London, was minimal, and we competed fiercely with the mothership whenever we got the chance.

I vividly remember the jubilation in the Virgin building when EMI's great white hope, Robbie Williams, failed to make number one with his first solo single, Freedom. Our joy at the dismissal of a senior EMI manager following an onboard incident with a female flight attendant was unbounded. We swaggered outrageously in the year when, thanks to the soaraway Spice Girls, Virgin UK reported more profit than its EMI parent.

But if Virgin saw itself as cooler than its Dad, its fake-indie sublabel replicated the relationship:

The guys who ran our faux-indie Hut label - home to the Verve and Placebo - were desperate to keep their operation out of the hands of Virgin's in-house press and marketing teams, whom they viewed as too corporate to be trusted with hypersensitive types such as Richard Ashcroft.

Clearly, it's going to be easy for Hands to sack 2,000 people - he can just prune off the people who refuse to accept they're part of a major label.

Sandall makes the point that when times were good, the lack of any corporate coherence wasn't a problem; it was only when the cash started running out that things got bad.

He is a little unfair, though:

Becoming the most successful record label on the planet encouraged EMI to embark on a long and giddy expansion programme that saw it merge with the TV rental business Thorn, and acquire large stakes in the retail sector, notably in HMV record stores and the booksellers, Dillons and Waterstones.

[...]
The vast amount of time and money spent on those failed hook-ups would have been better used tightening up the business itself and, more specifically, investing in the digital download market that EMI, like all the other majors, chose initially to view as a threat rather than an opportunity.

It's arguable that this is true of the Waterstones takeover - although that was a decision taken by the HMV shops management team rather than the people running the record business; but the Thorn-EMI merger happened in 1977. We're no fans of the major labels, but suggesting it was short-sighted to not be investing in digital downloads two years before CDs were invented seems a little harsh.

More trouble for EMI

Set again the bigger problems that EMI is struggling with, it's not much, but let's hope that Hands keeps enough staff on to deal with the lawsuit from Victory Records. The smaller label has the hump that Virgin tempted Hawthorne Heights into breaking their contract.

Amusingly, Victory have costed their losses at ten million dollars, and want twenty five million on top of that in punitive damages. Ten million dollars? Victory really believe that's what they could have expected to make? In profits?

The group's public announcement in August 2006 that it would no longer record for or work with Victory and the ensuing controversy -- along with a "shock and awe" legal and public relations campaign against the label and its founder, Tony Brummel -- drove down the sales of the second album, the suit says. As a result, retailers have returned more than 500,000 copies of the second album to Victory, which suffered "millions of dollars in damages for returned product alone," the lawsuit alleges.

How many copies did they press up in the first place?

RIAA win Thomas case

The jury have found Jammmie Thomas guilty of filesharing in the first downloading case to come to court in the US - a sample of 24 songs has landed her a $222,000 fine, a figure which even supporters of strict copyright have suggested might be a bit much. Writing on ZDNet, the bittorrent-basher Russell Shaw suggests that justice hasn't actually been served:

This has all the earmarks of a defendant being so totally outlawyered by out-to-set-an-example fancy attorneys from Big Music, and a starstruck jury buying the whole line.

But $22,0000? GMAFB.

Now here would be a good compromise. If Thomas is so guilty of hurting music, music labels and musicians, have her do some sort of community service helping musicians in her community. Maybe drive poor kids to after-school music classes, something like that?

But that, of course, would be to assume the RIAA is interested in music rather than money.

Reading the summing-up in the case on Ars Technica, it looks like the fundamental flaw in Thomas' case was her defence - that the RIAA couldn't prove she was using the computer when the tracks were uploaded - seemed to be undermined by a wave of circumstantial evidence which suggested the opposite. Although the music industry will be spinning this as a definitive victory, all they appear to have done is establish a legal precedent of where reasonable doubt might lie.

So, Virgin is suddenly £100k better off. Will this filter its way to the artists? While Thomas is now looking at spending the rest of her life working one and a quarter days out of five to send some cash to the record label, it's about one-tenth of the pay-off Virgin's parent EMI gave to Martin Stewart when he left the company. Suing nine more breadline people, and they'll be able to handsomely pay off another executive, then.

Plays No More: Virgin closes downloads service

Virgin is canning its windows media music download service, phasing it out over the next month. Oh, that does mean, of course, if you've been subscribing rather than buying, your music collection will stop working on October 19th. Surprise!

Which could be an illustration of exactly what people warned you about when you were thinking of hiring instead of buying outright.

The company has, however, apologised for "any inconvenience" that having your carefully-assembled music collection vanish might cause.

Virgin for sale?

Following on from the collapse of MVC, MusicZone, Fopp and Tower and the struggling of HMV as it tries to adjust to being a juice bar rather than a record shop, the Telegraph is reporting Richard Branson is thinking of offloading the UK Virgin Megastore chain.

Apparently, the chain's management are hoping to organise a buyout of the "roughly breaking even" chain. Presumably you can enjoy the downward spiral more if you've paid for your ticket.

Plane spotting

Having predicted that the American public would crush Heather Mills' Dancing With The Stars ambitions at the first vote - and having got it so incredibly wrong - The Sun is now struggling to find any signs that America might not have taken her to their hearts in defiance of the strict 'Heather bad; Paul good' party line.

Today? Apparently Heather was "humiliated" when nobody applauded after she filmed a drop-in bit on a Virgin Atlantic jet:

The Virgin jet’s captain announced they would be performing — but at the end not one person clapped.

One passenger said: “It was totally embarrassing for everyone concerned and all a bit shambolic.” Virgin said: “It was not our captain’s idea.”

The weakness of that Virgin quote - which sounds like a bemused press spokesperson trying to work out if a national newspaper is really asking them why nobody applauded a stunt being filmed for a TV programme on its plane - suggests that there wasn't very much there to begin with.

Of course they didn't applaud. Would you clap if there was a show-off on your plane doing some work? Almost certainly not. And - just in case that the piece's writer Thomas Whittaker has never been on an aeroplane - someone should point out to him you wouldn't really be able to do ballroom on a plane. Even if First Class.

The Moon's on with tunes

The geezerisation of Virgin Radio continues as the station's very studios trundle down towards Hackney: following the signing of Suggs, the network has now signed a big deal with Shane Richie. Shane was EastEnders' Alfie Moon, but is better known as having taken over the Daz doorstep challenge from Danny Baker and, of course, his seminal appearance on 3-2-1 with his sideway look at youth culture (i.e. he wore lycra and pretended to be bodypopping.) During that programme, Ted Rogers predicted that we'd be hearing a lot more from that young man, and how right he was. But surely even Ted couldn't have guessed that:

Richie will make his debut with an afternoon show on Easter Monday, April 9, which will be part of the station's "Great British Bank Holiday Weekend" celebrating "everything that's great and British".

Richie said: "I like to think of myself as voice of the people, friend of the stars. We're going to have a bit of fun here!"

We're looking forward to what Virgin might consider to be great about British things. The shortlist we've come up with is:

- Not Australian-born American-passport holding media moghuls
- Erm, that's it

Please say it'll be a one-way trip

The thought of McFly being blasted into space is one to cheer the sould on a cold winter's morning, although the apparent plans to bring them back as well takes the edge off slightly.

They're supposedly going to do something linked to Richard Branson's supposed holiday-in=space company.

Even if the technology exists, and Branson's underwriters let him go ahead, this won't be until 2009 at the earliest, so it's quite a leap of faith to assume that McFly will still be a going concern by then. It's always dodgy planning to put musicians on spaceflights too far ahead of time - NASA had a terrible time explaining to Eddie Fisher why he lost his seat on the manned trips to the moon - but even if Branson was blasting idiots off into space tomorrow, would the very rich really want to be entertained by a band aimed at nine year-old girls?

Still, at least in space, nobody can hear you scream "they're a bit like a poor man's Busted, aren't they?"

EMI shrinks a little

The merger of the Virgin and Capitol imprints at EMI has already yielded cost savings: eleven promotional staff and the entire Capitol sales team have been canned.

When management is this poor, all it takes is for Robbie Williams to release a duff album, and all of a sudden families are an income down.

NME - News coverage you can trust

Actually, we're rather proud they didn't bother to remove all evidence of their earlier, wrong story: