“Never in history music has been able to get so far, geographically, as now.”, says Ronaldo Lemos, law professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas law school in Rio de Janeiro, head of Creative Commons Brazil and chairman of iCommons, at a fair music discussion at Ars Electronica in Linz in September. By this Lemos means that the internet and digital technologies enabled the spread of music globally in a simple, cheap and fast way. This technological change leads to societal changes according to art and culture.
To give an example Ronaldo Lemos describes the scene of Tecno Brega in Brazil. Tecno Brega is a mix between an 80s beat with very romantic music, which is great for dancing together and therefore extremely popular in Brazil, especially in the north. The Tecno Brega scene releases around 400 new CDs every year and the so called Sound System Parties are crowded every weekend. Sony BMG, the largest music label in Brazil, in 2006 only released 13 CDs of brazilian music, Ronaldo Lemos remarks.
At the panel discussion “fair music – it`s time for a change” that had been held on 20th September at net.culture.space in the Wiener Museumsquartier in Vienna (Austria), the brazilian musician Celia Mara, who lives in Austria, talked about her difficulties in getting into the music biz in Brazil and in Austria. In Brazil, if you want to get on the radio, you have to pay something like a bribe. In Austria it is difficult for her to get into mainstream media as her music does not fit into any typical music category.
How the music “industry” beyond the nationwide-radio-record-label-business in Brazil works and how musicians can make their own deals is now described in detail in an article on the iCommons website. Paula Martini from Rio de Janeiro there describes the success story of the most popular band, Calypso, that has no contract with a label but ows her success to street credibility. Martini writes: “Their albums are sold primarily through street vendors, who sell CDs and DVDs of the band in the streets, not because they are pirated, but because that is the preference of the group itself. This is the result of a recent research published by F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, one of the largest advertising agencies in the country.”
The announcement of british band Radiohead to release their new album as download first and letting the fans decide how much they want to pay caused a lot of blog entries and comments. People are discussing if this was a good idea or not, whether it will be an example for other bands or kill the business all along. Bob Lefsetz, authority in music analysis, says very directly what he thinks about this news.
First he wonders in his The Lefsetz Letter if this news could be true, then thinks about the reasons and comes to the conclusion that Radiohead are playing by a different rule book “that says the money flows from the music, that people have to believe in you, that you’ve got to treat them right.”
At the World Forum on Music in Beijing Martin Kretschmer, director of the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management of Bournemouth University, UK presented his study about the earnings of musical artists. He said that there is not much data available on artist’s income and that it would be helpful to have a better and statistically comparable income basis. But what his research showed so far was that artists earn way less then the average citizen and that the top 10% of composers and songwriters account for almost 90% of the total earnings of the profession. A very important statement Kretschmer made on copyright income: “It is often claimed that copyright does ensure income for artists, but that’s plain nonsense.”, Kretschmer made clear. For composers, earnings from copyright royalties account on average for less than a quarter of creative income, for musicians, for about 1%. Copyright law in its current form is a weak and skewed regulatory mechanism for awarding authors and artists, says Kretschmer.
The song “Return to Innocence”, recorded by the German Group Enigma, was directly mixed from a song recorded years earlier by Kuo Ying-Nan and Kuo Hsin-Chu, known as “Jubilant Drinking Song”. Large portions of “Jubilant Drinking Song” were lifted and copied by Enigma into their hugely popular track. Over fifty percent of “Return to Innocence” contains portions of the “Jubilant Drinking Song”. Although Enigma claimed that it had received permission to copy from a third party, neither that third party nor Enigma had ever received permission from the Kuos. But far worse, Enigma failed to recognize the Kuos as the creators and performers of this work. (more…)
Posted by Fairmusic Team on September 21st, 2007 under background, culture
Mute Records is a record label formed in 1978 by Daniel Miller primarily to release his own single “Warm Leatherette”. Mute Records made a name for itself as the label that was willing to sign post-punk artists like Fad Gadget (Frank Tovey’s pseudonym), Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, and Cabaret Voltaire. Once electronic music hit the British charts from 1981 onwards, Mute signed artists like Depeche Mode, Nitzer Ebb, Yazoo and Erasure that utilised new technology which would eventually redefine the sound of the dancefloor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
