fair music weblog

Sony BMG looks set to win unconditional backing from the European Union’s top antitrust regulator for the merger that created the music group more than three years ago. The ruling, which could come as early as this month, would end more than a year of legal uncertainty following a controversial court ruling that annulled the European Commission’s original 2004 decision to clear the deal. (weiterlesen…)

The British rock band Marillion is widely considered within the industry to have been one of the first mainstream acts to have fully recognised and tapped the potential for commercial musicians to interact with their fans via the Internet circa 1996, and are nowadays often characterised as a rock & roll ‘Web Cottage Industry’. (weiterlesen…)

Peter Gabriel first came to fame as the lead vocalist  of the rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career. More recently he has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. He is also involved in various humanitarian efforts.

Gabriel has been interested in world music for many years, with the first musical evidence appearing on his third album. This influence has increased over time, and he is the driving force behind the WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) movement. He created the Real World Studios and record label to facilitate the creation and distribution of such music by various artists. (weiterlesen…)

In a report released today, RIAA v. The People: Four Years Later, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) provides a comprehensive look at the four-year litigation campaign waged by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) against music fans. The report traces the RIAA campaign from its beginnings in 2003 against a handful of students up to now.
The RIAA, writes EFF, continues to target college campuses for hundreds of new lawsuits each month. Under pressure from the recording industry, universities are establishing austere punishments for students suspected of sharing music files. In total, says the report, RIAA has already sued 20.000 file sharers.
“Despite the RIAA’s legal campaign, file-sharing is more popular than ever,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “History will treat this as a shameful chapter in the history of the music industry, when record companies singled out random music fans for disproportionate penalties. Artists must be compensated, but these lawsuits aren’t putting money in any creator’s pocket.”

Back to School for Reading, Writing, and RIAA Lawsuits? - EFF (the report can be downloaded from there)

“Schandfleck” in der Musikgeschichte - ORF Futurezone

The online newspaper Der Standard today published a comment of Paul Stepan, assistent for Cultural Economics and Creative Industries at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and member of the board of the Forschungsgesellschaft für kulturökonomische und kulturpolitische Studien (FOKUS), in wich he claims that there is no evidence of negative consequences of file sharing on the revenue of the music business. The comment is the latest contribution to a dispute over the role of the music industry in the digital age in Austria that has been going on in Der Standard lately.

(weiterlesen…)

iRights, a web platform for intellectual property rights in the digital world, reports about a prevailing study of the US Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), which says that “music piracy” costs US-economy a loss of billions of Dollars per year. Besides that, the study claims, 71.060 jobs get lost, thereof 26.860 in the music industry. One of the consequences shall be that the states are being deprived of 422 million US-Dollars on taxes.

iRights points out though, that at the end of their report IPI writes, all these numbers are estimates and their main source is the report 2006 Global Recording Industry in Numbers, published by the IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

(weiterlesen…)