We’ve all experienced the sneering smugness of the executives at YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Amazon looking down their noses at artists and labels (especially independents). (Never a problem with Apple in my experience, by the way, gee I wonder why.) But the ontological definition of smugness is often found in the smuggest of the smug–former […]
Senator Mark Warner has released (or leaked) a comprehensive plan to combat fake news and foreign manipulation of the American electorate through Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, however appealing or appalling some of Senator Warner’s proposals are, it’s likely that he may just be expanding the game of whack-a-mole that Silicon Valley loves so much. We’ve seen […]
More excellent argumentation from Creative Future. 04-09-18 Last month, CreativeFuture asked you, our followers, what you thought about platform responsibility. Little did we know that, in the meantime, the issue would start taking over the front pages of our newspapers and websites! In a nutshell, the issue is whether Google, Facebook, and their Silicon Valley […]
However much we dislike the way Apple uses music as a loss leader to see products, at least they don’t treat their users as a product. Which is more than you can say for Facebook, Google, Twitter and the entire Web 2.0 bunch.
Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was Time “Person of the Year” in 2010? Here’s a strange anecdote from the story in Time that accompanied their fawning over Zuck: On the afternoon of Nov. 16, 2010, Mark Zuckerberg was leading a meeting in the Aquarium, one of Facebook’s conference rooms, so named because it’s in the middle of a […]
[Editor Charlie sez: Remember what Bluewater Music Publishing’s counsel Richard Busch had to say about Spotify? At the time that Spotify hired HFA, HFA had a database with less than the number of recordings and compositions available in the Spotify library. Between this insufficient database, Spotify’s piecemeal system, and HFA’s own lack of a system capable […]
This is what happens when you stick to your property rights–Bloomberg reports that Facebook, aka royalty deadbeat, has signed a multiyear licensing deal with Universal Music Group: Facebook Inc. signed a multiyear licensing deal that lets the social network carry songs and artists from the world’s biggest record label, Universal Music Group, across its platforms. […]
Facebook pays no royalties for the music that gives significant value to the platform. That’s often a surprising proposition for artists and songwriters, much less the general public. Yet it is true—hitmakers and new artists, pros and amateurs alike do not get a penny from Facebook and the company doesn’t even attempt to license their […]
The good thing about Facebook is that it brings people together in new communities. The bad thing about Facebook is that some of those people previously only met on Death Row. And as Sartre said, hell is other people. via President Obama’s Farewell Address on Social Media’s Threat to Democracy — Artist Rights Watch
Like Wall Street before, the tech industry is a justifiable punchbag. “MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm.”
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