Hey Alexa, Regift Yourself: Google Overtakes Amazon in Biometric Data Acquisition Tools — Artist Rights Watch
According to the Canalys research outfit, Google has taken the lead over Amazon for the first time in the acquisition of biometric identifying data–aka “smart speakers”. It should come as no surprise that Google is vastly more interested in acquiring “phonemes” by which to identify users and track them through a variety of means.
The “smart speaker” is the latest step in government contractor Google’s long running campaign to track users and build speech-to-text and speech recognition tools.
The program goes back to at least 2007 when Marissa Meyer said of “GOOG-411”:
The speech recognition experts that we have say: If you want us to build a really robust speech model, we need a lot of phonemes, which is a syllable as spoken by a particular voice with a particular intonation. So we need a lot of people talking, saying things so that we can ultimately train off of that.
So who do you think the customers are for speech-to-text and speech recognition tools to whom government contractors like Google and Amazon might be selling your biometric data? The biometrics harvesting tools allows Big Tech to connect your voice print and maybe your fingerprints to all the other data that they have already harvested about you from other means. And of course when you add in facial recognition or iris recognition it’s game, set and match.
Think about that when you enable your fingerprint, iris or facial recognition authentication or talk to Alexa or your Google Home Mini. Or you could just ask the Shoe Gazer at the Internet Association.
“Hey Alexa, re-gift yourself.”
Facebook’s Campbell Brown Demonstrates the Ontological Smugness of the Ship Jumper
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 executives from a business in one of the copyright categories who quisling their way into a job defending surveillance capitalism at one of the big social networks. There is no better example than Campbell Brown. Yes, that Campbell Brown, formerly of CNN.
Ms. Brown, you see, is now Facebook’s “global head of news partnerships” or something like that. She’s the one that Facebook sends out to try to convince news organizations that Mark Zuckerberg isn’t out to destroy or at least censor them and their readers.
According to multiple reports, in The Australian, The Sun, The Guardian and others, Ms. Brown is quoted as telling a group of Australian news media executives (this from Olivia Solon in The Guardian):
“We will help you revitalise journalism … in a few years the reverse looks like I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a hospice,” she said, in comments corroborated by five people who attended the meeting in Sydney on Tuesday.
Now ask yourself this–how many times have you heard this exact kind of thing coming from Big Tech executives? I know I’ve been hearing it since at least 1999 if not before. That stuff is really, really getting old.
But wait, there’s more of the same.
During the four-hour meeting, Brown also talked about the company’s decision to prioritise personal posts from family and friends over journalistic content within the news feed. The move has hit some publishers who rely heavily on referrals from Facebook hard.
“We are not interested in talking to you about your traffic and referrals anymore. That is the old world and there is no going back – Mark wouldn’t agree to this,” said Brown.
Of course, the real problem is that because of a variety of safe harbors, it is difficult for news organizations to cut off “journalistic content” from Facebook altogether which is exactly what they richly deserve. If you’re going to the hospice anyway, wouldn’t you rather go to that big news conference in the sky on your feet than on your knees?
And here’s the height of smugness from Ms. Brown:
The Australian also reported that Brown said that Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, “doesn’t care about publishers but is giving me a lot of leeway and concessions to make these changes”, although both Facebook and Brown vehemently deny this comment was made, referring to a transcript they have from the meeting.
Facebook would not release the transcript from the meeting.
Of course they wouldn’t. They have all the data in the world that they sell to anyone with a pulse, but they’re not going to release that transcript. Presumably this is on the advice of Facebook’s soon-to-be-departed general counsel, the eponymous Mr. Stretch, he of the Dickensian name.
The upshot of the story would appear to be self-aggrandizement by Campbell Brown–who many would have thought better of–that your business is dying unless you deal with me because Mr. Big is too big for you but has deputized me to throw you some scraps.
Even though Ms. Brown and Facebook deny the event ever happened that way, I have to say that it all rings very true to me. I think it will ring true to anyone who has dealt with those who jump ship but then go sell themselves based on their past work experience to a buffoon like Zuckerberg (who kowtows like Bozo to authoritarian regimes, literally). Amazing what a few stock options will do to elevate one’s opinion of oneself.
All that’s missing is for the journalist trades to hail Ms. Brown’s expertise and deal making ability simply because she was once a passenger on the ship she jumped from. That would complete the ontological smugness of it all.
Must Read: @AnneMarieSteele: An insightful interview with Jody Gerson about songwriting and breaking artists
[This interview is one of the best statements of what signing and breaking a songwriter or an artist is all about. When I was reading Jody Gerson’s interview I remember when I asked David Anderle once why we didn’t do bidding wars at A&M. He said quite simply that A&M helped compelling artists make great records and then stuck with them until they found an audience. They didn’t always work out but it wasn’t for lack of trying. That had nothing to do with bidding wars.]
I think it is a difficult time for songwriters who aren’t writing massive hit songs. When I first came into the industry, you could write a cut on a big album, like for Whitney Houston, and it would sell a lot of records, and you could make a lot of money as a songwriter. But unless you’re writing hit singles or you have pieces of songs on enormous numbers of streamed product, it is very difficult right now….
A lot of people are relying on data today. I don’t go in that direction. I judge music based on what I feel. Does it move me? Is that a lyric that articulates a feeling that I have better than I can articulate it? Is there a driving beat that makes me want to move? Is there a melody that makes me want to sing along? I have found in my career anytime that I have trusted my instinct, I’m right….
What everybody’s missing is the role of the record company. There’s talk about whether artists need to be signed to a record company. I would like you to show me one streaming platform that has broken an artist, made a major investment in breaking an artist. It is not easy.
Just because a song is on a digital platform doesn’t mean you’re breaking that artist. The companies that put the most into the development of artists are still record companies. The investment in breaking artists still is something that we can’t underestimate, and platforms do not do that.
Hit artists, superstars, are never flukes. It just doesn’t happen that way. It takes a village to break an artist.
Read the post from the Wall Street Journal
h/t Artist Rights Watch
The Times of London Confirms that Google is Behind Astroturf “Opposition” to Article 13
Since the earliest days of MTP, we’ve been pushing what has come to be called the “value gap”–the margin of profit that Big Tech makes from playing games with the DMCA safe harbor (and the Section 230 safe harbor in the Communications Decency Act). In 2006 we called this “The DMCA is Not an Alibi” and pointed the finger directly at the biggest offender–Google and in particular its YouTube subsidiary.
We’ve also pushed the facts on how Google creates fake astroturf groups which has been going on for years and in countries other than the United States. While no one has ever looked too hard at what happened in SOPA opposition in the US and ACTA resistance in Europe, the circumstantial evidence suggests that there’s a mismatch of grand proportion between the number of “people” who show up for anonymous or near anonymous online “protests” yet nearly zero warm bodies show up in person to protest, say, Copyright Office Roundtables on modifications to the DMCA safe harbor.
This was even true of the White House petition on SOPA–there were no geographical boundaries on who could sign up to a White House petition, which is the least that you would think that the President of the United States would try to accomplish on a petition that directly affected U.S. law. We’re assuming that the same rules applied to all White House petitions, but it ain’t necessarily so–given Google’s White House influence, restrictions could have been dropped for SOPA alone.
We saw it once again with the Article 13 vote in the European Parliament. Millions participated in what could legitimately be described as a last minute DDOS style attack on the European Parliament–again, anonymous or near anonymous and largely unverifiable communications shrouded under the shield of “constituent communications” with no way to verify in real time exactly who these people were.
This makes no sense–why is it that the only time the anti-copyright crowd can summon large amounts of data is when no one knows who they are?
David Lowery and Volker Rieck writing in The Trichordist have put their finger right on exactly how Google accomplishes this policy bombing with stunning exposes of OpenMedia and New/Mode, the two organizations that seem to be funded by Google and are as close to what Mr. Rieck called the “political hack” of the European Parliament as one is to two.
We also posted on MTP about this issue and called on EU public prosecutors and the European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager to investigate the entire process.
The reason we mentioned Margrethe Vestager is because the week of the Article 13 intimidation campaign, the European Commission fined Google some $5 billion. Understand that Google got involved late in the Article 13 debate and stood up its astroturf campaign very late in the cycle–this would have been right about the time that Google knew it was about to be the subject of yet another multi-billion fine for its bad behavior.
These competition actions don’t happen in a vacuum and there is a lot of dialog with the companies subject to the fine, so it is hard to believe that the timing of the announcement by Commissioner Vestager as well as the amount wasn’t well-known to Google when it dropped the hammer on Article 13’s astroturf campaign. Not only that, but when the usual suspects called me out, I knew I was onto something.
Fortunately, David’s first rate investigative report on the astroturf campaign caught the attention of as august journal as The Times of London (“Google funds website that spams for its causes”) which confirmed David’s story with its own independent investigation. It is becoming increasingly apparent that in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, do we take these aberrant behaviors as normal or do we question them?
None of Google’s attacks on government should be surprising–anarchy is in their DNA. As former Obama White House aide and Internet savant Susan Crawford tells us:
I was brought up and trained in the Internet Age by people who really believed that nation states were on the verge of crumbling…and we could geek around it. We could avoid it. These people were irrelevant.
There seems little doubt that Google paid off Open Media to do its political dirty work–the question is, do the Members of the European Parliament want to sit there and keep getting abused by an antagonistic multinational corporation, or do they want to do something about it.
@mikehuppe: Broadcast Radio Makes an Ironic Plea for Fairness — Artist Rights Watch
SoundExchange’s CEO says it’s time radio starts paying all music creators fairly for their work.
On Monday, a group of radio broadcasters penned a letter in support of the National Association of Broadcasters’ (NAB) push for deregulation of the $14 billion radio industry. Their letter was based on the NAB’s petition to the FCC this past June, in which the NAB sought to allow expanded broadcaster ownership of radio stations (i.e., increased consolidation) throughout the country. The NAB’s justification: broadcasters must adjust their business model to the realities of the new streaming world.
As a representative of the many creative parties who help craft music, we are frequently on the opposite side of issues from the NAB. And while I can’t comment on NAB’s specific requests, I was delighted to find so much common ground in their FCC filing in June….
I agree with the NAB that the law should “finally adopt rules reflecting competitive reality in today’s audio marketplace” and should “level the playing field” for all entities in the music economy.
If radio truly wants to modernize, it can start by taking a giant leap into the 21st century and paying all music creators fairly for their work. Stop treating artists like 17th century indentured servants, just so radio can reap bigger profits. If radio wants to have rules that reflect the music industry of today, then that should apply across the board.
We should resolve this gaping unfairness to artists before we begin talking about allowing radio to consolidate even further.
And You Know It Makes Me Wonder What’s Going On: @theDavidCrosby’s Streaming Royalties
David Crosby was in this band called The Byrds which covered “Mr. Tambourine Man” aka Bob Dylan’s first #1 hit as a songwriter. Then he was in another band called Crosby Stills Nash & Young. He’s done a lot of other things, too, but I mention those two bands because each of those bands were inducted into the Rock Hall. That’s right–David Crosby was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice. And, one more thing–he is a pre-72 artist for many of his classic recordings and songs.
So here’s his reality. Oh, and PS Spotify closed at $175.50.
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