27 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
copyrights, movie industry, music industry

It's uncanny how as soon as the immediate menace of Sopa and PIpa seems to fade away a new agreement, rather secretly discussed between all countries in the world since 2008, is about to emerge and oh my, doesn't that one have an ugly head: ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) wants to establish new international standards on intellectual property rights enforcement.

While ACTA sounds fine for counterfeit goods (come on, no one serious about what she/he wears would want to be taken alive with a fake Vuitton bag) and all generic medecines (we don't mean the illegal sugar pill one buys on the internet on the promess it's the best weight control pill ever) , ACTA comes with a new array of measures about copyright infringement on the Internet that actually will be very counter-productive and rather against the tide. Not mentionning being organically prepared as a weapon against freedom and self expression on the net.

Copyright infringments need to be tackled down for sure. And there are ways to do it, and there are ways to just blast in the store with an armoured vehicle. Studies have shown that consumers are willing to buy content they would otherwise...

26 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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movie industry, music industry

Ok, enough with the rumour saying Megaupload was in fact really shut down cos it was about to unleash MegaMusic and hurt really badly the music industry and Itunes in the process (something we talked about on Dec 20th http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/megaupload-music)...What's next ? The Illuminati have hidden a nasty secret worm in every Mission Impossible movie illegally downloaded ? When whispering Megaupload in reverse 3 times, there's an image of a luxurious Mercedes SUV appearing in your coffee mug ? Enough nonsense !

We think it's a good time to look at some points that can be made out of the very internet intense two weeks that just happened

x The Feds didn't take any gloves when doing this international mission: they wanted MU out, they got MU out. It's scary, cos such power could be used in other circumstances. We can see more and more countries and states, not all rogues or tyrannies, pulling the plug off internet when interior troubles appear, or when they want to shut down informations sources. We should think about it: who owns Internet ? Isn't there a real urgency in making it...

25 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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marketing, music industry, music marketing

Captivating exposé by the eloquent Emmanuel Legrand (http://legrandnetwork.blogspot.com/) this morning at Huis 23, an interesting collaboration between Brussels' famous concerts hall AB, Poppunt and Muziekvlaanderen.

Done with datas covering one full year of radio airplays, legal digital downloads and national/pan european charts, Emmanuel succeeds in giving a precise and factual report on the cross-borders circulation of European music repertoire within the European Union. Under what seems to be at first a rather heavy-duty pile-up of numbers and colorful drawings rapidly emerges fascinating obesrvations on how 6 countries (France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Poland) in Europe act and reacts when it comes down to radio airplays.

I would advice you to download and read the report (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/32444317/Report_European%20repertoire_Jan%202012...) but here are some of the major foundings of Mr Legrand:

* Local repertoires does work rather well nationally but most artists do...

24 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
artists, music industry

So, you're online, gently browsing thru the Disney Store, looking for a gift you need to buy to your sister-in-law's children and gee isn't it hard to choose between all these pink tshirts and princesses outfits. Well, there are a few branded tshirts with The NightMare Before Christmas and that's a success among many, many Disneypark fans but that was as far as it went for Disney in terms of brutal originality... Until now as Disney has just released a Tshirt direclty inspired from Joy Division's iconic sleeve "Unknown Pleasures".

Most of the alternative music websites are going awol about it and while i'm sure Disney's lawyers have prepared themselves to return Joy Division's lawyers phonecalls any moment now, one can wonder about the rather distateful feel behind it. It is one thing to name a gloomy rock band after what if historically a group of enslaved jewish women forced to have sex with german offciers in the concentration camps, it is a totally different matter to use that specific cover design to make a commercial tshirt one hope to sell a lot to keep the investors happy and see many young, and less young, visitors of the Disney Parks gently stroll around in...

23 Jan
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General
music instruments

Things are getting heated up again around Gibson guitars...After being raid in 2009 for alledgely importing illegally endangered and rare ebony woods from Madagascar, a case still not closed, 20 armed (!) Feds raided again several Gibson offices a few months ago on the wings of a rather "only-in-America" retroactive law called the Lacey Act which prohibits the commerce of wood and wood products that were taken or sold in violation of any law meant to address illegal logging or species conservation, be them american laws or international laws... This year, the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) also sees protests by several organisations and individuals against the NAMM supports to the Relief Act, which could, they say, seriously impact on the regulations over rare woods.

Now, everyone knows the famous Gibson Rosewood but not everbody knows its rare wood came from the Brazilian rain forests until 2003 even tho Gibson promessed the Rain Forest Alliance never to use its woods anymore. And where this story takes a complete new turn is how the politics get into it: Gibson's boss is a known republican (altho he also gives donation to the Dems...) and his side of...

20 Jan
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music, music industry

One can sit down and procrastinate all day about the state of music and how he/she can't make a living from his/her passion anymore...And it's obvious and we all know it: for normal sized bands, touring, selling CDs and merchandising at gigs, providing extra content to the superfans, trying to get some synchro money going on and getting your rights from radio broadcasts are about what's left for the artists to get money from.

On the shelf you can now add: giving lessons of your instrument(s) using Skype and Paypal... And it starts to happen more and more, there was even an article in the New York Times about an ukulele virtuoso named Matt Dahlberg. You can tune in Skype and he'll teach you how to play the Star-Spangled Banner in a matter of minutes ! And once you dig in, you find other very good musicians using Skype to connect with people wanting to learn an instruments; violins, bagpipe (a huge succes with neighbours), guitars, of course, you can learn about any instrument you want. Altho i did look for synthesizer lessons that would be given on a Moog IIc but didn't find any :)

some examples:
ukulele:...

19 Jan
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artists, music instrument

You saw the post about the US study showing that, if blinded, people would consider the Stradivarius (the Tesla of the violins, the Champagne of the strings instruments, the truffe noire of the four stringed bows) as sounding flat and rather less musical than modern 1.000 dollars equivalents ? Well, here it gets worst :)

I'm pretty sure the DigiEnsemble (8 musicians and singers from Berlin) doesn't mind the contradiction between having been classically trained (read: sometimes rather stubborn when it comes to novelties and re-intepretation of the classics) and being a chamber music orchestra using state-of-the-art new millenia instruments with portable phones and latest generation laptops.

You can see them here, controlling audio samples of classical instruments using portable phones and Ipads. While the sounds aren't too bad and the expressions/vibrato/bowing they can give to the instruments using the gyroscope is frankly uncanny at times, and strangely they do have rather the same body language that if they were playing their cellos and violins...

Now, guys, try the same with full-on tuxedos and a larger repertoire and I can predict you quite a (well...

18 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
movie industry, music industry

If, just like us, you have one eye on your music and one eye on the net, you cannot ignore that, today, Wikipedia is shutting down its english speaking site for 24 hours as a protest towards two US laws that will seek chambers approvals in the US in the forthcoming weeks.

SOPA, and soon PIPA, are not just attempts to block content to be exchanged between internet users, using well known websites. While attacking a vicious problem (illegal downloads) that needs to be tackled down of course, it just cowardly opens its nets large enough to have any kind of content to get tagged as illegal.

The point that Wikipedia tries to make is obvious: there you have an encyclopedia (with its good and bad sides) developped by millions of users and which could be closed down if SOPA or PIPA are adopted by US congress and US senate under the sole argument that these laws are "censorship-on-the-button": Wikipedia (but also other sites like Boing Boing and, if pushed to the limit, a research you would do on Google...) has in its pages uncleared material being pinpointed or linked to, or phrases from writers being quoted from books they published, or small samples of music shown...

17 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
music industry

Sometimes, a good picture makes far more sense than a long article...and this article from theatlantic.com is just that: a simple drawning tells you how much a musician needs to sell in order to reach 1.160 US $ wage per month. Which, by musician standards, is already quite a reach as permanent wages is something few musicians experiment...

Just to cut down the chase to a few phrases, if a musician hopes to do 1.160 US $ a month, he will need to sell:

143 self-pressed CDRs
155 "real" CDs sold thru CD Baby
...here the gap is getting bigger: 1.161 CDs sold if he has a high end deal with a label
12.399 tracks sold on Amazon (unfortunately one of the consequence of digital music: people buy more on a song-per-song basis)
...and here's we're getting in the "I wish it was a joke territory but it's not":
849.000 Rhapsody streams
...if you think THAT was funny, wait till you see the Spotify streams necesseraly so the artist goes back home with 1.160 US $

4.053.000 streams. FOUR MILLION FIFTY THREE THOUSAND streams.

I rest my case.

...

16 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
music industry

2011 sales figures in the UK clearly show pop music (as in "popular music", heard a lot on the biggest radio stations and seen on TV, often used in adverts, etc...) has largely outsold rock sales in albums or singles this year. This is a first since 2003.

What's happening ? Do the masses turn their back on Evil Rock N'Roll ? Or are the radios more concerned with Political Correctness ? Or does the X factor, The Voice, Pop Idol, etc...finally succeeding in making most people believing what matters is the enveloppe, not what's in it ? I can recognize a good song when I hear one, but when you're made to believe TV show after TV show that an artist can be created in a matter or weeks and what is important is how well she/he sings an old classic, things can go wrong down the line...

Despite releases by rock heavy sellers like Coldplay or Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Pop Music is occupying 18 spots on the 2011Top 20 album sales, evidently pushed by albums from Adele, Lady Gaga or Rihanna...

UK Top 20 Albums Of 2011
01 21 - ADELE 3,772,000
02 CHRISTMAS - MICHAEL BUBLE 1,292,000
03 DOO-WOPS & HOOLIGANS - BRUNO MARS 1,214,420
04...

10 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
music industry

Dave Kusek is, to put it mildly, a man with a CV. He was the brain behind the Synare drums and the first music dedicated sofware (Passport). He also co-share the development of the MIDI standard, that little thing we take for granted but which finally allowed electronic instruments to talk with each other. Now, he's appointed VP of Berklee Media, the online arm from the probably best known music school in the world (Berklee College Of Music).

So, when Dave speaks, we should really listen...He has put online a presentation of Global Music Business and his points are very interesting, especially when it comes down to what we've been advocating for months here, on the Kollector Blog: the relation from the artist to the fan, and the artist's second most important to-do thing: create a special relationship with the fans and make them SUPERFANS. (the first important to-do thing is, of course, make great music).

To cut it down to a few phrases, here is what we have in 2012:

-the label model is no longer dominant
-CD sales have collapsed
-digital revenues aren't enough
-touring profitability is a challenge

this is what an artist should aim...

09 Jan
Published by jean-marc,
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General
artists, music history, songwriters

Where is David Jones ? Where is The Thin White Duke ? Where is Ziggy ? Decades of music fans can indeed wonder where their favorite workalcoholic singer is, and what he does these days...The thing is: David Bowie turned 65 yesterday and while even older stars like Keith Richards plan to go on tour yet again, the thin chameleon hasn't been seen or heard in ages. His last works were an album in 2003 and a song in 2005, a couple of commercials (one with...Snoop Dog), some apperances on stages with bands like Arcade Fire or Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters, some awards and discreet chanting here and there but nothing like the Bowie we're used too...

And it's missing. The Man had different periods (psychedelic folk/glam rock/white soul/Berlin/Mainstream Bowie/Tin Machine/electronics-bass and drums), he also had true visionnary moments and his music did capture most of the Zeitgeist indeed: no one can forget his Ziggy days nor his Berlin stance which probably launched a new musical genre by itself (New Wave is at least 5 pages off David Bowie's attitude and music/vocals cues). Now, in 2012, one wonder: what is Bowie doing ?

David Bowie also did something totally unique by...