In a similar vein, the ACTA anti-piracy treaty signed in the European parliament by member countries including Ireland last week could have wide-reaching ramifications for internet use. Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and the USA are also on board and the concerns centre around the lack of transparency in the negotiations and potential criminal prosecutions for internet piracy infringements.

The concerns all boil down to one thing. Mistrust that private companies like the major music labels will be allowed to dictate the digital rights of others through vague laws. It’s quite incredulous that the music industry has been dealing with piracy online for the last 12 years and the answer to it still appears to be blocking and criminal prosecution.

Entertainment products like Spotify, Turntable.FM and Netflix don’t get to ubiquity fast enough because we live in a world where global innovation is stifled by outmoded local copyright and licensing laws. Spotify or TurnTable.FM still have not launched in Ireland and Netflix, which launched a few weeks ago suffers from a poor choice in its film catalogue when compared to the US version.

When you offer people these services but hamper them with restrictions, is it any wonder that people go back to using Torrent files to get their fix? There is no such thing as a worldwide licence but there needs to be if the innovation that Sean Sherlock claims to represent as Minister is to flourish. Like it or not, people are used to getting their media fix instantly. If that’s not addressed, we’ll still be talking about blocking and piracy in another 12 years.

It’s worth reading up on why SOPA and PIPA are not ideal (If you’re stuck for time, The Oatmeal’s animated gif at theoatmeal.com/sopa explains it pretty succinctly). Their heavy handed answer to online piracy gives a lot of power to large entertainment companies to shut down and block access to sites it suspects of listing copyright infringement whether the sites exist in the USA or outside it. This means that sites such as Youtube, Facebook, Tumblr, Soundcloud and thousands upon thousands of blogs and sites could not operate as they now do. In an extreme case, Twitter could be shut down because of a single infringing tweet.

Meanwhile, opposition has begun this week to Ireland’s own statutory instrument to Irish law which may grant similar powers to outspoken anti-piracy representatives like IRMA. Stopsopaireland.com is the main hub and gathered over 57,000 signatures in opposition in its first few days. Minister Sean Sherlock is responsible for bringing in the instrument which does not need parliamentary approval and there are concerns from digital rights and law experts that Sherlock’s proposals are vague and open-ended.

Anonymous members in Sweden aimed their computers at these shores on Tuesday night apparently bringing down websites for the Department of Justice and Finance via Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks late on Tuesday night. A Twitter account @AnonOpsSweden later claimed it was a “a wake up, a warning shot.” Ireland may yet get its own blackout…

Redigi calls itself the “online music marketplace for used digital music” and offers music fans the ability to buy music from other users at a knockdown price and to sell MP3s that they don’t want. One big problem though… the music industry aren’t happy. Major label EMI have decided to sue and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have also sent a cease and desist letter to the company citing major copyright infringements.

It’s easy to see why. Redigi claims to be a legitimate service and that no copying takes place saying their technology is “far superior” to any others. But the copying of digital files certainly seems to be taking place in each transaction on the site. Whether a person uploads the MP3 to an intermediary server before it is bought, it’s still copied in one form or another and the law is unclear on digital goods. Redigi have said they will fight the lawsuit “vigorously’. Meanwhile, I would like to fight them for choosing that awful name.

Besides, social behemoths Facebook are continuing their plan to make music more social, so MP3s, nay recycled ones may be ripe for deletion in future. Last week, they launched the ‘Listen With Friends’ feature, which means if you use any of the current streaming music services like Spotify and Deezer, you can invite a friend to listen at the same time and shoot the breeze over chat. The move also challenges the popularity of Turntable.FM, the DJing chatroom that rose to prominence last year.

As ambitious as Deezer’s plans are, we’ve seen companies in the past year fall at the licensing hurdle. We7 launched last January with a similar offering and before the end of 2011 had shifted focus from a massive streaming music library to recommendation-based internet radio. No doubt that decision was informed by lower license fees for internet radio compared to on-demand streams.

Spotify is still the best hope for a major platform breakthrough worldwide. Its agreements with major labels bring with them lower license fees that allow them to expand, but not everyone is happy – independent labels have been pulling out of the service in protest at the small revenue payments offered in recent months.

Perhaps the most important thing for new services gaining ground this year will be Facebook’s Open Graph. You used to wear your favourite band t-shirt so the world knew your individual music tastes. No longer Sonny Jim! Zuckerberg’s company is already putting the songs you’re listening to on almost all of the above services right into your Facebook news stream, right in front of your friends’ eyes so maybe he holds all of the access keys to popularity already.

1. Rebecca Black
The modern story of a 13 year-old tween pop star. A Youtube-uploaded video for a song called Friday received over 60 million views in a month. The majority of people hated the auto-tuned track and its silly lyrics and thus, helped spread it even further. Black has so far had the last laugh, with an appearance in a Katy Perry video and healthy interest in her more recent music videos from a tween audience.

2. Fenton!
One owner loses control of his dog in London’s Richmond Park. As the dog herds some deer, the howls of a man who is also about to lose his mind were heard around the world, thanks to the internet. “FENTON! FENTON! JESUS CHRIST!”

3. Chuck Testa
A hilarious advertisement filled with awkward acting for a taxidermist which spawned a catchphrase (“Nope! Chuck Testa!”) and a series of images based on the idea.

4. Mario
A real-life short film version of Super Mario Bros where the two plumbers are doing too many mushrooms and star pills and attempt to get the princess back.

5. Jetpack Fail
17 seconds of the best live news broadcast fail of the year. “And it starts right nowww….. nggghhhh (splash)”.

6. Darth Vader kid advert
The clear winner of the orgy of Superbowl adverts involves a kid in Darth Vader costume attempting to move objects using the force until his father tricks him into believing he can actually do it.

7. Castletown Donkey Racing!
Pure comedy gold from 1994′s Castletown Donkey Derby featuring thrills, belly-aching spills and a finish line incident that you just couldn’t make up. Ireland’s funniest video viral of the year.
Watch at Youtube

8. The Lonely Island and Michael Bolton
Serial comedy song pranksters The Lonely Island are joined by Michael Bolton who almost ruins their “in da club” song with his obsession with the Pirates Of The Caribbean’s Jack Sparrow.

9. The Trinity Orchestra cover Daft Punk
The student-run Trinity Orchestra play a medley of Daft Punk’s hits in the exam hall of Trinity College and receive nearly half a million views for their trouble. One more time.

10. Dark Side Child
No top ten is complete without a cute kid video. Beating Emerson laughing at his mother sneezing at the post is this evil cackle emitted from a young child after realising that being evil to toys is way more fun.

An idea that spread from Twitter hashtags and beyond over the course of a few years, First World Problems really came into its own in 2011 when it came into common lexicon. These tongue in cheeks sentiments highlight the trivial inconveniences of modern life in a self-aware fashion. Favourite whines include “I tried to spread butter on my toast and the bread fell apart”, “I’m so tired of eating at all of the restaurants near work”, and “I want to change the song on my iPod but it’s too cold to take my gloves off”. See more at whitewhine.com and knowyourmeme.com/memes/first-world-problems.

In the field of endlessly recyclable image macros, Hipster Ariel  came out on top. Pair an image of The Little Mermaid with some black-rimmed glasses and you’ve got hipster-baiting caption gold with Ariel saying things like “The sea was just too mainstream”, “I got legs just so I could wear skinny jeans”, and “Don’t call me Ariel, my name is Helvetica”. Other image macro series that shone include Business Cat, Conspiracy Keanu, Dating Site Murderer, Baby Kanye, Musically Oblivious 8th Grader, Sad Hipster and Hipster Dog. Are you seeing a trend? Special mention goes to Feminist Ryan Gosling, a clever flip on Gosling’s perceived sensitivity which pairs highbrow idealistic chatup lines from Gosling with photos of him looking dreamy.

Thank goodness for Photoshop and the many free image editing programs out there. Their common usage has given us some of the most enduring and hard to forget images of the year. Take Chicks With Steve Buscemi Eyes the pasting of the actor’s famously sunken peepers over the faces of many a famous female celebrity from Christini Ricci to Adele to Paris Hilton. Positively retina-burning. On a similar tip, Michele Bachmann’s wide-eyed stunned gaze which featured on the cover of Newsweek sparked off a slew of crazy looking cut and keep-in-your-memory-forever faces.

Stock photography also provided a well of inspiration this year with Women Laughing Alone With Salad and Women Struggling To Drink Water being favourites in highlighting the preposterous nature of stock photography catalogues.

Closer to home, the successful presidential campaign of Michael D Higgins was marked with edited campaign posters and many Photoshopped images taking advantage of his diminutive stature while Ireland’s win over Australia in the Rugby World Cup was celebrated with Keith Earls’ flying try placed into endless other scenes.

The digital music conundrum still lives on too but conflicting opinion is as strong as ever. There is often compelling evidence published that suggests those who download music regularly buy more music. The Swiss government are in agreement. They commissioned a study which found that most illegal downloading was complementary and that personal budget for entertainment has remained constant. So Switzerland concluded that no change to current law is required because unauthorised music and movie downloading has not had a negative impact on the production of entertainment in the country.

The report also examined the actions of other countries in the same situation, from the Hadopi law in France to the three-strikes rule that has been touted in Ireland and currently in effect on Eircom’s network. That particular anti-file sharing tactic is now in jeopardy. In a decision that has been hailed as a victory for internet freedom, The European Court of Justice last month ruled that the monitoring and logging of an Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) customers would breach privacy and violate the rights of both the ISPs and its subscribers. The ruling came from the outcome of a seven year court battle between Belgian music rights group SABAM and an ISP called Scarlet. The cost of putting filtering and monitoring system was deemed to be too much of an infringement on Scarlet’s business operations.

The ruling is unlikely to affect Eircom’s blocking of The Pirate Bay website and their implementation of the three-strikes rule as that measure would only be illegal under EU law if it was applied “indiscriminately to all its customers, as a preventive measure, exclusively at its expense, and for an unlimited period.” It may have a bearing on proposals by Irish Enterprise minister Richard Bruton to amend copyright law.

While copyright, privacy and illegalities remain quagmired, the creatives continue to take advantage of the digital space. Sitting in the top 10 of the Irish download charts is Winter Song by Twitterxmassingle. As you may have guessed, the song is a Twitter-sourced Christmas charity hit. It all started from a tweeted idea by Brenda Drumm a few weeks ago which ended up with 140 people including singers, musicians, technicians, photographers, videographers, stylists, teamakers and volunteers recording the song in Dublin a week later. All proceeds will go to the Neonatal special care unit in National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street in Dublin, a decision that of course, was decided via Twitter.

45Sound was set up to address the uploading of fan-captured video with poor sound. 45Sound does that by recording the audio of gigs directly from the sound desk. So when you end up with a kickass live clip with shoddy audio quality, you can send it to 45Sound and if they captured audio at that particular gig, they will sync up a properly mastered high-quality version of the audio cut to your footage before you upload it to Youtube. 45Sound first debuted at this year’s Hard Working Class Heroes festival and the demos so far are impressive with clips of And So I Watch You From Afar, Rubberbandits and The Redneck Manifesto demonstrating the technology.

On the visual front, a new online “live entertainment venue” called VenueOne.com was launched with a gig at The Grand Social in Dublin on Monday with a lineup featuring Little Green Cars, The Riptide Movement and Arveene amongst others and you didn’t even have to attend to experience it. The gig was streamed live on the VenueOne website which is aiming to become the defacto site for video of pre-recorded and live gigs.

VenueOne already hosts a decent array of content at launch including Dave Fanning’s Fanning Files to gigs from the London Live Series and Peace One Day concerts. It’s a heathy cross-section of artists with AC/DC, Akon, The Mighty Stef, U2, Roisin Murphy, Queen and The Commitments all featured. The real draw for VenueOne is a place to host live streamed music parties and gigs. Artists get a share in the advertising revenue and fans and viewers can participate through chat and social media networks.

How the service aims to take on the already established Ustream live stream service remains to be seen however. Here’s hoping some enterprising bands take advantage of fledgling Irish startups like 45Sound and VenueOne to try out the technology and to make themselves sound and look better on the web at least.

New bands could also take a leaf out of Fugazi’s book. The legendary Washington DC post-punk band recorded about 800 of the 1000 concerts they performed in their lifespan and yesterday, their label Dischord Records opened an online archive featuring 130 of those shows accompanied by flyers, photos and other downloadable ephemera. Get immersed in the Fugazi Live Series at Dischord.com.

From the off, the store was offering a claimed 13 million tracks including songs from majors Sony, Universal and EMI as well as independent distributors including Tunecore, Beggars Group, Merlin, Merge and Warp. In a shrewd move, Google’s Artist Hub allows independent artists to sell the music they own the rights to, at the price they choose, for a one-time fee of $25. They keep 70% of sales and can allow users to listen to their songs for free if they desire.

Of course, it all ties in with Google’s other recent high profile platform Google +. You can share listens of songs purchased with your friends on the social network, much like Facebook’s much touted music sharing of songs on Spotify, Rdio, MOG and more ( which has racked up 1.5 billion shares in the first two months).

Back in Europe, Spotify launched in Belgium, Switzerland and Austria (still no sign of Ireland) in the same week that 234 independent niche dance music labels represented by STHoldings withdrew their songs from Spotify, Napster (it still exists!) and other US streaming services. Their decision was prompted by a review of their accounts which showed that 82% of listens came through streaming services but accounted for just 2.6% of its revenue and a study which concluded that streaming services are discouraging to music purchasing.

“Music loses its specialness by its exploitation as a low value/free commodity,” said an STHoldings press release. “Quoting one of our labels: ‘Let’s keep the music special, fuck Spotify.’”

That move follows the more high-profile rejection of Spotify by Coldplay for their new album. Coldplay’s decision makes sense for them. They’re a huge well-known band with a demographic that is more likely to purchase their music via legal means so offering streams could perhaps have compromised that.

“Fuck Spotify” was also how English composer Jon Hopkins reacted to his most recent royalty payment. Hopkins received just £8 (€9.31) for 90,000 plays of his songs. It sounds like a poor dividend but are Hopkins and STHoldings looking at that figure from the wrong angle? A single stream is not the same as a download and is usually only heard by one person. If you compare that figure to radio where one play on RTÉ 2FM to an audience of around 100,000 for example nets you €9.39 per play (at a rate €3.13 per minute) so all is not as black and white as it looks.

The concept is a simple and welcome one. Using a Soundcloud page, the Unknown Untitled project organisers upload a song from an electronic artist with no artist or track info. After 14 days, the artist info is announced meaning you listen to the song without any preconceptions or notions. It’s like radio except you deliberatly have to wait two weeks to find out what that song is you liked. Artists involved so far are drawn from London scene with names like Mak & Pasteman, Beau and Blacksmif but quality is high even if artist names are not. Team #Unknown, as they call themselves are hoping to expand the concept into an old school vinyl release next year.
Speaking of novel ideas, the latest Music Hack Day where developers get together and build cool music apps for the future took place in Boston last week. 56 notable, useful, small and silly apps were generated in the short timeframe. For example: Mustachiness creates a moustache images out of song waveforms just in time for Movember, Spartify makes Spotify party playlists easy, Snuggle synchronises the internet’s greatest medium the Animated GIF to music and Bohemian Rhapsichord turns Queen’s famous hit into an instrument. You can see all 56 Music Hack Day ideas and apps at bit.ly/bostonhacks.

My favourite two apps of Music Hack Day Boston are Drinkify and Christmas Findr. Drinkify has already taken off on social networks. Enter an artist name and the site will suggest an alcoholic beverage that matches it for a finer music experience. There are some interesting suggestions too: “The Black Sabbath” features whiskey, tonic water and ice-cream and “The Justin Bieber” is an under-18 friendly Red Bull on the rocks. Listening to Bad Romance? Gaga fans should go for straight vodka garnished with an olive. Dylan enthusiasts? Gin and cough syrup are good accompaniments apparently while Slayer fans should go for the suitable cocktail of equal mix blood and wheatgrass juice.

Christmas Findr is the most useful of the lot (bit.ly/christmashack). I know it’s only November but everyone hates bad Christmas music and there’s lots of it. Christmas Findr helps you find the good stuff, organised by genre so you can avoid Twisted Sister’s hilariously bad metal Twisted Christmas album or Keith Sweat’s family-inappropriate A Christmas of Love album of sexy Yuletide slow jams. That one is definitely too sexy for having the in-laws over so choose wiser.

1. SertOne

Portadown-born Liverpool-based producer is as prolific as they come this year with an EP of original material and dozens of high-quality remixes of tracks from Feist, Busta Rhymes, Halves and Laura Sheeran available for free on Bandcamp.

2. Bear Bones

Former members of promising band 8Ball get back together and make more encouraging music, this time in jangly pop Morr Music vein. The 6-track Ursa Major EP is a perfect intro to their sound.

3. Loud Mouth Collective

A Dublin-based bunch of producers, rappers and artists who are united in eclecticism: from hip-hop to post-dubstep and electronic, the roster runs the gamut of future music with names like The Bastard, C.F. Meister, Bingo, Exxon Valdez and Archetype featuring on two compilations and many of their own releases.

4. Cork Rock City

Curated by online music site, Drop-D, this compilation contains a whopping 39-tracks will get you acquainted with Cork’s alternative and rock music scene before you can say “Adebisi Shank” (last year’s was an excessive 69 songs).

5. The Depravations

Sunny Galway folk from a band that only recorded these five songs to get their new drummer up to speed (the Mosey of the title). Is the west coast the best coast? The Mosey EP makes a compelling argument.

6. MOTHS

It’s hard to believe but when Newbridge-based Jack Colleran was supposed to be studying for his Leaving Cert exams he was fast-becoming Ireland’s most promising solo musician through the release of his slowed-down emotional electronic music and an official remix for Interpol. If ever the term “one to watch” needed to be applied, this is it with bells on.

Bon Iver – Babys (Moths Remix) by MOTHS

7. DJ iZem

A French-born Irish-based musician has just dropped the free five-track album Quiver / Debaixo D’Agua EP of soulful dub rhythms, hip-hop and tropical music.

8. Elaine Mai

Layers of harmonies, gentle twinkling guitar and looping arrangements form the basis of Galway-based Mai’s slow-burning music. There’s plenty more to come from this unique talent.

9. Avalanche Ammo

The sound of Ant Boland playing all instruments on his debut Animals EP is a thrilling and singular one. The Kildare-based musician exerts full artistic control on his fast-paced post-rock stylings resulting in a taut and engaging five-track introduction.

10. Simon Bird

What’s exciting about 21 year-old Simon Bird’s music is watching the progress of his experimental ambient music and how it’s discovering new forms and finding new avenues. There are five EPs available for free, start with the latest entitled V which his most-accomplished work yet.

Legitmix creates a platform for DJs, producers, remixers and musicians to legally sample musical sources without going through the sample clearance process. A sample-based track can then be released legally via the Legitmix.com website and their widgets.

Here’s how the process works. Rather than provide clearance for the sampled song, Legitmix empowers the listener to create the final-sampled version of the song by recreating it on a digital binary level using a copy of the original music. What that simply means is that, a listener is buying an original copy of the the sampled source along with the new song and recreating it on their own computer. As the song was created using Legitmix on their own computer, it’s considered as personal use. Legitmix also pays the sampled artist for the song’s use.

RUSH OVER BKLYN by PRODUCTOMART

Brooklyn rapper El-P was the first artist to officially release a song featuring a sample from a big-selling Canadian rock band Rush last week. His Rush Over Bklyn song is a mix of his own song with a sample from Rush’s Tom Sawyer. Instead of leaking the track online as a bootleg, El-P is selling the song through Legitmix. Rush get a cut and the rest of the proceeds goes to to his friend DJ Mr Dibbs who is battling liver disease.

I tried out the Legitmix purchasing system which uses Java software to download and recreate the file and it worked really well. The song cost $1.99, $0.70 for El-P and $1.29 towards the cost of the Rush song. As well as getting the El-P cut as an MP3, you also get an MP3 copy of Tom Sawyer purchased legally as part of the transaction as a bonus. If I already had that song on my computer, then that file would have been used as the sample source and I would have not been charged that extra $1.29. Legitmix currently only works in the US so my payment via Paypal required a US postal address.

Diplo also released a 40-minute mix through the platform. However, at a cost of $17.46 (to cover costs for all the tracks used if you don’t have them on your computer) perhaps, a single sample-source is the way to go if Legitmix is to take off as a new standard for samples.

More info at legitmix.com.