We’re all familiar with the concept of multi-national corporations outsourcing to India but artists? That’s what Ontario singer-songwriter Drew Smith decided to do for his latest music video. After a English language student of his, Sohee Jeon from South Korea made a video for the first song from his album The Secret Languages, Smith decided to stick with the non-traditional route and to outsource his next music video to Bangalore.
He found Asha Sarella, a virtual assistant and sent her the song Smoke And Mirrors. Sarella came up with the concept and the pair talked on emails and the phone a few times. Sarella produced and choreographed the dancing in the video. Three weeks later, it hit Youtube and racked up 160,000 views in three days.
Loads of views is great on the surface but there was one problem. The resulting video (above) while nicely shot has no connection with the song. Smith’s clip attracted those views for the slightly gimmicky reasons behind the video not the actual content. Smith can’t live off Youtube views and while he should be commended for doing something different, I hope the Bollywood-style video won him some actual listeners that can help him make a living from his music.
Speaking of fans fueling art, the proliferation of crowdfunding sites has led to people pre-paying for artistic content but there’s always the danger of putting yourself out there and there won’t be enough interest in what you have to offer. A real ego bruiser. No such problem for Double Fine Productions, a video game development studio who wanted to finance their next game and develop it in the public eye. The plan was to run a campaign to raise $400,000 over a month but they hit 100% funding it in 8 hours. Three days in and the campaign raised $1.68 million dollars from over 47,000 people (currently at $1.92 million from 56,864 people) The whole reason they started the campaign in the first place was to find if there was a demand for classic adventure games after publishers told them there wasn’t. I think we know the answer now.
If there’s one good thing about the potential threats of SOPA and ACTA, it’s that their appearances have prompted searches for solutions to the problems that they may bring.
A potential solution that caught my eye came from Topspin’s Ian Rogers who proposed “a content registry where copyright holders can express the rules governing the use of their content”. So if a band released a track, it would be uploaded to this one central place that would govern how the song could be used. The band or their label would set the price per download, whether streaming was allowed, creative commons was enabled, subscription services were allowed to use it and myriad of other factors.
The benefit of such a registry is that new music services would no longer have to negotiate with individual labels or be asked for upfront payments for usage. This means that if you had a great idea for a music platform and signed up to the content registry then you wouldn’t need mountains of investor cash over four or five years to keep yourself sustainable before you got the chance to be profitable as Spotify’s current situation appears to be. Removing that financial gauntlet would encourage innovation and realistic solutions to the piracy problem.
Such a system also has benefits for the ordinary internet user, the kind who frequently uploads copyrighted material to sites thinking that a “I don’t own the copyright to this” disclaimer makes it OK. If they upload a song that has a free download rule in the registry to Soundcloud for example, it will be allowed to exist as a download. If not, it’s rejected as per the copyright owner’s rules in the registry.
Youtube already has an audio fingerprinting system that does most of this work so it’s definitely possible. Sure there are questions about who would run it exactly and how unregistered content would be dealt with but a proactive solution is better than a blocking one.
While last week’s protest over Minister Sean Sherlock’s proposed copyright amendments to law which may lead to court injunctions that force ISPs to block websites suspected of copyright infringement gathered over 75,000 signatures in a week, a battle may be brewing in a larger European context.
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 was a temporary victory for the power of the internet. On January 18th, in opposition to the proposed US anti-piracy legislation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), huge websites such as Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, Flickr and an estimated 115,000 other sites either blocked access to their services or publicly opposed both acts. Wikipedia’s 24 hour blackout page was accessed by 162 million people worldwide, 2.2 million tweets with the hashtag #SOPA were sent and 3 million emails were sent via the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other digital groups. The result of the blackout was a huge shift in opinion against SOPA/PIPA in the US Congress.
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. Continue Reading..»
You’ve heard of getting rid of old CDs you don’t want but how about those pesky MP3s that take up hard drive space that you never listen to? Rather than send them to the recycle bin, Redigi.com asked a different question. What if you could sell them to others?
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.
2012 will be the year that music streaming convinces everyone it’s here to stay. There’s no going back now. Youtube is already the biggest music platform in the world and while iTunes will continue to assert its dominance in the download store arena, even Apple have conceded that streaming is here with the launch of iCloud and iMatch, two services that stream and share content to different devices. Elsewhere we have Amazon and Google with their own cloud-based streaming music projects, Netflix launching a badly-needed streaming movies and TV platform in Ireland any time now and Deezer, the latest streaming music service on the block, hit over 130 countries including Ireland last month and offers multi-device and mobile access to a claimed 13 million songs.
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.
Tis the season to be jolly… and LOL and gasp “WTF? Spend some quality time ROFLcoptering with the family with Day & Night’s top 10 viral video countdown…
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)”.
With all the platforms available to us through technology, we often resort to cruder outlets of creativity in order to make our voices heard. Through Twitter hashtags, image macros, digitally altered photographs and captioned images, we disseminate our responses to the world. Sometimes, those voices are heard and helps fuel political change like the Arab Spring earlier this year. They are exceptional circumstances. Normally, these memes are just the mood rings of internet culture. With that in mind, here are some of the year’s best memes.
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.
