Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital- NYTimes.com.

Both of these pieces of legislation are harmful to the internet itself, to innovative business and will not achieve what their sponsors say they will. There are precise ways to prevent foreign websites from pirating US content and they are already written into law. There already ways to prevent counterfeit physical products. We do not need overly broadly written bills which conflate three different areas of law (physical, digital and technical).

You can read more at:

EFF.org SOPA Action page
AmericanCensorship.org
SopaStrike.com
“SOPA” Tag at Techdirt

“It’s true, I haven’t pursued higher education, but the presidency is a function and not a job.

BBC News – Youssou N'Dour announces Senegal presidential bid.

The second interesting thing about this article on the web is the SEO and page title tuning which the NYT has used for this piece. The article is called “The Year When Rock Just Spun Its Wheels” and it lists a bunch of groups who have, in Caramanica’s opinion, failed to set the US mainstream rock scene alight with their new albums, performances or even their entire careers to date.

But if you look at the page title (the bit at the very top of your browser window, above the address bar) it reads Rock in 2011 – Hot Chelle Rae, Foster the People, Chevelle. That’s the phrase which will appear when I paste in the address below this post. It’s also the page title which Google and other web services will use to help understand what the article is about. But is that actually what the piece is about? Sure, the article mentions those bands, but actually the newspaper headline writer had it correct, the article is about the year when rock spun its wheels.

I assume that NYT is hoping that by changing the title of the page away from the title of the article, fans of those bands who are looking for information about them will come to this page. That’s a mis-calculation which should backfire. For instance, I should imagine that a Foster the People fan would be annoyed with this:

… Foster the People, whose album, “Torches” (StarTime/Columbia), was one of the most lauded rock albums of the year by an emerging band, even though it did little to add to the soul-infused lite-rock of the 1980s.

Or how about this gem:

Nickelback on “Here And Now” (Roadrunner), Chevelle on “Hats Off to the Bull” (Epic), Disturbed on the B-sides collection “The Lost Children” (Reprise) — all released big albums this year that work the post-grunge rock spectrum, to varying degrees of success but with equal amounts of innovation, which is to say little. The burly guitars are the same, as are the melancholy choruses, the assertive but not affirming drumming and the sense that this has all been done before, and better (in some cases by Nickelback itself, several years ago).

I cannot imagine that there are too many Chevelle fans wandering around the web hoping to encounter stuff like that.

Choosing the title of a web page carefully is important. But it should be done to best indicate what the article is about, not to drive traffic in a misleading way. This is an interesting article about how mainstream US rock stood still this year, why not tell us, and the search engines, that.

Rock in 2011 – Hot Chelle Rae, Foster the People, Chevelle – NYTimes.com.

* I’ve inserted “US” into my description of the article’s subject. It’s a way to clarify that he is definitely not writing about any place else.

Techdirt and the NY Times both report: Louis CK: Over $1 Million In Sales In Just 12 Days For DRM-Free Download.

This should be reported as yet another in the long list of projects which work because artists have used the CwF + RtB (“Connect with Fans and Reason to Buy”) model.

Yup, Connect with your Fans and give them a Reason to Buy seems so obvious to us, but we still have to endure the content industry telling us that we should pass SOPA/PIPA because it protects artists.

Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy.

Now that the NY Times is telling your parents about “Skrillex and dubstep taking over America”, it’s time for a little corrective action. (Dubba Jonny – “Not Another UKF Dubstep Tutorial” from the Various Artists compilation UKF Dubstep 2011)

Enter a title into the search box, see which IP address it’s gone to. See what else that IP sucked down.

There’s a useful explanation of the system at the ZDNet blog

On his official site, Elvis Costello (or his minions) have posted a funny screed about the ravishing cost of his new recorded music fetish object (formerly known as “a record”). His point is that the Super Deluxe Edition is overpriced at $202.66, even if does include a whole bunch of extras in addition to the CD/DVD/10″. He goes on to endorse the 10 CD Louis Armstrong “Ambassador of Jazz” box, says that the component parts of his own set will be available cheaper in the new year and winds up acknowledging, in not very veiled terms, that fans might choose to obtain the box set via “unconventional means”.

(Presumably) following the coverage of the “Steal this Record” post, the blog posted a follow-up entitled “Let’s make things sparkling clear“, which contains the following paragraph:

If you should still want the component items in the above mentioned elaborate hoax, they will be available separately at a more affordable price in the New Year, unless you are one of those pirates who imagines they are evangelists or that other people’s rights absolve their own thievery, in which case this is between you and your dim conscience.

So there. That’s the pirates AND his record company told. Got it?!

You just cannot overestimate the venality of these guys. From the article:

… In other words, UMG put out albums without artist permission, held back royalties from these artists, and then finally paid out when faced with a much bigger legal threat. Now, even though the settlement money seems to cover what was claimed and acknowledged to be owed to artists, UMG is using the guise of a copyright claim to recover the money from its insurer…

Why Universal Music Sued Its Insurer Over a $14.4 Million Payment to Musicians (Hollywood Reporter)