Tuesday, 24 April 2012

The History of File-Sharing

Dan Bull: Sharing Is Caring

Yesterday a young lad asked me, “Dan Bull in the charts? Is this a ‘fuck off’ to the record industry then?”
Good question, I thought. What do I really want to say to the entertainment industry?
When I released my first album “Safe” in 2009, I sent it to record companies and radio stations but they ignored it. When I telephoned Q magazine with a story, they told me they couldn’t write about it because they only feature artists with record deals.
In frustration at the glass ceiling that independent artists face, I started to publish protest songs on YouTube. To my surprise, they got much more coverage. I was excited, but thought “What if the labels see my tracks? They’ll never sign me now!”.
At that point, I realised something; if they didn’t want me, then the feeling was mutual. I didn’t need a record label telling me what to do, how to do it, and then keeping 80% of the takings for the privilege. I had the internet and I had my brain.
By embracing the free flow of information the internet allows, through filesharing and social media, I’ve found a worldwide fanbase without leaving the house. I’ve collaborated with artists across the globe without ever meeting them, and I can chat to my supporters whilst lying in bed eating pizza.
None of that would have been possible without file-sharing. If I followed the copyright law that lobbyists like the RIAA and the BPI insist is in the interest of artists like me, I would have no musical career. If pro-filesharing sites like TorrentFreak and The Pirate Bay didn’t share my work with you, you wouldn’t be reading this. I owe a debt of gratitude to every person that has ripped, burned, copied and shared anything I’ve done.
Sites such as The Pirate Bay do more to help unsigned artists than industry lobbyists ever have. Projects like The Promo Bay, which devotes The Pirate Bay’s home page, free of charge, to any musician who applies, creates overnight success stories.
The Pirate Bay stands defiantly in the face of corporate bullies who tout such nonsensical non-sequiters as “if you copy files, artists don’t get money, and if artists don’t get any money, they will stop making art.” This is an insult to the millions of dedicated amateur artists around the world.
What’s funny is that I’d have more respect for major labels if they just admitted what we already know – their bottom line is nothing but profit. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s no need to hide it. But there is a need to play fair.
Entertainment lobbyists want to have their cake and eat it – they accumulated massive wealth through exploiting a free market when the means to distribute recorded art was scarce. This scarcity no longer exists – the market has moved on; and now they’re fighting to enforce artificial measures which will recreate those fleeting economic and technological conditions which allowed them to flourish.
Art has always been about sharing, adapting, and re-interpreting what you experience. Our children deserve to grow up in a world where they can enjoy this freedom without the fear that a pack of corporate lawyers will circle in and extradite them overseas.
People born in the late 80s have now lived more of their lives in the 21st century than the 20th century. A new generation has arrived for whom sharing information online is as easy and reflexive as breathing.
This generation isn’t going away; it’s growing larger all the time and to them, defunct business models developed by greying monopolists are utterly irrelevant. But these kids aren’t freeloaders or criminal masterminds, they are normal, decent people. When they hear a song or see a video that they like, they’ll post it to Facebook; they’ll Tweet it. They might remix it, or poke fun at it. This very behaviour which big entertainment claims to be the death knell of creativity, is the same behaviour that I believe will make my single a success.
“Sharing Is Caring” is a satire on this age of instant communication. It’s about what happens when things go wrong, and whether we are using the power of online communication to its full potential. Hidden somewhere in the track you can hear me urinating on a printout of the Digital Economy Act.
There are three main versions of the song – each about a different social network (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). There’s also a dubstep remix by Benny Aves and a reggae-tinged reworking by Animal Circus. I’ve also provided instrumentals and acapellas for you to remix and re-imagine at will.
I invite you to download “Sharing Is Caring” for free. If you like it, and want to support the campaign, you can choose to buy it. Each version you buy will count as a sale towards the charts. There are ten versions in all, meaning a single person can create ten sales towards the charts.
The singles charts are worthless as an indicator of quality, and artists needn’t strive for the validation of reaching them. However, by taking a free song by an unsigned artist to the echelons normally reserved for the industry elite, I want to smash the glass ceiling and show that there is another way of doing things. We don’t need the protection of ACTA, CISPA or any other acronym. As long as our internet is free, creativity will thrive.
And so, to answer the original question – I’m not shouting “fuck off” to the entertainment industry.
I’m saying “excuse me, but I think you’re in my seat”.
Links to the torrent or paid version of “Sharing Is Caring” are available here.
@'TorrentFreak'

Evol

Via

DJ JetSet - Fifty minutes of Marko Fürstenberg (the netlabel years)

Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Option23 Marko Fürstenberg
Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Sol (Marko Fürstenberg Rmx) L.O.D.
Long Loco Out Thrill (Surphase Remix) Selffish
Südschleuse Surphase & Rktic
Eissequenzer Marko Fuerstenberg
Busch Marko Fuerstenberg
Porn Infection (Remix) Marko Fürstenberg
Chasm 2 (Surphase Remix) Danny Kreutzfeldt
Trockendock Surphase & Rktic
Kampftruppe Marko Fuerstenberg
via

Cory Doctorow: There is a war coming...

Monday, 23 April 2012

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death

First Listen: Damon Albarn - Dr Dee

If there's a goal for up-and-coming musicians that encompasses creative satisfaction and relatively stress-free security, it's not chart-topping fame; if anything, success just spikes the cost of failure. The true mark of a fruitful career in music is liberation — the financing to follow flights of fancy, coupled with the credibility to experiment without derision. Jack White has reached that point: He could record an album of Tuvan throat-singing and release it only as a USB drive molded into a lone candy bar sold somewhere in North America, and would anyone second-guess him? The same goes for The Flaming Lips, whose members are free to bend and redefine the very notion of what it means to record and release a piece of music.
Though he's more tethered to traditional means of releasing albums, Damon Albarn has more or less arrived in the same place. He sold millions of records as the leader of Blur, then formed the human-cartoon hybrid "virtual band" Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, only to sell tens of millions more. If he wants to record the bizarrely clanging score to 1999's cult horror movie Ravenous, or make an album of Malian music, or start another new band and call it The Good, The Bad & The Queen, or form a side project with Flea and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, he can — and does. The fans remain, the money is available to him and, when he's set to make another recording for a mass audience, it's still a big deal.
Out May 8, Dr Dee is not one of those mass-appeal projects. Billed as a solo album for Albarn, it's an offshoot of an opera the singer helped craft with director Rufus Norris and the inspiration of mercurial comics legend Alan Moore. Based on the life of John Dee — a 16th-century philosopher, alchemist, astrologer and medical advisor to Queen Elizabeth I — Dr Dee fans out in many directions at once. If anything, it adds up to a sort of willfully obscure folk opera, full of baroque flourishes, spoken asides, unsettling rhythm tracks, guest vocalists and hairpin turns that lead down unpredictable cul de sacs.
It's hard not to wish that Dr Dee came with a bit of visual context for Albarn's free-floating musings, or at least footnotes to attach them to the history lessons in play here. But the album warrants the further exploration, with sounds as uncompromising and unconventional as the man who brings them to being.
Stephen Thompson @'npr'