Category Archives: Music Activism

With Nearly 1 Billion Licensed Works, Creative Commons Takes Stock

Text by Benjamin Sutton on December 9, 2014

CC licensed-works mapIn its first-ever “State of the Commons” report, Creative Commons — the nonprofit that aims to facilitate the free sharing and licensing of creative work — revealed that there are at least 882 million Creative Commons–licensed works currently available online, and that sometime next year that figure is expected to pass one billion.

The number of these works has grown exponentially, from just 50 million in 2006 to 400 million in 2010, to more than double that figure in the last four years. Creative Commons works with licenses linking back to the Creative Commons website are accessed 27 million times per day (this does not account for the many licensed pieces that do not link back)….

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Spotify Must “Adapt Or Die” : Pricing For Sustainability

Text by Trichordist

The single biggest problem with Spotify (and other services like it) is that they have completely removed the relationship between the artists and the fan. The labels have leveraged their catalogs as an asset in exchange for equity shares in a tech start up that is subsidized by the artists. And to be clear, that is equity that the labels are not “sharing” with the artists who are making the equity possible. We’re not even sure how this could be legal, but we’ll leave that to the lawyers to figure out.

The second problem is that the money the consumer pays, does not pay the artists the consumer is supporting. The model for Spotify and others is to divide the total pool of revenue by the total number of streams and pay out the revenue on a per stream basis. But that is not the same as a directing each consumers payments only to the artists that consumer is streaming.

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BREAKING! Apple Announces Itunes One Dollar Albums and Ten Cent Song Downloads In Time For The Holidays! By Sillycon Daily News

Text by trichordist

Satire – but not by much. Apple Computer announced today that for it’s Itunes Music Store to remain competitive in the digital distribution marketplace for music they would be changing their retail pricing of album downloads to one dollar and song downloads to 10 cents each. The pricing change will be effective on black Friday […]

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DooBeeDoo endorses: “DEMONSTRATE TO SUPPORT ARTISTS RIGHTS” rally this Sunday

Announcement From c3 (The Content Creators Coalition)

“Google is in the process of systematically destroying our artistic future… if the creative community doesn’t intervene now, and by now, I mean, fucking now — we will be bound to a multigenerational clusterfuck that will take 40 to 50 years to unravel.” – Kurt Sutter Attacks Google: Stop Profiting from Piracy (Guest Column) | Variety

DEMONSTRATE TO SUPPORT ARTISTS RIGHTS
when: THIS SUNDAY, Oct 19th, at 4:30-5:00pm
where: Google 8th ave btwn 15th and 16th sts in Manhattan)

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Neil Young’s New Climate Anthem “Who’s Gonna Stand Up” (Acoustic Solo)

People's Climate MarchAhead of the People’s Climate March, Neil Young shared with Democracy Now! an acoustic solo recording of his new song, Who’s Gonna Stand Up (previously unreleased). Listen to the song here: https://soundcloud.com/democracynow/exclusive-whos-gonna-stand-up-neil-young-acoustic-solo/s-lXWYo

They will be broadcasting the song during our 3-hour special live broadcast from the march on Sunday, September 21 from 10:30am to 1:30pm ET. Watch the livestream at democracynow.org. Democracy Now! is an independent, global news hour that is hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Watch the daily broadcast and search our vast archive of news reports at democracynow.org. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Stitcher, SoundCloud, Google+ and Pinterest.