A Última Fábrica de Fitas Cassete!

The Last Audio Cassette Factory

Springfield, MO-based National Audio Company opened in 1969 and when other major manufacturers abandoned tape manufacturing for CD production in the late 1990s, the company held on tight. Now, the cassette maker is pumping out more cassettes than ever before. (Video By: Janice Pettitt, Ryo Ikegami) (Source: Bloomberg)

Aqui Está o Por Que As Gravadoras Estão Furiosas Com o YouTube! De Novo!

Here’s why the music labels are furious at YouTube. Again.

You’ve heard this song before: The music industry is mad at YouTube.

In the old days, the music business used to complain that YouTube took their music and didn’t pay them. Now the complaint has changed: Now the music guys say YouTube doesn’t pay them enough.

The music labels have been grousing about YouTube for a while now, but they have recently turned up the volume.

Last month, the RIAA, the labels’ American trade group, lobbed a volley at Google’s video service, arguing that YouTube doesn’t pay a fair price for all the music it gives its users for free. The IFPI, the label’s global trade group, should have a report out shortly which repeats the same charge. (UPDATE: Here’s the IFPI report.)

The complaints come as the big three music labels — Universal Music Group, Sony and Warner Music Group — are set to renegotiate contracts with YouTube.

It would seem like the best way to get more money from YouTube would be to get a better deal this time around. But the labels say their bargaining power is reduced by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives broad protection to YouTube and other services that rely on content that users upload.

I asked RIAA head Cary Sherman to explain his industry’s beef with both the DMCA and with YouTube. Here’s an edited excerpt of our conversation. There’s also a response of sorts from YouTube at the end.

Peter Kafka: I don’t understand why the industry is complaining about YouTube and its use of the DMCA again. Viacom spent years on this in court, and got soundly defeated. Hasn’t everyone learned to accept this by now?

Cary Sherman: We accept the inevitability of death. It doesn’t mean we have to like it. There is now under way a study of whether the DMCA is actually effective and fulfilling its intended purpose, being conducted by the Copyright Office, and it has given us an opportunity for the community to collect our thoughts about just how dysfunctional the DMCA actually is. And to actually tell the government about it.

A lot of people would argue that the DMCA allowed Silicon Valley to build really big, really amazing and wonderful things. And that on the whole it’s a net plus for the U.S. and the world.

That assumes that only with the DMCA, as it was written in 1998, would that have been possible. We feel like the 1998 Internet is not the Internet of 2016. It’s a dramatically different Internet, and it’s time to take a fresh look at whether the balance that was struck in 1998 is effective in 2016.

And the answer is clearly “no.”

Just look at Silicon Valley. They’ve done an extraordinary job, and their market cap is worth gazillions of dollars. Look at the creative industries — not just the music industry, but all of them. All of them have suffered. We’re half the size we were. And we’re flat, and we haven’t been growing. And that’s true of all of the creative industries.

For the music industry, 70 percent of revenues now come from digital. We’ve licensed every different kind of model, but the revenues just aren’t coming in.

One of the problems is piracy, which continues to be a problem. The other is under-monetization, and that’s because of things like the DMCA, where some companies get the benefit of being able to distribute our content, without taking fair market value kind of licenses.

When you compare what we get when we get to freely negotiate, with a company like Spotify, vs. what we get when we are under the burden of an expansively interpreted “safe harbor,” when you’re negotiating with somebody like YouTube, you can see that you’re not getting the value across the platforms that you should.

What’s the single biggest change in the DMCA that you’d like to see?

Notice and stay down, instead of notice and take down. There are 100 copies of a song. We can’t just say to YouTube “we didn’t license this Pharrell song, take it down.” They will not just take down all 100 copies. They’ll take down only the one file that we’ve identified. We have to find every one of them, and notice them, and then they’re taken down, and then immediately put right back up. You can never get all the songs off the system.

If we had a system where once a song was taken down, you had a filtering system that prevented it from going back up, we wouldn’t have to be sending hundreds of millions of notices on the same content over and over again.

Maybe then we’d begin to make a difference with all the pirated copies on all of the websites. But as long as there isn’t a stay down, we can’t deal with that. It’s just not possible.

Jonathan Thorpe/JTHORPEPHOTORIAA CEO Cary Sherman

The labels do have deals with YouTube. If they don’t like those deals, why not negotiate better ones or walk away? All of them expire this year.

The way the negotiation goes is something like this: “Look. This is all we can afford to pay you,” YouTube says. “We hope that you’ll find that reasonable. But that’s the best we can do. And if you don’t want to give us a license, okay. You know that your music is still going to be up on the service anyway. So send us notices, and we’ll take ’em down as fast we can, and we know they’ll keep coming back up. We’ll do what we can. It’s your decision as to whether you want to take our deal, or whether you just want to keep sending us takedown notices.”

That’s not a real negotiation. That’s like saying, “That’s a real nice song you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”

So you’re saying the labels aren’t really free to walk away from YouTube — that their music stays up there whether they want it to or not.

We have experience with this. Because Warner Music, a few years ago, decided that they didn’t want their music on YouTube, because it was hurting all the rest of their deals. So they didn’t do a license with YouTube. A year later, they threw in the towel. What was that year like? They spent a fortune trying to take down their music. They could never even keep up with all the counter-notifications that were constantly being filed, so the music was going right back up anyway. And they were earning no revenues at all. So finally they threw in the towel, and accepted the licenses.

That’s what it’s like to negotiate, when somebody can claim the benefit of an expansive safe harbor. They’re taking the benefit of a safe harbor that was intended for people who were passive, neutral intermediaries. People like Verizon, where the content is just passing through their system. They’re not making money off of distributing content. YouTube does.

Katy Perry, among other people, is lobbying on behalf of the music business. It seems like getting rich musicians to press your case won’t help you change the laws. Do you think there’s a practical chance that will happen?

Two different questions. First: Katy Perry. The petition she filed makes clear that she’s worried about the next generation of songwriters and artists that are coming up. She isn’t complaining that she isn’t making enough money.

She made that money in the era that you’re complaining about. She made that money as a YouTube star.

Yeah. Well, the reality is that the industry is more stratified than ever. There are some people who have done really well. But it’s harder and harder for more musicians to make a living. Because the revenue that they’re getting from streaming isn’t keeping pace with the revenue that they used to be able to earn. We’re trying to get to a point where the streaming ecosystem works for everybody.

In terms of whether Congress will do something about it? We don’t know. It’s hard to get anything through Congress. But Congress has been taking a look at the copyright law for 3 years now. We want them to understand that one of the most important things affecting the value and ability of copyright to survive, is to take a fresh look at the DMCA.

It’s complicated, right? The labels used to be investors in YouTube, right before it sold to Google. Two of the labels are partners with YouTube in Vevo. It doesn’t look like they’re in real opposition. It looks like they’re partners who don’t like terms of a deal they did.

I think the record companies would like to be partners with YouTube. But it’s a little hard to call it a partnership when it’s so one-sided in terms of the negotiating leverage.

Some of the loudest voices against YouTube used to be the video companies – movie studios, TV companies. Viacom was the one who sued them. They’re not vocal in the way that the music labels are now. Why aren’t they joining you?

Maybe it’s because YouTube is not the place where you go for your pirated movies. But it certainly is the place you go for your pirated… I shouldn’t call it pirated. It’s “user-uploaded.” They’re putting up an entire album, and a picture of the artist, and therefore YouTube has become the largest on-demand music service in the world.

———————-

I offered YouTube executives the chance to rebut Sherman’s argument via a separate Q&A, but they declined. The company did point me to the response they offered when the RIAA criticized them last month:

“To date, Google has paid out over $3 billion to the music industry – and that number is growing year on year. This revenue is generated despite the fact that YouTube goes way beyond music to include popular categories such as news, gaming, how-to, sports and entertainment. And with the recent launch of the YouTube Music app, we recently launched a new, dedicated music experience with the goal to deliver even more revenue to both artists and the music industry more broadly. Past comparisons to other audio-only, subscription music services are apples to oranges.”

YouTube and Google have also responded in more depth, via the comments they’ve filed to US Copyright Office as part of the study Sherman mentioned. Here’s a passage that deals with many of the RIAA’s complaints:

Some in the recording industry have suggested that the safe harbors somehow diminish the value of sound recordings, pointing to YouTube and blaming the DMCA for creating a so-called “value grab.” This claim is not supported by the facts. As an initial matter, it is important to understand that YouTube has had license agreements in place with both major and independent record labels for many years; it is simply incorrect to say that YouTube relies on the DMCA instead of licensing works. Those pressing the “value grab” argument also assert that the royalty rates in these licenses are too low, allegedly because the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process makes it too difficult for record labels to withdraw their works from YouTube in the face of users re-uploading those works. This claim, however, ignores Content ID, which has been in existence since 2008 and which record labels (and many other copyright owners) use every day to monetize their works on YouTube. Thanks to Content ID, record labels do not have to rely solely on the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process on YouTube—they can remove any or all user-uploads of their works from the platform on an automated and ongoing basis. Indeed, since January 2014, over 98% of all YouTube copyright removal claims have come through Content ID. Although business partners can be expected to disagree from time to time about the price of a license, any claim that the DMCA safe harbours are responsible for a “value gap” for music on YouTube is simply false.

8 Razões Para Participar Em Uma Competição de Bandas

8 REASONS TO PARTICIPATE IN A BAND COMPETITION

Have you ever participated in a band-competition? You probably have. There are so many competitions, that you might think that every band must have won at least one of them!

Here the basic rules for a band-competition:
– Several bands participate, similar to a festival, but they don’t get paid.
– The audience come for one of the bands and listens to the others too.
– The audience likes the contest-element, it’s a way to participate as audience.
– Bands participate to reach a broader audience.
– If you win the competition, you not only win a price, you also gain a higher status.

Last month I read “Status Anxiety” by the UK philosopher Alain de Botton. His analysis of the concept of status was fascinating. If you win a competition, you gain status. That’s one of his points.

Is it good for you as musician to enter a competition? It depends on 8 things:

1. This band competition fits in your plan of investing in your band.
2. You need more experience on stage.
3. You want to reach a broader audience.
4. You want to profit from the PR of the competition.
5. You think that you can win the price.
6. You think that you can win and gain a higher status.
7. You know that it’s never a fair comparison of quality.
8. It’s fun, you like it.

When entering a competition to gain a higher status, you are risking the status quo if you loose. You can’t predict it, because to win you need luck. It’s important not to put too much importance on winning.

Os 10 'Canções dos Anos 90, Mais Intemporais de Acordo Com Dados Spotify

The 10 most timeless '90s songs, according to Spotify data

Some songs stay in our hearts for decades.

Matt Daniels, a data scientist and editor of Polygraph, discovered exactly which songs are timelessby combing through mounds of Spotify data. He looked at the streaming service's catalog of '90s songs and then ranked them by their play count in 2014 (the most recent year available).

The data includes people of all ages, but skews young considering the majority of Spotify users are in their 20s.

As he points out, until recently it was impossible to quantify the popularity of older music. But now, Spotify collects a vast amount of data about the bands we crave and how many times we play them. Daniels collaborated with Spotify to collect and analyze all of that data.

Here are the top '90s songs that fans still spin on repeat, according to his research.

10. Whitney Houston — "I Will Always Love You"

Play count: 27.48 million

9. Radiohead — "Creep"

Play count: 28.93 million

8. Metallica — "Enter Sandman"

 Play count: 29.16 million

7. Dr. Dre — "Still Dre"

Play count: 30.3 million 

6. Nirvana — "Come as You Are"

Play count: 30.36 million

5. Backstreet — "No Diggity"

Play count: 30.91 million

4. Red Hot Chili Peppers — "Under the Bridge"

Play count: 33.62 million

3. Oasis — "Wonderwall"

Play count: 34.35 million

2. Goo Goo Dolls — "Iris"

Play count: 35.66 million 

1. Nirvana — "Smells like Teen Spirit"

Playcount: 50.65 million (!)

Edward Snowden Uniu-se com o Artista Eletrônico Jean-Michel Jarre Para Fazer Uma Música "Techno" Veja o Clip

Edward Snowden teamed up with a legendary electronic artist to make a techno song

First of all thanks to Rob Price 

for this article.

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked thousands of highly classified documents to journalists about the US government's mass surveillance programs.

In 2016, he's releasing a dance track.

The 32-year-old whistleblower is teaming up with legendary electronic artist Jean-Michel Jarre to produce a "techno" song for the musician's upcoming album, after newspaper The Guardian put them in touch at Jarre's request.

The song, called "Exit," will appear on "Electronica Volume II: The Heart of Noise," due out on May 6.

I've always appreciated electronic music," Snowden, who currently lives at an undisclosed location in Russia, says in a video produced by The Guardian. "The melodies I remember with the most fondness are from video games where they generate 8-bit music, and those kind of chip tunes have really made a resurgence in modern musical culture today, and I thinkpeople like Jean-Michel are the ones that really popularised that, made it possible for us to appreciate it as more than just background but as actual culture."

Jarre is a pioneering French electronic music producer. 67 years old, he has released more than two dozen album and racked up more than 80 million album sales. He says he is inspired by Snowden's decision to speak out against US government surveillance, and is dedicating the new entire album to him. "The first time I heart about Edward Snowden, I thought about my Mum," the artist says. "She was a great figure about the French Resistance and she went into the Resistance [at] more or less the same age."

The song itself — which you can listen to a preview of in the video below — is a "speedy techno track evoking the constant and hectic production of data, this obsessive quest for more information on everything and everybody," Jarre says.

It also includes vocal samples of Snowden talking about rights and privacy.

Snowden signs off the Guardian's video with an ode to the power of music. "Music works across language, Music works across borders. Music works across culture. Music, as with all arts, is one of the only ways that we can create bonds and bridges between human hearts that are beyond semantic understanding — and that is reason more than anything else why we need music."

Rave on, Ed.

IFPI Libera Dados de Vendas Global da Indústria da Música

IFPI Releases New Global Music Industry Sales Figures

First of all thanks to my friend Bobby Owsinski for this info.



The IFPI (the organization that tracks global music sales) finally released its annual report on the sales for 2015. If you've been reading this blog for a while, none of the figures surprise you.

Here are the numbers right out of the report.

• Digital revenues now account for 45 per cent of total revenues, compared to 39 per cent for physical sales.

• There was a 10.2 per cent rise in digital revenues to US$ 6.7 billion, with a 45.2 per cent increase in streaming revenue more than offsetting the decline in downloads and physical formats.

• Total industry revenues grew 3.2 per cent to US$ 15.0 billion, leading to the industry's first significant year-on-year growth in nearly two decades. Digital revenues now account for more than half the recorded music market in 19 markets.

• Streaming remains the industry's fastest-growing revenue source. Revenues increased 45.2 per cent to US$ 2.9 billion and, over the five year period up to 2015, have grown more than four-fold.

• Streaming now accounts for 43 per cent of digital revenues and is close to overtaking downloads (45 per cent) to become the industry's primary digital revenue stream.

• Premium subscription services have seen a dramatic expansion in recent years with an estimated 68 million people now paying a music subscription. This figure is up from 41 million in 2014 and just eight million when data was first compiled in 2010.

• Downloads remain a significant offering, but now account for just 20 per cent of industry revenues. Income was down 10.5 per cent to US$ 3.0 billion - a higher rate of decline than in 2014 (- 8.2 per cent). Full album downloads are still a major part of the music fans' experience and were worth US$1.4 billion. This is higher than the level of sales in 2010 (US $983 million) and 2011 (US $1.3 billion).

• Performance rights revenue grew. Revenue generated through the use of recorded music by broadcasters and public venues increased 4.4 per cent to US$2.1 billion and remains one of the most consistent growing revenue sources. This revenue stream now accounts for 14 per cent of the industry's overall global revenue, up from 10 per cent in 2011.

• Revenues from physical formats declined, albeit at a slower rate than in previous years, falling by 4.5 per cent compared to 8.5 per cent in 2014 and 10.6 per cent in 2013. The sector still accounts for 39 per cent of overall global income and remains the format of choice for consumers in a number of major markets worldwide including Japan (75 per cent), Germany (60 per cent), and France (42 per cent).

That's a lot of data to take in, but the big takeaways are that the total industry revenue remains flat at $15 billion, despite streaming's growth, and paid subscriptions are taking off, at 68 million worldwide as compared to 41 million the year before.

There's more than meets the eye here though, which I'll address in an upcoming post.

Fundação (EUA) Diz Qua a Música Pode Acalmar, Socializar Pessoas Com Autismo

Foundation says music can soothe, socialize people with autism

Patricia Kayser, center, during a musical event with several children. Autism and Music Foundation

Thanks to OHANNA A. ALVAREZ

Activities organized by the Autism and Music Foundation are led to the rhythm of guitars, drums and maracas. 

For the past three years, this foundation has provided recreational spaces in South Florida for the enjoyment of children and adults with autism and other disabilities. Autism and Music Foundation events can be described as energetic and involving lots of music. They’re also usually held outdoors so that the children, who attend them, can be in close contact with nature.

“Our mission is to help improve the quality of life of people with autism through their interaction with music,” said Patricia Kayser, founder of Autism & Music, who added that the activities imply a lot more than just recreation.

“Through music we practice exercises involving patience, socialization, of [taking] turns. It’s like a game.” 

Despite the fact that music is the main driving force of the foundation’s activities, youths who benefit from the foundation’s work also have access to a space where they can play soccer or golf, or where they can paint. Activities are run in small groups to ensure a personalized environment. 

The Autism & Music Foundation was born when Kayser witnessed her brother Christian — who was diagnosed with autism when he was 4 years old — listen to a song played live and accompanied by the sounds of a guitar. 

Kayser, who is from Ecuador, said that as an older sister she always tried to play and communicate with Christian, who is now 15. “It was difficult interacting with him.” 

That’s why she was profoundly impacted when she saw the almost immediate connection her brother had with music. Since then, Kayser, 25, has submersed herself in the world of music. She bought a guitar and started learning its chords.

At the same time, she noticed significant changes in he brother’s behavior.

“His senses started waking up, he started coming to my room, he had never pointed and he started pointing at my guitar. He became more social, started looking me in the eyes,” said Kayser. 

Kayser volunteered in a school for children with disabilities and noticed that her brother’s reaction upon listening to music was not unique, it was often repeated by other children with his same diagnosis. That’s when she knew she had to do something. 

“This is my mission in life,” she said. 

Contrary to the generalized notion that children with autism dislike listening to noise, Kaysee said she has never experienced a tantrum reaction, which is an episode in which a person with autism expresses irritability) caused by the music. 

However, she did say she experienced an incident with a boy because he didn’t like balloons and that because of that they now seldom decorate activities with balloons. She also mentioned she requires parents of participants to fill out a form detailing their child’s habits and fears. 

Similarly, in the event that a participant experiences a tantrum, the Autism & Music team is ready to handle it. “We haven’t had a situation that has been out of control. We understand and try to take the child to another space.”

According to a report published Nov. 13, the United States government estimates that one in every 45 children born in the country has some type of autism. This statistic is one of three calculations by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The most rigorous statistics note one in every 68 children as being affected by autism. In 2007, the CDC estimated only one in every 150 children is born affected by the disease.

Autism & Music Foundation events are free but an initial $15 is required to cover costs for a T-shirt every child must wear to events. Beginning in March, activities will be held the Saturday of every month in Wynwood, at 450 NW 27 St. In the near future, Kayser would like to have a space in which the foundation could offer musical therapy. 

Interested parties can send inquiries via email to info@autismandmusic.org. 

Follow Johanna Alvarez on Twitter: @JAlvarez

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/health-fitness/article61994667.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/health-fitness/article61994667.html#storylink=cpy