This story inspires me to
RANT
"The longer it is, the more convoluted the language...iTunes...The Bible..." or
Myface.com (there are actually people who sign up and use this service!?)
The idea of intellectual property is one that has concerned me deeply since the german equivalent of ASCAP kyboshed
my band's monthly gig in a bar in southern Germany. We charged no entry fee, relying on a tip jar to pay for the petrol to get to the gig and buy a few beers. We played a mixture of traditional and contemporary songs, some of which were copyrighted, some of which weren't. The point of the excercise was to
have fun, not get rich and famous. Nevertheless, GEMA (the German ASCAP) demanded fees so high that it would not be worth the publican's while to allow us to perform. This was not the case ten years ago, when GEMA etc. could comfortably derive a large income from the sale of CDs - the inexorable rise of internet sharing has put an end to that, so behaviour that used to be tolerated is now deemed to be unacceptable unless it can be milked like a cow (as you can tell, I am slightly less than unbiased on this issue). Economic imperatives have shifted the goalposts as far as musical intellectual property rights are concerned - will we one day be stopped and spot-fined for whistling Kraftwerks's "The Model" as we walk down the street? and will Kraftwerks executors have to pass on a portion of this money to the estate of Nicolo Paganini, from whose "Caprice No 24" the main melodic motif of "The Model" is clearly lifted? Or should we presume that two musical geniuses who also have in common that their respective names both begin with MO (that has got to be significant!) both claimed, rather like St. Francis, that they were acting as channels:
''I never wrote a tune in my life,'' Bill Monroe once said. ''All that music's in the air around you all the time. I was just the first one to reach up and pull it out.''
Mozart himself would sometimes say that he felt like he was not composing so much as taking dictation
were speaking for all mankind when they passed these self-judgements.
It used to be the other way around, record companies would
pay DJs to play their records - as unjust (because it was unregulatable) the "payola" system was, it was the only way small independant rock'n'roll labels could have anything beyond local influence on the airwaves - shortly after new legislation, recording companies such as Sun, Ace etc. went to the wall and rock'n'roll became corporate, which was a shame.
Should I be able to claim "reverse royalties" from Al Stewart, because performing one of his more obscure songs from the early seventies has encouraged people to go out and listen to what he was doing before the A&R men turned him from a creative artist into a product and buy his old records (he's turned back into a creative artist in the meantime, by the way, and markets his records directly via CDBaby.com).
Questions, questions...
Rant over
respectfully
the polecat
