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Business News Week In Five
The music business week in five – Friday 8 Oct 2010
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 8 October 2010
So, it’s all go around here people. First up, I’m speeding up to Lancaster tomorrow to take part in an interesting sound panel on the live music scene as part of Soundbytes at the Lancaster Music Festival.
And then I’ll be staying in the lovely North West for the rest of the week because, of course, next week is In The City in Manchester. We’ll be running workshops, chairing and participating in panels, and reporting on the whole shebang. So busy busy. And then there’s the all important matter of reviewing the five biggest music biz stories of the week.
01: Ministry’s website was attacked by pro-file-sharing supporters. The superclub’s site became a target because the Ministry Of Sound record label is suing individuals who they believe have illegally distributed their content online. MOS’s lawyers went to court on Monday to ask a judge to force various ISPs to provide the contact information of accused file-sharers. This stage of file-sharing litigation is usually uncontroversial – but this time, because of the recent accidental publishing of confidential file-sharer data by another legal firm, BT asked the court to adjourn the hearing so they could present a case against handing over customer information without more conclusive evidence of infringement. The judge concurred with the phone firm and duly adjourned the proceedings. CMU reports | Slyck report
02: The Pirate Bay trial rumbled on. The three founders and main funder of the rogue file-sharing website are appealing their convictions for copyright infringement. This week the defendants again insisted they’d had legal advice that their service wasn’t illegal, because they didn’t host any infringing content. They also claimed they didn’t originally intend the service to be used to enable copyright infringement. The content owners responded by saying so called contributory infringement (where you don’t actually have to host the infringing content to be liable) is an uncontroversial legal principle, while asking why, if The Pirate Bay didn’t exist to aid piracy, was it called The Pirate Bay? They also tried to prove that the four defendants had made loads of cash by running TPB. One of the four defendants, Peter Sunde, also spent time talking about the good aspects of file-sharing. The case continues. CMU reports | Torrentfreak reports
03: EMI moved another publishing exec into a top recordings role. The appointment of former EMI Publishing US A&R man Dan McCarroll to the top job at the major’s main US record label – Capitol/Virgin – is another sign EMI Group boss Roger Faxon, previously EMI Publishing’s top man, believes the solution to fixing the EMI record company’s woes is to put his former team from the publishing division in charge. And as working in recordings, while no longer as profitable, is probably more exciting than a job in publishing, presumably they’ll all leap at the chance. Dan certainly did. CMU report
04: Power Amp reported a good return on their Madness investment. A 46.9% return for investors, in fact. The music investment firm funded Madness’s recent album ‘The Liberty Of Norton Folgate’, receiving a cut of recording, publishing, live and sponsorship revenues in return. The partnership is now over, with Power Amp making a tidy profit, and Madness getting to keep their copyrights. CMU report
05: Resonance FM apologised for messing up the ‘resting’ of Max Tundra’s show. The musician and producer wrote a blog complaining about the way the innovative London community station ‘rested’ his programme – the station’s Content Manager refused to meet to discuss his decision, and then axed the show a month earlier than originally planned without telling Tundra. When the presenter complained someone posted some bitchy remarks about him on the station’s Twitter feed. As online outrage on Tundra’s behalf grew Resonance bosses apologised and said they’d review training and management procedures. CMU report | Max Tundra’s blog
And that’s your lot for this week people. Do come say hello if your are Soundbytes or In The City.
Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU
