Business News Week In Five

The music business week in five – 25 Nov 2011

By | Published on Friday 25 November 2011

Chris Cooke

So hello there one and all, and welcome to Black Friday, America’s national day of shopping which Amazon is trying to inflict on the rest of us with its various “Black Friday Week” offers.

If we’re going to adopt one of America’s holidays personally I’d rather have Thanksgiving, I quite like eating excessive amounts of food, but absolutely hate shopping. And besides, ‘Black Friday’ was named because of the horrific congestion all those shoppers caused in American cities and malls. Who wants to adopt that?

But the good news is that there is no Black Friday in London, so there shouldn’t be any out of the ordinary congestion, which means there’s no excuse for not heading down to the main Topman store at Oxford Circus today for the mega-DJ-jam involving our very own Eddy Temple-Morris, and designed to raise awareness for CALM, an incredibly important charity designed to reduce the number of suicides among the young male population. If you can’t make it to Oxford Circus, do read Eddy’s column on the venture, and if you can, well do enjoy watching Eddy, Zane Lowe, Dan le Sac, Kissy Sell Out, Herve, the Loose Canons and many more going head to head in a DJ fashion.

But first, take a few moments to catch up on this week’s big music business stories…

01: Universal sued Grooveshark, again. Based on data it got access to as part of a previous legal dispute with Grooveshark, Universal says it has evidence that bosses at the often controversial streaming music service have themselves uploaded unlicensed content to the company’s web platform. Grooveshark is a Spotify-style set up that allows users to upload music to its catalogue, meaning it streams music from many more labels than the handful it has licensing agreements with. Owners of the service say they operate a DMCA takedown system for that unlicensed content, so are protected under US copyright law. But, Universal’s lawyers argue, that does not apply if Grooveshark staff are uploading the unlicensed material. The web firm said the major was deliberately misinterpreting the data it had handed over, but if Universal were to win this one, it would likely push for millions possibly billions in damages based on the statutory damages allowed in the US for copyright infringement. CMU reports | WSJ report

02: UK Music called on music types to contribute to live licensing review. The government is reviewing the 2003 Licensing Act which many in the live sector reckon has made it too hard to stage grass roots music events. The government’s consultation on the issue is actually considering proposals for cutting live entertainment red tape considerably more radical than those already set out in a private member’s bill on this issue, Lord Tim Clement-Jones’ Live Music Bill. Submissions to the review need to be in by 3 Dec, and UK Music called on anyone in the music space who supports these proposed changes to put that support in writing. CMU report | UK Music statement

03: European courts said ISPs couldn’t be forced to become the piracy police. In an ECJ ruling relating to a long running battle between Belgian collecting society Sabam and net firm Scarlet, the Euro judges said that forcing ISPs to monitor all traffic with a viewing to blocking the sharing of unlicensed content – which Sabam wanted Scarlet to do – would breach various bits of the EU’s Charter Of Fundamental Rights. Although a pain for Sabam, its arguable that the ruling doesn’t affect too many other efforts to force ISPs to assist in stopping illegal file-sharing, because other demands to this effect have been much more narrowly defined than by the Belgians. CMU report | PC World report

04: The Music Managers Forum backed a speech by EU Digital Commissioner Neelie Kroes which called for more reform to European copyright systems, including more collective licensing in the digital domain. Kroes also called for content owners and technology companies to collaborate on systems to better monitor copyright ownership and royalty distribution. MMF Chair Brian Message said: “Neelie Kroes summed up our views succinctly and with passion. Her final sentence – ‘let’s not wait for a financial crisis in the creative sector to happen to finally adopt the right tools to tackle it’ – says it all. We applaud her and wholeheartedly share her vision”. CMU report | Register report

05: CMU was confirmed as convention programmers of The Great Escape 2012. It may be a bit self indulgent to include this here, but yes, Team CMU will once again programme the convention side of Europe’s leading festival for new music next May, bringing together the very best minds from across the music, media and digital industries to share ideas, advice, case studies and opinions. Early bird tickets that get you into the whole convention plus priority access to the festival are just £120, get yours now! CMU reportTGE tickets

And that’s your lot till the CMU podcast this afternoon, see you for that later.

Chris Cooke
Business Editor, CMU



READ MORE ABOUT: