stevelawson.net

One of the biggest “music on the web” stories in recent months has been the breakdown in relationship between the UK Performing Right Society (PRS) and Youtube (owned by Google). It’s over the share of Google’s ad revenue that should go to the writers of the songs in ‘premium content’ videos on Youtube. (for some background, here’s An article from The Guardian, and the PRS’s latest statement).

So, who’s in the wrong? We’ll, not surprisingly, both are, at least partly.

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So, context: I’m on Myspace, ReverbNation, Last.fm, Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and Youtube, Vimeo, Seesmic, Phreadz…etc. etc.

All of them are social networks. On all of them, not surprisingly, I get followed/added/friended by a lot of musicians and bands.

Which is all well and good, except that I can’t listen to them. Not ‘won’t‘, ‘can’t‘ - the numbers don’t add up. Even if we ignore the 8000 myspace friends I deleted before christmas, we’re still looking and thousands of interactions. Even if I only listened to one song from each, that’s upwards of 4000 minutes of listening time, just to grant each of them a cursory ear. And given that a handful of them will really catch my imagination, I’ll probably end up listening to them a lot over time.

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First up, a HUGE thanks to everyone who’s bought the album already - thanks for the feedback, and thanks for investing in the music. It means that (if sales continue as they are) we’ll be able to pay for the pressing of the CD without going into any kind of debt… makes the whole process [...]

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This post is inspired by two things - firstly, a conversation I had recently with the very lovely Laura Kidd. We’d known each other quite a few weeks before she finally bothered to listen to any of the music I did, assuming that because it was solo bass it would be a load of techno-wank [...]

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Just a quick one: I’ve just seen that my number of listeners on Last.fm this week jumped up to 33, from 17 last week - see the list of weekly listeners here, and add yourself to it for next week by listening here.
So, in statistical terms, that’s a success, I guess, though this year, I [...]

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The other day I wrote my first post for MusicThinkTank.com - a really great collaborative blog with contributors from across the spectrum of ‘what’s happening in the music industry these days?’ - I was really excited to be asked to blog for them, as there are some fantastic thinkers writing for the site that I’ve [...]

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OK, one day into the last.fm buzzing experiment, and the first thing that’s clear is that this is going to take a little longer. Twitter buzzing takes a maximum of 20 seconds beyond reading the blog post. You find a link, you twurl it, you tweet it. Simple As.
I did, however, have twice as [...]

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OK, Pt II of the experiment is an easy-ish one, if you’re already on Last.fm.
In case you don’t know, Last.fm is an online radio/playlist/social network site - the heart of it is an ENORMOUS catalogue of songs, many of which can be streamed on demand, and all of which crop up in radio stations, [...]

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The last couple of months have been a really interesting time for me in terms of getting to experiment with, understand and conceptualise about the world of interactive web tools refered to as ‘Social Media’. Next week is the first London Social Media Cafe Musicians get together (we need a new title!) - so I [...]

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It’s amazing what you can find looking at your web-stats - I was browsing through mine, seeing who had linked back to this site, and found a review just posted on a blog in January of this year, of And Nothing But The Bass (my first album, for those of you a little late to [...]

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