A blog about Australian music, marketing and social media

This guest post was written by Julian Hewitt [pictured right], a music lawyer for Melbourne-based Media Arts Lawyers.

Jules works with a variety of Australian artists and events including Architecture in Helsinki, Lisa Mitchell, Miami Horror, Big Day Out, Boy & Bear, Falls Festival, and Operator Please. He uses a breathtaking handcrafted font called ‘Slim Aarons’ in all of his legal documentation.

Plagiarism, Copyright & The Human Factor

“Only God creates. The rest of us just copy.” - Michelangelo

“Always steal the best ideas. They are so much better than the bad ideas.“ - Recent advice from photographer Justin Smith

Art imitates life, but not nearly so much as it imitates art. Post-modernism made the act of referencing an existing work a conscious statement in itself, but music, art and literature have always been indebted to the influence of prior works. We don’t live in a vacuum, and artists do not create in one.

Music purists expect ‘authenticity’ from musicians, but there is no such thing. The Beatles pinched guitar riffs from Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry pinched guitar riffs from T-Bone Walker, and T-Bone was a protégé and stylistic disciple of Blind Lemon Jefferson. There are only a few small aesthetic steps to get from 1970’s Krautrockers Neu! to James Murphy’s LCD Soundsystem, and whilst Beethoven’s compositional style is considered “definitive”, it was “anticipated” by both Haydn and Mozart. In short, every song has a geneology that starts well before its first note.

The same is true of film and TV. One recent count suggests approximately 208 million films have been made since the birth of cinema, and yet screenwriting courses commonly suggest there are just eleven distinct film genres. NY Times film critic Janet Maslin said in 1983: “Hollywood may have never been more dangerously and unimaginatively beholden to its own past than it is right now” (and surely ate her words in 1984 upon the cinematic release of “Cannonball Run II”), and Quentin Tarantino learnt to make films by watching movies while on the job at the Video Archives rental store.

Television is no different. “There are only a handful of basic ideas,” says Fred Silverman, former programming head at ABC, CBS and NBC, “past those you are really into derivation.” Steven Bochco, who created a raft of successful shows including “Hill Street Blues”, “LA Law”, and “NYPD Blue” called making television “serving old wine in a new bottle.”

Are the visual arts more ‘pure’? Sam Leach’s Proposal for Landscaped Cosmos [pictured right] won the Wynne Prize for the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in 2010.

It was subsequently revealed that the painting was a reworking of 1600s-era Dutch artist Adam Pynacker’s Boatmen moored on the shore of an Italian lake [pictured left].

Outcry that Leach’s work was ‘unoriginal’ came largely from non-art media sources, upset that an Australian scenery prize was a copy of a Dutch work. Art-world criticism focussed instead on Leach’s failure to attribute the source material in the naming of his work, which is usual artistic practise, but seemed more casual on the issue of authenticity and originality. As Wynne judge Lindy Lee said: “Of course I can see there are structural similarities (but) there’s a long tradition of artists working from images of other artists“.

Does the realisation that Leach’s painting directly appropriates Pynacker’s impact the effect of the new painting? The knowledge contextualises Leach’s painting, and provides additional layers of meaning – as the newer work plays off a painting with its own distinct history. What would happen if Leach had copied Pynacker’s completely without making any changes?

In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman questioned the relevance of authorship:

“Why there is any aesthetic difference… [to the] original work challenges a basic premise on which the very functions of collector, museum, and art historian depend?”

But there is no question that being the “originator” means something valuable to us. As Louis Armstong noted, “a lotta cats copy the Mona Lisa, but people still line up to see the original”. The value is not just in the painting, but in the fact that it is an expression of something unique, ‘new’, and not only a facsimile of a prior work.

Cultural bower-birding doesn’t always sit comfortably with broader society. If Pynacker’s painting was still capable of being protected by copyright, Leach would have likely infringed on that copyright. The function of copyright is to protect the artistic expression of an idea, rather than an idea itself. The separation of the expression of the idea from the idea may seem semantic, but it is significant. Copyright law does not care that a work is inspired by another copyright protected work, provided it does not actually reproduce that work.

How can this happen? Woody Allen [pictured right] acknowledges his stylistic debt to Ingmar Bergmann; certainly, many of Allen’s films contain direct visual references. In Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal, the hero plays chess with Death, which was re-created by Allen in Death Knocks with the chess substituted for gin rummy. But Allen’s characters do not use Bergmann’s scripted dialogue, and his films do not feature footage shot by Bergmann, nor utilise sound from Bergmann’s film.

In a musical context, taking an interest in the style or mood of an artist – or what they might call their distinctive “sound” - is perfectly acceptable, provided you don’t use extracts of their recordings or substantially reproduce their melodies or lyrics. So Wolfmother can ‘do’ Black Sabbath [see below video] without fear of prosecution - at least not from lawyers, although there are a few Sabbath fans who want to turn them into “children of the grave”

And Midlake can ‘do’ Fleetwood Mac’s “Rhiannon” as “Roscoe” [see below video]. But like Wolfmother, they’re copping a ‘vibe’, as opposed to a melody or a lyric.

George Harrison unconsciously but directly referencing the melody of The Chiffons “He’s So Fine” in “My Sweet Lord” is a different matter entirely [see below video].

Harrison said at the time of judgement: “I still don’t understand how the courts aren’t filled with similar cases as 99 percent of the popular music that can be heard is reminiscent of something or other.”

The recent infringement case involving Men at Work’s “Down Under” had certain similarities to the Harrison/Chiffons case. Gregg Ham was the flutist for Men at Work. When he played on the 1979 and 1981 recorded versions of the Colin Hay/Ron Strykert composition “Down Under” he added a refrain “for the purpose and with the intention of evoking an Australian flavour in the flute riff“. [see below video]

More than 30 years later that “appropriation” resulted in Hay and Strykert (and their publishers EMI Songs) being successfully sued by Larrikin Music, the owners of the copyright composition “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree”, which bore melodic similarity to Ham’s “Australian flavour”. Ham said his musical reference of another copyrighted work was “inadvertent, naive, unconscious, and by the time Men at Work recorded the song… unrecognisable“.

Copyright legislation gives creators of artistic works a monopoly over those works for a limited period of time, and such laws stand right at the intersection of art and commerce. The cultural monopoly granted by legislation seeks to strike a balance between rewarding the investment of time and money made in the creation of artistic works by artists or their benefactors, and our desire as a society to maintain a freedom of cultural expression not unduly restricted by law.

The reason why the “99 per cent” of copyright infringements - as suggested by George Harrison - do not see the cold light of court is largely commercial. Kit Fennessy’s comments in The Age on February 6, 2010 highlighted this tension:

“Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree uses a bright, major scale. Down Under uses natural, minor chords with a relative major solo; a completely different sound with non-identical notes. You may as well sue the author of Kookaburra for ripping off Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It is preposterous.”

The enforcement of a disputed copyright can be prohibitively expensive, and the reality is that most art works do not generate sufficient income to justify legal action from an aggrieved owner of a pre-existing work. At the time of the initial ‘Kookaburra/Down Under’ ruling, Colin Hay said: “I believe what has won today is opportunistic greed, and what has suffered is creative musical endeavour,” and in one sense he is right: if Hay’s career never progressed beyond the Cricketer’s Arms in Richmond, he would never have been sued and his creativity would not have been in any way compromised. When art becomes big business, creativity is subject to larger - and more legally minded - commercial forces.

Artist and graphic designer Andy Warhol is an interesting subject when discussing the proprietary value of copyright, because his works again and again infringed on third party copyrights (as did the works of many “Pop” artists. Warhol regularly used copyright controlled materials without permission or attribution, and he produced individual works and entire series’ based on other people’s photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, press shots, and yet these infringements took place almost universally without legal incident over his working life of some 25 years as an internationally renowned artist. Even since his death there have been very few claims brought against his estate.

The Warhol print Green Car Crash (1963, pictured left) - which incorporates an unlicensed press photograph of an horrific car smash up used as the bed for the print - sold for $71,700,000 USD in 2008. At the same moment in time that Green Car Crash set an auction record, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc and the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board were being litigated against for denying recognition of various works claimed by collectors and art historians to have been authored by Warhol.

Denial of attribution when you are talking Warhol can easily cause problems. An example: the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board does not question that Warhol’s first print run of the famous ‘Red Series’ of self-portraits is authentic, but it will not endorse his second series of the same pictures. The reasoning of the Board is that Warhol was not present when the second run were printed, although they accept that Warhol was aware that the print had taken place and had even signed one of the prints in the second series.

Warhol’s printer Rupert Smith describes Warhol’s methods mid-1970’s: “We had so much work that even Augusto [the security man] was doing the painting. We were so busy, Andy and I did everything over the phone. We called it “art by telephone.”

Horst Weber von Beeren, who was responsible for painting many of Warhol’s later works has said that Warhol’s primary role in the creation of these paintings was simply to sign them when they were sold. Von Beeren had come to realize that a painting could be an original Andy Warhol whether or not he ever touched it. These works are all happily accepted as ‘original’ Warhols by the Board.

Aside from reinforcing the amount of money at stake in the attribution of authorship to a work, it highlights Warhol’s (unashamedly) tenuous link to much of the artwork that he “created”. The value in his mind being not in the artistic expression of an idea, but of the idea itself – the opposite value to that protected by copyright.

The Pop Art Portraits show in London in 2008 nicely illustrated the occasionally Orwellian nature of copyright in practice. At the show, the 1960s pop art on display was rife with copyright-infringing artworks that sampled everything from Minnie Mouse to Time magazine covers, whilst in the background the London National Portrait Gallery walls were plastered with “no photography” signs and lined with uniformed gallery staff whose job was to ensure patrons did not take (copyright-infringing) photographs of the artworks on display.

At some point, it seems the creative momentum of each generation moves from innovation to protection. This has been emphatically the case for generations born after the Second World War. The baby-boomers were almost single-handedly responsible for creating multi-billion dollar industries in music, film, TV, art, and entertainment geared specifically at teenagers. The huge value of these cultural works – and their ownership by large corporations looking to protect the value of these works – is the main driver towards the vast increase in copyright-related lawsuits in the last 30 years.

It is no coincidence that duration of copyright protection was extended in 1998 from 50 years to 70 years from the death of the author to prevent Disney icons like Mickey Mouse entering the public domain, nor was it surprising that the United States bill bearing the legislative amendment was championed by (and named after) 60s folk singer and former Californian senator Sonny Bono [pictured right].

In practise, lawsuits are not often brought by artists. Aside from the usual commercial limitations, artists are themselves more likely sensitive to the conflicts involved in claiming ‘originality’ of a work. When actions are brought, it is typically to prevent another artist unfairly profiteering from their creation, rather than to receive additional remuneration for the creative energy expended in generating the work in the first place. Thus, the creative monopoly in practise is not generally about use, so much is it about reward. For example, Brazillian artist Jorge Ben Jor sued Rod Stewart after realising “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” ripped off his melody from “Taj Mahal” [see below video], but withdrew his claim when Stewart donated all royalties from his song to UNICEF.

Such artistic and commercial conflict goes to the very core question of why a work is created in the first place: is the primary imperative commercial, or artistic? Had Marion Sinclair, the author of “Kookaburra…” been alive and in control of the copyright in her song, the likelihood of her suing for an infringement by “Down Under” is probably very low. Artists take pleasure in influencing future works, much in the same way that they were influenced in the creation of their work.

The same emotional response is simply not present when the rights are controlled by a third party corporation. Creative investments deserve to be protected - there are thousands of reasons why - but there is a strong tension at play between creation, appropriation and protection, and between artistic expression and the commercial monopoly which copyright grants over certain elements of that artistic expression.

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Besides his work with Media Arts Lawyers, Julian Hewitt is also the co-founder of a micro-label called Cohen Cooper & Roberts, a music supervisor for various film projects, a lecturer in music law, and he sits on the board of a number of public charities and events including the National Young Writers Festival and the Wired Lab.

He pens the odd self-serving article about how The Wire can be a metaphor for anything if you substitute the words “Chicken McNuggets” with “my idea”, and he also plays synthesizer in several bands and DJs badly. The last act he remixed was the Teenagers, who asked him to pull the saxophone solo out of his mix as it was “not appropriate”. He can be contacted via the Media Arts Lawyers website.

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Behind The Merch Desk: CD Sales

At a March show by American hard rock band Between The Buried And Me [pictured below], I visited The Hi-Fi’s merch desk afterwards, hoping to buy a CD to show my appreciation. While the wall behind the desk was adorned with a range of clothing apparel, a handwritten sign read: “No CDs - go download it.”

BTBAM: Disc-less in Aus.

Disappointment aside, this got me thinking: how prevalent is this occurrence among the international artists that tour Australia? It’s long been my personal preference to buy music directly from the artist at live shows, from local bands here in Brisbane up to the biggest touring acts. Stripped of the record store and digital retailer middle-men that cut into artists’ potential profit, I’d assumed that purchasing music from the merch desk was the quickest way to improving the artist’s bottom line.

Brian Taranto, managing director of Sydney-based merchandise and touring specialists Love Police, admits that a band will earn “marginally more” if a CD is bought at a merch desk, as opposed to online or in a record store. However, he states that the very act of offering CDs to the consumer at a live show is “largely a box-ticking exercise for record companies to say, ‘Yes, we’re selling music at shows’.” For the merchandising company, Taranto says, it’s a “painful and time-wasting experience. There are rare exceptions, but generally, throughout my 25 years of merchandising experience, it is a waste of time. I say that because CDs generally don’t sell. There’s a procedure involved with purchasing, paying for and returning product to the majority of record labels that is an accounting time-waster, unless there is a quick, clean and easy financial and logistical solution.”

According to Simon Lonergan, owner of TSP Merchandising Australia, the only way for CDs to be sourced for international acts is for the artist to ship them over, or for the merchandiser to buy the discs wholesale from an Australian record company. Both options are expensive, which is why the profit margins on CDs are so low. “The band knows they’re not going to make much money from CDs,” Lonergan says, “So they generally don’t want CDs hurting their t-shirt profits. You can get the music in other ways. If you can download it, that means that no-one has to freight discs around.” TSP handle around 150 international tours per year, including the recent AC/DC and Pearl Jam tours. Of those 150 tours, Lonergan estimates that only 15-20% request that the merch desk offers CDs for sale.

“I’ve been in the merch industry my whole life, and CD sales at live shows have never been good,” he tells me, effectively putting to bed my sneaking suspicion that consumer reluctance to buy the physical product is influenced by an increasing preference for digital music. At the independent end of the spectrum, artists don’t seem to be faring much better from live CD sales. Brisbane-based Lick It Media has presented the Brisbane legs of Australian tours by Crystal Castles, Metronomy and Datarock.

Lick It partner Matt Rabbidge suggests that in these instances, shirts are the primary merchandise offering. “In recent years, CDs seem to have become a second focus. I think that this comes down to the younger crowd these bands are attracting, who normally want to ‘wear’ their likes and dislikes. Bands see this as free promotion; if they can make a buck out of it while they do it, then so be it.”

From the front line as event promoter, Rabbidge doesn’t believe artists are losing out too much from CD sales. “I think that good bands are just getting smarter about how they make money now,” he says.” It comes down to more touring, playing festivals, and offering merch and digital downloads.” While TSP handled merchandising sales for the Australian leg of AC/DC’s Black Ice world tour - whose merch sales in this country alone grossed tens of millions of dollars - Taranto’s Love Police sold product for the tour’s support act, Wolfmother, whose shiny disc sales numbered just “a handful” across the whole tour. “That’s the big picture side of it: why would you spend significant money to see AC/DC and Wolfmother, then want to buy a CD?” Taranto asks. “Surely fans know their music by then; if not, they’ll buy it the next day. You can’t really put on a CD, like you can a shirt.”

On the logistical side, Lonergan suggests that the potential benefits for international artists looking to sell discs at shows are often offset by frustrations. “If you import something into this country, it’s got to go through a process customs. There’s a lot of paperwork, and I think the smaller bands decide it’s too much of a pain in the arse.” In his mind, the decision to nix offering CDs at live shows comes from a purely financial perspective. “I can see why a lot of artists don’t want to offer CDs: they think it’s going to take away a t-shirt sale. Why would they want to a sell a CD, when they could make four or five times the amount of profit through selling a t-shirt?”

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What’s your experience with buying music from the merch desk at concerts?

Do you prefer to sample before the show and buy direct from the band afterwards, or are you more interested in wearing your musical allegiances in t-shirt form?

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Hyperbole. R.I.P.

Sad news filtered throughout the Australian music blog community last week (via Pity The Cool, WhoTheHell and Sound Alliance) when it became apparent that the Google-owned free blogging service, Blogger, removed Hyperbole. We deemed the site the second best Australian music blog in March 2009.

Turns out that Blogger didn’t agree; its moderators decided that the site had received one too many MP3 takedown requests. With a few clicks from ’some gung-ho web sherrif’, three years and 600 posts passionately supporting the Australian music industry - all gone.

Hyperbole was run by inthemix.com.au deputy editor Dave Ruby Howe [pictured right], who took the time to answer some questions in the wake of what he deems an ‘excruciating’ experience.

Andrew: As you see it, what happened? Why did Blogger kill the blog?

Dave: Well I think it really comes from poor moderation services on somebody’s behalf. There was a time when I would post MP3s on there that were not cleared and looking back that was a poor decision. But for at least the past year I’ve only posted material sent to me by artists, labels, PR people, etc, which was cleared for blogging. I wasn’t trying to break exclusives with my blog anymore, it was more about writing and enjoying music.

So I kept receiving individual post takedowns for posts that were years old, and with no functioning links, so some gung-ho web sherrif saw that a post had once linked to some relatively high profile remix and then complained. My thinking is that Google got one too many of these and pulled the plug, neither party bothering to check what the content on the blog was.

All that work, down the drain. How do you feel right now?

I won’t sugar-coat it, it really does feel excruciating. Three years and six hundred posts later and it’s all flushed away. It’s brutal. And the worst thing is I have no way of redirecting any incoming traffic to the blog to my new host - hyperbole.tv. That stings the most I think, because readers might think that I have pulled the pin myself.

Do you think it’s possible for a Blogger-based music/mp3 blog to survive and thrive without being taken down?

Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly clearer that that’s no longer an option. It’s a combination of Blogger’s lax moderation and overzealous label and industry tattle-tales that’s causing this, I’d say.

I’ll give you an example: Ellie Goulding. A UK singer who’s now a chart-scaling artist on Universal. I’ve done several posts on her in the last year or so, and those were with material provided by a friend and fellow blogger Derek Davies, who also runs the indie lable Neon Gold, which was putting out Ellie’s records. So he gives me and scores of other blog contacts some tracks from Ellie, and I remember specifically a Russ Chimes remix of her tune ‘Starry Eyed’, and I post it and it’s fine. That is, until after Ellie’s album has been released internationally and I get a takedown notice for it. It’s infuriating, and any contact you try to open with Google about these takedowns is never responded to.

For any blogger that wants to develop any kind of profile as an MP3 blog: don’t do it on Blogger. Simple as that.

What would you have done differently, knowing what you now know?

Well for one, I wish I’d taken more action. I actually registered the domain hyperbole.tv in March 2009, looking to overhaul my blog onto its own hosting and turn it into something more personal that I could use as a site for my own freelance activities and not just as an MP3 blog. But I just didn’t get my act together. The writing was on the wall earlier this year when a bunch of other blogs got yanked and I was determined to get out whilst I still could but I just wasn’t quick enough. As for the content, as I said, I was blogging cleared tracks for the past year so that didn’t need to be altered, I just needed to be off Blogger.

I’m trying to be positive about the whole thing though and treat it as a cleansing fire, of sorts. It’s sort of made me scramble and get things together for the next phase of Hyperbole which will hopefully achieve what I outlined earlier.

Thanks for your time, Dave.

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Bereaved  Hyperbole fans can follow the site over to hyperbole.tv. For old times’ sake, we’ve included some screenshots of the old site below. Click for larger versions.

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Last week I wrote a feature article for Australian music website Mess+Noise about Faux Pas, a Melbourne-based electronic artist whose ‘digital DIY’ approach has intrigued me since Waycooljnr founder Nick Crocker pointed me in his direction.

I’ve since found Tim Shiel - the man behind the Faux Pas moniker, pictured right - to be a great example of an artist willing to invest time in developing his online presence. Besides using his computer to write and record his art, Shiel offers his music openly and honestly with bloggers, and allows fans to buy and share his material with minimal fuss. Below is the unedited interview that I used as the basis for my Mess+Noise feature ahead of the April 2010 release of his new album, Noiseworks.

Andrew: How do you describe Faux Pas’ sound?

Tim: I like the term “future pop” which i read in a Mess+Noise review. I actually like a lot of the new words getting thrown around like “chillwave” and “dreambeat” or “wonky” because they seem to describe a feeling rather than a set of conventions, though i don’t know if any of those words would apply to what i’m doing.

What do you use to create your music?

I have a very simple setup in terms of hardware. I have a computer running Ableton Live and a few Midi controllers that i use to control it. On Noiseworks, I mostly used virtual instruments - there was almost no actual “recording” in the literal sense - though I did play guitar on a number of tracks, and also for a couple of tracks I hooked up a friend’s microphone and breathed into it.

The only thing I’ve ever spent any real money on is my speakers. Nearly everything happens ‘inside the box’ (ie. my computer) - and inside my miiiiiiiiiiind. I basically just sit in front of a computer and play with sound, following an internal logic that I’m almost completely sure only makes sense to me. I play around with things until they sound right to me, then I cross my fingers and hope that other people are into it too.

At the beginning of your career, your friend Wally de Backer [better known as Gotye] adopted a “completely DIY” approached influenced you to do the same, without entertaining the thought of label support. What did you find appealing about this method?

It just seemed to make sense. I got to know Wally back when he was burning CDs in his bedroom and printing covers on his inkjet and making handwritten notes. It worked for him right from the start because he was genuine about it, and really passionate. I could see that he was having a lot of fun managing that side of things, making direct connections with people. It looked like a fun way of doing it. I understand it’s not for everyone, but I actually enjoy it.

You’re fond of distributing your music digitally. What do you dig about it?

Well that’s how I get music. I download, and it’s been that way for me for so long that its just the way that makes sense. It is what it is. I tend to think of the physical product as a bit of an after-thought but that probably says more probably about my own personal habits than anything else.

In your experience, are there any drawbacks to digital distribution?

Some people still want physical things. I totally get that.

You state that you’re proactive about sending your music to blogs. What have you learned about dealing with fellow bloggers - what appeals to them, what doesn’t? Is it just a matter of ego-stroking?

Often its not hard to get their attention, if you are polite about it. My advice to anyone who is considering sending their music to a blog, or a radio presenter, or whoever – just be honest, be yourself. Show that you care. Don’t pretend to be anything that you’re not; that kind of thing is generally more obvious than you think it is.

Is it fair to say that community radio exposure was largely responsible to help you grow your fanbase?

Without question, yes. I don’t play live shows, so radio airplay and internet exposure are really the two main ways in which my music gets spread out there. And the thing with community radio is – and I know this is obvious, but sometimes it bears repeating – in the majority of cases it is the individual presenters who make the call about whether they are going to put your stuff to air or not. So there are a lot of individuals who I’m heavily indebted to. I owe a lot of people a beer.

Where does community radio sit among the Australian media landscape in 2010? Do you feel it’s more endangered now than when you were first introduced to it? ..which was when, by the way?

If anything it feels stronger. I think more people than ever are disillusioned by conventional media, which is becoming more and more homogenised and uninspiring, so people are looking to hear independent voices. Community radio stations are generally populated by the most engaged, most passionate, most outspoken individuals that you’ll find anywhere.

These are people who are deeply engaged with their various communities and they use community radio as a platform to inform and evangelise and give unique perspectives that come unfiltered. Straight from the source. In that sense, community radio presenters are like the best kind of bloggers – they’re largely uncensored, they’re very passionate, extremely knowledgeable often about a very specialised area of interest. But unlike bloggers, they are part of a flesh-and-blood community, a group of people. Community radio stations, whether it’s the obvious big ones or the smallest of regional stations, they are like families. They are real.

I’ve been listening to community radio since I was in uni, and my first experience on air was around that time too, on Plenty Valley FM – which, for those playing at home, is situated on Childs Road, Mill Park, near Stables Shopping Centre - my friend and I did a late night show which was largely about Joel Edgerton and sports poetry. It was a few years later I became involved with RRR.

Is music as a full-time pursuit a goal of yours? Is earning a living from your craft a realistic goal? Do you know of many friends and associates who have achieved it?

I know a couple. There’s a few different ways you can do it. If it happened for me that’d be great, but I’m not gunning for it. I don’t have a five-year plan or anything, apart from “Continue making music”. I think if you get into music having that as your goal, to make a living from it, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Once you start thinking like that, you are bound to start making compromises creatively. That works for some people, and that’s fine, but its not something I’m interested in.

I’m definitely not of the mindset that only struggling broke musicians can make art of any value, and I’m open to the idea of using my music for commercial purposes – but I don’t take any of those considerations into account when I make the music. Its clichéd but I try to just make music that I can be proud of, if it ever led to commercial success – which is extremely unlikely - that’d be a happy by-product.

Your remix of the Paul Dempsey track ‘Ramona Was A Waitress’ appeared on the Ministry Of Sound Chillout Sessions XII compilation. Since this was, as you put it, your ‘first real experience dealing with the corporate side of the music industry’- how’d it go?

It’s an interesting one. I didn’t seek that out, it came to me. Paul Dempsey’s label approached me to do a remix, so I had a crack at it and I was happy with what I made. Then when I handed it over to them I also handed them all the rights to the song. This isn’t out of the ordinary, especially for a low-profile artist like myself, in fact I think its pretty standard.

So, it ended up on a Paul Dempsey single, and then they organised the Chillout Sessions thing, which I found out about later. Which was all cool. It was cool being able to take my sister to Sanity and point at a massive shelf full of Chillout Sessions CDs and say “I’m on that!”

But handing over 100% rights was not really something I was comfortable with, to be honest. I went into it with the understanding that that’s how it would be and I went with it because I really liked the remix I made, and didn’t want to be left in a position where I couldn’t do anything with it, and no one would ever hear it. But I’m not sure I’d want to make a habit of signing my songs away. That works for some people, but not me.

Was it lucrative? Is it something you’ll pursue now, or will you just keep the same ’see what happens’ approach?

I wouldn’t say it was lucrative, no. No way. I tend to approach everything with a ‘see what happens’ vibe. But no, I’m not beating down any major label’s door asking if I can remix their bands for cash.

If you were starting out in 2010, would you make the same choices that you did at the start of your career?

I think so. It honestly never really occurred to me to do it any other way.

Thanks for your time, Tim.

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Faux Pas’ latest release is Noiseworks [pictured above], a full-length album released via Melbourne label Sensory Projects and distributed via Inertia. Check out some of his stuff on Bandcamp, YouTube, MySpace and his blog before buying it directly from Shiel himself, or via iTunes.

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New Australian online music service Guvera is the flavour of the month at Waycooljnr.

First I interviewed its CEO, Claes Loberg, for The Vine, before publishing the full transcript here. And then I ‘road tested’ it for Mess+Noise, with the help from two independent Australian musicians - Ian Rogers from Brisbane doom rock trio No Anchor, and Melbourne electronic artist Faux Pas (Tim Shiel). Excerpt below:

In theory, Guvera is an admirable endeavour. But how does the service rate in terms of usability and practicality?

Checking The Boxes

Upon registering and before you’re able to download anything, Guvera demands that you begin filling out your profile with information on your favourite music, books, films, food, charities and so on. All up, there are eleven sections. Of course, what they’re trying to do is better match your tastes with the brands who advertise on the site. At launch, these range from Domino’s to McDonald’s, Casio to Band Hero.

This initial barrier, however, is an annoyance in itself. For example, if you’re interested in getting the new Nova-endorsed pop single, you’ll have to answer a series of questions first: whether you prefer “cop shows” to “cartoons”, or if you’d rather dine on “frozen meals” or “all you can eat buffet”. (Yes, those are all real options that appear on the site.)

By instantly demanding that the user tell Guvera their life story through a series of checked boxes, the chances of them mindlessly clicking their way through their profile are greatly increased. As a result, Guvera may well be subverting its initial aims: to allow advertisers to better “engage with” and target consumers by catering to their tastes. In this respect, they’ve got the order all wrong. The first few downloads should be “on the house”, so to speak, before the site requests that you play the marketing game.

Full road test over at Mess+Noise.

Have you tried Guvera? What are your thoughts?

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Australia-based online service Guvera (http://guvera.com) has been making waves among the music industry recently. It offers free high quality (256kbps) downloads to consumers, which are paid for by advertisers who can match particular artists to their brand’s ‘personality’. As you can see by the image to the right, Guvera is not particularly subtle when it comes to marketing.

Waycooljnr editor Andrew McMillen spoke with Guvera CEO Claes Loberg a few days ahead of its worldwide public launch on March 30, 2010.

Andrew: Hey Claes. Can you summarise what Guvera’s all about?

Claes: Here’s the gist of it: advertisers paying for downloads. There’s nothing new about the idea of advertisers actually paying for content. That’s how we’ve been receiving TV for free for all these years. What’s wrong with television at the moment, is that advertising is actually starting to lose value year, on year. People have got the power to click past it, sort of get around the advertising. That’s a reflection of all advertising across the board.

Now that the people are in control, Guvera’s business model is a reversal of the advertising process. Instead of advertisers being the annoying thing they used to be years ago, now they can be a channel that people will want to go to, to get content. It’s trying to change the value proposition away from ads-as-disruptors. It actually pays the artists for the content it’s created, and the people still get it for free.

Why should the average 21-year old digital music consumer give Guvera a chance?

Realistically, the person that we’re targeting is the person that’s currently getting it illegally. Guvera is not a streaming service, so we’re not one of the other different clients that exist that you can jump onto and create your own playlists, and listen to the music. Instead, we’re a client where you download music and stick it onto your iPod and then do your own playlist and do whatever you want with it.

Why we’re asking you to give Guvera a go is if you’re currently stealing the content from LimeWire, or BitTorrent, or any of the places that go to for peer-to-peer content: nobody is getting paid for that. Yes, you’re getting the content for free. Yes, it’s easy. But Guvera provides an opportunity to get it free, and the artist gets paid.

We get the argument all the time: “why wouldn’t people just continue using [services like Limewire and BitTorrent] because those services are so easy?”. The reality is that the people who want to use those services still can. What we’re trying to do is just implement something that creates an option for the music industry to try and monetise the free stuff that everybody’s already getting, by getting advertisers to pay for it.

How do the artists get paid?

We pay the labels for each download in exactly the same way as iTunes pays the labels for each download. It’s a pretty similar deal. It’s basically a transaction for the downloaded file, as if the file was purchased through one of those services. You just get the raw MP3 file that you can do whatever you want with. The transaction from the music label to us is exactly the same as if the end user actually bought it and somebody else paid the bill.

Which Australian labels are involved?

Of the global, major labels, we’ve got EMI and Universal, and IODA (Independent Online Distribution Alliance), a music group out of the U.S. Here in Australia specifically, we have Shock Records and a couple of smaller independent groups, but underneath your EMI, for example, you have Capital Records and Virgin Music and EMI represents about 15% of the music that exists. Universal represents about 35%+ of the music that exists.

Between just those two labels, that’s 50% of pop culture music. It’s not just your current pop. The content that we’ve got ingested into the system ranges from everything from the 1920’s up until now, so you’d be able to find a big chunk of what you’re looking for. But that in itself, the whole concept of Guvera when we launch, we know there are going to be issues with the system. We know that we have to create a balanced model: 1) We don’t have a 100% of all music. 2) If we don’t have enough advertising to support the number of users, that will limit the number of people that come in so we can guarantee the experience to as many people as possible.

Also, when you come onto Guvera, you may only be able to download 20 songs for free, and then maybe tomorrow you have to come back and download a couple more, and then maybe there is no brands the next day, and then maybe after that there is another 10 created. We see Guvera as sort of a stopping point; as we start growing and really becoming mainstream, and bigger, we have a vast array of advertising dollars to support unlimited downloads. We eventually see Guvera as a way for you to actually support the artists that you want to download their content from.

You just go check on Guvera. If it exists it’s in the catalog, and if it does, there’s a brand that pays for it and you get it for free. If it’s not, maybe you use the traditional method you would have used whether you go buy from iTunes or whatever it is you do to get the track. Think of it as a first stopping point.

I only say that because I recognise that when we launch, Guvera is not built around this idea of having 200 million people using it, and then figuring out how to generate revenue afterwards. Guvera is built on the idea that we only open the doors to as many people as we think we can give a good level of experience to. At the moment, we have 27,000 beta users, and that just keeps inching up each day as we just add more people into it, preparing for launch. We should have about 100,000 people in there at launch.

I’m interested to know how you pitch the service to advertisers. For example, what value does McDonalds gain from knowing that they have a lot of Lady GaGa fans?

At the moment, McDonalds runs an ad on television and it speaks to everybody that watches television. Or they run an ad in the newspaper or they run an ad wherever they do it and they present their message to everybody. Traditionally, you have 30 seconds to get somebody’s attention and to present your message to them by disrupting what they’re actually doing.

What we’ve presented to the advertiser is, first of all, because we know who our members are, you can say “I want to only pay for music to be downloaded by 25-30-year olds in Brisbane,” or whatever it is target that you want to promote to. So advertisers in Brisbane might pay for just that group, or regional advertisers in Melbourne could pay just for the downloads to those groups.

The secondary thing is that instead of disrupting the customer, you’re engaging them and you’re showing them the songs that fit with your brand personality. You get to say that, for example, Levis stands for a certain type of rock music. The advertisers themselves start to become this useful thing where it’s almost like a tag for a sub-genre or sub-classification of content. I know what rock music is, but do I know and understand all the different sub-genres? Whereas somebody could easily explain to me what “Jack Daniels country” meant, or what “Levis rock” meant, you know. These brands could actually present themselves as a grouping or personality subset.

The other thing is that your average person at the moment stays on each one of the channels for about 6-7 minutes. Instead of the advertiser having to try and get an ad in their face, stopping them from what they’re doing to watch an ad, they’re actually inside the brand’s world for 6-7 minutes, and they get a look at the brand’s personality. All they’re doing is they’re actually looking at a selection of music but by looking at that selection of music inside the world of that advertiser, it’s like looking at their personality.

The value proposition there for the advertiser is you’re actually allowing the customer to understand the sort of emotional or personality aspect of the brand, and then therefore look at the offers as you see fit, versus them trying to get it all rammed down your throat in 30 seconds.

On the flipside of that, can advertisers refuse to be associated with certain artists?

There are rules on three different aspects of the engine. Number one is the advertiser can say “I don’t want to be associated with any explicit content”, or “I don’t want to be associated with any rap content”, or country content, or whatever they feel sort of goes against their personality. They can also choose specific artists if they don’t ever want to distribute that artist’s track.

At the same time, we’ve got the same rules set up on the reverse side, where the actual label for the publishers or the artists can work either a track, publisher, artist or album level, and they can apply rules to say “Coca-Cola is never allowed to distribute this song” because they may have a deal with Pepsi, for example; or “no alcohol brands are ever allowed to distribute my music”, or no “brand X”, which you may think is doing something wrong in the world. Artists and labels can actually have that moral judgment. The artist can choose and apply rules, and the advertiser can choose and apply a similar set of rules.

At this stage, you’ll only be dealing with artists who are signed to labels?

Yes, that’s what we start with. All the artists that we have, and our whole catalog is obviously as big and wide as possible to try and handle everybody in there. We’re working with all the major labels and independent groups. The ultimate picture is a new unknown artist could sign up to Guvera themselves and upload their music. If their music starts becoming shared and appears on channels, then they receive a check for their music.

It creates this opportunity for unknown, unsigned artists to actually generate sales. We had a pre-event launch party in New York a few weeks ago. At the party, we had Alice Cooper standing there talking about how when he sold a few million records, his whole life changed as he became a platinum [seller], and everything about his lifestyle just branched up as a result of the sales.

Then on the flipside of that we had a girl called Marié Digby [pictured left] who had something like 80 million views on her  YouTube channel. On all accounts she would have been a platinum artist and should have been this hugely recognised, known, and her whole world should have changed as a result. But she never generated any revenue from that.

You’ve got this sort of world that even if you’re a struggling musician now and you think one day you’ll become a huge-selling musician that everybody is interested in. Chances are, you’re not going to generate any revenue any kind of physical sales. The only way you can make money is if you’re actually doing 3 shows a day, 365 days a year. Guvera represents, in that aspect, the ability for a new artist to actually start generating sales, by generating revenue for music.

I see. That sounds, cool Claes.

We’re hoping so. At the end of the day, every new business, regardless of how much we believe it’s going to work and what we know it can do, and where we see the actual issues, it’s in the hands of the customers whether this is a success and whether advertisers will support it enough to give us the dollars to promote the thing. But we feel like we’ve got everything sort of answered.

Good luck with it, and thanks for your time. I look forward to seeing how it goes for you.

Cool, thanks very much Andrew.

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Guvera’s worldwide launch is Tuesday, March 30 2010. Try it for yourself at Guvera.com.

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Wavves recently raised $1.5M in seed funding from a group of angel investors including Ron Conway.

I’ve been thinking about the applicability of early stage investment as a model for the next generation of record labels.  Here’s a summary of my thoughts.

Similarities

Barriers To Entry

For business and music, the barriers to entry are now lower than ever.  The digital opportunity is that an artist can cheaply record an album and a start-up can cheaply build a product - the demo - to prove what they can do.  For most startup companies/bands - 50k-500k will allow for a solid first product/album/tour to get off the ground.

Product/Market Fit

When a start-up is focusing on building its product or service, it’s the same as a band writing songs and touring.  Once they have something to take to market, a start-up will iterate on that product according to the market’s response, just as a band will take a bunch of songs on tour.  A product/service without a market is a band with no fans.

Funding

What funding enables is growth that would not otherwise be possible.  Funding for servers, staff or hardware is the same as funding for live shows, touring management costs or recording equipment.  It speeds the process of bringing a higher quality product to market.

Access

Ideally, early stage investment is also about access.  Access to people who know people and things that the start-up doesn’t.   Connecting start-ups with business development contacts, legal and financial advice or new staff is the same as labels putting bands in touch with promoters, festival organisers, producers and managers.

People, not ideas.

Investors sometimes talk about investing in people, not ideas.  They admit that start-ups often change course as the product evolves.  @Ev making Twitter was the equivalent of Luke ‘Sleepy Jackson’ Steele writing ‘Walking On A Dream’.  It wasn’t in the plan, but it became much bigger than the original plan ever could have.

Differences

Funding Tied To Milestones

Providing funding relative to progress or milestones is a way to protect an investment and provide incentives for action.  This happens explicitly in early stage funding and less strictly in the current label model.

Multiple Funders

Funding rounds allow for new partners to be brought into the mix, adding new funds and skills.  There’s the potential for a future model where EMI invests in the band’s first funding round and Universal comes in as a partner on a second round after seeing tangible progress or potential.

The Board

A board gives feedback and advice.  It talks through problems and tilts projects in future directions.  This structure is clearly laid out in business and informally defined (if at all) for most bands.  I imagine many bands could benefit from a more formal advisory board.

Corporate Bodies

A company is an entity.  It’s a registrable, definable body.   Bands aren’t so much.  This poses a challenge as it increases risk for labels when the band breaks up.  There’s the same risk inherent in a business breaking up but the process for hiring and firing staff is well defined.  Dismantling and recreating a band is more difficult.

Products Vs Services

In some cases, start-ups will rely on selling services to get them through the early days.  Ultimately though, most startups prefer to build products because, if they sell at volume, they provide a greater return.  Touring and live shows are services.  The music is the product.  The difference is that bands can continue profitably doing both throughout their careers.

Questions

The Exit

Where does a label exit in the label as investor model?  Can they ever?  Or do they just take a percentage of profits ongoing?  Can labels on-sell a musical product to a multi-national?  Other labels could be future purchasers or components of the artist package - touring, publishing, back catalogue could be sold off to other entities wishing to exploit them.

Art Vs Commerce

The performance demanded of start-ups is high.  The start-up identity is associated with long hours, tireless commitment and down to the wire negotiations, launches and capital raisings.  The artist identity is associated with sitting in a dark room with a candle, strumming chords from the depths of the soul.  Can great art be made under the same intensity that’s found in start-ups?  Will long hours of practice, endless touring and repeated recording make for better music?

Stepping Away

The biggest step in the process of labels becoming early stage investors is the step away.  Early-stage investors typically don’t take an operational role with the businesses they invest in.  Conversely, labels take an operational role with the artists they invest in.  Taking labels out of artist operations and making their role purely strategic and financial could be a good thing.  New industries would emerge - label management would be eaten by an expanding concept of artist management, music marketing would become the role of outsourced agencies.  Managers would become COOs, label managers would be operational staff.  The band would be the founders, in charge of product, the heart and soul of the undertaking.  Pitchfork would become Techcrunch.  London and New York would become Boston and Silicon Valley.  Labels would shrink by 90%.  They’d just be small teams of A&R guys with some financial backup.

Funding Sources

Often the best early stage investors are those who have had their own success in business.  Could successful musicians prove to be the best source of early stage investment for new bands?  Surely Bono could have got a better return investing in young bands than he did from his investment into Elevation Partners?

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All this is a simplification.  But it’s worthwhile thinking about.  From some angles, labels as early stage investors might be a more efficient means of creating and profiting from great music.

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Andrew McMillen, a previous contributor here and prolific contributor elsewhere is Way Cool Jnr’s new editor.

As well as his writing as a freelance journalist, Andrew is one of the organisers of Unconvention Brisbane.

Andrew will be managing more regular posts, guest contributors and tips and tactics for musicians wanting to make the most of digital opportunities.

I’ll be staying on as a contributor and look forward to adding to the discussion on a more consistent basis.

With that - I’ll hand over to the Fuck Buttons.

Cheers.

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EMI have just launched a new initiative to open themselves up to conversation with artists and fans.

Mark Holland is an A&R Scout for EMI and in the video above he talks about a day in the life of an A&R guy, whether he uses MySpace and his favourite Australian producers.

I think this is a good thing.  You can email him (details here) with questions.

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