tune out – Stilgherrian

08 May 2008

Stilgherrian Live Alpha: episode 1 tonight!

I’ve just organised by first guest(s) for tonight’s inaugural episode of Stilgherrian Live Alpha. And, as you can see, we’ve spent half the night playing with graphics too.

I’ll be speaking with Adam Purcell and/or Jared Madden from Emerge.tv about tune-out.com campaign — their counter-campaign to the music industry’s propaganda film, Australian Music In Tune, which I wrote about the other day.

How can the music industry respond to the dramatic changed happening around them? Is it actually too late for them to change? And it’s interesting to note that the film on their website right now isn’t quite the same as the one originally released…

Since it’s the first program, I’ll probably tell you a bit about myself and what’s been on my radar this week. If there’s anything you’ve wanted to ask me, now’s the time.

Stilgherrian Live Alpha is recorded live at stilgherrian.com/live at 9.30pm Sydney time (1130 UTC), and I’ll be talking “talkback” via audio and video.

If you turn up early, you’ll probably see us doing some last-minute technical tests. And once the program is recorded, I’ll turn it in a podcast — details later.

05 May 200805 May 2008

Music industry internetz FAIL

Ah, the music industry really doesn’t grok teh intenetz. Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI), who coordinated the Australian Music In Tune propaganda flick I mentioned on the weekend, didn’t know their website was offline until phoned them. Meanwhile I’ve written a piece on this for Crikey, to appear a couple hours from now. [Update 1.20pm: It’s being held over until tomorrow. Apparently Crikey found something more important than me.]

02 May 200826 August 2020

Oh you poor, dear record companies…

You’ve got to hand it to “the music industry”. This week they released a propaganda film Australian Music In Tune which asks us to sympathise with musicians because they’re all poor struggling artists. Diddums.

The only reason musicians trying to “make it” are poor is that as soon as they do get that sought-after recording contract they still pay for everything from there on. Before they see a single cent from their music, they have to pay off the studio hire, recording engineer, video director, stylists, set designers, editor and dozens of other parasites — including music company executives with their nice lunches and their BMW leases.

An entire industry — “the music industry” and their retail outlets — sits between the musicians and their audience, sucking out something like 90% of the money in the process.

And they have the gall to rope musicians into their propaganda film under false pretences, telling people like Frenzal Rhomb’s Lindsay McDougall that it was a movie about life as an artist.

He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.

OK, so who are the guys in the photo? Jared Madden (left) and Adam Purcell (right) have created tune-out.com in response to the industry crying poor.

Continue reading “Oh you poor, dear record companies…”