Thursday, December 11, 2008
Vanishing Act
You may have noticed that a couple of posts here, including Trip's recent effort praising new Nashville troubadour Jamey Johnson, have disappeared. It seems that Columbia Records has made a policy of asking Google (which operates blogspot, which hosts us) to remove posts that contain mp3s of copyrighted material. We're not going to complain (it's their music, they can do what they want), and we're not even going to comment on the wisdom of a tactic that prevents new audiences from being exposed to the company's products. We'll just spend more time describing music to you than playing it for you, though I'll continue to post mp3s that record companies ask us to share.
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Feel free to file this great move by Columbia in the "Let's Keep Shooting Ourselves In The Foot" file.
Listen - I get it - Columbia owns the tracks - and they can do with them what they want. But in a day and age when breaking new music has become next to impossible - it amazes me to watch the 'majors' continue to try to thwart those who champion new music - and who try to bring that music to an audience who would actually buy the CD (with, I'm pretty sure, no financial gain to Teenage Kicks - this "blogging" done in the spirit of true love for music).
If the current state of the music business continues, we will continue to watch the majors crumble till all they have left to offer the record buying public are "20th Anniversary" issue CD's of records we've all bought a few times already and whatever the latest Disney approved act is.
Like the rest of the retail world, the record business is falling quicker than the chart position of most new releases that came out this year. But they continue to block fans from spreading the word.
I could understand this if Teenage Kicks was making a profit from this - but I'm pretty sure you guys aren't. And I know there are file sharing sites that make money - and offer full CDs of music to be downloaded for free. But TK aint that.
To the editors at Teenage Kicks, feel free to make my little rant part of the 'vanishing act' if you feel that it would cause harm to your blog - I would never want that - I find out about a lot of great music from this blog - but, as we roll in to 2009, I think that "posting an MP3 on a website that promotes new music" is a discussion that needs to be had ... with representatives from the major labels being involved.
So ... how do we break a new artist?
How do blogs (like Teenage Kicks and others) become part of the story - how do we keep 'fans' of music involved in the process?
These questions are from a guy who bought seven CDs at his local CD shop (Main Street Music, Philadelphia, PA), last night. Most of which I heard about through getting MP3s online before I went and bought the CD.
I will now get off my soap-box.
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