How ASCAP Takes Money From Suc­cess­ful Indie Artists And Gives It To Giant Rock Stars. The short ver­sion of the story is basi­cally that, to make its own life eas­ier, ASCAP just pays those per­for­mance roy­al­ties to the top 200 gross­ing tours in the US, and every other tour­ing musi­cian is more or less screwed — unless you can con­vince ASCAP that you play “seri­ous music.” [Techdirt]

I know a num­ber of indie artists, and I can’t remem­ber ever hear­ing any of them say any­thing, good or bad, about ASCAP.

Ter­ror­ist Pianos of Doom!. Toward the end of last month, a note­wor­thy inci­dent occurred in the clas­si­cal music life of Los Ange­les:

Pol­ish pianist Krys­t­ian Zimer­man, who is widely admired for his vir­tu­osic per­for­mances and who famously tours with his own custom-altered Stein­way, cre­ated a furor at Dis­ney Hall on Sun­day night when he stopped his recital to announce that this would be his last Amer­i­can appear­ance — in protest of the nation’s mil­i­tary poli­cies overseas.

In a low voice that could not be heard through­out the audi­to­rium, Zimer­man, uni­ver­sally con­sid­ered among the world’s finest pianists, made ref­er­ence to Guan­tanamo Bay and U.S. mil­i­tary poli­cies toward Poland.

“Get your hands off my coun­try,” he said.

Then he turned to the piano and played Szymanowski’s “Vari­a­tions on a Pol­ish Folk Theme” with such pas­sion and inten­sity that the stunned audi­ence gave him mul­ti­ple ovations.

Ear­lier, about 30 or 40 peo­ple in the audi­ence had walked out after Zimerman’s dec­la­ra­tion, some shout­ing obscen­i­ties. “Yes,” the pianist, known in Poland as “King Krys­t­ian the Glo­ri­ous,” answered, “some peo­ple, when they hear the word mil­i­tary, start marching.”

[Once Upon a Time…]

The whole post is worth reading.

Apple launches iTunes Pass con­tent. Apple has intro­duced the con­cept of the iTunes Pass, a new shop­ping option in the music sec­tion of the iTunes Store. The Pass auto­mat­i­cally sub­scribes a per­son to all of the tracks and videos in a par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion, down­load­ing exist­ing mate­r­ial and any­thing new as it becomes avail­able. Apple notes that all the mate­r­ial pro­vided in a Pass is DRM-free, and encoded with 256kbps AAC audio.… [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

This seems like it could be good for inde­pen­dent musi­cians. More than once I’ve heard about a CD release being held up because the artist needed to save up money to pay for art­work or man­u­fac­tur­ing, and with some­thing like this maybe they’d be able to cover those expenses from “Pass” orders.

I came across this com­ment on Mac­In­Touch:

iLife 09’s “killer appli­ca­tion” has to be Garage Band’s Artist Lessons. Not because it’s a cool way to learn music. Nor because it is another rev­enue stream for Apple.

It’s an attempt by Apple to cir­cum­vent the music indus­try labels. iTunes is a pre­ferred gate­way to new music for many con­sumers already. But in order to get that music Apple is still hav­ing to use the inter­me­di­aries who own the dis­tri­b­u­tion rights to those tracks.

Now Apple is cre­at­ing a com­pre­hen­sive 3-way link between the fan, the artist and Apple. At some point the tra­di­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion medium and cor­po­rate appa­ra­tus will become moot under this arrange­ment as the artists will less and less rely on a label and can have the abil­ity to inter­act with fans at a truly indi­vid­ual and per­sonal level.

Future artists will get their expo­sure directly via por­tals like iTunes, and with fea­tures like Artist Lessons can add value to the expe­ri­ence, some­thing that entirely bypasses the cur­rent dis­tri­b­u­tion and pro­mo­tion system.

It’s a bril­liant end-run against the estab­lished indus­try. Cer­tainly it won’t work for some gen­res in the teaser form we saw at the keynote, but it def­i­nitely opens up inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties when fans can inter­act directly with artists with an agnos­tic tech­ni­cal enabler like Apple get­ting a cut of the trans­ac­tion. Labels will increas­ingly see new artists bypass their sys­tem for this more direct inter­ac­tion and will become reliant on legacy cat­a­logues alone. They’ll lose clout over iTunes mar­ket­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion tech­niques and costs. Noth­ing value added from the estab­lished indus­try has worked since the music video rev­o­lu­tion almost 20 years ago. Artists Lessons and deriv­a­tives have the poten­tial to be just as tran­scend­ing. It has that mass mar­ket pop­ulist streak to it that goes to the heart of Apple’s design fort?.

In its cur­rent form the prod­uct needs work to get beyond Apple’s often overly cute aes­thetic steril­ity (sex, drugs, and Fogerty’s “bright” chords?) but it is nev­er­the­less strate­gi­cally innovative.

TS Low

Song­writer Round w/ Jay Nash, Joey Ryan, Javier Dunn & Sara Bareilles @ Hotel Café, 1÷5÷09.

Song­writer Round is a semi-regular gath­er­ing of singer-songwriters, hosted by local Jay Nash (MySpace), that’s usu­ally held at the Room 5 Lounge above Amalfi on Fair­fax. But Monday’s edi­tion was moved to the newly-expanded stage at the Hotel Café (MySpace) in Hol­ly­wood to acco­mo­date peers Joey Ryan (MySpace), Javier Dunn (MySpace), and spe­cial guest Sara Bareilles (MySpace), who was adver­tised as the ana­gram “Lara Sarables.”

In such an inti­mate set­ting, Song­writer Rounds have allowed the artists to per­form mate­r­ial that’s usu­ally not heard on a reg­u­lar basis, and this edi­tion was no dif­fer­ent, with Bareilles per­form­ing “Under­tow” and the newly-written “Anchors Aweigh”. In addi­tion, the evening fea­tured unique col­lab­o­ra­tions, which included Dunn and Bareilles’ stripped-down cover of Huey Lewis’ “Heart and Soul”, and a group ren­di­tion, with Count­ing Crows’ David Immer­glück on man­dolin, of the Crows’ “Sul­li­van Street”.

“How great is it that there’s a place for singer-songwriters?” exclaimed Bareilles early in the evening. Indeed, it has been mem­o­rable to see artists like her and Gary Jules return to their “old school” roots in recent weeks. And that includes Katy Perry (MySpace), who is sched­uled to per­form an acoustic set there next Tues­day in advance of her sold-out show at The Wiltern on the 31^st.

As for upcom­ing local shows, Nash’s are on Jan­u­ary 14^th at the Hotel Café and Feb­ru­ary 4^th at Saint Rocke (MySpace) in Her­mosa Beach, and Dunn opens for Bareilles on March 11^th at the Hotel Café.

There is an image gallery to this entry which you can view at LAist

Spe­cial thanks to Jay Nash, Joey Ryan, Javier Dunn, Sara Bareilles, and the Hotel Café.

[LAist]

I stum­bled across this site through a Google search for some­thing com­pletely unre­lated and imme­di­ately added it to my news­reader. The arti­cle on Monday’s show is very nice, almost as good as what you’d pay to read in Music Con­nec­tion. The pho­tog­ra­pher shows promise, although they need a bet­ter photo edi­tor (there are shots in there that I would have tossed). I went to this show myself, as I know all four of them.

Javier also played a late night (11 PM) show at Room 5 last night, and I tem­porar­ily un-retired from con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy for the occa­sion. His “day job” is play­ing gui­tar for Sara, but despite try­ing for two years I never got a photo of him that I was really sat­is­fied with. I shot five rolls of him at Room 5, with Mona Tavakoli and Becky Geb­hardt of Rain­ing Jane on cajon and bass (also Sara joined him for one song).

This year’s Grammy nom­i­na­tions have been announced, and there are three peo­ple I’ve pho­tographed on the list: Sara Bareilles, Katy Perry, and Rufus Wain­wright. Sara got two nom­i­na­tions, includ­ing Song of the Year for “Love Song.” Appar­ently the music indus­try has very long years, as she wrote that (and first per­formed it) in 2005…

Pupils to receive finance lessons. Chil­dren in Eng­land are to receive lessons in how to man­age their finances, under an £11.5m gov­ern­ment scheme. [BBC News]

I’ll bet nobody in the main­stream media will even notice the absur­dity of a gov­ern­ment teach­ing peo­ple how to man­age their finances (and spend­ing mil­lions of pounds stolen from tax­pay­ers to do it).

YouTube intros links to buy music fea­tured in videos.

YouTube has intro­duced “click-to-buy” links on some of its part­ner videos so that users can have one-click access to the media fea­tured in the video. With this fea­ture, users can buy music or video games directly from some YouTube pages, and in the future, this fea­ture could be extended to other videos, too.

Read More…

[Ars Tech­nica]

Hope­fully this will get extended to inde­pen­dent musi­cians soon. Some of the musi­cians I know put videos up there, and this can be a big help to their career–for exam­ple, Terra Naomi got a big boost from her YouTube videos. It would be great if peo­ple could go directly from those videos to their music in iTunes.

Record labels plac­ing big bets on MySpace Music.

MySpace Music may be the labels’ last hope. The new ven­ture is expected to for­mally launch within days.

Read More…

[Ars Tech­nica]

One of the musi­cians I’ve pho­tographed, Meiko, is signed with MySpace Music.

TuneCore will put your indie film on iTunes.

Known mainly as a cheap, no-royalties ser­vice for putting music on iTunes and Ama­zon, TuneCore is branch­ing out into full-length films. For a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars, your film can soon be sold through iTunes.

Read More…

[Ars Tech­nica]

This seems like it would also be good for inde­pen­dent musi­cians who want to put their music videos on iTunes. The TuneCore web­site has a sec­tion in their FAQ on what’s involved.