Dec
7
Music industry numpties strike again
Category: Culture, Music |
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PearLyrics is no more. (Well, I’m sure it can be found elsewhere on the internet.)
Why?
Because numpty-headed lawyers at Warner Chappell have decided that the distribution of a tool that searches websites for lyrics is an infringement of copyright. Doesn’t Google do that too? Or is it actually the case that Warner Chappell realise that Google would put up a fight? In the event that the reader of this blog happens to be a music industry lawyer, would you mind awfully just pissing off?
I love music. One of the aspects of my job that I like the least is that it doesn’t involve listening to superb music all day long. In the 1980s, when I was at school, I taped music. At home. I have recordings of almost entire broadcasts of Mark Radcliffe’s seminal Out on Blue Six
, I taped The Stone Roses
from a school-friend who also put the Paul Oakenfold remix of W.F.L. (Think about the future)
by the Happy Mondays at the end of the cassette. Until that time I had a profound dislike of the Happy Mondays as their image was built entirely on being drug-addled Mancunian prats. They did take drugs (well, I don’t think Shaun Ryder or Bez would be able to deny that), they come from Manchester. But through home-taping I discovered a band whose every album and single on Factory Records I bought within three or four years. I didn’t kill music. I didn’t copy Jason Donovan singles. I like to think that my apathy contributed a small part to his career’s death.
The first five or six CDs I ever bought were by the Stone Roses (yes, I bought all of their singles too). The music industry ensured that the Stone Roses never gained a single penny from my purchases as their contract allowed them no royalties whatsoever on CD sales. It rather makes one wonder whether music industry lawyers have any scruples.
