DGM HQ Another frosty morning

Posted by Robert Fripp
20 Oct 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011

09.17

DGM HQ.

Another frosty morning. Alex arrived early with Buddy the Wonder Dog, to allow for the morning walk around the village and its fields.

Here, morning reading and the day’s unfolding events are beckoning.

10.46    Oh no!

Universal Music Keeps Trying To Claim Zoe Keating’s Royalty Checks, Despite Having Nothing To Do With Her

from the the-plight-of-the-indie-musician dept
earlier this week, Keating noted that Universal Music was once again claiming her own music as its own, and trying to claim the royalties owed to her.

In our own affairs, Declan Panegyric had difficulties with the UK equivalent, PPL They refused to allow Declan to become a member for years, even though he kept filling in the forms. PPL kept rejecting them for unspecified reasons until eventually we learnt that their rejections were based on their mistaken belief that EMI owned the KC catalogue; indicating the default position of industry bodies is to have confidence in the major label. Declan continues to fight EMI’s PPL claims years later.

Simply, large music industry bodies are incompetent, this serves their interest; and they know this serves their interest. But, the more rough music, the less defensible is industry belief in the major.

Change is in the air.

12.31    An important kitchen meeting with David and cakes…

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… close by the DGM Fridge Magnets…

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Formal announcement: DGM is looking for an app-builder.

13.51    While in the officing area, my eyes fell upon paper with UMG on it. These three letters are terrible when put together in this order, as are G and E when placed otherwise. The paper was a royalty statement from UMG, for King Crimson downloads and CDs dumped in Mexico from the US.

What! the eager-eyed Diary visitor a little familiar with our UMG dispute, now with eyes flashing, might expostulate: But UMG has no digital rights, never has had any digital rights, and rights to sell CDs expired at least 3 years ago! And poor Declan Panegyric, David DGM and the Awful HRVL have been banging on about this for over four years!

Proof I…

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II...

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David is on the ‘phone to Declan, Indeg is scanning the royalty statement…

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… with downloads in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

It will be interesting to see how Mr. UMG Outside Lawyer Man responds to this on behalf of his clients. The UMG internal Lawyer Man’s approach was, usually, to ignore us when Declan sent them the latest batch of detailed complaints. Now that an outside lawyer is appointed, a prominent member of the legal profession, it may be harder for UM to forget / overlook they have just sent us a royalty statement for their unauthorized and illegal actions.

Time for UMG to own up to systemic malfunction and international incompetence?

15.05    The street I…

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II...

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The DGM Hall…

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… with a bold attempt, failed, to access old- and new-worlds of computer synthing. I tried this perhaps 4-5 years ago and it never worked. Korg Legacy for Mac = nothing at all.

15.10    And now in the Chamber Of Venality: catching up with the latest from Grooveshark.

Diary readers, interested in how our fallen nature finds expression in the technologically-driven world, might like to go here...

Is Grooveshark Purposely Screwing Over Musicians?
4:00 pm Tuesday Oct 18, 2011 by Tom Hawking

RF Interjection: like, Grooveshark might be screwing over musicians by mistake?

This Morning, Grooveshark Sent Us This Angry Email...
 Monday, October 17, 2011
Here’s an email sent to us this morning from Grooveshark SVP Paul Geller. It responds to our publication of several email exchanges involving King Crimson, a band frustrated by their inability to remove their content from the service.  (The first sentence addresses a delivery error - apparently there was a problem receiving our emails initially.)     Paul [Resnikoff],

Paul Geller: I am writing to let you know that I received this email, but it is the first.  I also don’t appreciate the headlines you’ve been creating out of my exchanges with Mr. Fripp.  He has left out a lot of email correspondence including the repeated attempts we made to contact him via phone.

RF interjection: the ‘phone has not rung once from any of the Grooveshark VPs, nor their lowly anonymous creatures-of-employment.

Paul Geller: He even stripped out parts of emails from Aaron and Marshall (our GC) when he posted them on his blog.  He has consistently doctored the conversation to fit his message.

RF Interjection: what Mr. Geller refers to as doctoring I approached as editing. But Mr. Geller can always forward our full correspondence to DMN, including all of my own, with my permission.

Paul Geller: That’s not to say his complaints weren’t legitimate.  Far from it. We couldn’t have messed up a takedown for anyone worse.  But you could have dug a little deeper.  You might have noticed that King Crimson is on Virgin (EMI) -- who we have a licensing deal with.

RF Interjection: Mr. Geller could, and should, have dug a little deeper than not-digging-at-all. Had he done so, he would have noticed that King Crimson is not on Virgin EMI, and has not been since 31st. December, 2003. The reason for the licence-ending was EMI insisting their Standard Company Policy was to have digital rights – even though they’re not important! This an actual quote. If we go out in public and comment on the weather, better not to have our head placed where sunshine never falls.

It would be particularly informative were Mr. Geller, given Grooveshark’s public claims to transparency, to declare the terms of the Grooveshark – EMI licensing deal, especially since deals of this kind, between streaming providers and catalogue licensees, are - seemingly - top secret.

Paul Geller: We have deals with all the PROs in the US and over 1,000 labels and imprints.  Lots of artists don’t even know we have licenses for their content so you can’t take claims like Fripps at face value without a little research.

RF Interjection: Fripp’s claim/s are exceptionally rare, in an industry where its creative-providers customarily and conventionally are deprived of rights to their work. Hence, perhaps, Mr. Geller’s assumption that Fripp (and King Crimson) have been screwed over in much the same way as nearly everyone else on the artist/musician side of the table. And this assumption would be correct: we have.

But the conclusion Mr. Geller seems to have reached is inaccurate and misplaced, because he has not taken into account twenty years of Ongoing Grief of which Endless Grief is only one part. The outcome of this grievous process is that RF is the owner / controller of all KC/RF copyrights. Period.

Mr. Geller has been informed of this, with correspondence copied-in to an EMI lawyer, several times. Astonishing, then, that Mr. Geller has overlooked this information while reading our e-mails to him. Or perhaps he forgot. Perhaps Mr. Geller needs to do a little research, inside his e-mail?

I find it more terrifying that lots of artists don’t even know we have licenses for their content. Why would that be? Why would all the PROs in the US and over 1,000 labels and imprints not inform their artists that their creative endeavours were being made available to Grooveshark (and other platforms)? Why? Lets hear it for transparency! Once again, may we have the details of the licensing deal with EMI, please?

Paul Geller: However, they’re in this weird situation where their content was never delivered by EMI but they were not on an EMI blacklist -- which is the "weird case" I speak of.  We didn’t have a system to identify these problems and that’s why it took so many emails.

Turns out EMI doesn’t have the digital rights to King Crimson, but while the attorney from Virgin was CCed on all of the previous emails, no one ever said anything.  People like to see us squirm and it appears you’re no exception.

RF Interjection: personally, I have no interest in seeing Mr. Geller and his Groovehsark chums squirming. I have a very direct interest in straightforwardness, transparency, accountability, owning-up, distributive justice, common decency and goodwill as the drivers of business conduct.

… no one ever said anything. Mistaken. We did write quite-a-bit-of-something. Perhaps Mr. Geller missed this? Or forgot?

Paul Geller: The truth is, we should have thought about these contingencies and you can be damn sure we will from here on out, but the headline you published made it seem as though we hadn’t processed his takedowns and that they came to you for help. The email thread shows that they were just looking for attention.

RF Interjection: here Mr. Geller is spot on. Fripp is an inveterate and incorrigible attention-seeker. However, that Awful Man’s personal failings (and gratitude to Mr. Geller for calling attention to only one of them) does nothing to alter the fact that our correspondence with Grayzone has alerted them, to the issues above, that Mr. Geller seems to have overlooked or forgotten (and those are only two possible options).

I find these words are difficult to accept from Mr. Geller: The truth is. Although I agree with him: the Truth is.

Paul Geller: In short, I think your coverage has been disingenuous at best and I would appreciate it if you didn’t publish my emails anymore.  I’m trying to teach our company to be more transparent, to participate in a process that we have been disconnect from.  It’s good for us.  It’s good for artists and in the end it’s good for you.

We teach transparency by being transparent. It’s good for us. It’s good for artists. Perhaps it’s good for everyone. But not in the end, please: let’s have transparency at the beginning.

Paul Geller: But seeing the headline you used really puts a damper on things.  I don’t even see how you derived it from the single email exchange… unless of course Mr. Fripp sent you emails weeks old to support his argument, which it appears he did.
-Paul [Geller, Grooveshark SVP]

Declan Panegyric has responded…

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:50
Att. Paul Resnikoff @ Digital News


Just to correct a few of the more glaring inaccuracies of Grooveshark’s representative Mr. Geller’s email to you.



King Crimson is NOT on Virgin as he states. The band’s music hasn’t been licensed to Virgin since the end of 2003. 



With regards to digital availability, Virgin never held the license for KC or Robert Fripp material.



This email is copied to Mark Furman (a lawyer at Virgin) who will, I’m sure, happily confirm this if asked.



Furthermore, Virgin/EMI has already confirmed to Grooveshark that the company, despite claims to the contrary by Grooveshark, has never delivered to Grooveshark, or claimed to have rights to deliver to Grooveshark, King Crimson material.

Grooveshark is aware of this.



Indeed, Grooveshark has been served with numerous notices from Grayzone (also copied on this email), requesting full takedowns of all KC material on behalf of Robert Fripp (copyright owner), his management company (DGM) & my company (DCML) as licensee of the material over a lengthy period of time.



Again - I’m sure Doug at Grayzone will confirm this for you.



Grooveshark has never been in any doubt about the ownership & licensing of King Crimson material.



The supposed "EMI license for King Crimson" is, like the company’s supposed adherence to DMCA requirements, simply a fiction.



David DGM has written directly to Mr. Geller…

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:50

Dear Paul,
 
I read your latest letter to DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS, in which you try to explain the situation with King Crimson - and accuse Digital Music News of doing insufficient research - saying that they might have “noticed that King Crimson is on Virgin EMI”.  You go on to say that King Crimson content was not “delivered by EMI but they were not on an EMI blacklist” and blame this for the arising problems. In so doing, you seek to give the presence of King Crimson on Grooveshark a form of legitimacy.

It is sadly not DIGITAL MUSIC NEWS that should have done more research, but Grooveshark.
 
The situation could not be more simple - King Crimson is not on Virgin EMI, and has not been since 2003. That is why they were not delivered by EMI and that is why they were not mentioned on any EMI blacklist. King Crimson has no relationship with EMI.
 
This fact has been pointed out to you in numerous emails - and it is difficult to understand why you would now publicly assert something that you have been informed is incorrect. It gives the inaccurate impression that you had rights to King Crimson.
 
You accuse King Crimson of using Digital Music News to garner attention. Nothing could be further from the truth. The only two occasions that I have had cause to write to you, copied to Digital Music News, are when you yourself have appeared on Digital Music News making public statements which needed correction. The first was that

“Artists choose what is put on GrooveShark”,

and the second is that
 
 “King Crimson is on Virgin EMI”.
 
Both statements seek to give the presence of our music on GrooveShark a form of legitimacy, and both are untrue. And yet you accuse Robert Fripp… of doctoring the message.
 
Fie!, as he might say.
 
Yours,
 
David Singleton

Interested visitors might scroll down to the comment

I work for Grooveshark. Here is some information from the trenches:

We are assigned a predetermined ammount of weekly uploads to the system and get a small extra bonus if we manage to go above that (not easy).The assignments are assumed as direct orders from the top to the bottom, we don’t just volunteer to "enhance" the Grooveshark database.

All search results are monitored and when something is tagged as "not available", it get’s queued up to our lists for upload. You have to visualize the database in two general sections: "known" stuff and "undiscovered/indie/underground". The "known" stuff is taken care internally by uploads. Only for the "undiscovered" stuff are the users involved as explained in some posts above. Practically speaking, there is not much need for users to upload a major label album since we already take care of this on a daily basis.

Are the above legal, or ethical? Of course not. Don’t reply to give me a lecture. I know. But if the labels and their laywers can’t figure out how to stop it, then I don’t feel bad for having a job. It’s tough times.

Why am I disclosing all this? Well, I have been here a while and I don’t like the attitude that the administration has aquired against the artists. They are the enemy. They are the threat. The things that are said internally about them would make you very very angry. Interns are promised getting a foot in the music industry, only to hear these people cursing and bad mouthing the whole industry all day long, to the point where you wonder what would happen if Grooveshark get’s hacked by Anonymous one day and all the emails leak on some torrent or something.

And, to confirm the fears of the members of King Crimson, there is no way in hell you can get your stuff down. They are already tagged since you sent in your first complaint. The administration knows that you can’t afford to sue for infringement."

Clearly, I cannot confirm the accuracy of this, however resonant it may feel to me.

Mr. Geller himself has another life...

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http://paulycrush.com/
Pauly has thrown down mixes with many influential deejays in the genre including Justice, Mstrkrft, Diplo, DJ Medhi, Riot In Belgium, Digitalism, Nick Catchdubs, Pase Rock, Felix Cartal, DJ Funk, Kid Cudi, A.C. Slater, Crookers, Orgasmic, Para One, Steve Aoki, Curses, Surkin, A-Trak, Clever, Drop the Lime, Franki Chan, Toxic Avenger, Gui Borrato, Jesse Rose, Pace Rock, Lazaro Casanova, Tittsworth, Aaron Lacrate, Flosstradamus, Kid Sister, Jubilee & Udachi, Designer Drugs, Villains and dozens more. Pauly Crush has credits on a handful of indie and major release records as Paul Geller and Pauly Jett, most notably as the founder and lead guitarist of early SFL emocore band Keepsake; writing and production credits for many hardcore and indie bands, and has produced authorized and unauthorized remixes/edits/blends of and using artists including Justice, Lady Sovereign, Aaliyah, Dr. Dre, Simian Mobile Disco, The Ting Tings and Miley Cyrus. Pauly is the founder of CRUSH and is also credited with co-founding Club Firestone’s legendary “Saturday / Thursday” party, PULP @ Czar in Tampa and a handful of other Florida events that have broken down barriers for the electronic dance music scene. Pauly is a guy at the largest free on-demand music streaming website in the world Grooveshark.com.

Groovehsark’s Numero Uno is Mr. Sam Tarentino…

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Summary
Founded EMG with business partners. Created, developed and periodically revised Business Plan, Financial Projections, and Executive Summary. Compiled management team, industry advisors and board of directors; directed the hiring of software development team, marketing team, and design team; closed over $3,000,000 in F&F, angel & institutional capital. With partner and team, successfully released Grooveshark with over 4M registered users. Structured Company’s Capitalization, HR policies and external team of accounting and legal.

Negotiated and closed deals with V2 Music UK, Nettwerk Music Group, Magnatune, Naxos, Sheridan Square Records, EMI Records and Publishing, Telecom Italia, ASCAP, BMI. & SESAC. Negotiated and closed licensing deal with University of Florida for their support with contacts, and IP issues. Negotiated and closed angel and institutional seed round.

Has attended numerous industry conferences such as MIDEM, CES, Digital Music Forum East and West, as well as private portfolio company events. Developed relationships over the past two years with many C-level and executive media, technology, and music industry players while negotiating with the major and independent labels. Developed multiple partner-level contacts in the venture community as well. 

Oversees and gives strategic direction to a team of 7 team leaders including a hardware infrastructure director, three senior software directors (Backend, & Frontend), a sales and PR director, a label relations director, and a business development director.

Specialties
Deals and Negotiation, license acquisition, organizational behavior, operations, fundraising, startups

“Sam is a great leader who is able to inspire a team of peers to believe in something larger than themselves. I am confident that with Sam as the head of our company, there is no possibility that we will not succeed and prosper.” April 28, 2007
Andrew W., Chief Marketing Officer, Escape Media Group
worked indirectly for Sam at Escape Media Group

Sam Tarantino
Sam Tarantino is the Founder and CEO of Grooveshark. He is a musician, an entrepreneur, and a visionary. His intent is to fix the world’s problems, but for now is settling on fixing the music industry.

RF Interjection: I have considerable sympathy with Mr. Tarentino’s intent, both of fixing the world and the music industry. Regrettably, this product of his labours has significantly increased the problems in my world, of which the music industry is part. Better just go back to fixing the world’s problems?

Grooveshark CEO Rails Against UMG-Forced App Takedown
August 18, 2010 By Antony Bruno
On Grooveshark’s relations with Universal Music Group.


There are some key issues here people are not looking at. First, we completely, 100% adhere to the DMCA takedown procedures. If you send us notice, we’ll take stuff down within 24 hours. The funny thing about UMG, they have never once issued us a notice to take down their content. Other labels have, and we’re progressing with them not only on taking down their stuff but on deals going forward. It’s funny that one label here is sort of just in its own world. We’ve reached out to them to get their metadata, otherwise they’re asking us to police something that we don’t even know what it is. 


On the importance of a mobile app.


The iPhone app made more money for us in the 10 days it was available than any of the other mobile apps combined. Our partners now that have deals with us have to suffer because of one label’s problem in a state of New York lawsuit. This isn’t even a federal lawsuit... Why hasn’t Universal gone to Google and said, ’Pull our app from Android’? I don’t know where it’s coming from. Why are they treated differently? Because they’re owned by Google? 


On why they don’t just take out UMG’s content


It’s not that simple. There’s so much content that a) It’s very hard to identify the actual masters themselves, and b) We can’t know what they are until UMG gives us either the masters or the metadata in the first place. Some of the identification systems have failed miserably. The master rights we received from a lot of our label partners have been completely mis-tagged. The only way to be precise about this stuff is to work with the people in question... Here’s an example that happened recently. An artist’s manager uploaded all their live bootlegs. The label said take it down, so we take it down. The manager goes, "Why’d you take it down, we own our live and bootlegs." That’s not out problem, and that’s happened in thousands of cases.


On licensing negotiations.


We’ve been at this for four years. It’s tough. This space is very difficult. I started this at 19. You don’t exactly walk into one of these major label guys’ offices at 19 and go, ’this is really cool.’ It’s more, ’Get out of my office.’ Our guy [at UMG] who we were talking to left, so we were focused on closing EMI.

RF Interjection: in the interests of transparency, what deal did Grooveshark close with EMI, please?


History
Grooveshark is a service of Escape Media Group Inc (EMG), a Gainesville, FL company.[8]EMG was founded in March 2006 by three University of Florida undergrad students.[9] Sam Tarantino, a "down-on-his-luck economics major", and now CEO of Grooveshark, was on his way to donate plasma when he passed a record store with a sign that said "buy/sell/trade CDs",[10]and had the idea to apply that to digital music.[11]
Grooveshark launched in private beta in early 2007, and was initially a paid music download service.[12] The music was sourced from their proprietary P2P network, facilitated by a downloadable client application.[13] Grooveshark offered a unique purchase model whereby upon purchase, the person who uploaded the transacted song was paid a portion of the total cost of the song. Grooveshark positioned itself as a legal competitor to other popular P2P networks likeLimeWire.[14]
As of 2008, EMG has discontinued their paid download service and has repositioned itself as an online music jukebox, similar in functionality to services like Pandora and Last.fm.[15]
On October 27, 2009, Grooveshark introduced a new user interface, which provides a look similar to iTunes. Also, users were now able to skip forward and backward to any point in a song.[16]
In 2010, Grooveshark was noted by Time Magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2010.
On December 2, 2010, Grooveshark released their HTML and JavaScript version of the site as the default user interface. The site uses an invisible Adobe Flash component to stream music and work around cross-domain restrictions.[17]
As of March 2011, EMG employed around 80[18] people, many of whom were students of the nearby University of Florida,[19] and had secured just under $1 million in seed funding in 2009.[20]
On March 23, 2011, Grooveshark announced a partnership with Pushbutton, an interactive design agency to bring Grooveshark apps to different platforms including Microsoft Mediaroom.

Legal issues
Operating in similar fashion to other online services like YouTube and Vimeo, Grooveshark requires users to indemnify Escape Media Group for any losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses arising from any breach of the Terms of Service or any allegation that user uploaded content violates intellectual property rights.[21] Users have complained about the unbalanced indemnification protections found in Grooveshark’s EULA.[22] Despite these concerns, no user to date has faced legal action from Grooveshark or third-parties. Parties in the USA claiming copyright infringement may use mechanisms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to request that their content be removed. Repeat offenders, users who have uploaded unlicensed content more than two times, have had their Grooveshark accounts suspended.[23] Grooveshark makes a Label List available of all record labels with which they have royalty agreements, though in the past major record labels were noticeably absent.[24] This changed on May 8, 2009[25] EMI filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark,[26] which was dropped on October 13, 2009 and replaced with a licensing deal.[27]

Universal Music Group filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Grooveshark on January 6, 2010, alleging that Grooveshark maintained on its servers illegal copies of Universal’s pre-1972 catalog.[28] A complaint from Universal Media Group to Apple is believed to be the reason behind Apple pulling the iPhone app from its store after only a few days on Aug. 16, 2010.[29] Grooveshark CEO Sam Tarantino maintains the company strictly follows the Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown procedures, usually removing content within a 24-hour period, but that Grooveshark never received a notice from UMG to take down content.[30]
In March 2010, Pink Floyd sued EMI, claiming that it has no right to sell their songs except as part of full albums[31] because it reduced the albums’ artistic integrity.[32] Pink Floyd won against EMI, preventing the band’s long-time record label from selling individual songs online,[33][34] which prompted the band’s removal from Grooveshark.

Another player in the Grooveshark firmament is Mr. Jack de Young

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What is Grooveshark?
Jack de Young: Grooveshark, fundamentally, is the YouTube for music. In that anyone in the world can come onto our site, listen to any song they want on demand, and upload whatever song they have on their hard drive to create this giant streaming library for everybody. It’s basically the world’s jukebox.

RF Interjection: if, as the anonymous Grooveshark employee-commentor suggests, Grooveshark employees are themselves loading up the material, this is a more serious issue than Grooveshark as jukebox, or the world’s iPod
http://www.facebook.com/Grooveshark
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… it is an illegal activity.

How does that work with the artists’ compensation?
Jack de Young: That’s a very good question.

RF Interjection: yeah! An ace question. So, in the interests of transparency, what deal did Grooveshark close with EMI, please?

Jack de Young: I can tell you one of the first checks that we did write was to the Performance Rights Organization. We were all in, admittedly, really really crappy bands for a long time. We know that lifestyle of sleeping on people’s couches, slogging away in a broken down van. So, everything we have built has been created with the artist in mind, first and foremost. The way they get paid is kind of a three-pronged thing. We have several different revenue streams and based on how many times you are played within Grooveshark is how much of that revenue you actually get. So, it’s basically, if you’re not getting played, [you] don’t get as much money, but if you are getting an inordinate amount of traction and plays on Grooveshark then you’re going to get more than someone that isn’t getting as many plays.

RF Interjection: yeah! I can follow that. It’s really very clear. More plays = more money. Very straightforward. Really transparent, too. So, how much per stream, please? And if it were an EMI artist, what would EMI get per stream?

Jack de Young:  We’ve been constantly tweaking and creating new revenue streams to insure that we aren’t paying artists out in pennies for streams. We want to be paying them out in dollars and that’s something that is incredibly important to us.

Wow! Maybe we are on the same page, after all.

Three recurrent claims made by Grooveshark’s VPs…

1.    Transparency.

2.    The artists are paid… We’ve been constantly tweaking and creating new revenue streams to insure that we aren’t paying artists out in pennies for streams. We want to be paying them out in dollars and that’s something that is incredibly important to us.

But not, it seems, awfully really very much incredibly important.

3.    Grooveshark’s operation is legal.

If Grooveshark is YouTube without-the-pictures, content is delivered to the platform by punters in addition to the material licensed from, say, EMI. In the most positive light, Grooveshark inhabits a grey-ish area within the digital world. But, if any of its employees load unlicensed content onto the site as part of their work, this falls outside the DCMA and is strictly illegal. Cf the comment I work for Grooveshark. Here is some information from the trenches posted above.

Cf also this comment…

Visitor • October 18th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
The comment from a Grooveshark ‘employee’ is completely and utter bull (not true). Take it from another ‘anonymous employee’ that there’s not one statement that rings true here or actually came from a real employee at Grooveshark. Why’s that? Because coming from someone who actually does work there, the negative anti-artist sentiments go against EVERYTHING the company’s management believes in.

Well, we don’t know the legitimacy of this commentator, either. A bona employee? A management-type person protecting their company?

So, transparency: what are the details of the deals done with the record companies, for example EMI? (Cf Negotiated and closed deals with V2 Music UK, Nettwerk Music Group, Magnatune, Naxos, Sheridan Square Records, EMI Records and Publishing, Telecom Italia, ASCAP, BMI. & SESAC). Given that Mr. Geller seems to believe / have believed that King Crimson is/was provided by EMI, and Grooveshark has a deal with EMI, it seems fair to ask: what is the Grooveshark deal with EMI, please? What do artists get paid, please? (Cf Mr. de Young above).

As Drummer Custer…

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… once put it in an e-letter to us, Grooveshark were in effect wanting to send (us) money. A reasonable question then: how much money? What proportion/%age of Grooveshark/EMI income was this, please? I’m sure Mr. Custer is sufficiently informed and able to provide this information. Or not? Well I can’t give you a number because it’s really hypothetical.
.
Cf. Mr. Geller
Geller: "Well I can’t give you a number because it’s really hypothetical.  But I can tell you this, though: moving forward, we’re going to be completely transparant about how people are paid.  And you can log in as an artist, you can see how many streams you’re getting.  And that artist payment system is going to be completely on-demand, so when we roll out this direct-to-artist payment system, you’re not going to need a label.  You don’t need a big label to claim your money, that’s not what we’re trying to do.  This is an open platform where anyone in the world can distribute their music anywhere in the world.

RF Interjection: the problem seems to be when anyone in the world doesn’t want to be on Grooveshark’s open platform, and which isn’t very open when they try to get off it.

Geller: And I think the licensing question is a question - it’s complicated.  We’re aggressive about licensing and when we go directly to the artist, the artist has complete control.  You have complete control over what you put on Grooveshark and what you don’t.").

RF Interjection: not.

Would Mr. Tarentino, Mr. de Young, Mr. Geller and/or  Drummer Custer please present clear answers to these questions:

1.    Has, or has ever, any Grooveshark employee loaded material onto Grooveshark, as the first anonymous Grooveshark employee commentator claims?

2.    What are the details of Grooveshark deals with “licensing partners” and catalogue providers, such as EMI?

3.    What have the three highest-earning artists earned from Grooveshark to date? How much have they earned? No need to mention their names, only the numbers, please. And how much did their licensing providers earn, please? No names needed.

17.09    A major letter gone off to UMG re: the current infringements detailed in the UMG royalty statement.

Enough disputation and dissension for one day. Time to clear the desk and head North to Bredonborough.

20.36    A brief visit to Mr. Romain of The Wilton Emporium…

20oct14c.jpg

… and home to the Minx and WillyFred. Yippee!

To gentle.

20oct15c.jpg



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