Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to bmk,
It felt like a deliberate unscrupulous ploy. Imagine another business doing a job and invoicing one person then deliberately invoicing someone else in the hopes that they would both pay. So in my limited experience APRA are indeed gangsters practising extortion,.
To be fair, the kind of gangsters who when contacted say "Shit, sorry, that was clearly incorrect and we won't do it again."
-
A great column by Rod Oram on the “wildly inaccurate and irresponsible claims” of a council financial crisis.
Notable:
Debt remains well within the limits the council has set itself. For example, interest this financial year will take 11 per cent of revenues and 19 per cent of rates, versus limits of 15 per cent and 25 per cent.
The council has an AA credit rating, better than all but one of our banks.
Government, local and central, should always be subject to robust media scrutiny, but Bernard Orsman's reporting in the Herald really seems to have crossed the line into being actively destructive of the city’s interests.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ian Jorgensen,
APRA’s lawyers sent me a letter threatening legal action, 5 years imprisonment or a 150,000 fine if I didn’t pay my background music fee the second year – and it seems the one thing we can agree on is their background music collection is not 100% accurate. To me this is extortion. If its something else, please enlighten.
But I totally get how that could shape one's perspective.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ian Jorgensen,
They’ve already committed to making a few changes and haha, in a bizzare move, Don has asked me to do their job for them and come forward with ideas of how to do background music collection better – I have many and am not sure why its my responsibility, but hey…I’m up for it.
You're complaining because they won't change and because they've asked your for your input on changes? Jeez, I know you're slightly joking, but maybe don't be too ungracious Blink ...
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Samuel Scott,
Definitely. And to be honest, I feel there is a distinct lack of young bands breaking through in the funny land between total-indie and yucky-mainstream that acts who emerged in the early noughties (Mint Chicks, Brunettes, Pluto, Goodshirt, my band, lots of shitty bands) seemed to operate in.
This worries me. Other people have written about the widening gap between "hits" and artisan production and I think the move towards streaming models is currently exacerbating that.
In the other hand, we are seeing these very self-possessed individuals like Daniel McBride, Eddie Johnston and Janine Foster. I think Janine is amazing and I'm so pleased that Andy Murnane is making it work for her in the US -- using the lessons he learned from trying to break Mareko and others. I dunno, maybe the ideal unit is turning out to be a band of one with production chops.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ian Jorgensen,
sorry russell for my patronising post above, didn’t mean to come out like that :/
No problem! All in the spirit of vigorous and healthy debate :-)
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ben Howe,
Explore ways where One Music licensees are either measured more accurately OR can opt in to playing a certain % of local music (via some kind of separate agreement). Although I realise the issues with measuring accurately, and also the danger that the local % may in fact go down, I think many small business would embrace the idea of playing local music and this would give us the opportunity to lobby them to do so with actual financial results. For example I will always go to a local cafe over starbucks. I would also be happy to promote local businesses who did this via the various FN/AH etc channels.
I like all this, and it’s not like Apra hasn’t been flexible in the past. When I did a keynote at the Australian-NZ Internet Awards last year, I concluded by encouraging companies and people present to pay for music they used in their businesses.
It would need:
- A brand
- A website
- Window stickers and posters
- A loyalty card for customers?
- An accepted means of accounting for use. I do not believe that this is impossible, or even difficult. RMNZ already has a sponsorship relationship with with Spotify and it’s hardly a big step to sort out “powered by Spotify” logging.It wouldn’t matter if not every premise participated, but there would be a reputational benefit to those that did. I’d be happy to help, throw in advertising, whatever.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ian Jorgensen,
They are a company who collects money on your behalf without you knowing and makes no proper effort to contact you, forcing you to sign up to them to receive money which is rightfully yours.
So Apra is supposed to magically know what songs you’ve written and performed and when, find out where you live and send you money without you ever registering, proving your identity or claiming those songs? Really?
They do actually advertise a list of non-member authors they think are due royalties (mostly in tiny amounts) but it’s hard to see how they can pay anyone who refuses to register their authorship.
-
Speaker: Not even a statistic, in reply to Paul Campbell,
(hats off to the ODT for both giving us the search terms and telling us it is legal to use them).
Indeed.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Ian Jorgensen,
Are we maybe also talking about a regional issue here too? Like all the people I've just mentioned, I'm in Auckland. It's easy to not see far past that.