I got to Austin at about ten or eleven at night on Wednesday and stumbled into town to find Peej, who kindly offered to put me up, and Vic Galloway, who along with Peej is one of about four people I know in Austin this week, at the Scottish Showcase.

Due to not having bothered with either a badge or a wristband and the place being absolutely jam-packed, Peej had to sneak me in the back door, getting rid of a bouncer with a vague sort of ‘I’m in the band’ response which rather miraculously seemed to work.  Peej had a badge which he waved and that did the trick.

I saw the tail end of the Jetpacks show, which people went absolutely mental for.  I have never been a big fan of the band, honestly, but Peej loves them and they seem to be going down an absolute storm in the States.  They certainly do put on a good show too, so it’s hard not to warm to them.  After some quality MCing by Mr. Galloway, with an enormous super jumbo extra helping of cheese, Frightened Rabbit took to the stage and they really were good.

I gave their new album a bit of a savaging, and in the comments section there was a bit of discussion about how the songs would come across in a live setting, free of the smothering production.  I also said that a lot of the guitar sound on Winter of Mixed Drinks was really good, or at least what little of it you could hear, and live this really is what dominates the songs.  The new stuff fits in perfectly with the older songs, and when they are just played on guitar I enjoyed them miles more than on the record.

On Wednesday night I slept like a fucking corpse, and wandered into town at about three or four o’clock in the afternoon.  First port of call was the Hype Machine to meet Dev Sherlock, who has had the unenviable task of editing our hour longs chats down in to concise five minute soundbites for Hype Machine Radio.  It turns out that instead of simply being a nice bloke on the internet, he actually has a rather storied history as a music journalist and instead of going to a lot of music stuff we wandered off to the Ironworks to eat burned meat and pickles with a beer on the deck.  It was very, very civillised and finally meeting someone who’s been an internet friend for a couple of years now was a rather strange pleasure.

On the subject of internet friends, I finally met a certain Campfires and Battlefields on Thursday evening at the 4AD/Bella Union showcase.  I went in with the Broken Records lads to see them, Efterklang and Midlake, and ended up also catching an excellent set by John Grant, whose new album is out on Bella Union in a few weeks.  He used to be in a band called Czars, who I also rather liked, and he sounded really good.  When he sat down I expected something a bit like Bon Iver, but in fact it was probably closer to Rufus Wainright than anything else.  Very promising, in any case.

Efterklang weren’t bad, and I am not going to go on about Broken Records (great idea – travel all the way to Texas just to go and see bands from Edinburgh).  The real revelation of the night for me was just how good Midlake were, however.  I saw them at the End of the Road Festival a couple of years ago and they were no better than pretty good, and their new album was pretty much like that as well: really enjoyable, but didn’t exactly blow me away.  In the rather fantastic surroundings of Buffalo Billiards in Austin, however, they were pretty brilliant.  The harmonies were gorgeous, and I have no idea why they needed five bloody guitarists, but the sound they made was so nice that you can’t really question them on that count.

And of course, just before the Midlake set, Jamie Broken Records tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘I think there’s someone here you should meet – a certain Mr. Campfires and Battlefields…’

However, in order to reassure you that I am not just pissing about like some sort of gadfly and neglecting the site I can give you something of a list of cool stuff to expect over the coming month or so on Song, by Toad:

1. Podcast: Whilst in Texas I will be staying with Peej, who comments on this site occasionally and also writes/curates Dear Scotland.  By coincidence, he also happens to be good mates with Vic Galloway, so this weekend’s podcast will probably involve the three of us drinking and swearing our way through an hour’s worth of music.

2. Homegame interviews: whilst at Homegame we recorded some live footage and interviews of the Silver Columns, Django Django and Findo Gask.  These will all be going up on the site soon.

3. The general Homegame highlights video: I wasn’t so scrupulous about getting general ‘atmosphere’ shots this year, but I still imagine I’ll be able to put something decent together.  Hopefully.

4. Cold Seeds Toad Session: we recorded the one and only Cold Seeds performance, which took place in the Hew Scott Hall in Anstruther on Saturday night.  We spoke to the ‘band’ the next morning and will cobble the whole business together into some sort of ad hoc Toad Session in time for the full release of the record in June.  The 12″ vinyl can be bought now from Song, by Toad Records.

5. Mumford & Sons Toad Session: We recorded this today and it sounded and looked brilliant.  They were a little pressed for time, what with a sold out Queen’s Hall waiting for them, so this was about as professional and efficient as we’ve ever been, but I am certain that the results are going to be fantastic.

6. SXSW coverage: this will be patchy, frankly.  I am taking out a little voice recorder and a camera and will probably write a daily post every morning, but I am promising nothing because the plan is to take it easy and drink Margaritas.

And that’s just about it, I think.  Again, apologies, but it really has been fucking mental around here I’m afraid.  Normal service probably resumed in April!

[Alex Cornish (shown right on the Tom Robinson show) is an Edinburgh singer songwriter and a good friend of mine.  He has helped us out with contracts for Toad things for free, for no more reason than generosity and, although he may not be that well known in the alt-folk spheres inhabited by most people here, he has actually achieved considerable success, including being playlisted on Radio2, all using entirely DIY methods and entirely off his own back.  He wrote this on his own site recently, and gave me permission to re-post it here as part of this week's Sunday Supplement.]

I know everyone is writing about 6 Music being axed, but here is my viewpoint as an artist who works in a very DIY way and has first hand experience of sending out unsolicited CDs to producers at radio shows.

Once you have written and recorded the ‘masterpiece’, it’s time to decide who is likely to play it. This is all inapplicable if you have a wad of cash to pay a radio plugger, I didn’t, so I did it myself. Anyway, there’s no point sending out promo CDs to people who don’t play your sort of music and there’s no point sending it to the wrong address or the wrong producer. There’s also no point in sending it to the majority of commercial stations (XFM down south excepted). You need to spend a long time doing research on the old internet. After I had recorded Until the Traffic Stops first time around I spent said long time on the internet and the telephone (one of the great things about the BBC by the way is that if you telephone the switchboard they have to tell you who the production team for a show is, including the right box no. etc.). At that time, and this was before I had ever been played on the radio, I found that XFM Scotland might play it, so I sent a CD to Jim Gellatly for his new music show. I was also a massive fan of the Tom Robinson show on 6 Music, which at the time was on Monday – Thursday from 7pm to 9.30pm. There was also Vic Galloway’s Radio 1 Introducing show. So, out of all the radio stations, in general terms I had 6 Music, XFM and BBC Introducing on Radio 1. Now XFM Scotland has closed that leaves 6 Music and Radio 1 Introducing. If 6 Music closes it’s the introducing shows on Radio 1 as the only champions of new music, and to be honest they would rarely play my sort of music.

There are two reasons why 6 Music is so important to me:

- the first is that Tom Robinson and his producer picked out my little unsolicited package, which led to it being played, then a session, then someone at 6 Music handed it up to Radio 2 and a year later I got on the Radio 2 palylist. The same thing happened with Jim Gellatly, he picked it up and from there it led to other things. Without those massive leg ups I wouldn’t have had anywhere near the level of the exposure that I have had. There are obviously people at Radio 2 and Radio Scotland who have taken big chances in backing me, but I wouldn’t have got to them without those intial acts of support.

- the second is the new music I have discovered as a fan – I remember hearing ‘ The Ride’ by Joan as Policewoman on 6 Music and buying it right away. There are lots of occasions when that has happened.

So, as a musician where does that leave you? Well, there are obviously blogs and they are great, and I send stuff to blogs already, but as a reader or listener on a blog site you have to be active i.e. you have to actually read and listen to the material on a blog. With the radio, it is more passive – it is on in your home and when you hear something new, you stop, check out the tracklisting online and buy it from itunes or whatever. 6 Music closing is going to leave a massive hole for both those that love discovering and supporting new music and for those musicians trying to reach those potential new fans. I’ll never forget the first time ‘This One’s for You’ was played on the Tom Robinson show – first radio play. A huge thrill. It’s a fucking shame.

Petition FM
Go Petition

And if you’re a Facebooker, please join this group.

You can also fill in the following consultation form if you can make the time, which would also be a big help.

Equally importantly, please email srconsultation@bbc.co.uk and tell them why they should keep 6Music.

And finally, make sure you listen to the bloody station.  I can’t stress this enough.  It’s not enough to support something by moaning, and it’s not enough just to like the idea of something existing, if you want to support something you have to actually use their product, whatever that might be.  Otherwise we become these people.

So, why, in all honesty, should we do all this?  What’s the big deal, and are we just being snotty about losing 6Music because it generally played ‘our kind of music’ or is there some wider purpose beyond specific taste which the station served which should be preserved?

The answer, from me, is yes on both counts.  Firstly and most obviously, in terms of supporting the actual making of new music, across all genres, 6Music was without parallel.  By giving so much opportunity to small and emerging bands, and by using specialist DJs who could put those bands into a broader historical context, the station fulfilled a unique function in actually supporting the development of music in the UK.

In saying this am I being insulting to the BBC Introducing network, with Vic Galloway, Bethan Elfyn and Huw Stephens?  No, I don’t think so.  As good a job as they do, and as grateful as I am to the consistent support and friendship Vic has shown Song, by Toad, they simply don’t have enough time to represent the entire BBC contribution to new music.  With so little time to play stuff, the volume of submissions to time allowed ratio means that the music cannot all be reasonably listened to or played and the whole thing becomes a crap-shoot, which becomes a real barrier to good things rising to the top.  6Music has enough airtime that good stuff is likely to be picked up – it’s still far from perfect, but it’s alright.

The other point is that in ditching 6Music the Beeb would basically be abdicating any role in cultural and artistic development in the field of popular music.  They may think that fits with their charter, but I do not.  Basically, Radio One is what is already happening, and Radio Two is what was never happening.  These stations are entirely dominated by the finished article, but who is going to finish that article for them?  In the absence of 6Music there will be the shiny, professional mainstream at one end, and tiny DIY enterprises like this one at the other, and absolutely not a single bloody thing inbetween.

How the hell are you supposed to progress, to step up, to actually make that massive leap without the developmental step of 6Music, where you can start out with a couple of airplays on one show, maybe get a session on another, and hope to eventually make the step up to a Maida Vale Session and perhaps eventually some Radio1 airplay.  Take away 6Music and you have to go from the Song, by Toad podcast to Radio1 in a single leap, which is not only a ludicrous expectation, but also makes the process increasingly arbitrary, because bands develop at different rates.  Not everyone can teach themselves all the stuff required to do this without intermediary steps, and even fewer have the stamina to keep going all that way without the encouragement they provide.

So from a label or band’s perspective, this is basically a disaster.  This was the closest we had to a reasonably understandable route to establishing ourselves, and in its absence this is going to become extremely challenging.  If I wanted to be a cynical bugger about it I would look at the Toad Sessions and look at the podcasts and watch the BBC and everyone else (XFM, anyone?) abandoning this middle ground for the higher echleons of pimping finished products and I would be rubbing my hands with glee at just how much audience they are surrendering and how much artistic ground they have abandoned, ground which we can now make a concerted effort to occupy.

Ultimately, though, that just isn’t how I feel.  Getting the likes of Gideon Coe, Marc Riley and Stuart Maconie off the air is a massive loss to anyone who cares about music and, more specific to the BBC, to anyone who cares about supporting cultural development in the UK.  The BBC are paid a lot in the form of tax, and they have a public service responsibility, and as far as I am concerned cutting 6Music will represent a very significant failure to fulfil that role.

Some people release videos to promote their music, but Ok Go seem to release music to help them promote their film-making talent.  This is their second video for This Too Shall Pass and it speaks for itself really: mental genius.

Apparently this took them four months to build, and honestly, I don’t even care if they cheated a bit (how did they do that going through the hole bit about 3/4 of the way through?) or if it really is as clever as it looks, it’s so visually engaging I am going to love it anway.

Terms like ‘viral marketing’ really were invented for people like this, and of course it sums up the fundamental misconception a lot of people have about viral marketing.  I get emails from fuckwits all the time saying ‘have you seen the latest ‘viral’ by suchandsuchatalentlessfuckwit?’  And of course, that’s just not how it works.  You can’t designate something viral status, and lo and behold – poof! – it is then a viral video.  Viral is a description of how something spreads, and if it’s shit and doesn’t go anywhere then it isn’t viral, no matter how cool your haircut is or how hard you try.

It’s like respect – the description of something as viral is not something you can demand, it’s something which must be earned.

Anyhow, these reports originate from The Times, who are part of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp media dinosaur who are themselves splashing about rather desperately in the ocean of free content, harried by internetters on one hand and the Beeb on the other.  So until this is actually confirmed by a credible source, I’d hold back on the histrionics a little – which is why I have yet to cover this month-old rumour until now as it is.

Still, it worries me because it’s part of a wider trend which I find rather scary at the moment: entertainment holding increasing sway over culture.

Of course, any fan of painting, sculpture, poetry, classical music or anything like that will tell you that this is just the same as it ever was and that basically it’s just our turn now for a change, and that they’ve had this problem for years.  If anything is killing the music industry, for example, it’s the fucking vacant populism of the X-Factor, it ain’t the internet.

Anyhow, late last year the Metro closed their regional arts offices, basically swinging the axe on some of the best local arts coverage in the UK.  Culture, simply, isn’t all that commercially viable.  But the Beeb themselves seem to have little idea what they are there for to begin with.  Why the fuck did they start trying to compete with reality TV?  Why the fuck did they foist the likes of George Lamb on 6Music and basically date-rape the daytime schedule?  Well the answer to the latter question is that apparently Lesley Douglas thinks that women are fucking idiots, but the whole thing speaks of general confusion as to what the BBC is actually supposed to do.

Tax is there to pay for things which commercial concerns will not cover, and to provide accountability to the public which commercial practises do not.  The Beeb is pretty clearly covered by the first, but it has slowly but surely been forgetting its remit and trying to compete with commercial channels on their terms.  6Music only costs £7m a year to run (just over a third of Wossy’s wages), and if they wanted to cut costs they could simply fire their fucking dreadful daytime celebrity presenters and return the station to the specialists for whom it was originally intended.  This mission creep has left it falling between two stools to a considerable degree

Mrs. Toad said to me once that you used to become famous by being on the radio, but nowadays the only way you got on the radio was by being famous to begin with.  This is patently not the Beeb’s job – they are there to ensure that all are represented, not just the most famous.  There is a sizeable audience for alternative music outside the Brits and Q fodder who represent the dismal indie mainstream, but the routes to success for small bands are continually being cut off by commercial pressures.

The problem with this is that in craving larger audiences the Beeb destroys the USP of the station, and risks turning it into XFM.  The trick is not to neuter your individuality by craving the mainstream, it is to accept what you are and budget accordingly.  If (and it is still an if, remember) 6Music goes then the BBC are essentially abandoning all pretense of supporting the development of alternative music culture in the UK.  Radio One is too populist, Radio Two too cautious, and therefore that will be pretty much the end of one of the most important points of access to their audience which existed for emerging musicians in Britain.

Or, to put it another way, how the fuck are any of us going to get our music out there now?  The States has already seen this happen, as print media failed completely and Clearchannel hoovered up and then euthanised all commercial radio, until all that was left was the blogs.  And inasmuch as I like blogs, I feel I need to stress the point that this is not a good thing.

However, there is a note or two of optimism to be struck.  As the major record labels have discovered, scrambling towards the lowest common denominator with such desperation leaves a void behind you which can eventually reach such critical mass that it swallows you up.  If the Beeb is abandoning the alternative to this extent, all it does it leave that space open for amateurs like us, and eventually they run the risk of making themselves so culturally irrelevant that they will lose their right to participate altogether and will have effectively ceded everything which makes them special to the rest of us.

Rhythm of the Saints didn’t really click with me either, I have to confess, so by the time Songs From the Capeman was released in 1997 I will admit approaching it with some trepidation.  It barely made a scratch on the public consciousness, but I actually think this is a great album.

Simon works a lot in an area which is politically sensitive, in that he is often more obviously open to the accusations of cultural colonialism which dog Vampire Weekend.  For all the Lion King charicatures of their last album irritated the shit out of me, I think Vampire Weekend tend to draw their influences not from the cultures from which they are accused of pilfering, but from sources once and twice removed, which makes that accusation a little harder to seriously level at the band.  Paul Simon, on the other hand, seems to go a lot closer to the source, which if anything is also closer to what could conceivably be described as actual exploitation.

Am I accusing Paul Simon of being exploitative, then?  Well, no I’m not.  I am not Puerto Rican, and know so little about the place that it’s really not my accusation to make anyway.  And besides Simon does, at least from my superficial perspective, seem to genuinely immerse himself in the culture he is working with, and try and approach his work from the perspective of genuine understanding.  I could be totally wrong about that, of course.

This album, for example, far from being a tourists’ eye view of some ethnic culture or other, was actually written for a Broadway musical* specifically about the life of Salvador Agron, who was sentenced to death for the murder of two teenagers in a gang fight in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, in 1959.  So as well as being a strong and deliberate political statement about racial divides and class culture in the States (as well as many other things), it does seem to me to be a genuinely sensitive attempt to understand, rather than simply mimick.  As I said, though, that’s really not my place to say.  You can read a little more about it, starting with those Wikipedia links, and then judge for yourself if you are so inclined.

So political bollocks aside, is it any good?  Well of course, I think so or I wouldn’t be writing this.  There are, admittedly a couple of songs which I find saccharine to the point of physical pain – I Was Born in Puerto Rico springs to mind, and I really squirm at Time is an Ocean – but there’s a shitload of great stuff on here.

The two songs downloadable below, Bernadette, Satin Summer Nights, Trailways Bus, Quality, Killer Wants to Go to College – all of them have a laid back, uninsistent sort of vibe and a nice rhythm.  A lot also include the kind of male-female duets which made Calexico’s Roka so incredible.  I suppose I’d say that there’s just a lot of warmth about this album.  It’s written with sympathy, but doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the situation it describes.  There’s no obvious hit, and it’s all perhaps a bit sweary and generally a bit downbeat for radio, so maybe that contributed to it never really capturing the public imagination, but in general I think this is a really underrated record.

Paul Simon – Adios Hermanos

Paul Simon – Vampires

Website | Buy from Amazon

*Yeah, because Broadway’s never exploitative, superficial or sensationalist, right?  Oh.

There’s something about that pointless little factoid which makes me giggle, pretty much every time I remember it.  Partly, it makes McGregor himself seem like one of us.  He’s already talked about how starstruck he was to be involved with the Star Wars films in the first place, but it’s one thing to say it, and quite another to have your childish glee hung out there for all to see.  I know nothing about McGregor at all, actually, but I don’t think I want to know anything beyond that one fact, because it makes him something of a hero to me, honestly. I can just imagine the weary voices of the crew every time he did it as well – that dragged out, two-syllable admonishment pronunciation of his name: “Yoo-WUN, fucksake.”

Vrrroosh! You tool!  Brilliant.

In other news, Jesus H. Foxx have a couple of demos up from their recent recording escapades. These can be downloaded from their new blog, and enjoyed with a cup of tea and a nice biscuit.

And in yet more hilarious news, Parliament has finally realised that all this money Prince Charles and his band of deluded halfwits insist we spend on homeopathy is basically a total waste of everyone’s fucking time.  I tend to think of the National Lottery as a tax on the inability to do basic statistics, and homeopathy is very similar, in that it is at root simply a tax on ignorance.

Basically, there are no ingredients in homeopathic remedies, and they have been repeatedly shown to do absolutely nothing at all.  If you buy them, you are being scammed, pure and simple.  Like a great many religous beliefs it is easy to wave your hands and ignore it and pass it off with tolerant statements like ‘oh it does no harm’, but it does.  Homeopathy is harmless enough in most circumstances, I would agree… unless you are actually suffering from something.  If you actually have a disease then this sort of childish nonsense actually does have plenty of potential to cause real harm.  Certainly the placebo effect is powerful, so simply believing that you are being given medicine can have a strong benefit, even if you aren’t, but there are two very serious consequences which result from failing to challenge this sort of mumbo-jumbo.

Firstly, it distances us from the real world, from observable, actual effects, and things which actually happen.  It damages our ability to actually do good and to progress medicine and to heal people, because that only happens when we study and test medicine using controlled, randomised, double-blind trials, and then throw out the shit which doesn’t work.  Giving charlatans who peddle no more than wishful thinking some sort of hocus-pocus shield to hide behind gives large pharmaceutical companies the same get out of jail free card as well.  Most of the people who sell you all this alternative bobbins are actually owned by large pharma companies anyway and, frankly, published, peer-reviewed and controlled trials are the only defence any of us has against their avarice.  It’s also the only defence we have against wishful thinking, and against the flaws of what we humans rather vainly call our common sense.  Or, to put it another way, it’s the only way to tell if something actually fucking works.

Secondly, the more money we waste on shit which simply doesn’t do anything, such as homeopathy, the less we have to spend on employing doctors and nurses, buying actual medicine and other trivial little things like that.  Money is a precious commodity in the NHS, and it’s one thing for some idiotic middle-class fuckwit to waste their own money on nicely shaken bottles of water and sugar pills, but it isn’t just their own money which they are wasting.

I would agree with a lot of the critiques of modern medicine, most obviously its corruption by the large companies who seek to profit from its exploitation, but if you think that in any way invalidates its achievements then you are quite simply an idiot.  Do you really want to go back to a time when life expectancy was about fortyish and when a simple dental problem could kill you?  Do you want Polio back?  How about Smallpox?  Fucking idiots.

So, from Ewan McGregor making the Vrrroosh noise, to new Jesus H. Foxx songs, to homepaths finally being told to fuck off back to playschool, all in a single post.  I have a hangover, and I need a sandwich.

Star Wars Theme

Google have recently been deleting, wholesale, entire music blogs, representing years of work for no profit by people who are in some cases explicity operating one hundred percent within the law, and in other cases with the tacit approval of the music companies whose nuisance complaints under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have actually caused what tweeters are calling #musicblogocide2k10.

About six months ago, if you remember, the music companies started abusing the DMCA, using it in a frivolous, scattershot manner to harrass music blogs as a nuisance technique for disrupting independent music conversations.  Effectively, they would make copyright complaints to blogs hosted on Google’s Blogger service under the DMCA, which pretty much obliges Blogger to delete the post in question, irrespective of the legality of the post in question.

After the resulting outcry amongst bloggers (whose writing is their intellectual property, remember) Google backed off slightly, insisting that they would simply revert accused posts to draft rather than delete them, and that they would start notifying bloggers when they removed their posts rather than simply deleting them and hoping writers would never notice.  It still remained on record as a Terms of Service violation however, and now the inevitable has happened: some blogs with multiple complaints to their name have been dubbed repeat offenders and simply deleted.

Put that way it all sounds pretty tame, doesn’t it.  It’s pretty clear that mp3 blogs operate in something of a legal grey area – some of the tracks we post are shared with the blessing, and even encouragement, of the copyright holders, some with their tacit if unwritten approval, and some directly against their wishes.  Some offer downloads of full albums for free, and are completely illegal as well as being, as most bloggers would agree, very damaging to artists, labels and even bloggers themselves.  Why is it an issue, then, after a legal complaint about an illegal act and with a record of repeatedly flaunting the law, if a writer is simply shut down?  It’s not an issue, actually, for me, when put like that, but that is an almost totally inaccurate portrayal of the reality of the situation.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, simply, like much of the law being written in the heat of the copyright wars, is nothing more than a big stick for the entertainment corporations to beat people with whom they dislike, and has no relation to justice, fairness, or protection of copyright beyond the preservation of a very specific way of monetising it.  More importantly, for some, it is quite simply rotten law – no more than a dictation taken by massively corrupt or woefully ignorant politicians at the command of a nervous and malevolent cartel.

Think that’s a bit rich?  Well, when making a DMCA complaint there is no obligation to show that you own the copyright in question.  There’s also no obligation to prove, beyond a ‘good faith’ statement that an actual infringement is taking place.  If the actual host – in this case Google, even though often all they host is a link to the material in question – acts immediately to remove the article (not the link under dispute, the entire article) then they are immune from liability for the alleged infringement and immune from any liability for their actions if the claim turns out to be spurious.

In other words if you are Google and you have any questions, these are the answers.  Why is it illegal?  Because we say so.  What if we disagree?  Well if you obey then you are in the clear and if you don’t then we’ll take every single damn copyright infringement, or anything even vaguely close, on Blogger and probably YouTube as well and we’ll sue you for the whole bloody lot.

The results of this are even more ridiculous than you might expect.  A small UK label sends a blogger an mp3 to help promote their site, but the US release of the same record might go through a larger label, who license it to their distribution partner, in whose Los Angeles office a placement student is given the tedious task of trawling the internet looking for copyright violations to crack down upon, spots one of the artists they’ve been assigned to police, and sees a pat on the head and a nice dog biscuit in his immediate future.  And the article vanishes.

The above situation may sound ludicrous, and it is, but it is exactly what happened to Muruch last year, and that site is one of the oldest music blogs in existence and has always been one hundred percent legal – the only mp3s Vic posts are the ones sent to her by labels with their explicit permission to make them available for download from her site.  But the confusion between copyright, performance rights, publishing rights and distribution rights, and between the global nature of the internet and the territorial nature of many of those deals, makes this situation far from as unusual as it should be; in fact it makes it almost inevitable.

The communication disconnects need not be within such a complex daisy chain, either.  Last year, when I met with Sony in London, the young, forward-thinking people I spoke to were enthusiastic about courting music blogs, because they recognised that the network effect of sparking a bushfire in the blogosphere can easily exceed the benefits of getting a handful of articles in the mainstream music press.  Bloggers aren’t taken all that seriously by labels like Sony, however, so these guys were relatively junior.  So, never mind their chances of getting their own managers onside, according to them the legal departments in places like that are without fail the most resistant, backward, inflexible reactionaries you could hope to find, so they themselves might send an mp3 out to the blogs with the full blessing of their line manager, but once someone in legal finds it out there that won’t necessarily prevent a crackdown.

It’s such a mess at the moment that record labels’ attack dogs have even ended up biting their own tails.  Hilariously, Sire Records recently had all their official music videos removed from YouTube because of a copyright complaint by their parent company, Warner Music.  One of the complaints which sparked the recent blog deletions ended up being directed at the label’s own official blog for hosting their own official promo track.

So every single one of these fuck ups within the framework of an already ridiculous piece of law-making ends up on a blogger’s record as a violation of their Terms of Service.  They can make a counter-claim, but they all go through a tiny, volunteer run company somewhat aptly named Chilling Effects (at least someone has a sense of humour), where the backlog is so severe as to have effectively made their job impossible.  A blogger could sue of course, but I find it hard to imagine a twenty-year-old college student taking Warner Music to court over their butchered website.

And now the inevitable has started to happen.  Blogs with multiple ToS violations on their records have started to be deleted.  Google is already bickering with the major labels about music videos on YouTube, so presumably they are more worried about keeping them sweet at the moment than they are about music publications, even ones which represent five years of work for no monetary reward and operate entirely within the law.  As an example, five-year-old music blog I Rock Cleveland has been entirely legal for the last two years, and contains not one single copyright violation, but has still been a victim of these frivolous attacks. Google clearly have no interest in establishing their veracity and yesterday simply deleted the site, along with several others.

Google themselves have made a weak statement about ToS violations and filing counter-claims, but it is difficult to take them seriously when actually making those counter-claims results in no more than being casually ignored.  If you don’t believe me, here are are some of Dave from I Rock Cleveland’s attempts to get a response to the false claims filed against his site.  Vic from Muruch very bravely fought this last year, despite the potentially disastrous financial consequences if she were deemed to be in the wrong, and she did finally get through, but it was a long and painful process, and she represents just one music blog.  There are thousands.

So why is this happening?  Well from Google’s point of view, they want to own all the information in the world, and they have far more important fish to fry, I should imagine, than music blogs.  Or to put it another way, they simply do not care.  One on side of this argument, as I would imagine they see it, is a handful of disgruntled music bloggers leaving their service to self-host using things like Wordpress.  On the other side they host an enormous amount of user-generated amateur content, from Blogger to YouTube to, in some senses, eBay, and under the terms of the DMCA they are not liable for damages for any of the infringements taking place across any of their various sites if they remove it immediately an accusation is made, whereas if they do not, they might well be liable for damages (which have been ludicrously punitive in past music industry cases) for the whole bloody lot.  So despite the fact that music blogs represent some of their most popular sites (Gorilla vs Bear springs to mind) I’m sure they think it’s a shame, but it’s no big deal when compared to the potential and ill-defined consequences of swinging the other way.

The other reason it’s happening, of course, is that music companies are desperately afraid.  They are kind of nervous about filesharing, but I think that is merely a symptom of a more deep-rooted and, ultimately, more dangerous ailment: they have lost their audience.  And by lost I mean just that: misplaced – they don’t know where they’ve gone.

If you are massive label selling pop music in the United States, say, who are you trying to sell to?  Commerical radio is all owned by ClearChannel and is a banal monoculture, not used as a place to find music, but more often consumed as no more than background noise.  Music retail is so dead that the Billboard Chart basically represents no more than babysitting money spent by parents on behalf of their children in Walmart on the stuff like the Hannah Montana Soundtrack or NOW 56 compilations. Music magazines are all but extinct.  Music television has been totally obliterated by the likes of American Idol.  So who are they selling to?

Corporate money has gone to buy ads during X-Factor.  The companies hoovering up that cash may be owned by the same corporations as the major labels in some cases, but I doubt that they’ve realised that they are in an either/or situation.  Casual pop fans who use music as social glue do not need to buy their water-cooler pop from labels anymore because it is piped into their houses every evening on the television, and these people represent a massive, massive chunk of the market.

The people who are actually still spending money on music have all but deserted the mainstream channels like print and commercial radio because they simply are not catered for there.  So the illegal downloaders are the only people left consistently spending money on musical products, but they are doing it through alternative and underground channels – through blogs, from independent labels, from merch desks at gigs and online.  Because of their technological troglodytism and general fear of change, these are channels which tend to lead away from major labels not towards them.

So they have lost the determined spenders to the underground and the casual ones to other media, and they are now squabbling over the leftovers.  They have either misplaced or actively driven away their market.  The only place any music market still clearly exists in online, through podcasts and blogs and webzines.  Look at the likes of Drowned in Sound, Pitchfork, Stereogum, and the general blogging diaspora – that’s the only really obvious place to find lots of people still willing to spend money on music.  Unfortunately, this is not a conversation the entertainment companies control.  These nodes may be becoming increasingly corporatised (DiS was very nearly bought out by BSkyB a year or two ago), but even Pitchfork, which is the biggest and most influential, is still a tiny little enterprise by anyone’s standards.

When people like Madonna release an album it is not unheard of for the handful of lucky, pre-selected reviewers to be huddled into a room, played the album once, not always in its entirety, and then sent away to write their words.  Apart from the ridiculously superficial nature of any review written under those circumstances, it is also a very tightly controlled process – it seems almost military.

Compare that to how music is reviewed and brought to its audience today: it is a totally fragmented process.  An album will be reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of times by almost anyone, and how the hell do you manage or hope to steer a process that splintered and vague?  They have lost their market, they have lost their audience, they have lost control of the conversation itself and that is why they are so scared at the moment – it really is not just about filesharing.

My personal theory is that major labels hate blogs because they over-estimate our influence.  The audience for music is spread very thinly these days, but it is at its most visible in and around the blogosphere.  Blogs represent an obvious and easily indentifiable group of people who still spend a lot of money on music, but it is all too vague and unclear a picture for companies accustomed to having the channels of conversation as nailed down as they used to.  So they are filing nuisance claims against blogs with no more goal than basic disruption.  They want blogs to either go away, like the amateur ones will, or to do as they are told, as the more professional ones might.

Now, as applied to music blogs this all seems pretty inconsequential.  Music, after all, is just entertainment.  But this desperation to retain control of the conversation is not limited to music. The Associated Press recently announced plans to charge for the right to quote their articles.  The writing is their intellectual property after all, so if you want to reproduce it, you should pay. This is utterly ridiculous, of course.  Fair use is often cited as a justification for sharing a couple of mp3 files on music blogs, in order to facilitiate critical review.  Basically, this is the artistic equivalent of a quotation – you cite an example in order to explain your argument.

Certainly in intellectual debates it is very difficult to argue against something if you can’t show people what it is you are disagreeing with, but the idea of charging to quote is basically a way of pricing people out of the discussion.  How can an amateur possibly discuss politics online if they have to pay a few dollars for absolutely everything they quote?  Those costs would become prohibitive very, very fast.

Think how simple it would be for someone to wage a nuisance campaign against people who are publically criticising or disagreeing with them if they could file a DMCA complaint against every quotation.  And they can, remember.  There’s no burden of proof and a legal pardon from facing the consequences if you’re in the wrong.  All that is needed is the accusation.  Homeopaths and Chiropractors already have a proud history of using this kind of digital vandalism to silence bloggers critical of their dangerous charlatanry.  Censorship by threat and bullying, is routinely used as a way of silencing debate – and they’re just homeopaths defending their commercial interests, imagine if it was debate about the war in Iraq, or bank bailouts.

The law in this area has taken a very sinister turn – that of guilt by accusation, without the burden of either proof or indeed any kind of due process of law.  This is not just about the nuisance of shutting down a few music blogs operating in a dubious legal grey area, this is purely and simply about consolidating power, and owning information.  By removing due process from these areas and making them between an individual and their provider’s terms of service you are essentially privatising law enforcement, and putting its policing in the hands of powerful vested interests.  What this does is effectively enshrine the concept that Might Makes Right in law, because by removing due process and abdicating any responsibility for enforcement, governments are effectively leaving us on our own to duke it out with massive conglomerates and their armies of lawyers.  And who the fuck do you think is going to win that one?

I’ve never done a competition before, but if you are going to break your duck it might as well be for a headline like that.  Communion is part club part record label, run by a couple of the guys from Mumford and Sons and Cherbourg.

They’re releasing a compilation of live performances from their nights on 12″ vinyl and I happily have a few to give away.  Looking at the tracklisting below, I reckon this is going to be really rather nice.

So, to win one, send me a photo of someone incredibly, achingly, crotch-crushingly cool, and I’ll post them on next week’s Friday Five.  It doesn’t need to be a new one – if you happen to have one in your Facebook stuff already then that’s no problem, but the subject of the photo has to be incredibly hip (or at least trying really hard).  Mostly this will be about taking the piss, so no need to put much work into it, just bung me a funny photo and I’ll post the shortlist next week.  Email address: songbytoad *ahem* hotmail.co.uk

Johnny Flynn – ‘In The Honour Of Industry’
Jay Jay Pistolet – ‘Vintage Red’
Marcus Foster – ‘Circle In A Square’
William Stokes Feat. Marcus Mumford – ‘Zion’
Pete Roe – ‘Bellina’
Broadcast 2000 – ‘That Sinking Feeling’
Benjamin Francis Leftwich – ‘More Than Letters
Jeremy Warmsley – ‘How We Became
Brendan Campbell – ‘Maudlin Reverie’
Alessi’s Ark – ‘Hands In The Sink
Mumford And Sons – ‘Sister’
Matthew And The Atlas – ‘Deadwood’
Alan Pownall – ‘Take Me’
Elena Tonra – ‘Peter’
Beans On Toast – ‘Things To Do Before You’re Thirty’
Kurran And The Wolfnotes – ‘Pounding’
Peggy Sue – ‘February Snow’
Andrew Davie – ‘Lie Down In The Blood’
Rachel Sermanni – ‘My Friend Fire’
Jesse Quin And The Mets – ‘The Sculptor And The Stone’
Matt Corby – ‘Light Home’