This, unlike my usual tedious pontificating, is actually a straightforward question to the Toad readership: in the days of Soundcloud and Bandcamp embeds, YouTube videos and free promo mp3s being issued by labels with almost every release, is it still necessary for me to post two mp3s with a review, generally of whatever songs I feel best represent either the album or my opinion of it?

I ask, because things have changed a lot since I started doing this.

Back at the beginning there was no such thing as a free mp3, and those of us who wrote blogs like this were all engaged in borderline illegal activity.  Technically speaking, mp3 blogs should probably have been covered by the Fair Use Exemption, allowing us to give away part of copyrighted works when part of a critique of the work in question, provided that did not in itself negatively affect sales of the overall work – so we gave away a couple of individual songs in order to make sense of our review of an album.  Although once those parts of copyrighted works were also being sold as individual copyrighted works in their own right, things became a little muddier.

Nevertheless, it was generally accepted that as long as we stuck to an unwritten code – no more than two songs per album, no leaking pre-release, always take things down when asked – it was pretty well established that most of the music world saw what we were doing as beneficial.  Radio play is a free listen, and can be taped too, and for all there were some tantrums at the time, it is pretty clear in hindsight that this all helped stimulate demand for music, just as we mp3 bloggers feel we are doing now.

It’s not quite so simple anymore, however.  As the music industry has seen how much of a benefit can be achieved by freely passing their material around, they have sought to control it a little more, whilst not destroying any of the benefits, and I can’t say I blame them for it either.  Given the power of anything you can embed in a Facebook stream, and the rise of things like Twitter and Tumblr, a simple mp3 is actually quite outdated these days, with embeds from Soundcloud, Youtube and Bandcamp being passed around social media sites at a furious pace.

So embedding mp3s, for one thing, might just not be necessary anymore, what with all the other approved alternatives out there.  And for another thing, it is still illegal and done without explicit permission.  Anthony from God Don’t Like It came to the world of blogging a little later than me, I think, and I was talking about this with him on the weekend, when Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s management (very graciously I might add) asked me to remove some of the stuff I made available with my recent review of their Tell My Sister release.

Basically, he was horrified that I would ever use anything not supplied by the artist with specific permission to share it.  When I started it was all illegal, so I never worried about that really, because we knew that most of the time we had the label’s tacit approval to do what we were doing. Nowadays, that is less the case, and I began to wonder a bit.

The most obvious arguments in favour of persisting with the free mp3s, in the format I tend to use at the moment are as follows:

Firstly, what I write is not advertising, it is suppose to be critique, and as such the songs a label thinks represent an album won’t always agree with the ones I think do, particularly if something is bad.  In this case, when discussing an album, I think the Fair Use Exemption for the purpose of critical evaluation still stands. There are obvious differences, but you wouldn’t suggest that you reasonably critique a book without quoting it.

Secondly, a lot of people can’t listen to streams and embeds for whatever reasons, and tend to simply dump all the mp3s into a playlist, to listen later.  Prevent this, and the artist will simply lose the listen altogether, as few people are likely to remember or bother to look them up at some other time.

The arguments against include some which are the same as before: legal/illegal, potential harm to sales (before you even start, this argument is bollocks when applied to posting two songs from an album,  although singles are different of course), and respect for the wishes of the artist.

And, of course, there are now a couple of added ones: that there is more than enough material made freely available these days that the old ‘tacit approval’ excuse no longer applies.  And now people have a much more concrete idea of the benefits of freebies, and their wishes are clearly expressed, unlike before the mp3 blog became an established format, in which case all was muddy.

And of course it’s fair to ask where I stand when wearing my other hat, as a record label?  Well personally, if someone posts two different songs to the two freebies I give away with every release then I don’t mind at all.  I would far rather a review based on someone engaging with the music, than someone robotically copying and pasting the press release and slapping my two Soundcloud embeds up there.  As long as there are only two songs, I still think it’s a considerable benefit to the artist and to me. More than that, and you’re getting cheeky.

So I find myself here, writing a music blog with an mp3 posting policy which is a little outdated, and which I am not sure if I want to change.  I think I personally just want to balance what I myself am trying to do, which is to critique music and express my opinions as clearly as I can, with the benefit to the artist themselves.  Surely just saying that something is dull is more harmful to sales than an mp3 I might post in order to prove my point.  But then, maybe I could just embed streams instead rather than full downloads, but honestly, what difference?  And are we all multimedia enabled enough these days that there is no real difference in accessibility between a Bandcamp embed and an mp3 link?

So over to you.  Would anyone seriously miss the downloadable mp3s?  Do you believe that me posting the mp3s which represent my views of an album rather than the label’s represents an important part of the critique I provide?  What do you reckon, because I am kind of in two minds, to be honest.

Music companies still don’t like people discussing music, it seems, and Google are a very dangerous company to give control of your information because they cannot be trusted.

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. Read the rest of this entry »