I have always been a little wary of Celtic Connections, because my interest in folk music sort of peters out as it gets closer and closer to purely traditional forms, which dominates a fair bit of the festival.  Not that they don’t give loads of airtime to the crossover of folk into contemporary pop music, because they very much do, it’s just that only a certain percentage of the lineup is ever really going to appeal to me personally, that’s all.

Anyhow, the not very folky at all Broken Records played last night with The Burns Unit, and it was reviewed by Lloyd from Peenko.  That’s dangerously close to being ‘legitimate’ rather than just a random hack fannying about on the internet, so congratulations to Lloyd, and I am delighted he enjoyed Broken Records.  With the exception of the glorious Since We’ve Fallen Out I really don’t like the Burns Unit I have to confess, but the more stripped down stuff in the video above is lovely nevertheless.

In other news, Vic from Muruch (one of those mysterious friends you end up with these days who you know only via the internet – she could be Scarlett Johansson, Rosie O’Donnell or Jerry Springer in disguise for all I know) got in touch to say that she was helping Mountain Stage do some PR for their event and wondered if I might feature it.  And you all know how I feel about nepotism…

So yes, Mountain Stage are a two hour live performance music show, which gets syndicated across National Public Radio all across the US, and they have an event at Celtic Connections this year.  The bill is comprised of Mavis Staples, Dougie MacLean, Joy Kills Sorrow and Mollie O’Brien & Rich Moore, takes place at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall this Friday, the 21st January, and tickets can be purchased here.

So, enjoy, Glaswegians.  I am staying here until next Thursday, when I might raid your fair city for some beers, which apparently you have in abundance.

I’ve been talking to Anthony from God Don’t Like It recently, and I think we both agree that longevity is the key to achieving anything in the music industry, particularly if you are a publication or a label or a promoter or a venue or anything like that – just make sure you stick at it for as long as possible.  For bands, maybe the flash in the pan model is a bit more feasible, but even then only if you play a particular kind of music.

Applied to mp3 blogs the same is true, particularly when you take their popularity boom into consideration.  Most music blogs started up about the time I moved to a Blogger account, in around 2006.  Around that time there was something of an explosion, with new ones popping into existence every few weeks, and consequently the older ones, dating back to 2003/4 and so on ended up with a kind of mythical status in the eyes of many writers (and readers) of these sites, because they blazed the trail that we all follow.

Muruch is a music blog written by a friend of mine, and it trumps all of these whippersnappers: it recently celebrated its tenth birthday!  There are a few reasons why this is an incredible achievement.  Firstly, the sheer slog of writing even a handful of posts a week for no tangible reward is a lot harder than most people think.  I pretty much go from internal monologue to blog post with barely a filter inbetween, which is why I get myself in hot water from time to time, but it is still the only way I can generate this amount of writing this regularly.  For Muruch to have managed ten years of consistent posting is a feat of endurance which I doubt many will be fully able to appreciate.

There is a little more to it than that, however.  Most mp3 blogs, this one included, play pretty fast and loose with the law.  Almost everything I post is sent to me by bands and PR people and therefore cleared for posting, but there are definitely times when I think ‘aw, fuck it’ and just fire something up on the assumption that a/ the band probably don’t mind and b/ if they do mind then they probably don’t care all that much and are unlikely to ever find out anyway.  This applies to a lot of music blogs, but not to Muruch.

Muruch, is entirely, 100% legal, which is one of the reasons they don’t feature all that many mp3s, a fact which hurts their audience somewhat when you consider the importance to blogs of things like the Hype Machine blog aggregator.  As well as this, when the music industry started wielding the ludicrous DMCA and making invalid, nuisance complaints against anyone and everyone, resulting in blogs being vandalised by their hosts or just shut down altogether, Muruch was one of the only ones to stand up and fight back.

Because everything they post is legal they were able to pursue a counter-claim all the way back to the source of the complaint, and by doing so highlighting just how little control bands actually have over their own music.  It was a brave and rather thankless task, but something which I think deserves an awful lot of respect.  So well done Vic, thanks for all the support for the record label, thanks for the last ten years, and good luck for the next ten!

George Davis – Sixteen Tons

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Eels – Sixteen Tons

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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 »