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Old 05-10-22, 06:31 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 8th, 22

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October 8th, 2022




The Andy Warhol Case That Could Wreck American Art

Without strong fair-use protections, a culture can’t thrive.
Paul Szynol

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Lynn Goldsmith, a polymath skilled as a photographer and a musician, took pictures of many of the period’s prominent rock stars, including the Rolling Stones, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, the Police, Talking Heads, and Prince. Some images are in vivid color, and others in black and white. Some were taken in unrecognizable, decontextualized spots; others were shot on rooftops in the heart of Manhattan, with New York City’s architecture providing the backdrop. All of them have the lush, analog softness of film, and, especially if viewed together as an entire collection, evoke a specific era in music and in the city.

Goldsmith’s prolific and historically significant output has deservedly been archived in various institutions. One of her images was also enshrined by Andy Warhol, who used a photograph she took of Prince as the basis for his illustrations of the musician. But at least in some legal and art circles, Goldsmith may end up being remembered not so much for her beautiful photographs, but for her legal dispute with the custodians of Andy Warhol’s art, which the Supreme Court will hear on October 12.

The dispute started when Goldsmith learned that her 1981 photograph of Prince, which she’d taken in a quick session in her New York studio, was the basis for Warhol’s illustrations of the rock star. In 2019, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Warhol’s image was protected by fair use. The appellate court reversed, principally on the grounds that Warhol’s image is not sufficiently transformative because it “retains the essential elements of its source material” and Goldsmith’s photograph “remains the recognizable foundation.” In other words, the original is too visibly baked into Warhol’s iteration.

To Goldsmith, the question is one of justice; her website describes her battle as a “crusade,” an impassioned effort to make sure that “copyright law does not become so diluted by the definition of fair use that visual artists lose the rights to their work.” If the Supreme Court agrees with her legal challenge, a doctrine that is central to our freedom of expression and cultural growth will be damaged and weakened, possibly for decades to come.

If you head over to Google Scholar, you’ll be greeted with an invitation to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” an old (as in medieval) homage to the trite but essential idea that art and science build on existing work. (Google presumably uses it because Newton referenced it in one of his letters.) If you’re a jazz musician, you channel a rich library of standards. If you’re an architect, you apply principles from earlier periods (or, in some tongue-in-cheek cases, other areas of culture). If you code, you leverage existing libraries. And so on. No one starts from scratch; no one creates in a vacuum: “A hundred times every day,” Einstein wrote, “I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead.”

But what if you’re barred from the building blocks that would allow you to create your project? What if you can’t access those original materials—say, a photograph of an emerging musician—because they’re copyrighted and, legally speaking, not free for the taking? If you live in the U.S., you have the option of contacting the owner and asking for permission. You may be ignored. You may receive permission. You may have to pay a license fee—if you can afford it (networks routinely charge thousands of dollars for short video clips, for example).

Or you could throw caution to the wind and exercise your fair-use rights, which allow you to use a reasonable amount of content without permission or payment.

The American doctrine of fair use isn’t as old as medieval clichés, but it’s respectably aged at nearly two centuries. (The English version, like a lot of English beer, is older but not necessarily better.) A paradigm example of fair use is an excerpt quoted in a scholarly work. In fact, that’s precisely what was at issue in the earliest American case, which was published in 1841 and concerned George Washington’s letters. Judge Joseph Story found the use infringing because of the sheer volume of letters that were copied, but the opinion also notes that “a reviewer may fairly cite largely from the original work, if his design be really and truly to use the passages for the purposes of fair and reasonable criticism,” and enumerates the fair-use principles that courts apply to this day—and not just to books and letters but to photographs, music, films, paintings, software, and other copyrightable content.

One of the favorite shibboleths among advocates of free expression is that ideas are as free as the air. By itself, though, that maxim leaves out the reason for its own importance. Ideas need to remain free, because ideas like to connect to other ideas. They like to find different media, different combinations, different modes of expression, different audiences. The invitation to stand on the shoulders of giants is literally built into stained glass at the Chartres Cathedral, making the glass itself an example of the kind of meld that happens when ideas remain free to join other bodies. To a large degree, fair use lets that happen by allowing not only ideas but their expressions to meld, too. It’s not just Warhol and Prince. Fair use is the doctrine that allows us to record broadcast materials, permits filmmakers to incorporate clips of existing materials into their projects, and makes it possible for Google to show thumbnails of images when we do a search. Without it, our cultural experience would be markedly different, and certainly not better.

Fair use, in short, is the legal mechanism through which pieces of copyrighted materials move from one work to another without the owner’s imprimatur; it’s how the legal system allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants when we don’t have the money to pay the enterprising copyright owner for the privilege. It’s the legal vaccine that protects the flow of creativity, high and low.

So why attack it, like Goldsmith is doing, especially if you yourself are an artist who understands the importance of creative freedom?

Disputes around the scope of fair use are essentially grounded in two conflicting views of copyright law. Copyright maximalists—those who advocate for an expansive, impermeable, and sometimes even perpetual copyright—believe copyright owners should be able to charge for virtually every use of their works, much like a car-rental company charges for every rental. Copyright reformers, in turn, see this approach as too extreme. Artists should be rewarded, of course, but the fundamental and constitutional purpose of copyright—“to promote the progress of science and useful arts”—is realized not only when the general public has access to copyrighted materials, but also when generous pieces of copyrighted material can be broken off and used by downstream adapters for their own creations. To frame it in First Amendment terms, more speech is better, and an aggressive and overweening copyright regime creates chilling effects that harm us all.

Prince himself appears to have been a copyright maximalist: He notoriously used copyright to scrub unwanted content from the internet, and Universal Music, presumably at his behest, even went so far as to demand that YouTube remove a clip of a child dancing to one of his songs in a homemade video (a dispute that ultimately generated precedent helpful to fair-use advocates). Warhol, in contrast, viewed existing content as source material for his own work, which, of course, is what he did with Goldsmith’s photograph. Whether he would sue someone to protect his own work is another question, but he certainly viewed others’ intellectual property as artistic ingredient.

Prince, for one, seemed most interested in controlling his image when he launched his digital cleanup initiative. Some artists want to control the integrity of their art and how it appears in public. And for a lot of people, the incentive is economic: Copyright owners want to control their content so they can capitalize on its value. In all cases, though, an expansive fair-use regime threatens to undermine the copyright owner’s control by allowing other people to use the copyrighted content without permission (and without profit). Whether for dignitary, artistic-integrity, or pecuniary reasons, copyright maximalists don’t want an assertive fair-use doctrine that undermines their control.

And because those who see copyright as merely property, rather than speech, effectively reduce creative output to its commercial value, it’s an odd historical twist that Warhol’s art is potentially a target of the very commodification it highlights.

Goldsmith’s argument falls in the maximalist camp and may generate externalized costs: Because everyone benefits from a robust fair-use doctrine, while vindicating her interests, Goldsmith may turn everyone else’s into collateral damage.

Warhol’s image transforms Prince from the vulnerable and uncomfortable three-dimensional person we see in Goldsmith’s photo into a floating, two-dimensional, disembodied face emerging from smooth, richly saturated color. The same faint sadness lingers in both images, but, aesthetically, the two are far apart. Warhol’s image isn’t a mere replica, in other words—it adds substantial expressive content that conceptually and aesthetically distinguishes it from Goldsmith’s image. The similarities that are there are, in turn, immaterial: They’re mostly the mere result of Prince looking like, well, Prince, rather than Goldsmith’s interpretation of him.

Even if the two images were the same, moreover, their meanings would still be different. Goldsmith’s image highlights Prince’s androgyny and vulnerability. Warhol’s underscores the cold commodification of cultural icons. New meaning is the touchstone of conceptual art—it’s why Duchamp’s urinal isn’t a urinal anymore—and the touchstone of a fair-use analysis, too: If the secondary user adds new meaning, the use is eligible for the fair-use exception. And of course Warhol has to invoke Prince—and the photo of Prince—if he wants to comment on both the musician and the way he’s portrayed in the media.

If I were to include the original photo in this article and comment on it, I’d add some new meaning to it, which (depending on what exactly I said) should qualify it for fair use. This is effectively what Warhol did by converting a portion of the original image into a drawing. Instead of adding meaning with text in an article, he added meaning visually on canvas. That kind of use should be protected.

The Supreme Court might not be persuaded. It might find another basis to rule against Warhol, or simply agree with the Second Circuit’s assessment. But any outcome in Goldsmith’s favor that dismisses the fair-use arguments would be culturally dangerous. Because the Supreme Court’s decision will generate a principle that will apply beyond this dispute, Goldsmith is attacking not just this particular use, but potentially all forms of art that rely on similar techniques. This decision will shape not only other courts’ thinking, but also that of content creators and, as a result, the content itself.

When the Supreme Court finds a particular use to be fair, it provides a safe framework for that genre of creativity, as, for instance, it did with parody in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., in 1994. Creators now feel confident in crafting parodies that use copyrighted materials: In 2001, for example, the Eleventh Circuit protected Alice Randall’s book parodying Gone With the Wind. But if the Court decides that a particular use is not fair, it will draw a punitive circle around other uses, too.

And any shrinkage in fair use creates chilling effects around the edges of the actual border. Content creators, especially independent ones who don’t have access to legal counsel, not only will abstain from doing the precise thing banned by the Court (e.g., drawing something based on a photo), but will also fear doing anything that approaches that particular use. In practice, it’s not just the specific use that will be attacked, but the entire class of similar uses.

Even relatively minor overzealous fair-use skirmishes can create undesirable outcomes. Netflix was recently sued because Tiger King used five seconds—yes, five seconds—of Ace Ventura 2 in one of its episodes (that dispute is ongoing). In the next iteration, will Netflix—or an independent filmmaker—decide to remove Hollywood content for fear of frivolous litigation? Will that cost us as audience members a giggle, a laugh, a small insight? What if 10 shows take out 10 clips, or 100 shows take out 100 clips? How many giggles, laughs, and insights will we lose? This is cultural death by a thousand cuts.

Consider instances that survived fair-use challenges: posters for Grateful Dead concerts in a book about the band’s history; the hilarious movie poster for Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, which parodied Annie Leibovitz’s famous photograph of Demi Moore; playing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in a documentary about the perception of religion in popular culture. Our cultural history is plainly richer as a result of these integrations, just as it’s richer with Warhol’s image in it.

The Goldsmith camp could argue that it’s not attacking the broader doctrine of fair use but merely a single use that isn’t fair in the first place. That argument would be persuasive if this kind of use had already been deemed outside the bounds of the doctrine. But it hasn’t been; indeed, that’s precisely the question. Goldsmith is asking the Court to banish this type of use, and, by virtue of that prohibition, to constrain the doctrine itself. The challenge is directed not only at these images or this particular type of use, in other words, but at the shape and structure of fair use itself—which, from the perspective of anyone who advocates for free and open expression, is an attack on fair use itself.

This process usually happens out of sight, in courtrooms, private settlements, studios, and edit rooms. When content creators remove elements because they worry about lawsuits, they cover up their tracks, and we don’t see the empty spaces left behind. We don’t know what we don’t see, so we don’t miss it. But a diminished fair use leads to diminished content and a diminished cultural experience. And, to quote Roger Waters, is this the life we really want?

Warhol’s image is not infringing; the district court got it right. Goldsmith has a valid reason to be frustrated—she, like all creators, deserves recognition for her work. But Goldsmith’s desire for legal vindication goes too far. It threatens to diminish a doctrine that gives essential breathing room to creative expression. That’s an incongruous step given that, elsewhere on her website biography, Goldsmith says: “Creativity is based on breaking limiting thought patterns, busting through fear, taking risks.” The Court ought to fortify fair use precisely because the doctrine creates protected space for those risks, and allows creative risk-takers—and our culture—to thrive.

Paul Szynol is a media attorney, filmmaker, and professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...prince/671599/





Backing Lindt, Swiss Court Orders Lidl to ‘Destroy’ Its Chocolate Bunnies

With Easter still far away, there are none to melt down. But the decision opened a door on the bunny-eat-bunny world of European chocolatiers.
Michael Levenson

The face-off pitted two chocolate bunnies against one another and only one, it seemed, could survive.

In one corner was the chocolate bunny wrapped in gold foil and made by the German discount retailer Lidl. In the other corner was the chocolate bunny, also wrapped in gold foil, but made by the venerable Swiss chocolatier Lindt and Sprüngli.

After a yearslong legal battle, the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland sided with Lindt and found that Lidl’s chocolate bunnies could be confused with Lindt’s chocolate bunnies, which are protected under Swiss trademark law.

As a result, the court decreed that Lidl can no longer sell its bunnies in Switzerland and “must destroy” the chocolate bunnies it still has in stock, according to a statement from the court.

The ruling was a victory for Lindt’s confectionary hares in a country internationally known for its premium chocolates. It raised questions about whether Lidl’s banned bunnies could be melted down and formed into less offensive shapes.

The court’s statement seemed to suggest the bunnies could be melted and reused, saying that while Lidl had to destroy its bunnies, “this does not necessarily mean that the chocolate as such has to be destroyed.”

Lidl said in a statement that no bunnies would have to be discarded.

“The chocolate bunny in question is a seasonal item, which is why we currently have no stocks in Switzerland that need to be destroyed,” Lidl’s statement said.

Christoph Gasser, a lawyer for Lidl, said that the Supreme Court had returned the case to a lower court for further review, in particular to evaluate whether Lindt may be entitled to monetary compensation.

“In essence, it appears as if the Swiss Federal Supreme Court had adopted a result-oriented approach in its legal reasoning, trying to protect Lindt’s Easter bunny, despite some significant departures from prior case law,” he wrote in an email. “While we accept the Swiss Federal Supreme Court’s decision, we feel that it has done a disservice to Swiss intellectual property law.”

Lindt praised the ruling, saying it would safeguard its “Gold Bunny,” which it has been making since 1952.

“The ruling of the federal court is of great importance for the protection of the Lindt Gold Bunny on the Swiss market,” the company said in a statement. “It will help to further protect the iconic form of the Lindt Gold Bunny against dilution from unauthorized copies and will likely serve as a precedent also in other jurisdictions.”

Lindt’s zeal in protecting its chocolate bunny was not a surprise, said Jonathan Drucker, a former general counsel at the Belgian chocolate maker Godiva, who called Lindt “an 800-pound gorilla in the chocolate industry.”

At Godiva, he said, “we were always very cognizant of what their chocolate bunnies look like and what protections they had.”

“Lindt is very, very aggressive as far as trying to stop other competitors from quote-unquote infringing on their trademark and their product, and they’ve been very, very particular about their Easter bunny, which they claim to have ironclad protection for,” he said.

Lindt calls its chocolate bunnies “one of the most famous Lindt chocolate products” and an “iconic Easter fixture.”

“Today, more than 160 million Lindt Gold Bunnies are hopping around the world per year,” the company says on its website, adding that if all the Lindt chocolate bunnies sold annually were lined up, they would stretch from the company’s headquarters in Kilchberg, Switzerland, to San Diego, Calif.

The battle of the bunnies began in 2017, Mr. Gasser said, when Lindt first went to court to stop Lidl from selling its chocolate bunnies wrapped in gold foil (or any other color foil).

The Lidl bunny, like the Lindt bunny, is a compact rabbit, squatting on all four paws. But its facial and paw markings are different from those on the Lindt bunny, according to photos provided by Mr. Gasser. The Lindt bunny also sports a red ribbon and bell while the Lidl bunny has a yellow or green ribbon and bell, the photos show.

In determining whether Lidl infringed Lindt’s trademark rights with its chocolate bunnies, the Supreme Court examined whether such shapes are protected under trademark law. Such is the case when brands became established in the market, the court’s statement said.

Based on the results of opinion polls submitted by Lindt, the court found that Lindt’s chocolate bunnies are well known in Switzerland, and therefore established in the market.

The court also examined whether there was a likelihood of confusion because of the similarities between the two bunnies. It concluded that such a risk existed, even though the products have certain differences.

“Given the overall impression, Lidl’s rabbits have clear associations with the shape of Lindt’s rabbit,” the court’s statement said. “In the public’s mind, they are indistinguishable.”

Mr. Gasser indicated that the ruling would not deter Lidl from making chocolate rabbits. He said the look of its chocolate bunnies changes “almost every year” and it was his understanding that Lidl would make bunnies again next Easter.

“Everything else is subject to internal reflections,” he wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/b...e-bunnies.html





Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a Supreme Court Brief.

“Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government?” the satirical website asked in a friend-of-the-court brief filed Monday. “This was a surprise to America’s Finest News Source.”
Eduardo Medina

A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday.

“Americans can be put in jail for poking fun at the government?” the brief asked. “This was a surprise to America’s Finest News Source and an uncomfortable learning experience for its editorial team.”

The source is, of course, The Onion.

Or, as the satirical website described itself in the brief, “the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.”

The Parma, Ohio, area man in question, Anthony Novak, spent four days in jail over a Facebook page he created in 2016 that mocked his local police department. He was prosecuted, and a jury found him not guilty.

Mr. Novak says his civil rights were violated, and he is trying to sue the city for damages. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit earlier this year, saying that the police had qualified immunity, and an appeals court upheld that decision. Now the high court is reviewing his request to take up the matter.

One of Mr. Novak’s lawyers, Patrick Jaicomo, said in an interview Monday that last month he contacted Jordan LaFlure, the managing editor of The Onion, which is based in Chicago, to make him aware of the case and see if he would be interested in helping raise attention.

“They heard the story, and they were like, ‘Oh my god, this is something that could really put all of our people in the cross hairs if we rub someone the wrong way with one of our stories,’” Mr. Jaicomo said.

A race to the right. After a series of judicial bombshells in June that included eliminating the right to abortion, a Supreme Court dominated by conservatives returns to the bench — and there are few signs that the court’s rightward shift is slowing. Here’s a closer look at the new term:

Legitimacy concerns swirl. The court’s aggressive approach has led its approval ratings to plummet. In a recent Gallup poll, 58 percent of Americans said they disapproved of the job the Supreme Court was doing. Such findings seem to have prompted several justices to discuss whether the court’s legitimacy was in peril in recent public appearances.

Affirmative action. The marquee cases of the new term are challenges to the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. While the court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs, a six-justice conservative supermajority may put more than 40 years of precedents at risk.

Voting rights. The role race may play in government decision-making also figures in a case that is a challenge under the Voting Rights Act to an Alabama electoral map that a lower court had said diluted the power of Black voters. The case is a major new test of the Voting Rights Act in a court that has gradually limited the law’s reach in other contexts.

Election laws. The court will hear arguments in a case that could radically reshape how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures independent power, not subject to review by state courts, to set election rules in conflict with state constitutions. In a rare plea, state chief justices urged the court to reject that approach.

Discrimination against gay couples. The justices will hear an appeal from a web designer who objects to providing services for same-sex marriages in a case that pits claims of religious freedom against laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation. The court last considered the issue in 2018 in a similar dispute, but failed to yield a definitive ruling.

In a filing that read in places like one of its articles, The Onion laid out why it believes the authorities in Ohio had acted unconstitutionally, sprinkling in sincere arguments in defense of parody while riddling the rest of the text with moments of jest and hubris — claiming, for example, a readership of 4.3 trillion, and also boasting that it “owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes.”

Chapter headings included: “Parody Functions By Tricking People Into Thinking That It Is Real” and “It Should Be Obvious That Parodists Cannot Be Prosecuted For Telling A Joke With A Straight Face.”

In page 15 of its 18-page filing, the brief accepted that “the reader’s attention is almost certainly wandering.”

“So here is a paragraph of gripping legal analysis to ensure that every jurist who reads this brief is appropriately impressed by the logic of its argument and the lucidity of its prose,” it says, before dishing out a series of phrases it said was for the “Latin dorks” in the federal judiciary: “Bona vacantia. De bonis asportatis. Writ of certiorari.”

Mr. Novak’s fake Facebook page for the police department was modeled after the real page, but it contained a satirical slogan: “We no crime.”

One post, according to The Onion, claimed that the department would ban city residents from feeding homeless people in “an attempt to have the homeless population eventually leave our City due to starvation.” Other posts joked about abortion and pedophilia. (The Onion argued that the “quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant.”)

The police, as well as some residents who called them to complain about the site, did not find the page funny, Mr. Jaicomo said.

A lawyer representing Parma, Richard Rezie, did not immediately respond to a call seeking comment on Monday.

Mr. Jaicomo said he was grateful for The Onion’s backing. He said the brief was telling the court: Parody is important, and we’re going to use parody to make that point.

“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks,” the brief said.

It pointed to The Onion’s history of blatantly ridiculous headlines: “Fall Canceled After 3 Billion Seasons.” “Children, Creepy Middle-Aged Weirdos Swept Up in Harry Potter Craze.” “Kitten Thinks of Nothing but Murder All Day.” A footnote reads “See Mar-a-Lago Assistant Manager Wondering if Anyone Coming to Collect Nuclear Briefcase from Lost and Found, The Onion, Mar. 27, 2017.”

Sometimes, of course, discerning which headlines are parody is not always easy. It has become customary for people on social media to attach the disclaimer #NotTheOnion when a news item seems too strange to be true. (“Indeed, ‘Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook’ might sound like a headline ripped from the front pages of The Onion,” the brief said.)

To prepare the filing, The Onion worked with lawyers in Grand Rapids, Mich., who had previously worked with Mr. Jaicomo.

One of those lawyers, D. Andrew Portinga, said Monday that writers at The Onion had helped his team flesh out the text and legal citations with quips.

“One of the points they wanted to make is that if you’re a comedy writer, you can’t tell people you’re going to tell them a joke before you tell them a joke,” Mr. Portinga said.

The brief also noted that the case posed a threat to The Onion’s business model.

“This was only the latest occasion on which the absurdity of actual events managed to eclipse what The Onion’s staff could make up,” it said. “Much more of this, and the front page of The Onion would be indistinguishable from The New York Times.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/u...eme-court.html





Whole Lotta Zeros: Apple Music Crosses 100M Song Barrier
Mark Kennedy

Apple Music is about to cross a huge milestone, offering its eye-and-ear-popping 100 millionth song on the streaming service.

The music giant tells The Associated Press that internal data indicates Apple Music will reach the heady mark on Monday. Every day, 20,000 singers and songwriters release music on the service.

“It’s a huge, huge number,” Rachel Newman, Apple’s global head of editorial and content, told the AP. “It really is possible to create music and record it and release it more than ever before in the history of music, which we think is pretty incredible.”

Apple Music says the milestone cements it as the world’s largest catalog of music, more than YouTube Music’s 80 million songs, Spotify’s 82 million tracks and podcasts, and Amazon Music’s 90 million songs.

While the actual song that brings Apple Music across the threshold won’t be known, there’s a good chance it will not originate from the U.S. or even be in English as the service sees more and more music arrive from all over the world.

When iTunes was launched, the service had music in 200 languages and dialects, with half of the content in English. Now, 40% of Apple Music’s offerings are in English and the number of languages and dialects are up to 350. The platform’s top charts — once the domain of the U.S., U.K, Canada and Australia — are now populated by tunes from Japan, Colombia, Ghana, Nigeria and South Korea.

The milestone has been fast approaching as the globe gets more digitalized. The number of Apple Music songs has doubled in the last four years, from 50 million in 2018, with the pandemic believed to have accelerated the timetable as people in isolation looked for creative outlets.

The 100 millionth song could perhaps come from an artist as yet unknown, Apple Music added.

Apple Inc. started iTunes in 2003 with 200,000 songs feeding its iPods and launched Apple Music seven years ago — now feeding iPhones — with subscribers in 167 countries and regions.

It also says its customers are not just listening to whatever’s new; they’re exploring back catalogues of artists. In 2015, when Apple Music launched, the top 1,000 songs made up 20% of the plays. Now they make up 10%. The average song’s release date is from March 7, 2017, a number pulled down by listeners going back in time.

The music streamer is celebrating the milestone by launching on Monday a new editorial series called Apple Music Today. The streamer’s editorial team tells the story behind one new or old song — now with 100 million to choose from each time.

“We believe that it’s both an opportunity for us to help all of our subscribers connect to music that they may have forgotten about or not know about,” Newman said. “And, also importantly, finding a new platform for storytelling. We believe that’s one of the things that we’re doing to preserve the artistry in music.”
https://apnews.com/article/apple-mus...0eb756219eb4ec





Warner Bros. Discovery Maniacally Slashes all Programming Until Only a Naked Matt Smith Remains
Elizabeth Yoon

Editor’s Note: A Daily staffer is affiliated with Warner Bros., but they were not involved in the creation, production or publication of this piece.

On April 8, 2022, 153 days before the British Queen Regnant Elizabeth II’s death, AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Discovery combined and became Warner Bros. Discovery. As a consequence of the merger, Warner Bros. Discovery arranged a marriage between its streaming counterparts HBO Max — the illustrious home of Matt Smith’s rear filmed in cinematic 2:1 aspect ratio — and Discovery Plus, a ruthless unscripted cable TV swamp. However, the company shake-up has been dogged by controversy, internal leaks and disappointing cancellations. In an absurdly short period of time, the media company cornered its contracted artists into considering pirating their own work and became the latest battleground in a larger conversation regarding artists, ownership of art and corporatism.

No, all is not well with Warner Bros. Discovery.

Newly instated CEO David Zaslav cut his TV executive teeth on unscripted reality television like “90 Day Fiancé” and had a meteoric rise, uniting his much smaller Discovery Group with the gigantic WarnerMedia. Perhaps conscious of his unscripted reality TV pedigree, Zaslav initially attempted to create a narrative of himself as pro-artist and pro-creative. His recent profile in the Wall Street Journal includes quotes from Zaslav’s corporate peers testifying to his financial sensibility and support for artists. The exclusion of artists working with HBO Max and Discovery Plus alludes to Zaslav’s priorities. Namely: a $55 billion debt Zaslav inherited after the company merger.

In an opening salvo to defray the debt, Zaslav laid off 14% of company staff, the majority being HBO alums. That decision led to former executives accusing Zaslav of being anti-diversity, given the composition of the company’s leadership and the demographic of employees fired. But the round of layoffs was only one prong of many myopic cost-saving changes.

August 2022 was an emotionally crushing period for staff and creative teams working at Warner Bros. Discovery. Without any notice or communication, Zaslav began axing programming, secretly removing content from streaming services and deleting social media posts.

Most prominent among those revenue-driven decisions is the shelving of HBO’s nearly finished $90 million dollar Batgirl film. Variety reports that Zaslav did not believe the film would recoup production and advertising costs and made an unprecedented decision to bury the movie to claim a tax break. Effectively, if a company declares that it will stop profiting off of a piece of media, it can claim a tax break for its associated costs. To clarify, HBO had already invested roughly $90 million into a nearly complete product; fans and actors were excited about its release. Warner Bros. Discovery is not soft-releasing its product or sending it straight to streaming to save on advertising. Like a horrible remix of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” HBO has a fully filmed, exciting project that they’re burying alive.

Unless we are very, very lucky, “Batgirl,” starring Leslie Grace (“In the Heights”), will never see the light of day.

Batgirl’s directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, found out about their cancellation through the news cycle. In vain, they tried to pirate their own movie as a keepsake of the film. But the directors were circumvented and were locked out of the film’s servers. In what would become a pattern, El Arbi and Fallah released a video over Instagram Reels detailing their sense of betrayal and the scope of Warner Bros. Discovery’s lack of communication. At the end of the video, they encourage fans to watch their upcoming film “Rebel” to imagine what their “Batgirl” could have been.

But “Batgirl” is only one example of many. Overnight, fans found that their favorite shows vanished from HBO Max’s catalog and were unavailable elsewhere. Cartoon programming was unceremoniously shelved, causing a sharp outcry from fans. Animators from visually stunning and narratively ambitious projects in development, like “Driftwood” and “Bye Bye Bunny: A Looney Tunes Musical” were held in suspense for days, uncertain if their projects would move forward. Those animators are now looking for work.

To further the confusion, content related to the removed cartoon programming was deleted from HBOMax, Cartoon Network, HBOMax and Cartoon Network’s Twitter and YouTube accounts. Julia Pott, the creator of the popular cartoon “Summer Island Camp,” has a Twitter page eerily absent of prior statements and posts. She retweeted a post from Cartoon Network a week prior to the media purge, and now her retweet nestles in a gray box that says the content is no longer available. Fans are crowd-sourcing piracy links and taking stock of what was deleted.

Amidst the chaos, Pott took to Twitter to express her frustration and explain the situation to panicked fans. Similarly, Owen Dennis, the creator of “Infinity Train,” lauded for its innovative soundtrack and animation, updated fans in his Substack newsletter. In his letter, he notes that the disapproval is not limited to the creative teams and fans blindsided by the scrubbing. Dennis writes that “Cartoon Network warned (the company) not to do this as it would hurt relationships with creators and talent, but they clearly do not care what any of this looks like publicly, much less about how we feel about it.”

Quite aptly, John Oliver, host of an HBO talk show, commented during one of his television segments that “I do get the vague sense that (Warner Bros. Discovery is) burning down my network for the insurance money.”

And Oliver got it exactly right. At the heart of the bizarre, convoluted and ongoing story that is the WarnerMedia and Discovery Group merger is a financial policy that prioritizes marginal financial gains over arts and culture.

The mildest outrage involved in the merger is the leaked, sexist diagram from the company’s quarterly meeting where the company outlined the benefits of the HBO Max/Discovery Plus betrothal. According to them, HBO attracts male-oriented “fandom” while Discovery attracts female “genredom” — a term as bland as it is condescending and inaccurate. But the corporation’s sexist material reveals the scope of its ignorance. HBO as a streaming service has a responsibility to more entities than big-budget “House of the Dragon” and the “Harry Potter” movie collection. Warner Bros. Discovery made a miscalculation when it started burning bridges. In approaching TV shows and movies like sinking and rising stocks, the newly conjoined company bumbled onto an existential landmine.

Can corporations be responsible stewards of art and popular culture?

The response as of September 2022 is a resounding “no” from creatives and consumers.

“What is the point of making something, spending years working on it, putting in nights and weekends doing their terrible notes, losing sleep and not seeing our families, if it’s just going to be taken away and shot in the backyard? It’s so incredibly discouraging, and they’re definitely not going to be getting their best work out of whoever decides to stay. We’re working at the intersection of art and commerce, but the people in charge have clearly forgotten that they’ll have no commerce without the art,” writes Dennis in his Aug. 20 Substack letter.

From Zaslav’s Financial Times profile published in May, a peer offers a now haunting commentary on Zaslav’s Warner Bros. Discovery merger leadership: “a load of people in Hollywood are in shock that someone who is as gauche as (Zaslav) gets to run away with the crown jewels.”

Rest in Peace to all the Warner Bros. Discovery programs canceled or removed.
https://www.michigandaily.com/arts/b...smith-remains/





HBO, Discovery+ Merger Brings cuts to Animated Content
Ezra Brown

Late last month, animators with thought-to-be steady jobs were met with an online, public announcement that their shows had been canceled. HBO Max announced it would no longer be hosting a number of programs on its platform, the result of merging HBO Max and Discovery+ into one streaming conglomerate. The Warner Bros. and HBO Max merger is reportedly $55 billion in debt; canceling these shows, along with the recent heavy staff layoffs at HBO Max, would go toward saving costs, though there has been no official statement from Warner Bros. regarding their reasoning.

That list of canceled shows included Warner Bros.- and Discovery-owned content originally broadcast on cable, as well as cartoons specifically created for the platform. Many of these shows were animated. The rest of the list included mostly media directed at children, like 200 episodes of Sesame Street. When speaking to CNN, Julia Alexander, director of strategy at Parrot Analytics, explained that HBO Max was leaning away from children’s content and instead focusing on their adult programs. This is just the latest in a long line of blows to the animation industry, showing time and time again that, in the opinion of the artists, broadcasting companies do not care about them.

The shows were pulled at varying stages of production. Infinity Train was dropped after the completion of its entire run, Summer Camp Island while new episodes were still airing on Cartoon Network and J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves’s Batman: The Caped Crusader while it was far along in production. Going a step further, some shows’ entire online presences were wiped, including the aforementioned Infinity Train, as well as Mao Mao: Heroes Pure of Heart. All of their official YouTube videos and tweets were deleted without warning.

Creators were understandably upset, not only with the HBO Max announcement but also with its abruptness. Summer Camp Island creator Julia Pott tweeted, “37 teams of artists … found out online that their shows were being stripped from HBO MAX and for some, episodes we worked on for two years during a pandemic would never be released. @discoveryplus has no respect for artists.” Pott’s tweet claims that artists were not informed of potentially losing their jobs until the wide public announcement.

While the mere cancellation is devastating to the many artists working on these shows, it also emphasizes an issue concerning the entire digital entertainment industry: Without physical media, how can you guarantee that your show will remain accessible? How can you be certain that your creation will still be on that online platform for years or decades to come?

As of now, animation culture has come to rely on pirating as a digital archive. Even creators themselves pirate. Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, tweeted a screenshot of the show with a pirating website’s watermark in the corner. She confirmed this in a now-deleted tweet, adding, “I don’t have cable either.” Levon Jihanian, art director, commented on this subject, tweeting in reference to the deletion of his show, Tig N’ Seek, “Like, yeah. I can go on a pirate streaming web site to watch episodes, but my kids can’t. I made this for them.”

Despite its history of critical acclaim and the success of companies like Disney, animation continues to be treated as a low form of art, entertainment solely for children. And while this is not the case, the current state of entertainment certainly groups animation and children together. Regardless, the art form is at risk of falling to the wayside in the streaming era, leaving audiences to wonder what genre is up next on the chopping block.
https://kenyoncollegian.com/arts/202...mated-content/





Spotify's Latest Acquisition is a Company that Detects Harmful Content in Podcasts

It says Kinzen will help 'identify emerging threats on the platform' across many languages.
Kris Holt

Spotify has bought a company it says will help it detect and address harmful content on the platform. Kinzen uses machine learning and human expertise to analyze possibly harmful content and hate speech across multiple languages, Spotify said in a statement. It added that Kinzen will "help us more effectively deliver a safe, enjoyable experience on our platform around the world" and that the company's tech is especially suited to podcasts and other audio formats.

Looking for signs of harmful audio content across hundreds of languages is a difficult task, particularly since there may be nuances that certain systems and non-native speakers may not pick up on. As such, Spotify says Kinzen will help it to "better understand the abuse landscape and identify emerging threats on the platform."

The two companies have actually been working together since 2020, with the aim of preventing misinformation in election-related content. They forged their partnership before Joe Rogan started spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on his Spotify-exclusive show, which is said to be the most-listened-to podcast on the planet.

There was a significant backlash against Rogan and Spotify earlier this year. Hundreds of doctors and scientists urged Spotify to enact a policy to stem the spread of misinformation. Weeks later, Spotify started adding a content advisory to podcast episodes that included discussions about COVID-19 and made its content guidelines public.

Several prominent artists pulled their music from Spotify in protest against Rogan, including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. The host and editor of Spotify-owned podcast Science VS also pledged to stop making episodes (except ones in which it fact-checked Rogan and countered misinformation on the platform) unless the company did more to stem the flow of harmful falsehoods.

It may be the case that Spotify sees employing Kinzen's tech as a means to help it avoid similar PR catastrophes in the future. However, it's unclear how effective it will be in preventing the spread of misinformation. Were harmful content to be featured on a popular podcast, it may gain traction on social media and in press coverage before Spotify can act. Still, at least it's trying to do more to stamp out misinformation.
https://www.engadget.com/apple-music...175703163.html





Is Streaming Fragmentation Reviving Piracy?
David Satin

Have you found yourself sailing the troubled waters of streaming video piracy lately? If so, you’re definitely not alone.

Piracy is eating into the bottom lines of companies like Netflix, and the problem is getting worse. According to piracy tracking company Muso, as reported by Torrent Freak, Netflix content makes up 16% of all global pirated content. Pirating movies and shows declined as Netflix launched and became the dominant hub for all streaming content and the most compelling titles were all available to stream legally at a reasonable price.

But, the fragmentation of streaming services is leading to a revival in piracy. As the content that people want to watch is distributed across more and more services, the price to maintain access to all of the in-demand titles is climbing. That is leaving some feeling that the financial burden is too high to justify maintaining a large number of streaming subscriptions, and more and more of these customers are turning to less than legal ways to obtain the content.

According to a recent survey from Horowitz Research, as reported by MediaPost, 40% of U.S. adults admit that they pirate video content by using a “jailbroken” set-top box, visiting a pirating website, or via peer-to-peer BitTorrenting.

Twenty-three percent of respondents also said that they thought piracy was “OK,” a jump from 14% in 2019, when the streaming market was less saturated, according to MediaPost’s reporting of Parks Associates data.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the data shows that lower-income households were actually less likely to pirate content than they were to share passwords, which is legal but frowned upon by streaming companies. Netflix is exploring ways to crack down on password sharing after it reported earlier this year that 100 million people use the service via an account paid for by someone outside of their home.

But the new data may make companies like Netflix revise their plan for password sharing. After all, if the other alternative is simply having their content stolen, streamers may feel it’s better to at least have SOMEONE paying for it.

Services could also think about cracking down harder on piracy, but that’s a risky proposition. Media companies are rightly or wrongly seen as some of the richest corporations in the world. A harsh campaign to prosecute people who pirate content is likely to be a public relations nightmare for any company that attempts it.

Aggregation could be a helpful path forward for streamers looking to avoid piracy, especially if they can bundle services at a lower price point.

“With an increasingly fragmented content landscape as content owners [license to] direct-to-consumer services, piracy is soaring,” Sebastian Kramer, SVP for digital TV company NAGRA, said according to MediaPost. “Ultimately, consumers are looking for content, so we all need to focus on the best, aggregated approaches to allow this to happen.”

Rebundling and consolidation will likely be a major part of the future of streaming, but it will take time to put this particular genie back in the bottle, so expect the trend of increasing piracy to continue. But media companies are noticing, and consumers who engage in piracy shouldn’t be surprised if they’re made to walk the plank for such behavior in the future.
https://thestreamable.com/news/is-st...eviving-piracy





Recording the Grateful Dead: The Culture of Tapers

Mark A. Rodriguez’s ‘After All is Said and Done’ explores a chapter of Grateful Dead history embedded in the band’s narrative
Bill Kopp

Deadheads didn’t invent taping concerts. As Clinton Heylin chronicles in his exhaustive 1994 book, Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, people have been making unauthorized recordings of live music since the dawn of recording technology. Using crude wax cylinder recording devices, audience members were “bootlegging” live opera performances as early as 1901.

But fans of the Grateful Dead took the practice to a new and previously unimagined level in their documentation of the group’s concert history. At first, concert tapers had to be sneaky, but by late in the Dead’s historical arc, they were acting with the tacit approval of the band.

Now, Mark A. Rodriguez has brought together the various components of this underground tradition in his new book, After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead 1965-1995. A massive tome–nearly LP-sized, more than an inch thick and weighing in at close to four pounds–Rodriguez’s book represents 12 years of dedicated and exhaustive research. A breathtakingly impressive work, After All is Said and Done represents the kind of creative fanaticism that could only come from a Deadhead.

Loving Sculpture

The casual observer might look at the hefty, pale-yellow hardbound volume and see a book. But Rodriguez prefers to think of it as merely one of several physical manifestations that make up the project.

“I work conceptually on a project-by-project basis with many different materials,” Rodriguez explains. Those materials, he says, can involve “anything related to three-dimensional space.” And he considers the work to possess a performative dimension. Rodriguez says that his decade-plus focus on the project “involved a lot of relating to people socially to collect tapes, to discuss tapes and to get certain information.”

The tapes themselves are at the heart of Rodriguez’s project. As Stuart Krimko asserts in one of the book’s many essays, Rodriguez “was struck with the Sisyphean impulse, perhaps familiar to many completist Deadheads, to acquire a copy of a tape of every show the band ever played.” Most estimates place that number somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand recordings. Nobody knows for sure.

And as Krimko explains, since Rodriguez was already “an active artist with a conceptual bent, it wouldn’t be a mischaracterization to call the idea itself an artistic proposition.” And that’s precisely what the author of After All is Said and Done proceeds to do.

Rodriguez characterizes the result of acquiring, organizing and archiving his collection of live Dead tapes as “what technically might be called a relief sculpture with an additive process.” By way of explanation, he points to several images near the beginning of After All is Said and Done which document his collection. To the rest of us, those photos look like huge, wall-mounted shelving units filled with thousands upon thousands of cassette tapes, each meticulously labeled, and all placed carefully in chronological order. To Rodriguez, they’re documentation of the art project he’s shaped.

There’s also the music, of course: magnetic tape capturing audio documents of the Grateful Dead onstage in all their often-erratic, sometimes transcendent glory. But the history as compiled and archived by Rodriguez also emphasizes the project’s visual aspects. These visuals are not, except in a few rare cases, photos of the band. More than 150 pages of After All is Said and Done are filled with color photos of cassette j-cards–the paper sheets upon which loyal Deadheads have inscribed not only the set lists (with plenty of “>”’s to denote those occasions when one piece of music tumbles imperceptibly into the next), but also hand-drawn artwork, fancy lettering and additional annotation.

Often the j-cards contain information relating to the tape’s generation (meaning the number of analog copies between the source tape and the one in hand) and the occasional personal note (e.g. “My favorite #1 show of old-school Dead,” written on the j-card for a 1977 show at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium).

When photos of band members are included on the cards, as often as not they’re of Deadhead main man Jerry Garcia, hunched over one of his distinctive electric guitars, perhaps outfitted in some bright red knee-length shorts. Bobby Weir shows up now and again, but far more common are meticulously drawn human skulls–lots of skulls–and roses and dancing bears, plus co-opted images from pop culture (Mickey Mouse, Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County etc.). Taken together, these j-cards represent both the crowd-sourced character of the entire taper enterprise, and its fundamentally communitarian character.

Yes and No

Rodriguez made sure to maintain an open mind while researching for the book, but he admits that he began with at least a vague thesis. “I was trying to figure out if the members of the Grateful Dead intentionally sought to reinforce that taping was good,” he says.

The answer to that question remains a bit vague. Even now Rodriguez wonders: “Was the taping phenomenon such a part of myth-making that it became a legacy? Or did [the Dead] not really have any control over it?”

While the Grateful Dead organization was involved in the project to the extent of allowing reproduction of specific images, no former members of the band were among Rodriguez’s list of interviewees. So he’s left to draw conclusions based on interviews with some of those who were around the band, and fellow expert Deadheads.

Rodriguez emphasizes that Grateful Dead Productions was cooperative, and he’s appreciative. Because of the multiple levels of red tape and multiple entities who had to sign off, it sometimes took him years to get clearance to include a particular image or document. Cases of flat-out “no” were rare—but there was one. After All is Said and Done includes photos of the San Rafael tape vault, and another in Nevada. Rodriguez hoped to include a photo showing the Grateful Dead tape vault that exists at Warner Brothers Records, the group’s label from the beginning to 1973. When he asked, the answer was a “hard and fast ‘no.’” So he decided that the next best thing would be to include a reproduction of the “no” email from Warners.

“I got shut down on that, too,” Rodriguez says with a wry laugh.

The Next Best Thing

Remarkably, Rodriguez never witnessed the Grateful Dead live on stage. “I was in elementary school when they performed last,” he admits. But he has frequently attended shows by the myriad post-Dead mutation –“Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog and all that,” as he puts it–beginning in the 1990s. So for him, the tapes also serve as a way to reacquire that you-are-there vibe in the present day.

But for this expansive project, Rodriguez went straight to the source. Days before the pandemic-spawned global shutdown, he visited the official Grateful Dead Archive at UCSC. He sought to connect with the archivists and librarians there, hoping to gain access to “the documents that specifically lent themselves to the start of the official tapers section in 1984.”

He succeeded on that score, and the visit helped chart the project’s subsequent path. Rodriguez interviewed key figures connected to the Dead’s taped legacy, including Dave Lemieux, the Dead’s current archivist. He also spoke with archivist David Ganz, who was “kind of confused [as to] why I was interviewing him,” says Rodriguez with a chuckle.

Each interview and review of documents felt like a step forward on Rodriguez’s journey of discovery. “I took what I learned from someone–maybe based off documents I found from the archives–then found the line that would connect me to the next person,” he says. “It was an organic process, a weird detective thing. Kind of like forensics, in a way.”

The reader of After All is Said and Done experiences the journey in similar fashion. “For the most part, all the interviews are laid out chronologically as I [conducted] them,” Rodriguez says.

While there’s a kind of linear flow to the book, Rodriguez is keenly aware of the spontaneous, free-flow mindset that is often brought to all things Dead. “I wanted the book to be this experience where you could open it to a page, maybe half-complete it, and still come away with some curiosity,” he says. “Even though you might not understand the total context.”

Some of the documents that Rodriguez uncovered are reproduced in the pages of After All is Said and Done. Readers may experience a bit of cognitive dissonance upon reading the typewritten minutes of a meeting (dated July 11, 1984) at which the attendees included “M. Hart, P. Lesh, B. Weir, R. Hunter, J. Garcia, Ram Rod” and two dozen others. Business meetings aren’t the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of the Grateful Dead, but such documents help explain the band’s collective attitude toward fan taping, and the ways in which the Dead organization’s perspective on the phenomenon changed over time.

Complete As Can Be

It’s not as if Rodriguez is any kind of a newcomer to the Grateful Dead and their work. “I’ve been researching the Grateful Dead in whatever capacity I could since I was 14,” says the 40-year-old author. And while images provide much of After All is Said and Done’s appeal, it’s much more than a picture book for the Deadhead’s coffee table. It’s filled with informative essays that round out the taper experience/phenomenon from most every angle.

“I wanted to add information that either wasn’t compiled in a succinct kind of way, or provide information that maybe didn’t exist before,” he says, noting that doing so posed a challenge. “That’s kind of a hard thing to do with the Grateful Dead,” he admits, “because so much information is out there.”

Still, there are holes in the larger narrative, especially when it comes to the band’s live onstage legacy. “The ’60s portion of their career is not as heavily documented,” Rodriguez explains. “There’s not nearly as much Pigpen-era material out there.” The Grateful Dead’s original keyboardist, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, was a founding member who was with the group through mid-1972.

Even the official Grateful Dead vault is ostensibly complete only from 1971 onward, Rodriguez says. Still, he holds out hope that there remain gems yet to be discovered. “There’s probably reel-to-reel tape that’s mislabeled or that can’t be identified,” he suggests. But nearly as quickly, he tamps down expectations. “Those are [probably] partial recordings, and the quality of tape is probably terrible.”

For all of his extensive efforts, even Rodriguez has yet to compile an exhaustive archive of Grateful Dead recordings. “I’m still 160 or so tapes away from completing the whole collection of recordings between 1965 and 1995 that are on tape,” he admits.

The live tapes documenting points on the Grateful Dead’s arc can be enjoyed and appreciated on multiple levels; After All is Said in Done is evidence of that. The music and the homemade physical packaging that accompanies the tapes are both substantial parts of the experience. Unsurprisingly, Rodriguez takes things beyond all that. These days he tends to focus on the quality of the recordings.

“I appreciate the music,” he emphasizes. “But I appreciate the method of recording, and the existence of the actual tape that I’m listening to at any particular time.” He feels there’s often something special captured on audience tapes, a quality that more polished and professionally created recordings can lack.

“Sometimes, if it’s a soundboard, I’m like, ‘Eh, this is boring,’” he admits. “Because the sound is so boring.” He believes that a tape made by an audience member can provide “an image of the concert [itself].” One can hear ambient noises–talking, applause–“but you’re still not being taken away from the sound generated from the band,” he says.

Taken as a whole, and in sequence, Rodriguez says that Grateful Dead live tapes are also a kind of history of the evolution of recording technology. He points specifically to early ’70s FOB (“front of board”) tapes as “amazing feats of strength” by those who made them.

“They made quality recordings with limited technology,” he says.

By the Dead’s later years, there was a “taper’s section” at concerts. Rodriguez explains that the designated area arose not so much to accommodate tapers, but to move them away from other concertgoers who were there simply to enjoy the experience. “The tapers’ section steered the annoyance that was the tapers into their own area so [the Dead’s crew] didn’t have to worry about them anymore,” Rodriguez says.

Even a hardcore Grateful Dead tape collector like Rodriguez has his limits. Collectors of Pink Floyd concert recordings, for example, obsess over the provenance of the tapes (or, these days, lossless digital files). There’s a seemingly never-ending quest to source the lowest-generation copy of any given recording. The argument is that until the advent of digital audio, each successive analog copy added a layer of hiss, and removed a degree of sonic quality. The nth generation copy one might have of the January 20, 1972 premiere of Eclipse: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics (which would soon be re-titled The Dark Side of the Moon) likely boasts significantly compromised fidelity compared to the original tape.

But Rodriguez draws the line at such obsessions. “I understand that to participate in that particular bit of nitpicking would drive me absolutely insane,” he says, sidestepping the unasked question about the sanity of collecting thousands of Grateful Dead tapes in the first place.

Many bands have engendered a level of fandom that extends to tape collecting. The Beatles, Pink Floyd and many others have extensive “unofficial” catalogs filled with non- or semi-sanctioned audio. But the Grateful Dead taping aesthetic is a world apart. Rodriguez attempts to explain what he thinks makes it different. “You have such fervent energy about trying to make the best recording possible given the circumstances,” he says.

And the Dead’s laissez-faire attitude about the whole taping phenomenon set the group in sharp contrast with an artist like King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, a vigorous opponent of audience recording. With the Dead, Rodriguez says admiringly, “It was permissible [for tapers] to experiment within the concert setting.” And the result is the massive, often high-quality archive that exists today.

The tape collecting community that grew up around the band is arguably a tangible example of the Grateful Dead’s fundamental aesthetic. “One goal of this particular band was to change culture, for people to relate to each other in idealistic or ‘utopic’ fashion,” he says. The tape-trading tradition had its start among people who could afford to buy mobile recording gear. But immersed as it was in the Dead’s milieu, the practice soon became a “free distribution thing,” Rodriguez says. And that fit well into the group’s egalitarian ideals.

Rodriguez doesn’t think that we’ll ever see another audience recording-and-collecting scene like the one that exists around the Grateful Dead. “I think it stands as a phenomenon of that block of time, from 1965 to 1995,” he says. “I don’t have any expectations of that form of energy existing again.”

There may never be another audience recording-and-collecting scene as dedicated as tapers were during those three decades. Still, it continued after Garcia’s passing, as the other Grateful Dead bandmembers have continued touring in various iterations. Since 2015, Dead & Company—featuring former Dead members Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann, with John Mayer, Oteil Burbridge and Jeff Chimenti—has filled hundreds of arenas for their live shows. A photo of the taping section at Dead & Company’s recent Wrigley Park concert reveals that same devoted fanbase.

Just a few days ago, the group announced that their 2023 summer tour would be their last. But even if there are no further incarnations of the band that started it all, the Grateful Dead’s tape-sharing community will likely keep the legacy of its performances alive forever.
https://www.goodtimes.sc/recording-t...ure-of-tapers/





Manchester DJ Mocks Liz Truss after 'Pirating' 90s Classic with 'Amazing' Lyrics

M People star Mike Pickering said: "I was just looking at the lyrics. It's amazing. I hope she takes note. It's about, 'Go and pack your bags and get out'."
Damon Wilkinson

M People founder and former Hacienda DJ Mike Pickering has poked fun at Liz Truss after the PM walked out onstage at the Tory party conference to one of the band's biggest hits. Pickering said he hopes the PM 'takes note' of the lyrics to Moving On Up, adding: “She won't be around to use it again for very long. I would imagine."

The opening lines of the song read 'You've done me wrong, your time is up', with the last line of the first verse saying: 'Move right out of here, baby, go on pack your bags'.

The dance anthem, which was released by the Manchester-based band in 1993, peaked at number two on the UK singles chart.

Pickering said: "I was just looking at the lyrics. It's amazing. I hope she takes note. It's about, 'Go and pack your bags and get out'.

"They (the band) are livid. (Lead singer Heather Small's) boy James is a Labour councillor. Hopefully most people will know that they have pirated it off us."

He added: "I am absolutely gutted by it because they are killing the live touring of bands and artists… I am Mancunian and getting from Manchester to London these days is harder than getting on to continental Europe."

Pickering said the band had contacted their lawyers but been advised there was little that could be done.

He said: "The rest of the band have rung me: 'For God sake, how can we stop it?' And we just rang the lawyers and they went, 'You can't actually stop it. We can send a letter to cease and desist but you can't do it'.

"They can play what they like, which seems a bit weird to me."

Asked why he thought the song had been used, he replied: "No one said to them 'Tony Blair and new Labour used that song all the time' or 'Heather's son is a Labour councillor' or 'Mike is really vociferous on Twitter and social media about being an anti-Tory'.

"I don't know why they have used it. They are so useless at everything. Who knows?"

Liz Truss personally selected M People song Moving On Up for her walk-on music, her press secretary said. "There was a range of options and she chose that one," he added.

He was unable to say whether the party had asked the band for permission. "I don’t have detailed knowledge of how the licensing of this stuff works," he said.

When asked about Mr Pickering's criticism, the press secretary said: "I don’t know who he is." The Prime Minister's speech quickly had to be paused after protesters interrupted the conference. Two women held a flag which read 'who voted for this?' as the Prime Minister delivered her keynote speech. The banner also had the Greenpeace on it.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co...truss-25184428

















Until next week,

- js.



















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