Last week, a music site called BlueBeat made headlines by offering Beatles songs as free streams and 25 cent downloads. The Beatles are known for not making their songs legally available on iTunes or any other online forum, so observers rightly asked "how are they doing this legally?"
EMI, the record label that owns The Beatles' recordings, has a simple response: they're not doing this legally. But here's where the story gets very strange.
The legal reasoning in this case is straight out of "Alice in Wonderland."
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons (public domain illustration))BlueBeat is owned by a company called Media Rights Technologies, which specializes in digital rights management technology. DRM is supposed to be used to prevent copyright infringement. But according to a 2007 blog post on HuffingtonPost.com by the company's founder, Hank Risan, MRT backed into this business after being--get this--targeted by the RIAA for copyright infringement.
As Risan explains in his post, he and a partner had posted a bunch of streaming-audio files to a Web site about the history of music. The RIAA issued a takedown notice, and the site took the streams down.
The streams had been protected by Windows Media DRM, but according to Risan, an update to the Media Player broke the DRM. In response to this flaw, Risan created MRT and built his own DRM system, which he claimed would be far more robust than the systems on the market at that time. Then, in 2007, MRT sent cease-and-desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and RealNetworks, ordering them to use MRT's DRM technology instead of their own, on threat of legal action.
The legal reasoning was twisted--basically, MRT argued that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should force these companies to use the most robust DRM technology available, even if that technology was created by somebody else. Predictably, nothing ever came of this demand.
MRT's legal reasoning is equally funny this time around, as Ars Technica reports. According to the report, MRT claims that it didn't post the exact Beatles recordings. Instead, it posted "psychoacoustic simulations," then added simple video content to them. This constitutes a new audiovisual work, and isn't covered by the existing copyrights, MRT argues. In fact, MRT even went so far as to apply for copyrights on the "new" works!
Perhaps this is all some kind of metacommentary on the frustrating inconsistency of U.S. copyright law, but I predict that MRT is going to be laughed out of court. In the meantime, if you want your Beatles music online, it's still available on BlueBeat as of the time I posted this. I didn't want to give the company a credit card to test the whether the downloads work, but the streams sound pretty close to perfect...especially considering that they're only psychoacoustic simulations.
Every one of them knew that as time went by, they'd get a little bit older and a little bit slower.
This news is over a month old, but somehow I missed it until the intrepid Penn Jillette tweeted about it Sunday (never say Twitter's useless). Here's the scene: Beatles. 1968. That'd be the long-hair bearded Beatles. "White Album" recording session. John's recording a slowed-down version of their recent hit single "Revolution," the B-side to the umpteen-million selling "Hey Jude." Being in a particular state of mind, he stretches it out for 10 minutes, then adds some scary horror music plus Yoko spoken-word weirdness at the end. Later, John or the rest of the band or George Martin or other mysterious powers decide that they'll add some overdubs to John's take and cut it off after about four minutes and record a new ending. (I believe the weird triple hit after the last chorus--every other time, it's a double hit--signals the beginning of the new end.) That's "Revolution 1." Then, John will add his own nine-minute musique concrete freakout to the end of the album. He uses some of the bits from the end of the old "Revolution 1." That becomes "Revolution 9," perhaps the most-skipped song of the CD era.
A month ago, somebody leaked the original track, which to "White Album" fans, comprises a sort of holy grail connecting the two Revolutions, which otherwise bear no similarity except their names. EMI has been issuing takedown notices as fast as it can, but as of 10 a.m. Monday you could still hear it on YouTube, and download it (right click-save as) from a source called Rawkblog.net. I'm purposely not linking to either source to give this remarkable track a bit more life, but google "Revolution 1 Take 20," then click on the YouTube and Rawkblog.net links and you'll get it. (Warning: some of the other links to the download connect you to pop-up-infested sites that may make your computer very unhappy.)
Now if somebody would just leak the seven-hour version of "Helter Skelter"...
As a member of the old-people-who-used-to-play-in-rock-bands demographic, I've never found much appeal in Rock Band or its competitor/predecessor Guitar Hero. But they obviously have a lot of devoted fans, including, apparently, "the only Beatles in the world" (and the others' designated heirs).
On Thursday, Rock Band creators MTV Music-Harmonix teamed up with Apple Corps and announced a forthcoming video game that will let you play along with Beatles songs. The game won't merely be another Rock Band version or Track Pack, but will rather be an entirely new game that will presumably work with the Rock Band peripherals. Album art will be prominently featured, as will the original mixes, presided over by Beatles engineer George Martin's son Giles (who also worked on the Beatles/Cirque du Soleil tie-in project, Love).
Personally, I'm hoping for an interactive Yellow Submarine portion and a new Rock Band keyboard so I can try to play "Hey Bulldog."
It doesn't seem like there'd be much overlap between a band that broke up nearly 40 years ago and a new video game, but generation after generation keeps reclaiming the Beatles as its own. My friends' 7-year-old daughter has been obsessed with them for some time--she could tell John songs from Paul songs from George songs when she was only 4, and watches Beatles movies alongside Hannah Montana flicks.
The game will come out late next year, in time for the holidays.
Money from Beatles record sales helped fund the invention of the CT scan (also known as CAT scan), a medical tool used to take three dimensional photographs of the insides of people's bodies.
As recounted on the blog Epidemix, the story starts with Godfrey Hounsfield, a researcher at EMI back in the 1950s. Although it's a (somewhat struggling) major record label today, EMI--which stands for Electrical and Musical Industries*--was once an industrial research company. Hounsfield did some pioneering work on computers, helping to build the first all-transistor computer, but the division wasn't profitable for EMI and the company sold its computer business in 1962...right when it signed The Beatles. His standing was good enough with the company that they let him conduct independent research with funding from the Beatles' string of massive successes in the 1960s. He went on to invent the CT scanner, which EMI first released in 1972, and shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for medicine for his invention.
I was aware of EMI's scientific legacy from a class I took on audio production: the company's Abbey Road studios (where the Beatles recorded) were legendarily cutting-edge, and an EMI scientist, Alan Blumlein, invented a microphone technique for stereo recording that's still used today. By the end of the 1990s, however, EMI had sold its technology businesses, and today it's exclusively a label and publisher.
*Corrected from "Electrical and Musical Equipment" which indeed would have made the acronym "EME." Whoops.
It was just two months ago that Nine Inch Nails released its album Ghosts I-IV in multiple formats, from free nine-song download all the way up to a deluxe LP/CD/Blu-ray set. Today, the band started taking orders for free downloads of its next album, The Slip; like Radiohead did with In Rainbows, the band will subsequently release the album on CD and LP format.
The download era may see a return to the kind of prolific output we saw from The Beatles and other artists in the 1960s.
Everybody's interested in the business model--has free-then-fee already gotten old?--but when's the last time you saw a band release two albums in two months? Sure, Trent's interested in making a living, but he's also got lots to say and he wants you to hear it.
And over here in the other corner, we have Beck rumored to be following the Raconteurs and planning to "surprise" release his next album within the next four to six weeks--no advance copies to reviewers, no pre-release radio single, no preparatory wave of marketing hype. Across the pond, The Cure plans to release 13 singles over the next 13 months leading up to its next album release--and some of the B-sides won't appear on any albums.
This all sounds a lot like what the Beatles and other pop musicians and labels used to do in the 1960s--quick-release tons of music, mostly singles, and let the fans decide which sink or swim. Sure, there was a earload of marketing back then as well, but the ratio of hype to music was a lot lower. Perhaps the new model's going to be the same as the old model?
Last week, George Harrison--who created the best post-Beatles solo album, the gorgeous All Things Must Pass--became the fourth of the Fab Four to go online. His full solo catalog is available on iTunes and other music stores now. Today, Led Zeppelin confirmed that its entire catalog will be released online Nov. 13, not just the songs on the new greatest hits compilation, Mothership. Zeppelin will also follow AC/DC and sell its songs as ringtones on Verizon Wireless.
Surely, the full Beatles must be next?
New Jersey radio station WFMU--which may well be the best radio station in the world--has a blog called Beware of the Blog. The other day, they posted an MP3 file from listener Steve McLaughlin containing all the Beatles' U.K. albums, digitally time-compressed into a single hour. (No Magical Mystery Tour because it was a double EP, not an LP.) It sounds a bit like the sped-up President Bush speech at the end of Godspeed You Black Emperor's vinyl version of Yanqui U.X.O., only, it's the Beatles.
Then, some enterprising listeners took the McLaughlin MP3 and decompressed several sections of it back to their normal speed. The results...you just have to listen.
If I were in charge of the New Musical Genre Naming Committee (NMGNC), I'd call this type of remix a "microdot" remix. I can't explain what the word means, but that's what it sounds like to me.
As one of my colleagues at Directions on Microsoft pointed out, MacWorld's speculating that the Sept. 5 Apple announcement will include the big news that The Beatles will finally be available on iTunes.
Specifically, my colleague pointed to some comments (scroll down) noting that Apple's promoting the event with the tagline "The Beat Goes On," which appeared twice at the end of the Beatles' final press release, issued on Apr. 10, 1970.
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone by playing "Lovely Rita", and the solo catalogs of Paul, John, and Ringo have all come to iTunes in the last few months--Ringo's just yesterday. Given these facts, I think the odds are pretty good.
Incidentally, the line "and the beat goes on" was used in the 1970 song "Ball of Confusion" by the Temptations. (Later covered to great effect by Love and Rockets.) According to Wikipedia (which might not be correct), they began to record this song on Apr. 12, 1970, two days after the Beatles' breakup press release. Coincidence?
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