Author: JP

Pottering about on copyright and Calcutta

I had to read this a second time, just to make sure somebody wasn’t pulling my leg:

The group is accused of erecting a massive structure in the shape of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for the Hindu festival of the Goddess Durga, which celebrates her killing a demon and the victory of good over evil.

A statue of the 10-armed goddess sitting on a lion, stabbing a demon emerging from a buffalo, dominates the set, and organizers are planning to also include lifesized models of the bespectacled Potter and his companions.

“We had no clue that we had to seek permission from the author,” Santanu Biswas, secretary of FD Block Puja Committee of Salt Lake, the community group which designed and paid for artists to make the tent.

“Our lawyer in Delhi will appear before the court tomorrow to explain our stand.”

[Mr Biswas, there will always be a house for you wherever I live.]

That was yesterday. Today I see that reason has prevailed:

The community group building the model is said to be delighted with the ruling.

The wood and papier mache model, based on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, can now be used until 26 October when the Hindu festival celebrating the goddess Durga ends.

Whatever next? Descendants of Guy Fawkes claiming their dues on 5th November? Puh-leeze.

Which have eyes, and see not: Musings about the music industry and The Because Effect

which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not:

Jeremiah 5:21, KJV 

Madonna is reported to be leaving Warner Music and moving to Live Nation.

This, at a time when, as the AP report states:

Regulatory filings show that Ticketmaster’s revenues jumped 14 percent to $1.1 billion in 2006 and generated almost a 25 percent operating profit margin for the nation’s largest seller of tickets

This, in a week when Radiohead released their latest album In Rainbows as a digital download, with the price of the download left up to the buyer. As Wikipedia puts it:

While the discbox, which includes the MP3 download, is priced at £40 (about $80 U.S.), the price of download by itself is left up to the buyer. Upon purchase, the buyer is prompted to type their desired price, plus a credit card transaction fee of 45 pence if purchased for more than £0.00. [15]

The unique nature of the album’s availability has put doubt on whether the album will be eligible for inclusion in the UK album charts.[16] According to Gigwise the album has ‘sold’ 1.2 million copies from the website, as of 12th October 2007, with the average price people paid expected to be £4.[17]

This, in a month when a Led Zeppelin reunion concert attracts 20 million fans in a mad scramble for tickets, and crashes the internet service provider used to run the concert ticket lottery:

A spokesperson for the gig told Guardian Unlimited Music that mid-way through yesterday’s press conference to announce the one-off gig at London’s 02 Arena in November, at the precise point where promoter Harvey Goldsmith confirmed details of the show, ISP Pipex reported to organisers that their network had collapsed.

This, in a period when Prince gave away his latest album for free, as a newspaper insert, before the actual release of the album:

On June 28, 2007, the UK national newspaper The Mail on Sunday revealed that it had made a deal to give Prince’s new album, Planet Earth, away for free with an “imminent” edition of the paper, making it the first place in the world to get the album. The date chosen was July 15, 2007. This move has sparked controversy among music distributors and has also led the UK arm of Prince’s distributor, Sony BMG, to withdraw from distributing the album in UK stores. [27] The UK’s largest high street music retailer, HMV decided to stock the paper on release day due to the giveaway.

Okay, he got paid by the newspaper for giving the album away. But that’s not the point.

The point is that he sold out all his concert tickets. For 21 concerts. In a single tour. In record time:

On June, 13 2007 Prince announced a further six nights at The O2 arena, Europe’s ultimate entertainment destination that opens on 24th June. Prince is now performing ALL 21 dates at The O2, after his last 15 concerts SOLD OUT in a matter of hours. The shows eclipse all previous arena attendance records and will see Prince perform his greatest hits for the last time ever.

David Campbell, President & CEO of AEG Europe, commented: “Prince’s 21 nights at The O2 are a testament to London’s eagerly awaited new entertainment destination. We’re thrilled that a world-class artist like Prince is part of our opening season, and that he’ll be breaking a world record in our arena.”

Promoter Rob Hallett of AEG Live said, “It is extraordinary that any artiste can sell out so many nights in London, the previous record was 14, but to sell this quickly and in August is quite remarkable! However with Prince we are talking about a phenomenal artiste who has spent his whole career raising the bar so we shouldn’t be too surprised. I can see this record outliving the century!”

Madonna. Radiohead. Led Zeppelin. Prince. They understand the intrinsic abundance of digital music and the intrinsic scarcity of live performances. They understand what’s broken and what needs fixing. They understand The Because Effect as originally expounded by Doc Searls.

Looks like Live Nation understand this as well:

Live Nation Chief Executive Michael Rapino has made no secret of his desire to use the company’s relationships with artists to get into related businesses. He has talked about selling T-shirts, parking passes, VIP party passes, secondary tickets and DVDs as well as broadcasting shows live. And gaining direct access to fans through ticket sales is seen as a crucial building block to collecting other profit related to the event.

Rapino said Live Nation owes its window of opportunity to the rise of the live show as a profit driver — instead of the records and CD sales as in previous years. “Thankfully for our business, the center of that pie has really become the live show now,” he said in September at a Goldman Sachs conference.

What can I say?

……Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

 Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’

My thanks to all of you

Last Friday was Byte Night. Every year, people from the industry sleep out “rough” for one night. Their aim? To raise funds for NCH’s projects to do with leaving care and youth homelessness.

This year I was privileged. Privileged to take part, privileged to have a number of my colleagues with me, privileged to be sponsored to the tune of over £12,000.  When we added in the money collected from our donations to the auctions, and from our participation in the auction itself, we were not far off our original target of £25,000.

Last Friday was an incredible experience. Not for the sleeping out rough per se: we only experienced a very small, almost infinitesimal part of what young homeless really experience. But what we did experience mattered:

  • We understood a tiny bit about being out in the open and cold and hungry. Thankfully, we had a dry night.
  • We understood a little bit about the role of care and support in providing youth homeless with an anchor in difficult times. How food and clothing and shelter and a shoulder to lean on really mattered.
  • We understood something about how organisations like NCH can help provide this care and support. They were magnificent. The entire evening was special. Particularly the street theatre put on by people who’ve been helped by NCH.

And we understood something very important, how community matters. The camaraderie amongst the sleepers-out was amazing. There were some crazy moments and some great conversations.

We also learnt something about humility, as we watched the tireless devotion, good-humouredness and energy of the people who made events like this happen. People like the staff of NCH. People like Jenny Agutter, who’s been there eight of the last 10 years. People like James Bennet, the founder of ETF now with Ernst and Young, who’s been committed to roping in people from all over the industry.

My thanks to all of you, for your incredible generosity. I intend to go back next year; let me know if any of you is interested in joining me, or in helping in any way.

An aside: I also learnt something about justgiving, how it worked, how useful it was, and I was impressed. Now that’s the way to make fundraising simpler…..

Bungie jumps, but the Halo doesn’t slip

I learnt recently that Bungie, the people behind Halo 3, has done something quite unusual. For the last decade or two, most start-ups have had acquisition by Microsoft (or, more recently, Google) as their goal. Bungie, having achieved their goal, have apparently agreed terms with Microsoft to go back to being an independent company.

This by itself would have intrigued me, maybe just a bit. Coming on the back of Halo 3’s incredible success, it would normally have intrigued me even more. But what got me is the following quote from the BBC article:

On the Bungie website, Frank O’Connor, lead writer on Halo, explained the move to the community of fans: “Bungie has long been built on creativity, originality and the freedom to pursue ideas.

“Microsoft agreed, and rather than stifle our imagination, they decided it was in both our best interests to unleash it.”

Put this in the context of the following quote from Microsoft:

Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios, said the company was “supporting Bungie’s desire to return to its independent roots”.

He said Microsoft would continue to invest in Halo entertainment property with Bungie and other partners, such as Peter Jackson, on “a new interactive series set in the Halo universe”.

“We look forward to great success with Bungie as our long-term relationship continues to evolve through Halo-related titles and new IP created by Bungie,” he added.

So let me get this right. Microsoft are letting Bungie go back to being independent, recognising that they might “stifle” Bungie’s “imagination”. Wow.

Sometime in 2000, when I chaired the technology incubator at what was then Dresdner Kleinwort Benson, I remember getting into conversation with Professor N “Venkat” Venkatraman about a related subject: in those days, so many startups seemed to have “bought by Microsoft” as their exit strategy. Venkat remarked that the trend could not continue, for two reasons. Firstly, Microsoft were running out of a critical currency …. their equity was no longer attractive to new hires. Secondly, partly as a consequence of the equity currency problem, but more as a result of becoming mainstream, they were unlikely to remain the only game in town for startups who wished for a trade sale exit. In both cases, we came to the conclusion that at some point Microsoft would no longer buy companies outright, but instead take a minority stake. That way, the potential problems to do with attracting talent or retaining speed and agility could be solved.

And now, seven years later, we have Bungie jumping. With Microsoft’s blessing, and while Microsoft retain a stake. Intriguing. Very.

Maybe the Blue Monster is working after all. Something’s changed.

Musing about the weather, and about sleeping rough

Every now and then I start thinking about what the inception, brokering and delivery of masses of event-driven asynchronous “services” would look like, and, for some inexplicable reason, somewhere along the line I start thinking about the weather.

Particularly since I came to the UK, I have been fascinated by the weather. When I got here, I could not believe just how much media time was devoted to the weather, be it TV or print or radio. After staying here for a bit I could not believe how much people actually talked about the weather, how much the caricature of English people always talking about the weather turned out to be true. Once I’d been here for a few years, I could not believe how changeable the weather was, how often a day that started with bright windless sunshine could end in wet and windy.

Talking about people talking about the weather reminds me of one of my favourite Mad Magazine cartoons, I think it was Don Martin who did it. Titled Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, the first frame showed a person walking in from the outside, completely drenched from head to toe. And an observer asking “Is it raining outside?”. The cartoonist then proceeded to suggest a series of answers, ranging from “No, I always get into a shower fully dressed” to “%@*£”. Incidentally, while recuperating over Christmas, I treated myself to this: the entire Mad Magazine oeuvre available on disk. Fantastic stuff. Sergio Aragones and his Marginal Thinking Department never failed to amuse me, whatever my mood.

Talking about the changeability of the weather. I am gently tinged with trepidation as to what tomorrow night holds, as we try and raise funds for homeless youth. Do try and help us, you will find the link here and in my sidebar. My thanks to all of you for your incredible generosity, we have already raised nearly £10,000.