APRA, the collection agency for Australia and New Zealand, is a non-profit organization. Well over 75 percent of its members are independent artists, this means that they don't have their own publishing company nor are they signed with any other publishing company. When you join APRA you grant APRA exclusive rights to your material.

When it comes to voting for the board, the way that APRA works is that for every 500 dollars that an artist or publisher collects, the artist or publisher is given an extra vote (see 41 a and b in the PDF link below). One-half of the board is made up of publishers and one-half of artists. APRA does not have one independent artist on the board. The organization has had basically the same system in place since 1926, but in 1926 the internet did not exist and it was not possible for people to publish music without a publisher; it is even possible that at that time most of APRA's artist members were signed with publishers.

The Association's constitution can be changed by the membership in a vote on a special resolution if it is passed by 75% of the voting members. If APRA had a one-member one-vote system in place, independent artists would be better represented.

http://www.apra.com.au/corporate/downloads/APRA_Co nstitution_06.pdf"

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BLOCKBUSTER, Strip Mall, Thursday — In the face of ludicrously overreaching intellectual property claims by the Hollywood copyright-industrial complex, consumers are rebelling — by buying new High-Definition DVD releases, in protest at the valiant copyfighters battling for their rights by spamming the AACS processing key "09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-wt-fg-1b-b3-r1-5h" into every goddamn input box on the goddamn intarweb.

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The RIAA are geniuses. "If we shut down second-hand CD stores, people will HAVE to buy shitty new ones!" Yes, that will definitely stop people redistributing CDs they've bought, and they won't just give the stuff away.

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New Melbourne band Dance With Voices have been making a name for themselves, reviving and building on the synthpop sound of the early 1980s with considerable style. They have released one CD-R EP ("Cold Colours"), have played support for the likes MSTRKRFT and The Infadels and been named as a "breaking band" by NME. Now they're coming to the UK, and doing gigs in London and Brighton.

Dance With Voices are playing in London on the 16th of May at Barden's Boudoir, supported by local electropop band Arthur & Martha and Japanese glitch-pop artist Sonic Dragolgo. (Disclosure: the gig is being co-organised by your humble correspondent.) After which, they set off to Brighton to play at the Great Escape festival on the 17th.

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If you want to trash your monthly download cap and to have to buy another 400GB outboard disk, do the following:

  1. Go to Google BlogSearch.
  2. Enter a band name.

P2P is for plebeians. And telly.

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May I earnestly recommend to you:

• The WFMU Beware of the Blog.
• Van Morrison's Contractual Obligation Album. (Buy here, lyrics here.)
• A rip of the incredibly rare CD edition of Dogs In Space. NOW WHERE'S A DVD, DAMMIT.
• Lots of fantastically good rock'n'roll MP3s from Crypt Records.

My forthcoming first child, Freda, is quite the music fan, kicking in time with anything she likes (e.g. Deathboy) and out of time with anything she doesn't. The WFMU stuff is particularly Freda-disapproved.

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Legendary dame finds street cred

What really worries me is that the people in the photo appear to be dressed as Dame Edna and Wonder Woman. What's worse is that the lanes in that area have cool names already - Coromandel Pl., Alfred Pl. (which has too many high-profile shops to be the candidate), and Pink Alley. You just fucking know Melbourne City Council are going to change Pink Alley, because they suck.

The betting pool is now open for the next street name change. Is Billy Thorpe Walk too obvious?

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The CD is set to finally go down this year. (Or next year, betcha.) The WMA download stores just got Zuned, and Zune sales may creep into double figures. iTunes Music Store may be forced to open up access, eMusic (which only does MP3 — and is what a record nerd would want in a download store; I'm an enthusiastic customer and advocate) is a distant second to iTMS in sales, but that's really quite the bundle of cash, and Amazon is rumoured to be starting an MP3-only store. Even Sony and EMI are backing down from DRM and copy control everywhere. So Wired has declared that MP3 will be the last man standing.

Which sorta sucks, as every codec in the last fifteen years kicks its arse for quality versus size. But oh well.

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The British Phonographic Institute has called upon the government to increase the copyright term for sound recordings in the UK to 95 years from the present 50, to achieve harmonisation with the United States. In support of this, the BPI placed an advertisement in the Financial Times in December listing forty thousand musicians who support their position — including deceased performers such as Freddie Garrity (died 2006), Lonnie Donegan (died 2002), Jimmy Shand (died 2000) and Chuck Berry (died 1997).

Without an extension of the term to 95 years, these deceased artists are not expected to bother with any further recordings, performances or even songwriting.

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