All entries for Tuesday 10 March 2009

Music & Copyright; If compilation soundtracks still confound what chance Youtube?

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7933565.stm

The dramatic brinkmanship of the bulk copyright negotiations between Youtube UK and the PRS hit the news this morning, see the BBC story.

This reminded me of the problem described in Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail and on this Blog entry that prevents re-runs of TV series such as ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ to be cleared because of all the music copyright problems!

I have continued to search around for CD versions of some my best-loved albums having recently found Bob Marley’s ‘Live at the Coliseum’ pressed again but the album that had evaded me the longest was FM, the soundtrack album of the film of the same name. Earlier this year I noted that many of the tracks below were being played on Radio 2.
All of these were attributed back to their original albums but this was too much of a coincidence! I went onto Amazon and found the CDs were available again in the US and bought an import copy. The track list, below, from Amazon is incomplete and in the wrong order. I had to resist putting these back in order!
Life In The Fast Lane, Do It Again, Lido Shuffle, It Keeps You Runnin’, Your Smiling Face, Life’s Been Good, We Will Rock You, FM (Reprise), Night Moves, Fly Like An Eagle, Cold As Ice, Breakdown, Bad Man, Tumbling Dice, Poor Poor Pitiful Me, Livingston Saturday, There’s A Place, Way You Are

The deal being sought by Google’s Youtube is important for the Web 2.0 creative sites such as Animoto. The main creative constraint to creating the movie you want is music copyright. One of my companies, LickWorX creates a large amount of original music to match any sound you want. To discover Geoff Nicholls, composer and musician, also a back-stage and occasionally on-stage member of Black Sabbath, was a founder of LickWorx has just added to the sense of fun it has been to work with them.

Robert McGonigle : 10 Mar 2009 10:12 |  Tags: Animoto FM Soundtrack Geoff Nichols Lickworx Music Copyright |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem