Men At Work will lose 5% of the royalties from “Down Under” that they’ve earned since 2002 (on, yes, a nearly 30-year old song). The publishing company that sued their record company originally sought 60% of royalties because “Down Under” uses the 70-year-old “campfire song” “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” as its famous flute refrain.

Apparently use of the tune was fine for 27 years and now it’s not.

EMI plans to appeal the ruling.

BTW: If you go to the source website, you can see the “Down Under” video as well as a group of schoolchildren performing “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.” I’m curious if Larrikin Music will now sue the school and/or the person who uploaded that video to YouTube.

[Prince] explains that he decided the album will be released in CD format only in the Mirror. There’ll be no downloads anywhere in the world because of his ongoing battles against internet abuses.

Unlike most other rock stars, he has banned YouTube and iTunes from using any of his music and has even closed down his own official website.

He says: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. “The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. “They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

As the BBC says: “The band largely avoided releasing singles during their career, instead preferring fans to listen to entire albums such as Dark Side of the Moon, which has sold more than 35 million copies around the world.”

The issue of selling individual tracks online has been a thorny one for many artists, who want their albums to be seen as complete works. Bands also receive less money if fans pick and choose tracks instead of buying a full suite of songs.

When I think of certain albums, I think of them as whole pieces, not as individual songs (Tommy, Abbey Road, Dark Side of The Moon, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Nebraska, American Idiot, etc.). For these, when I put them on, I play them straight through. Putting these albums on shuffle illustrates how essential song order and coherence are to the concept album (as well as the concept of “album”).

Of course I like buying songs a la carte and we own a lot of songs that we would never have purchased an album to get b/c the rest of the album is crap. I used to call it “single-filler” in the 80s when I judged whether it was worth my $8 to buy a whole album by whether it had at least three songs I liked on it or it was a Duran Duran album (talk about single-filler; yes Mr. LeBon, I’m looking at you).

In the case of concept albums though, if you spend the money to buy all of a concept album, you’re going to get your money’s worth in my experience. So as much as I enjoy freedom of choice and buying my music as I chose, I have zero problem with Pink Floyd’s concept here. And the choice remains to be able to purchase the music or not. It’s not as though the songs are unavailable for legal purchase. You just need to buy the album. Or don’t. Simple.

It makes me think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans (a remix work if ever there was one; would Campbell’s sue for trademark infringement today? In the 60s, they commissioned a canvas from Warhol). The work itself is 32 individual canvases. Each canvas is its own piece of art yet the concept calls for all of the canvases to be shown together. High art meets pop culture via concept. Mmm mmm good.

Somewhat OT: I’ve heard people ask who buys hard copy CDs anymore. I gave my husband Sweetheart of the Rodeo for Christmas, a kinda-sorta concept album in terms of genre/tone.

So let me get this straight: her son learns to walk. She makes a video. She uses this great way to share that video with her family and friends.

Yet it’s implied in some quarters that my doing the exact same thing three years ago (sans iPhone) was some kind of plea of attention, a quest for fame or money, or that I had some other ulterior motive. Truthfully, this was what I did. Holden had learned to walk only days before. I happened to get him dancing on my Kodak Z740 camera (the focus is blown; we need to get a new camera) and I shared it the way I’d always shared videos: on YouTube. That’s all it was, all it ever was.

And now it’s become a story that we’ll get to tell the rest of our lives at birthday parties. It’ll be in my obituary. This simple little 29-second home movie of Holden happy to be mobile enough to race with his sister in the kitchen (something they do just about every night to this day). And now it has over a million hits.

Astounding.

And apparently Apple-icious as well.

The RIAA is claiming that P2P file sharers are “undermining” humanitarian efforts in Haiti. Now that’s quite a claim, and you would think the RIAA would have some evidence to back it up, but (of course), it doesn’t. It’s just making stuff up.

The claim is based on the fact that some musicians quickly put out a “Hope for Haiti Now” digital only album, with the proceeds going to help Haiti. It apparently did quite well, topping the Billboard sales charts. Considering there were tons of ways to donate to Haiti, this was basically a way to get some free music with your donation. Fair enough. But the RIAA noticed that the tracks also appeared on file sharing sites. This is hardly a surprise, nor is it meaningful. But, according to the RIAA’s interpretation, this somehow “undermines” humanitarian efforts.

MusicAlly saw the RIAA’s blog post, and figured it would check in to see just how much downloading was going on to undermine those Haitian humanitarian efforts… and discovered that very, very, very few people are downloading the album.

In other words, despite the claims of the RIAA, file sharers certainly weren’t “undermining” anything. They certainly weren’t particularly interested in downloading this album at all. Looks like the RIAA has been caught making up arguments that have no relation to fact, yet again.

Making up stuff? I can’t believe it.

/sarcasm

Check out these comments. I particularly like the input by Bob from Ohio, who thinks I “deserve[] to lose and pay much, much in the way of attorney fees” for using an emoticon in a private chat (while admitting “I don’t know anything about the merits” of the case).

BTW: I do not use dashes as a nose in my emoticons unless it’s this one, which I post here simply to annoy the anti-emoticon people: