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Danger Mouse Releases Blank CD-R To Spite EMI
An anonymous reader writes "DJ Danger Mouse famously fought with EMI over his Beatles/Jay-Z mashup, 'The Grey Album,' and now seems to be battling with the label again. Rather than release his latest album and face legal issues with EMI, Techdirt is reporting that Danger Mouse will be selling a blank CD-R along with lots of artwork, and buyers will be responsible for finding the music themselves (yes, it's findable on the internet) and burning the CD."
But doesn't this seem like the height of laziness?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
Can't I just keep the CD blank?
Crumbs DM!
+1 Insightful to Danger mouse for finding a way to stick it to EMI.
It had to be said.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
One to burn, one to keep on a shelf to then sell to some eccentric collector in 50 years. Retirement, here I come!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
I hate techno handbag disco music like this, but you've got to give credit where credit's due. This is an excellent idea to highlight these very topical issues. Well done young man.
I might even go out and buy the box of artwork and blank CD-R specifically to support this protest.
Stick Men
Wherever there is danger he'll be there.
Frankly, I think that the idea is rather ingenious. I already sense a horde of lawyers sniffing the judicial currents, wondering if this could be prosecuted as encouraging copyright infringement. That should be an interesting case.
Offhand, I'd guess it hinges on whatever public statements have been made by Danger Mouse on this topic.
Another legal issue I'd be interested to come to court would be if the mashup as provided on the net didn't actually include any material under copyright, i.e., it was just a bunch of editing instructions which could be used by a computer program to which the user provides The White Album as input. It might be hard to prove that that is still clearly a derivative work of The White Album if the program would produce output (even gibberish output) given other music as inputs.
The big question is, will music stores be allowed to sell it. Will retailers who sell this be blacklisted by the distribution chain? EMI and the RIAA have a lot of influence in how their music is distributed. How long until retails get jacked up prices from their distributor for other music for selling this?
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's a 100+ page BOOK of David Lynch photography.
I think he maybe planning to "leak" that music he's talking about. Fans will be able to download and add the music to it. Make sense to me.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I'm sure they'll want to have a word with Danger Mouse...
Here's a direct link to listen to the music:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104129585
Or to download it use this torrent:
http://www.demonoid.com/files/details/1922583/2325666/
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
while this is pretty entertaining, and it certainly does seem like this man should be applauded - I dont see how this is anything other than a superficial victory at best. after all, what steps can really be taken against corporate entities that will ultimately buy themselves "justice" and legislature?
we just might all be screwed in the fight for "freedoms", "rights", and "privileges"
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
how is a blank cd the same as a recording of silence?
I actually had been thinking for a while this would be a good idea. The torrents aren't going to just go away, and the lawyers are spending a great amount of money that could be saved as profits. I'd been thinking that if the artists simply created the boxsets, artwork, and maybe included videos, they would probably come out ahead.
Didn't Greenday already do this like five years ago?
PC games have been doing this for years. Go buy a copy of any MMO game in the stores. You're not getting the entire game on the discs you buy. You're forced to go online and download the rest of the content patches before you can play it.
I think this artist is brilliant for applying essentially the same idea to music in an attempt to circumvent the law.
Damn, I wish I thought of that.
I'm quite surprised that nobody here can see through this 'protest' to it's true nature, that it's an excellent marketing gimmic. Danger Mouse has shown already that he's very good at marketing. Want great press? Fight a record label. (Even early in his career, he would wear a mouse costume - because he was to shy/stagefrightened to show his face - and then took the name dangermouse. Great hook right there. ) He's most definitely talented - having collaborated and produced some very cool artists (Gnarles Barkley, Gorilliaz) as well, each well marketed in it's own right - but this marketing ploy... I'm beside myself at it's simplicity and beauty.
Give out blank CDs. ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. He's already getting amazing free press over this, and there's more coming for certain. I was reading through the replys to just this article here on slashdot, and found more than a couple of readers vowing to by multiple copies of the release just to show support. Multiple copies. Of A Blank Disk.
I envy him.
http://www.bistolas.net
He is trying to pull NIN and Radiohead Internet buzz. However, this isn't going to work. NIN and Radiohead are both independent artists who live by their own rules without the record industry.
Here in the UK we call a purse a "handbag" and a wallet a "purse" if owned by a lady vs. a man when it is still called a "wallet."
So think of it as "purse music."
Stick Men
Danger Mouse battling EMI on Lost Highway!
The mouse is gonna get nailed for violating John Cage's copyright on 4'33"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
A blank CD-R still is writable. With the music off of bittorrent.
A recording of silence obviously not. You can play it in your player.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I wonder how Mr Mouse would react if a record company decided to publish his copyrighted material without his permission?
Mash-ups are a great new form of creativity, but creativity doesn't give you free reign to publish other people's material without permission from the copyright holder.
Works the other way around, actually. They very much want shelf space at big retailers. See none of the big retailers make a significant percentage of their profits on music. For the most part, they don't make a significant percentage of their profits on any one specific category of item. People shop for all kinds of things there, so they make their money spread out over a lot of different items. So losing any single item isn't going to hit them that hard.
Wal-mart in particular is notorious for dictating terms to suppliers, including demanding price cuts that suppliers have trouble handling. However all the big stores exercise an amount of power over the suppliers for the products they sell. It isn't a completely one-way street, of course, but it isn't a situation of the suppliers saying "You'll do precisely as we say or face the consequences."
Especially given their slipping market share, the recording industry isn't in a good position to make demands on the retail chains. If EMI threatens Wal-mart and Target and such over this, the answer might be "Ok, screw you, don't sell to us, we'll use the shelf space for other things." Maybe if EMI convinced all the other labels to join in then the retailers would knuckle under, but that's problematic. For one, the other labels might have no interest in playing ball, since it would mean less marketshare, and it also could lead to an anti-collusion lawsuit.
So I imagine a store's decision to carry this or not will be entirely decided by the person who does their purchasing. EMI is likely to have no say in it at all.
If there is no data, there is no recording. You can't infringe with just media alone. :)
zosxavius photography
by releasing a blank CD as his own orignal creative work, does he not own the copyright on it's (blank content) isn't he entitled under copyright law to at least roylties from the sale of every blank CD sold containing his work? this would also make him one of the best selling arisits of all time! Bigger than the Beatles!
It's brilliant! He's only selling a blank cd with his artwork. People can take the cd, download and burn his music, and EMI can't do a damn thing about it because he technically didn't sell the music.
THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
http://www.dangermouse.org/sounds/penshush.wav
And do we have to pay him a royalty?
this is a very talentless marketing.
If he really wanted to make a political statement, he would have licensed the music or sued to get it licensed, and then released the CD with a statement revealing how much of the cost was license fees to the Beatles and Jay-Z.
What we see instead is a protest statement, which smacks of impotence. Don't abandon your legal system to dickheads pretending to be lawyers; use the system and gain what you want legitimately, instead of trying to sidestep it like a teenager.
Futurist Traditionalism
Does iTunes support selling an album that has a bunch of artwork but no included music?
I read the internet for the articles.
When the Dead Kennedys released "In God We Trust, Inc." on cassette tape (remember those?), they left the B side blank, with the following note: "Home taping is killing big time entertainment industry profits. Therefore side two of this tape has been left blank for your convenience."
OK, that avoids trouble with EMI. But won't John Cage's estate go after him over this?
Although the reasoning was different, The Dead Kennedys left side B (we're talking cassette tapes here, kids) of "In God We Trust Inc." blank. Printed on that side was, "Home taping is killing big time entertainment industry profits. Therefore side two of this tape has been left blank for your convenience."
This was a response to an anti-piracy campaign by the BPI
I imagine the Dead Kennedys weren't the first either, since the music industry has a pretty long history of pissing people off.
Will it be available on iTunes?
What, you mean like Green Day back in 2004?
I'll buy it. Been saying they should do this for years. The movie biz dvd sales are suck. Sell the movie cheap on the internet, sell the box complete with artwork and a blank DVD and let people put it together. I miss my proud collection of DVDs because it's always fun to go into someone's house and get a sense of their tastes, maybe have something to handle and look at, but NetFlix and other means have made it so easy to get digital access to movies/music it's pointless to waste production costs on providing a $20 compilation.
Of course, this method wouldn't be good for the people currently specializing in mass distribution, don't know how I feel about that, but it seems logical from a seller/consumer perspective.
The question is, by buying this album are you implicating yourself as a pirate?
Wouldn't just be a riot if this 'blank' album topped the charts? Went Gold? Platinum?
MP3 for CD quality Audio? Seriously? Where's the FLAC? You think someone like Dangermouse would care about audio quality.
RES PUBLICA NON DOMINETUR
If there is brilliance here, it belongs to who Danger Mouse (true to form, I'll give you that) copied from, namely Green Day.
He is setting up the tried and true defense/offense of the Chilling effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect_(term) . He is single handedly showing the current flaws in copyright and the fact that artists can not use old material as inspiration for new.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
To the Canadians out there, if this gets big, do you think he'll be able to collect on the Blank Media Levy?
As it stands, every blank CD-R sold is subject to a 21-cent levy (77 cents if it's an Audio CD-R). The question is, which part of the retail chain gets to take the hit on the levy? Retailer, Distributor, Label, Artist, or Consumer? Who will get to see those 77 cents at the end of the day?
This might be a neat way for those starving artists to finally start collecting payment for their work -- selling blanks for fun and profit.
This doesn't make any sense: why would a dispute with EMI be relevant to the release of this cd? I know that EMI fought Danger Mouse on behalf of the Beatles for the Gray Album, but that appears irrelevant here. EMI isn't Danger Mouse's label, isn't Sparklehorse's label, and as the new album doesn't infringe on any copyrights of EMI (unlike the Grey Album), it should be no concern of EMI.
Brilliant marketing ploy though; everyone hates record labels.
Buffer underrun...? FUCK.
Alternate Poster & CD-R is $10 if you want to support this but don't want the David Lynch book.
P.S. For Mac users, Audio HiJack is a great way to copy the stream: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104129585
by John Cage's estate. They've already successfully sued a guy for releasing 1 minute of silence. (He settled for $100K)
In case anyone thinks this is a joke http://archives.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/
He's better keep that blank CDR to himself.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
...my experiences with any music by anyone called D.J. [Blah-de-blah] is that the blank CDR is the best option, in terms of doing your ears a favour.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It is my true hope that one day, when micropayments become more efficient or even before that, every artist can use the same idea by simply having a donate button on their website and leaving the rest to the communuity. No reliance on physical or any other kind of centralalised distribution, simply the most efficient experience for everybody.
Well you see, back in those days we didn't need to call them cassette-RWs... everyone just understood that the tape could be recorded upon (possibly with the aid of a bit of tape).
Far from lazy, watch what happens when you put a little work into it.
"Dangermouse has sold me an label-approved(sorta) CD-R. Blank. Then he ordered me to go find (his) music and burn it."
But how do you prove what was actually recorded onto that CD was in fact Dangermouse Music? Are the feds going to raid owners of Dangermouse Cds to demand to listen to them??
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Revenge (Flaming Lips)
Just War (Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals)
Jaykub (Jason Lytle)
Little Girl (Julian Casablancas of The Strokes)
Angel's Harp (Frank Black of The Pixies)
Pain (Iggy Pop)
Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It) (David Lynch)
Everytime I'm With You (Jason Lytle)
Insane Lullaby (James Mercer of The Shins)
Daddy's Gone (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Nina Persson of The Cardigans)
The Man Who Played God (Suzanne Vega)
Grim Augury (Vic Chesnutt)
Dark Night Of The Soul (David Lynch)
After downloading the files you will need to tag them. I would suggest tagging them as per the names on the NPR site as this is the only official source.
http://www.panix.com/~ruari/dnots.txt explains how this was done.
This page http://www.panix.com/~ruari/dnots.txt explains how it can be done.
Revenge (Flaming Lips)
MD5 = 1d1a41b4830a438405dbd85731ed25d3
Just War (Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals)
MD5 = 5c99aef8bfdd886f144e14bbb4ca54ce
Jaykub (Jason Lytle)
MD5 = 59264d485d8a136867087f418060aeb9
Little Girl (Julian Casablancas of The Strokes)
MD5 = 28918d3a87c163a7e035189c1595bca6
Angel's Harp (Frank Black of The Pixies)
MD5 = 6e8c05a1e89a7587653a76ce058beb6a
Pain (Iggy Pop)
MD5 = 42e464fd0125556c5e05048444f34cab
Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It) (David Lynch)
MD5 = a8f58dab6de5dd21259562149b7f7a54
Everytime I'm With You (Jason Lytle)
MD5 = bcea5fc87d799554c2629122b1419e63
Insane Lullaby (James Mercer of The Shins)
MD5 = 521f38ac8da6b52529f03fed1097b3e9
Daddy's Gone (Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse and Nina Persson of The Cardigans)
MD5 = 9192f811c6ac9146c017aa091ca6971e
The Man Who Played God (Suzanne Vega)
MD5 = 4ae7ea005952aba68424c957c06d577d
Grim Augury (Vic Chesnutt)
MD5 = 71c59557314b39161fff037d3f5fc059
Dark Night Of The Soul (David Lynch)
MD5 = 0ccb1bb36a9247e905df95d08993a463
I would rather pay this artist $10 for blank media than risk letting one Shekel of my money finding it way in to the greedy hands of those shysters at RIAA or their clients!