Ref: R24241
Re: http://www.pampelmoose.com/mspeaks/audio/Portishead-Silence.mp3

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am contacting you on behalf of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and its member record companies. The IFPI is a trade association whose member companies are some 1,450 major and independent record companies in the US and internationally who create, manufacture and distribute sound recordings. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the IFPI is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

We have learned that your service is hosting infringing files on its network. These files contain sound recordings by the artist known as Portishead. These sound recordings are owned by one of our member companies and have not been authorized for this kind of use. We have a good faith belief that the above-described activity is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law. We assert that the information in this notification is accurate, based upon the data available to us.

We are asking for your immediate assistance in stopping this unauthorized activity. Specifically, we request that you remove the infringing files from your system or that you disable access to the infringing files. In addition, please inform the site operator of the illegality of his or her conduct.

You should understand that this letter constitutes notice to you that this site operator may be liable for the infringing activity occurring on your service. In addition, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, if you ignore this notice, you and/or your company may also be liable for any resulting infringement. This letter does not constitute a waiver of any right to recover damages incurred by virtue of any such unauthorized activities, and such rights as well as claims for other relief are expressly retained.

You may contact me at IFPI Secretariat, 10 Piccadilly, London W1J 0DD, United Kingdom or email Notices@ifpi.org, to discuss this notice. We await your response.

Faithfully,

Jeremy Banks
Vice-President, Internet Anti-Piracy
IFPI
10 Piccadilly
London
W1J 0DD
United Kingdom
Email: Notices@ifpi.org

My reply:

Hi Jeremy,

Thank you for your letter of May 6th. The Portishead files have been removed from the Pampelmoose music blog and server. We apologize for any wrongdoing as we thought the files were made available to us in good faith as many other music blogs were hosting the same file. We are huge fans of Portishead and will continue to support them.

Best, Dave.

Dave Allen

My blog thoughts about this and the DMCA.

By Justin Spohn, Interactive Director – Nemo Design

Sometimes things are just in the air. And sometimes those things are nerdy. This week is one of those times. On the heels of reading this article just published on A List Apart – Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry, I was forwarded an article about a large local Portland agency adding a Director of Search. Later in the week, I sat in a conference room going over marketing requirements for a client, near the top of the list was “SEO strategy”. This got me thinking again about why we in the industry do the things we do and who we’re doing them for. (Really, I’m the life of the party) Looking at the sort of prototypical web application, something like Wikipedia, the mechanics and reasoning of search are obvious: we’re searching for a specific piece of information, we find an entry on it, we’re happy. For those of us who work in marketing though, the reasoning can become muddled.One of the things that makes interactive attractive to our clients is that it’s very easy to define and retrieve success metrics. If we launch a digital media campaign, it’s nice to be able to tell our client that the banners we made got a .8% click through. We can show charts of drop-off points. And of course – we can show search results. But what do all these things really mean? It shows that people are seeing the message, but says nothing to what they think of it. And even when we can infer some type of opinion, what they don’t show is what the viewer wanted and didn’t find. Our goal is to craft a message, and then try to get as many people as possible to view that message. It’s TV, with craftier Nielsens.

But by viewing the web as a channel, like TV or radio, we’re missing one of the things that is fundamentally great about the web: its a conversation between our clients and their customers. It’s the first and best chance to help our clients create the sort of relationship dynamic that converts the curious into customers and makes customers fanatics. If all we’re doing is helping people find our one way broadcast message, then aren’t we really just finding new and creative ways to say and do the same old thing? On the other hand, if we change the goal from getting our viewers to listen to our client’s pitch to providing viewers with a meaningful experience, and if we start making our clients a part of the communities they’re selling to, then it becomes necessary to expand our conversation from the tactical methodologies of SEO into the more holistic notion known as find-ability.

What’s the difference? If you go and read the article on A List Apart (and you should, but then come right back) you’ll see that there are many things, both technical and non-technical, that go into making a site find-able.What really makes the notion of find-ablity stand out for me though is that at its core, it requires us to consider the relative value of our interactive projects through the lens of the user rather than ourselves or our clients. It makes us ask the question: Are we simply trying to get people to the site from a Google search? Or are we trying to help them find the content and experiences within our site that are meaningful to them? It asks us to look at our sites as more than one monolithic exercise in marketing and instead see it as a collection of content that in some way benefits the user. It transforms the notion of SEO from a metric to a service. It changes the way we look at content, from being something that we create that is consumed by the viewer into something that reacts to the community that views it, that is portable and contextual. We stop writing the narrative and realize that the brand is the vessel into which the community pours its own experiences. At its foundation, the notion of find-ability is far less about technology, and more about a genuine empathy for the people who use our products.

Starbucks: In the late 90’s Starbucks purchased Hear Music, a small chain of music stores based in the San Francisco Bay area. I remember well shopping for CDs at its Santa Monica store as it offered selections that appealed to my eclectic tastes. Soon Starbucks was offering CDs in its stores around the country and the most compelling part of their offerings were the ‘music discovery’ items as I’d call them. I am no stranger to reggae so it was heartening to find a reggae compilation in Starbucks that had been put together with care by someone who obviously understood that genre; I also liked the idea that I would be able to discuss the merits of Peter Tosh with someone who had never previously heard of him. For some time the Starbucks Hear Music program became a convenient way for thousands of music lovers to discover great artists both old and new while grabbing a coffee; in short they had become a ‘trusted source.’ Unfortunately those days are now behind us as the NYT reports – “…for emerging talent, it (Starbucks) has raised the price of entry. When Starbucks merely stocks an album by an emerging artist on an outside label, it routinely seeks up to 50 percent of the total profit, including sales at retailers.”

What happened? Well for me the end came when I saw a Paul McCartney album being pushed heavily in the stores but here’s another explanation – “Mr. Schultz (Starbucks’ chief) decided to hire someone with a more general business résumé to oversee the company’s expansive entertainment projects, and picked Ken Lombard, formerly president of a company overseeing retail development projects for Magic Johnson, to be its entertainment chief.”

It appears that after Mr Lombard joined the company there was an exodus of talented executives from the entertainment department at Starbucks who disliked what one of them noted was Lombard’s “brusque style of management” and how he perhaps did not have a “particular creative vision.” Lombard’s focus appears to be on the bottom line and about increasing margins by squeezing the labels to take a cut in what Starbucks pays them. Which is a shame, because just as Starbucks has been criticized for losing its way with customer service and watched its stock tank, the one area of satisfaction for customers was the Hear Music program. See BBC: Why Starbucks’ Sales Have Gone Cold.

Starbucks customers have noticed the shift too – “The music offering “is more popular now,” said Hazel Delgado, 33, a social worker and Starbucks regular from San Bernardino, Calif., who attended a recent concert presented in front of one of its coffee shops by another act on the company’s label, the singer Sia. “I want to come in and be surprised,” she said. “If they do get more mainstream, why bother?” In other words if you can buy a Paul McCartney album at Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy then Starbucks’ customers quickly realize that they are just part of a numbers game, a push to sell more units. That’s what record labels do, sell the shiny discs in the plastic hard shell wrapper – Hear Music used to sell music, the emotion. Not any longer. They are just another music retail store now; where they were once seen as a solution they are now part of the problem. What the Hear Music program originally provided for music consumers was an end run around the record companies who were forcing their more commercial wares, via the airwaves, upon a restless public who were becoming disenchanted with what popular musicians were turning out. Those days are now gone.

Warner Music Group: Meanwhile over at Warner Brothers Music Group, Thom Whalley who has had a long and successful career as an A&R director, is struggling to keep head above water as he battles not only the slump in music sales and the perception that large record labels are redundant, but also his cohorts in the building – namely Lyor Cohen and Edgar Bronfman Jr.. Neither of these two men have much support from those who work in the music business. Cohen’s critics have repeatedly called him a “bully” and Coolfer had this to say once – “In another case, when Lyor Cohen became chairman of Warner Music Group in 2004, his company was paying Hits more than $2 million a year for advertisements and promotional services. The publication called his appointment a ‘blockbuster’ deal and quoted Warner’s chief executive as saying that Cohen was “one of the most respected executives in the business. Within months, Warner significantly decreased its spending with Hits. Last month, the publication’s website described Cohen as ‘overly aggressive’ and ‘untrustworthy,’ mentioned his ‘inability to turn things around’ and compared “the staggering list of bridges he’s burned to the Russian retreat in World War II.” Granted that was a story about Hits Magazine’s ‘pay to play’ problems regarding its coverage of the labels’ acts but it doesn’t paint Cohen in too much of a good light.

Bronfman Jr., has had his troubles too. When he took control of the family business, the Seagram company, he fell foul of Wall Street through the widely criticized sale of Seagram’s stake in DuPont. He was trying to diversify the company and move it towards becoming an entertainment operation which led to the acquisition of Polygram the music company and then moved into film entertainment through acquisition of MCA and Universal Pictures. His entertainment conglomerate didn’t last long before Seagram was passed off in a controversial all-stock acquisition to the French conglomerate Vivendi in 2000. On February 27, 2004, Bronfman bounced back into the entertainment industry by finalizing the acquisition of Warner Music Group and he has served as Chairman and CEO of the music company since that time. On his watch Warner Music Group’s stock has plunged to $4.57 from a 52 week high of $18.22.

Throughout the daily circus at WMG Thom Whalley has kept a clear head and a firm hand on the rudder by signing new talent, and with it the content that the company sorely needs, as well as baby sitting the label’s stars such as Green Day and Linkin Park. In a recent Financial Times article he says – “It still comes down to A&R,” he explained. “None of this works – mobile doesn’t work, downloads don’t work, CDs don’t work – if A&R isn’t good.” And he’s right, but I can’t help feeling that he has a giant struggle on his hands. Ironically he’s one of the few record company executives that embraces the digital distribution of music and sees the power that the internet brings to the table when it’s time to market one of his artists’ releases. And yet the genie is out of the bottle and cannot be put back.

He also realizes that the industry’s problems began when music fans grew tired of paying up to $18.99 for a CD that contained at best three good songs and a lot of sub par filler. Then there was the scrapping of the single a format that often lead consumers to buying a full-length CD. Soon enough music fans had turned to the internet to find and discover music and of course in most cases download the music for free. Where the record labels used to act as tastemakers now word of mouth and music discovery on the ‘net have taken their place. Whalley may be the best of a dying breed – in the same article there’s this ominous sentiment – “Guy Hands, the new owner of rival EMI, recently derided the A&R man as an overpaid type “who gets up late in the day”. He has vowed to remove their power as part of the company’s restructuring.”

A&R folks used to be a ‘trusted source’ and a filter, ironically so did the Starbucks Hear Music program. Whalley and Lombard have got a lot of work on their hands to turn things around.