Sunday, January 01, 2006

THE CURSE OF MOGWAI

Can it really be true that Mogwai got so upset by the appearance of one of their songs on Said The Gramophone that - rather than making a direct approach - had the site yanked by the ISP? Obviously, they have every right to object to their music being used, if they really believe it's a problem, but we're slightly disappointed at the impersonal way they went about things. Are they turning into U2 or something?


4 comments:

ian said...

no. U2 are almost listenable.

Anonymous said...

i wonder if said the gramophone asked if they could use the song or songs before posting them. And it was a song from an upcoming album ripped from an advance copy... so, this is bound to happen to blogs posting illegal unreleased songs.

Anonymous said...

"Before people go overboard, I should specify that the members of Mogwai may have had nothing to do with this, but their management saw fit to send Apple a cease-and-desist."

Glad to see they've made the effort to clarify this, but it's not like anyone's going to pay any attention. A few handy links, a few angry comments, no forethought to be found anywhere, and a band that have made their way in this world by respecting their fanbase and staying true to the values they had when they started get demonised as a bunch of business-minded cease-and-desist-happy bastards, even being likened to U2 without a trace of irony in the process. It makes for a snappy closing sentence for your snappy paragraph in your snappy music news blog, yes, but was it really worth it?

Simon Hayes Budgen said...

But Adam B - the management represent the band; that's what the function of management is. The band pay the management, the management don't pay the band. (That's except for pop music, of course.)

And it's precisely because Mogwai have hitherto been known for - as you say "respecting their fanbase and staying true to the values they had when they started" - that it's especially frustrating that their management has been throwing their weight around in this way.

I'm sorry, saying "Hey, we love our fans and support them, this was our totally unrelated management who did this" is a piffling distinction.

For what it's worth, anonymous, it doesn't surprise me that STG got their fingers burned on this one. The problem is the way the band - sorry, the management - went about it. A quick email to the site would have had the mp3 removed; the problem here is the band went straight to the host and had the whole site pulled. A little heavy-handed.

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