Labour leadership: Not true to you

Never mind Yvette Cooper's sudden realisation that, actually, she always hated Ed Miliband and everything he said, or did, or thought, or liked, or touched, or tasted, or loved, or licked, or coloured-in, or flirted with, or smelled, or drilled, or folded, or applauded, or arrested, or fed from a packet of seed he kept in his pocket, or folded, or bought, or proposed, or endorsed, or Googled, or polished, or filed away for safe keeping, or sang to, or wrapped.

As John Rentoul has reminded us, last year Andy Burnham went cold on The Smiths. In an interview, Burnham talked about how Morrissey changed his life, but:

[But it hasn’t lasted?] I feel that. I play it to my kids [13, 11 and 8] and the only song that they will really relate to is “How Soon Is Now?” And it has a vibe, or a beat, a bit more of the reverb thing going on, but the jingly-jangly yodelling-type lyric does feel a bit trapped in Eighties indy-land.

When you see those early Top of the Pops performances it’s like a historical curiosity. Did they really do that back then? I’m also – a bit predictable again – a huge Stone Roses follower. I was younger when I liked The Smiths and then the Stone Roses came along, ‘89, ‘90, and I was 19, I was old enough to follow them around. I went to the Heaton Park thing in Manchester when they reformed last year and they’ve also got a film out recently. One thing you notice about the Stone Roses is that they are more Everyman. They are less an introverted sixth-form thing, and they are much more the lads in hi-vis jackets, they are everyone’s band in the way that The Smiths never were. The Smiths were always, I’m a student therefore – The Stone Roses [has] a more timeless feel to it, more relevant.

Also, Morrissey's position on thresholds for strike ballots is so anti-business.

Why we love Cornershop

Cornershop turn up in The Guardian Guide today and pretty much manage to wrap up everything we say in No Rock and everything we say on our Twitterstream in about three-quarters of a paragraph:

Cornershop remain a profoundly British creation, still infused by British politics, the serenely sardonic Tjinder regarding David Cameron today as "a tosser". The Labour party fares even worse. "It's full of bastards, [David] Milliband is an idiot and Andy Burnham [health secretary] is a dick; he spoke at Digital Britain and knew nothing about it and to have Feargal Sharkey [also at Digital Britain, the former Undertones yodeller now being chief executive of UK Music] representing the government's view on how music should be, is ridiculous."

Tjinder is surprisingly, though thoughtfully, generous to Gordon Brown:

"I think Gordon Brown is a great man," he declares. "I think he handled the financial thing very well. He is an awkward chap. I'm an awkward chap. And if I had one eye I'd be a damn sight more awkward. But to come across as that strong after all that shit has hit you, I think we've got steel in that man. But I'd vote for the Greens, if only they had more presence than window stickers about recycled tea bags."

RIAA feels the cold chill of efficiency

Let's face it, any organisation that requires money to keep running is having a tricky time of it right now. But if you're a failing organisation, lacking a strategy, having burned through enormous sums on legal fees with the only outcome making an industry despised, you're going to have to work a lot harder when it comes to getting the subscription renewals in.

Hypebot is reporting a deep-throat on the slashing of budgets at the RIAA:

RIAA "It is about 90-100+ people across the US and global offices - anti-piracy, coordinated IFPI/BPI etc - trust me it's a bloodbath...

(Major label heads) Hands, Morris are squeezing the ____ out of these guys after the ISP failure and a major budget cut. (The) RIAA as you know it is probably history by Tuesday of next week, a formal announcement is being drafted for drop next week.

The new group is a aggregate of IFPI + remaining pieces of BPI + RIAA - (a) new leaner, coordinated group...DC offices are getting closed except for one part of one floor on Conn. Ave., just for the address."

What's especially interesting about this is that it suggests a dropping of the fiction that the BPI is a group representing the British music industry and an admission that its real role is promoting the interests of multinational organisations even if it is at the expense of smaller, local companies.

And if that is the case, Andy Burnham and the DCMS is going to have put on a very good explanation of why the BPI should be allowed more than a secondary influence on UK government policy.

It sounds like we could be in for an interesting week.

Burnham seeks to start global war on downloading

Andy Burnham, out of the DCMS, is still seeing his job as doing the record company's bidding and not protecting the consumer, and wants an international strategy to beat "illegal" downloading:

"I am working towards an international memorandum of understanding, it is time for much more serious dialogue with European and US partners. No solely national solution will work. It can only be durable with international consensus," he added.

Seriously, Andy? You think a handful of snaffled mp3 files and a tiny sum in potential lost sales is so bloody important you need to convene a world parliament to fight BitTorrent?

An internationa memorandum of understanding, no less. Serious dialogue. International consensus.

This is people sucking down a few old Wham! songs and the odd record-company-created leak of U2's latest you're talking about, Andy. It's not The Penguin weaponising his umbrella, or global warming. God forbid you worry more about global warming.

Still, Burnham's got to get it right at home first. He's going to need a strategy. No, that won't do it. There must be two strategies. At the very least. In fact:

Burnham said he is aiming to "bring the threads together" with a five-pronged strategy to help the UK music industry. "It is an incredibly important industry to this country and perhaps it has not been focused on in the way it should. There is a strong sense that this is the year we have to bring this stuff off, we have a head of steam, a bit of momentum," he added.

It's nice to see Burnham demonstrate the strength of the UK's creativity by using a metaphor coined in the age of steam trains.

You've got to love the idea that Burnham seems to believe that nobody has really focused on the unlicensed download question. Even while John Kennedy of the IFPI is stood in a court testifying in the Pirate Bay trial.

By the way: The Digital Britain report - which includes the suggestion that it become law for ISPs to send letters to filesharers - is currently being sliced and diced to allow you to comment through the mighty WriteToReply.org.

Andrew Gowers: Andy Burnham is out of touch with reality

It's not quite throwing shoes at the president, but there's no respect at all in Andrew Gowers' assessment of Andy Burnham's sudden quavering on copyright extension.

Gowers, of course, wrote the original report for the Department of Culture Media And Sport, recommending that fifty years is plenty long enough for a recording to be out of the public domain. He's not impressed with Burnham's decision to start moving towards copyright extension:

There was, he said, “a moral case” for performers – who often do their best recorded work in their 20s and 30s – to benefit from it throughout their lifetime. The government would therefore consider extending copyright for recordings to 70 years from the present 50.

As political speeches go, this is pretty silly. A moral case? You might just as well say sportspeople have a moral case to a pension at 30.

Copyright is an economic instrument, not a moral one, and if you consider the economic arguments – as I did two years ago at the request of Gordon Brown – you will find that they do not stack up. All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community.

Burnham's suggestion that, somehow, extending copyright for longer might make the world a more creative place is swiftly despatched:

Twenty years’ extra earning power in 50 years’ time does nothing to put more money in the pockets of struggling performers now: two thirds of lifetime income from an average compact disc comes in the first six years after release.

And it will not alter the incentives for creation one jot. As Dave Rowntree, Blur’s drummer, told my review: “I have never heard of a single band deciding not to record a song because it will fall out of copyright in only 50 years. The idea is laughable.”

Rowntree, of course, is not just the drummer from Blur, he's also a member of Burnham's party and keen to enter Parliament at the next election.

There are two broader messages. First, to music companies: you have moved beyond trying to close the internet down as a distribution channel, but you have still not done enough to exploit the swirl of creative and commercial opportunities unleashed by the world of social networks and web 2.0. Please focus on innovation, not on trying to eke more rent from the successes of yesteryear.

Second, to policymakers: many of you are debating how government can support business in these challenging times, and that is fine. But you would do well to pick the targets for assistance and the instruments you use with care. Get it wrong, and you will end up looking silly and out of touch like Mr Burnham.

I think I might be a little bit in love with Andrew Gowers.

Andy Burnham wants them to bring back Top Of The Pops

TV isn't doing enough to help new acts, reckons the government. Or at least that's what culture secretary Andy Burnham thinks:

Andy Burnham said: "We need a programme like Top of the Pops again.

"This was a great thing that was always putting a great mix of new music before the public."

Mr Burnham, speaking at music industry conference In the City in Manchester, said great acts that emerged 20 years ago may not get the same chance today.

Broadcasters must "promote and champion new music in this country, rather than having just very safe options on prime-time TV", he told executives.

Although, of course, we did have a programme exactly like Top of the Pops just a couple of years ago and they took it off because nobody was watching it.

Burnham then recalled watching Tony Wilson on the Granada Reports:

Mr Burnham said he recalled seeing Wilson, who died last year, promoting new bands at the end of his regional news programme.

"Today, people perhaps have more power over their own destiny, but getting heard over the bottom rung of noise is much harder than it was 15 or 20 years ago when people were being chucked onto Granada Reports at the end of the news," he said.

"It seems to me to be a more difficult place to be.

"Perhaps what was always surprising about music, and some of the music that came out of this city, was that they could go national because of the way things were.

"Whereas I do worry very much that if we retreat into that comfort zone, that tried and tested model, they just won't break through in the same way."

Actually, of course, Granada's great strength came not in the slots on Reports, but in the longer-form programmes featuring regional bands that the company would throw out late at night: the So It Goes, the Other Side Of Midnights - even the Pennis Pops Outs. It's arguable that The Stone Roses and New Order owe more to the cross-subsidisation allowed by making Corrie than just from coming from the right place, full stop.

Mr Burnham might like to count up exactly how many programmes are being made like that by the modern ITV his government have allowed to develop; he might also ponder if slots for local bands on teatime news are going to become easier to come by, or harder to come by, when Ofcom lets ITV turn local news into 'somethings that have happened in a 500 mile radius'. You know, something he could actually do something about rather than making weak calls for the return of a show which had been allowed to wither in a multichannel world.

Shouldn't the culture secretary have been looking ahead, anyway? If, say, games are going to become an important new space for promotion of new bands, isn't that where Burnham should be focusing his efforts, rather than calling for Jimmy Saville to come out of retirement?

Burnham: Music business is like a canary

PaidContent UK has picked out some choice chunks from Andy Burnham's speech to the Convergence Think Tank last night, including this bit:

"The music industry has been the canary in the internet coal-mine in terms of the consequences of piracy and illegal file-sharing. There is a lot of thinking yet to be done on this question. But we have signalled in our creative economy programme that if the policy and creative industry insiders don't solve this problem, we will bring the same values of the real world – the values that say shoplifting of a CD is unacceptable - to the internet."

Hmm. As we observed earlier, Sony-BMG is worth some three billion dollars, which is a pretty healthy looking canary.

Burnham's metaphor is wrong, though: it assumes that there's no reason why the old companies shouldn't suddenly be in the middle of a totally new industry and still doing as well as they were in their old industry. It's like assuming that the companies which used to deliver coal should suddenly have transformed into gas distribution when natural gas started to be piped to homes with no loss of equity or profitability. In effect, if you want to see the music industry as the test for something in the new economy, they're the first fish on land - they might evolve beyond gills or they might not. But there's no reason to assume that they must do so.

It's also slightly uncomfortable seeing Burnham just blithely slap on the "stealing a CD" metaphor, like he's reading from a script prepared for him by EMI. Apart from being hackneyed (Burnham effectively covering a five-year old Britney Spears routine - perhaps he'll cover himself in Pleather and do I Did It Again for us next), it's philosophically suspect. People don't take CDs from shops because depriving people of their physical property feels wrong - the morality seems pretty clear-cut, and certainly the 'not thieving stuff' impulse wasn't 'brought' to us by government. It's just there. All the government can do is get involved when someone deviates from the generally accepted line that it's wrong to do so.

Downloading a file you might not have paid for from the internet isn't transgressive of the same moral code, though, is it? However much the music industry might wish it was, however much they may get their stooges in parliament to squeak that it is, people really don't view it like a bad thing in quite the same way. Cheeky, perhaps - like nipping in to a parking space someone else had clearly been waiting for - but not a bad wrong. And, much as the government might like to, it's not in a position to change that viewpoint. Given they're attempting to bring in a form of internment even while I'm writing this, it's probably no surprise that Burnham believes he can do so, but you'd hope that he's wise enough to know his time would be better spent trying to find ways to encourage artists to make money in the world we live in, rather than protecting conglomerate's interests from a world we have flown.

Government pushes ISPs to become the police

It's been trailed quite heavily, so it's not a surprise, but Andy Burnham's DCMS proposals to do the BPI's bidding and 'open consultations' on whether ISPs should be made to police their customer's online activities still bring something of a shudder.

Leaving aside the issues of copyright and ownership and if it could work: Andy Burnham is proposing that private companies should not only be given the right to eavesdrop on your conversations, but could actually be legally compelled to do so.

And what makes it even more frustrating is that even the BPI don't believe it'll make any difference to their sales. The record company cartel's spokesperson Matt Philips admitted as much to the Guardian's Technology supplement yesterday:

But imagine, finally, that a rigorous self-regulation procedure is in place, and that the internet populace knows about it. Does the BPI think its members' sales will grow? For once, Phillips hesitates. "That's really hard to answer. But it would send out the message that copyright is to be respected, that creative industries are to be respected and paid for," he says. "It would mean that the people who are paying for content wouldn't be subsidising those who don't. But I can't say to you now that it would make sales grow, or by how much."

So, this invasion of everybody's privacy - the treating of all broadband users in the UK as suspects, and as such open to the investigation of any corporation which provides ISP services - isn't even going to do anything other than "send out a message" about copyright. Let's hope they don't start publicising new records in the same way - "we're asking the government publishes people's health care records online to promote the new Kylie album".

The official announcement of the threat is part of a wide-ranging DCMS press release which tries to get away with hiding the unpleasant policy amongst some fluffier stuff. But it's in the fluff that you can see the little deals that have been done behind the scenes - clearly, part of the trade off has involved record companies doing little favours to prop up Burnham's weak creative industry 'stimulation' plans in return for being allowed to dictate government policy on filesharing:

# securing 5,000 apprenticeships across the creative industries by 2013. BBC at mediacity:uk, Tate Liverpool, Universal Music Group and Monkeydevil Design are among the first to sign up to offer high quality training

# working with the industries’ most successful creators, including Aardman Animations, EMI, and the Royal Opera House to develop five new ‘centres of excellence’ in creative skills

[Our emphasis]

Universal and EMI, eh? That's a strange coincidence, isn't it?

The government is trying to make it sound like it's merely encouraging a dialogue between ISPs and the BPI:

The Government supports current discussions between internet service providers and rights holders for action on illegal file sharing and our strong preference remains for a voluntary solution. However, to date no voluntary agreement has been reached, and we will shortly consult on options for a statutory solution, with a view to implementing legislation by April 2009. This consultation is in parallel with the voluntary discussions and we will stop the statutory “clock” if and when a voluntary solution is reached.

All very civilised. However, when the negotiations are taking place against a ticking clock, with the knowledge that if there's no agreement, the BPI will get what it wants anyway through legislation, you might wonder how fair the government is actually being.