Don't worry music, Britney's coming

Apparently music is in need of saving, in some way, and VH1 has appointed itself saviour.

Of course, it can't save music on its own - it has other demands on its time, making programmes about tattoos - and so has some ambassadors on board:

Britney Spears has joined the VH1 Save the Music Foundation's 2014 Ambassador Class, a consortium of musical superstars that includes Taye Diggs, Jason Derulo, Hunter Hayes, Gloria Reuben, Diane Birch and Cher Lloyd. The artists have banded together to promote music education in American schools.

It's a laudable aim, but Cher Lloyd and Britney Spears don't quite strike me as the right people to address the main problem with teaching music in American schools, which is Americans don't want to pay the taxes that would fund it.

Perhaps VH1's parent company, Viacom, might want to stop taking fifty million dollars in tax breaks when it makes pisspoor investment decisions and have the states have more money available for schools, rather than sending in Britney Spears to hector people into learning London's Burning on the recorder?

If ever an event didn't need celebrities...

Sure, the 9/11 "What will you do to remember" campaign has its heart in the right place, but if ever an event didn't need Lady GaGa bouncing about to draw attention to it, surely the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks are it?

Beginning on Tuesday (September 6) through Sunday, Viacom's networks will air specially produced "I Will" public service announcements featuring artists and actors, including Gaga, Fran Drescher, Pauly D, Nas, Hough and Bell, along with Viacom employees.

"We were in disbelief," Lady Gaga says in the promo, remembering how she as a New Yorker witnessed the attacks. "We all watched the second tower fall together."

I'm not sure that actually answers the 'what will you do to remember' question, come to that.

Viacom splits from the RockBand

Having realised that there wasn't really any synergy between MTV and the RockBand game franchise, Viacom have flogged off their games studio, Harmonix.

But, hey, it isn't a humiliating climbdown - they made $25m over what they paid, and are able to push out a press release with a bit of dignity:

"Harmonix has and will continue to create terrific video games, but for us, it is about focus. The console games business requires an expertise and scale that we don't have," chief executive Philippe Dauman said.

Of course, we could have told them that back before they bought in.

Punk'd: MTV slices workforce

MTV is axing 10% of its UK workforce under orders from Viacom.

That's going to be tricky for the company at a time when it believes its future is in 'made' programmes rather than showing videos, output which requires rather more staff members than fewer. Unless, of course, they just lob on lots more of the dismal American programming.

Viacom deny they want anything personal

Viacom are trying to salvage their reputation in the YouTube information hand-over by denying they want to infringe your privacy:

Viacom said it “has not asked for and will not be obtaining any personally identifiable information of any user”.

Oh, really?

They want user names and IP addresses, and the videos which people have watched. This, of course, is information which could be completely anonymous, but - as we saw with the release of supposedly anonymous data from AOL - there is anonymous data, and data which can be pieced together with other information to not be anonymous any more.

On a broader philosophical note, why is someone's Google ID not an identity which should be treated with the same respect as your name in the real world? Many people use the same screen-name in many places; if you've done nothing illegal, and haven't been accused of anything illegal, shouldn't that identity be spared from being violated by a corporation in the same way as your passport-and-social-security identity?

Via-late-com

So, can anyone at Viacom explain why, in the pursuit of people who have shared what they claim is their material on YouTube, they require to know the user name, IP address and details of every video watched by anyone anywhere in the world?

More to the point, how can Viacom reassure me that the data about what videos I have watched are going to be kept safe?

It seems a little unfair that an American judge can violate our privacy in the UK for no actual reason, so we're sending off a polite letter to a senior person in the UK branches of Viacom, inviting them to use their influence on their parent company to save Viacom from getting a reputation for being a heavy-handed organisation with no respect for individual privacy.

Nick Bampton - nick.bampton@viacombrandsolutions.co.uk - is the managing director of Viacom Brand Solutions and, you hope, in a position to have a gentle word.

If you want to complain direct to Viacom in the US, their contact form actually insists that you relate your comment to one of their networks - Viacom, it seems, believes we will all have a relationship with one of its channels. Perhaps that's why it can't conceive of our online activity having absolutely nothing to do with them.

Don't believe the Hype Machine hype... quite

Something seems about to happen to Hype Machine - although, apparently, not a $10million sale to Viacom. That is "not very accurate" according to HM's Anthony Volodkin. Not, you'll notice, completely wrong.

Just not very accurate.

Dutch TMF counts filesharers, shapes programming

Viacom's TMF channel in the Netherlands has started to blend filesharing trends into making playlist decisions, although original plans to build the figures into the weekly chart were dumped when the local RIAA client organisation started to protest:

Wouter Rutten, the spokesman for the Dutch IFPI said he doesn’t see the use of P2P data as problematic as long as they don’t explicitly use it for their music charts or advertise it in any other way.

So, it's alright for TMF to listen to the audience and choose what to play based on the peer-to-peer networks, but not to directly report what filesharers are sharing. It's almost as if the music industry aren't that worried about filesharing providing its only used as a background promotional tool - it's okay for it to exist on the strict understanding that nobody talks about it. Curious.

Last FM attempts to fix Christmas

In the seasonal rush for a Christmas number one - Cliff Richard, whatever bag of spuds is spewed up from the X Factor, something supposedly funny - a new paper-hat-from-a-cracker has been hurled into the ring in the shape of Lucky Soul's Lips Are Unhappy. This has been chosen by the CBS-funded Last.FM community to be the target for a campaign designed to show the power of online hitmaking. The idea being that everyone on Last.FM buys a copy, it takes the seasonal number one position and everyone in the music industry quakes in front of the power of the new hitmakers.

There's a couple of problems here. First, as the NME's embarrassing attempts to propel God Save The Queen to number one demonstrated, it's not actually that easy to rig the charts in this way.

The second is what, exactly, is the motivation for Last.FM members meant to be here? Admittedly, they were invited to participate in a vote to chose the record that would be pushed by the campaign - but presumably the people who voted for Lucky Soul would be interested in buying it anyway; those who preferred another track would, surely, rather spend their money on buying a song they liked rather than one they didn't?

And it's the purchase price that is key here: sure, the download is priced at a reasonable 49p, but that's still an actual payment. Why would anyone want to spend half a quid of their own money on what is, in effect, a marketing campaign for a company owned by one of the biggest media organisations in the world? If CBS want to push Last.FM, can't they use some of the Viacom outdoor poster sites rather than shaking down the userbase to chip in to cover the costs?

I don't want my MTB - not at these prices

The granddaddy of music TV might find itself lost in music in the UK as Sky stares down Viacom. It could mean that MTV drops off the electronic programmes guide, making it a bit like the Lost City of Atlantis.