The thing Ive never understood about the current situation (resting warmly on the laurels of years of chronic mismanagement) is how an industry which is so valuable to the UK economy can have been allowed to completely destroy itself over the course of 10-20 years. If this industry were The Car Industry millions would be pumped into it to help shore it up due to loss of jobs and loss of domestic and international revenue.

The record industry isnt just an industry either – its one of the major new artforms of the 20th century – allowed by governments, public, interested bodies and the Musicians Union to just dissolve like a slug in sea water.

It should be a legal responsibilty that all record company accounting to artists is fully accurate (as far as is currently possible) – it should not be up to artists like ourselves to bash our heads against the polished concrete walls of snug labeldom in order to find out how much we have actually sold.

I completely agree with your idea that actually it benefits labels to have shoddy accounting systems – if it didnt there would be no need to have auditing clauses written into contracts.

Peer Publishing is just as bad by the way – their publishing statements look like theyve been handtyped! Getting them to email me a copy has taken YEARS! then they finally only sent me one rather than the two separate ones requested – and Pinnacle’s old system for accounting for Digital sales was a mess – Im still waiting on PPL (even!) to finally sort out any PPL payments for broadcast play some 5-6 years after they lost the very first set of contracts we returned to them – and Ive been trying ever since.

All these companies have computer systems in place to take care of accounting – and, I would guess, recieve their own information digitally – it isnt rocket science therefore to expect that they account to their artists willingly, on time and, most importantly, accurately.

Tell me about it.

Cheers!

However, now that there are billions of people able to publish their own views, copies, derivatives, and software, hopefully someone will get around to abolishing the privileges of defamation, copyright, and patent. Sooner rather than later – though it may take quite a few bankruptcies yet.

No-one should suffer litigation for libel or defamation

Unfortunately in the U.S. the civil court system is even more skewed in favor of the corporations and the rich than the criminal courts are. At least in a criminal case you have the right to a court appointed attorney; if a coprporation decided to sue because they don’t like what you said about them, or even if you are filing a complaint about what they are doing to you (look up SLAPP suit ) you are forced to pay for your own attorney or (as in many cases) you can’t afford one you have the fun of trying to defend yourself against a high powered lawyer. Even if the corporation/wealthy person is dead wrong in the eyes of the law they can force people to back down just by bankrupting them with court expenses, and planting fear in them of a huge settlement against them should they lose.

http://www.bloggingcanadians.ca/LiberalBlogs/Skippy_Stalin_Packs_Up_Homepage/

No-one should suffer litigation for libel or defamation, only for refusing to qualify their unfounded allegations, to provide evidence to support them, or to retract them. The natural right is to truth (against falsehood), not to have the privilege of prosecuting someone who says something defamatory.

“Okay, as promised, I abandoned and deleted the old place.”

Ahh, house cleaning, sigh I always HATED that when I was a kid, as anything I valued got tossed but junk I could care less about got left alone.

I suspect that someone who knows what they’re doing can figure out how to obtain it

Still looking for Skippy Stalin…
I’m usually pretty good at extracting what I want out of google, but have to confess to an epic fail on this one. I ran those search lines and I got either nothing or the original url which now links to the damn car site. The “cached” link also brings you to the car site. As mentioned previously, no go from the wayback machine either. Just tried dogpile(runs query through a bunch of search engines), no better luck there.

1) http://www.warrenkinsella.com/index.php?entry=entry090213-125310

2) http://twitter.com/skippystalin

3) http://skippy-posts.blogspot.com/2009/02/welcome-to-postcards-of-hanging.html

“Okay, as promised, I abandoned and deleted the old place. In fact, I deleted nearly six years worth of archives with it. I know I’m going to regret that someday soon, but I like the idea of starting fresh. Other than what’s cached on the web, everything I’ve ever written for the public is gone forever.

After a while, the Enjoy Every Sandwich experience was starting to feel as though I was saying the same things over and over again, and had been for several years. Without the archives being readily available, I may escape that trap. Or I may not. We’ll see, won’t we?”

Hmmm. I wouldn’t be surprised if past material is still lurking somewhere…

http://studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=38072&highlight=&sid=35b26cedcd46ff2ddd4e637ed1837cfb#38072

Here’s what you get if you keep on searching for each sentence’s successor:

“The music industry operates on a fascinating business model”
“It involves fucking the people most responsible for their profits until they bleed.”
“Then they fuck them some more, just to make sure that they’re properly”
“fucked and stay that way. In most businesses, you try to make your cash-cows happy”

It’s a good article in the school of Steve Albini.