A BLOG OF SORTS FROM CHRIS COOKE
Here is some stuff I did in July 2021…
Madras Medai
Setlist is now on its summer holiday, because every podcast deserves a summer holiday. But in the meantime I guest on an episode of this new podcast series from Madras Medai, supported by the British Council, exploring independent music-making and content creation in South India and the UK. Check out all the info here.
Boom boom
If you are finding all our CMU coverage of the digital dollar debates, COVID confusion and Brexit bureaucracy a bit perplexing, distressing and/or depressing, on our other website at the moment we have an interview with the one and only Basil Brush! You can read it here.
Podcast stuff!
No prizes at all for anyone who guesses what topic we discuss on this week’s Setlist podcast – yes, it’s Parliament’s big old report on the economics of streaming. This edition is called ‘The Things People Still Get Wrong About Streaming’. Which is partly clickbait. And partly because we talk about the things people still get wrong about streaming. Click here to tune in!
Economics Of Streaming
It’s not often that the CMU Daily Top Story gets so long that we have to split it up into sections. But you know, the DCMS Select Committee report on the Economics Of Streaming is 118 PAGES LONG! So I guess my report on it was going to end up being quite long too. You can read it on the CMU website now. Or wait for Monday’s Setlist if you don’t like reading. We’ll talk about it there too. But for fans of things that are written down, here is my big report on the big report.
Speedy digital pies
Ahead of Parliament’s culture select committee publishing its Economics Of Streaming Report this Thursday, we managed to get our explanation of the whole digital pie debate – all three strands of it – down to seven minutes in this week’s Setlist. It’s in the middle, between some chatter about football songs and what Sainsbury’s might replace CDs with. So if you’ve been looking for the super speedy digest, I think that might be it. Access the podcast here.
Reporting downsides
As you all know, I love nothing more than writing about a good old copyright dispute. I’m happy with a stream-ripping case, or a safe harbour case, or a fair use case, or a termination rights case, or an uncleared sample cases, or a moral rights case, or a collaborator splits case, or – best of all – a classic song-theft case. Although, like any job, there are always the down sides. I mean, for example, sometimes researching one of these news stories requires you to listen to a Chris Brown track. I will now take a three week break to recover.
Organising digital debates
Inspired by AIM’s very interesting panel discussion on Thursday – and the three (that’s right, THREE!) papers I am currently writing on different digital dollar debates – I made a new diagram. There are so many debates around the economics of streaming it gets confusing. Basically, there are three steps involved in paying artists their digital royalties, and the debates are different at each step of that journey. In almost related news, I’m doing a webinar on how digital licensing works on Tuesday. Info here.
