Meet Andrew. He’s a musician out here in sunny California. Like lots of musicians, he has a Myspace profile. But unfortunately for Andrew, by the time he joined up and started uploading his music, Myspace and Gracenote had become good friends. This wouldn’t be so unfortunate (having friends is good, right?), but when this starts happening, you know that the indie haven Myspace has become is gonna take a hit:

I recently came out of the studio having recorded 4 original songs that were entirely written by me and a friend. I created a new page (www.myspace.com/tinystar) to showcase our work and after downloading our songs one of the main pieces (Festival Of The Seagoat) I recieved a “copyright infringement” notice next to the song on the edit page and consequently all the songs on my page are frozen. Frustrating to say the least! I’ve emailed support numerous times with no response….I cannot fathom how Gracenote technology can at all be accurate, as evidenced by this caper, and in the meantime I’m stuck with a frozen page and a piece of software telling me that my hardfought creative output is not mine after all! Thanks for reading and in advance for any help!

You see, Andrew’s smart. He wrote in to Boing Boing, who happened to be include Andrew’s story in their coverage of this new collaboration. Now on his Myspace Page, there are some songs so this could mean they got through (though without the Festival of the Seagoat song he mentions above). Or they could have been there before and it was the new stuff which was rejected. Not sure.
In the same Boing Boing article, Aaron points out that the DMCA protects Myspace from copyright infringers (yes, it does something good; amazing, huh?). When you go to open up a new Myspace Music account here’s the “welcome mat”:

Friendly, ain’t it? They’re covering their butt, and you can’t help but respect that. Which may be why the partnership and the troubles encountered by artist’s like Andrew seem so unnecessary. Not to mention the lackluster support working on this issue. Especially when implementing this new kind of system, they had to expect there were going to be problems — it will be unfortunate if this kind of experience keeps up and the power that Myspace has been in the indie music community lately crumbles.

It just doesn’t seem worth it to inconvenience the artists who gravitated to Myspace because they don’t have the money or the knowledge to establish an online presence from scratch…to “prevent” instances where someone has uploaded music that they represent as their own when it’s not. Both are scenarios that suck. But the net result just seems like they’ve traded customer service queries (”That’s my song! Not hers!”) for customer service queries (”That’s my song! Why does Gracenote say it’s hers?!”).

Either way, someone should be answering.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 3:43 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.