Live8 Sgt Pepper for sale
p2pnet.net News:- We live in a tiny village on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
Friday was Canada Day, but it was also the start of a 10 day festival in Victoria, the Big City. Music performances and all kinds of other cool events are happening. So my wife and I bought passes for ourselves and our eight-year-old daughter and headed down.
Driving back from Day Two, yesterday, we tuned into the CBC news and heard a report on the Live 8 show in Barrie, Ontario. An interviewer was asking people what the performance, featuring elderly stars of yesteryear, was being staged for.
‘It’s a party, man. And it’s FREE!’ That was probably the most common response. ‘Yes,’ the frustrated interviewer would say. ‘But what’s it for?’
‘I dunno. Hehe. But it’s FREE!’ Or ‘ Uh, something in Africa?’ ‘Raising money for something?’ Or ‘To help HIV research?’
We caught most of the broadcast and no one we heard answered that the Canadian Live 8, and the other shows going on around the world, were to raise public awareness of the terrible poverty in Africa, and to encourage government leaders at the July 6 G8 summit to do something about it.
Towards the end, the CBC played a sample of the kind of thing you could hear —- U2 and Paul McCartney doing The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Immediately after, it was transmitted by satellite to the BBC Television Centre in London, and relayed to UK broadcaster Capital Radio, says a Universal Music Group press release, which goes on:
“A direct digital recording was captured there for Universal Music, which edited, mastered and transmitted the track to its production centre in Hanover, Germany. The final master was sent to the company’s global electronic distribution warehouse in the US, followed by real-time delivery to online retailers around the world, for sale as the first Live 8 download.”
Sgt. Pepper Mk II was on sale as a digital download an hour later and, “The unique recording is available to buy through more than 200 online music stores and services in 30 countries, including www.Live8Live.com, and the proceeds from the download sales are being donated to Live 8.”
UMG is owned by France’s Vivendi Universal. It’s the world’s largest music company and one of the Big Four record label cartel owners. As such, it never does anything out of the goodness of its heart. Never.
The Sgt. Pepper online release was a cold PR stunt. Pure and simple. But that’s OK. It demonstrated exactly how incredibly effective p2p can be in a hard-core commercial context and maybe it’ll wake the labels up.
It’ll also be interesting to see how much was raised, how it’s broken down for distribution after various expense accounts have been paid, and where the money will actually end up.
Stay tuned.
JN
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July 3rd, 2005 at 7:54 pm
I’m thinking about my own campaign. getting people to sign a online petition that says any “artist” that makes over $500,000/yr should have to donate 50% of it or stop telling us to donate our money. Yes they want the govermant to send more money that comes from where? our taxes, which will have to do what? that’s right increase. So we have millionaires telling us we should donate more money. Well I think that’s a pile of crap, maybe thet should do without a jet or 2 and send their own money.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against stopping poverty. I’m just against the rich telling other’s they aren’t giving enough.
July 3rd, 2005 at 10:41 pm
its a way for a bunch of rich farts who have no idea about what poverty and deprivation are to pretend theyre still relevant and get their names in lights again
July 4th, 2005 at 1:03 am
i’d sooner watch a comet crash on tv than anything having to do with live aid crap.
July 4th, 2005 at 6:44 am
It doesn’t even say what format I’ll be downloading this in! Thanks for posting this, I don’t trust Live 8 anymore.
July 4th, 2005 at 6:45 am
No wait, I see it now:
“Compatible with Windows 98/2000/XP”
Fuckers.
July 5th, 2005 at 2:23 am
bah, on my boring scale, you’ve just earned 10/10
it’s for a good cause, making poverty history, being there and seeing some of the messages broadcast with 200,000 people around you. It does make you think and open your eyes to how much people are suffering, and what you can do to help and encourage the G8 leaders to listen to what the people want and strike the best deal possible – although with Bush being president, America ain’t going to do much, besides sue more students, the elderly and children!
July 5th, 2005 at 11:56 am
the tickets were free – as has been mentioned quite a lot on tv news – so where does the money come from? what’s the point of a free concert if it doesn’t raise money? t-shirts? bah!
July 5th, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Oh, I am very sure it raised money. My lady wanted to watch it. What she found out was unless you had AOL or wanted to put your name in the hat for spam, you weren’t going to get it. (We don’t watch tv nor the trash that passes for tv these days.) What she did find was a live feed streamed. It amounted to listening to the announcers, who shut up for 30 seconds or so to let some music be heard and then started the announcing again. As if they were covering a sports event and not a music event. From those she heard watching tv, it was about the same with short spans alloted to the bands and then them being cut off before their set was through. It really wasn’t worth the time or the effort. It also tells me that since they did it this way, somewhere down the line will be the dvd sales.
I will refuse to buy this, rather I will download it at some point, if for no other reason than denying the major media groups any sort of funds out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with charity for a good cause, I do have problems with highway robbery, which seems to be the only mode the mega-corps operate under.
July 5th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
This is very interesting. The majority world countries that are in theory the beneficiaries of this campaign can’t afford the “software manufacturing” brands being actively promoted and/or mandated by Live 8.
From various points on the site it says “official downloads” with a link to:
http://www.7digital.com/downloads/live8/ which for me simply says:
“Sorry. Your computer does not appear to be compatible. This download will only work on computers with Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.”
Various other multimedia requires the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash player, which while available free/gratis is not free/libre and not available on all platforms.
Many majority-world countries are moving heavily towards development-friendly fair-trade Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) such as Linux, and away from illegal copies of “software manufacturing” software given paying for the software is unreasonable.
Talking about Microsoft, the most successful “software manufacturer”, Marcelo D’Elia Branco, coordinator of Brazil’s Free Software Project, stated that “every license for Office plus Windows in Brazil – a country in which 22 million people are starving – means we have to export 60 sacks of soybeans”.
It is ludicrous to demand people pay for the software that the Live 8 site is promoting when perfectly legitimate and legally free alternatives exist. They should be promoting the opposite, suggesting that instead of rich people paying money to these brands that people use FLOSS and donate the difference in the cost towards making poverty history.
Given the anti-sharing message pushed by Big Music’s BPI (British Phonographic Industry), I really have to wonder if this concert was about “making poverty history”, or about whitewashing the anti-development, anti-fair-trade policies of the recording industry, their most famous musicians, and the “software manufacturing” brands which they were partnered with?
There is no legitimate reason why all the results of this concert were not openly licensed under a Creative Commons style license (Maybe non-commercial share-alike so that third parties wouldn’t be making money off of these concerts), and all available media released in at least vendor-neutral standard file formats such as MPEG video and MPEG audio (MP3).
As a FLOSS developer and supporter (both as a volunteer and commercially), anti-poverty and fair trade activist, and supporter of international development, I have to admit I’ve been less than impressed with how this specific campaign turned out.
Further (copyright) policy suggestions on how to Make Poverty History.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/view/960
July 6th, 2005 at 9:42 am
I gotta agree with you. I started on linux, open source OS last month. Simply I am learning a new OS. You know what? I love it. I thought it would be really a booger bear to learn, having heard all this command line stuff. What I am finding out is it isn’t necessary just to run the OS. That gives you time to figure out the command line later.
What I have done is modify my video player to accept a wider range of formats and can now play almost anything that comes down the pipes. That doesn’t come stock on linux but if you are willing to spend the time to learn, I am proof it can be done. I have learned what to do to make the necessary modifications on the net and got the necessary files, libraries, and changes on the net also.
What I won’t do is change my linux over to IE, get bug and security problematic windows junk, nor will I be paying for software again in the sense of an OS.
The whole thing about Live8 wasn’t that it was free. It was put on and the exclusive rights to make the dvd for sale pretty much came through AOL (read Time-Warner). While much to do was done about Time-Warner and AOL splitting it was more for the appearance for the stockholders than it was anything else. For the stateside tv broadcast and for the streaming feeds it was nothing but advertisement and the audience wasn’t allowed to really see the concert in its entirety. Rather it was broken up to give a commercial appearance with announcers mouthing off more like a sports event than a music event. Evidently commercial broadcasting felt you should be paying to see it sometime in the future and if they showed you all that was there then there would be nothing for sale. You could get it through AOL but guess what? You need that Windoze crap to do so and you had to sign on AOL which means setting yourself up for both spyware and for spam when you give up your email. Neither of which I am willing to do.
Sense they feel you should pay for the right to watch a free concert when they put the dvd out, I am certainly not going to spend the money to see it. To me it defeated the whole purpose and intent of the live8 to begin with. Once again commercialism has gotten in the way to make money off an event that was supposed to be a freebee so that you would donate money to feed the hungry. The freebee wasn’t there and I am not going to support the thieves that use economic terrorism to get their way.
Call me a drop out but I am not going to do it the way they think commercialism should be accepted. Since the spirit of the event was corrupted, so was my willingness to support the theme.