Halifax Politics dot ca

The Recording Industry Association of America has revealed its new strategy in fighting against the downloading of copyrighted music by working with internet service providers to sever abusers’ net connections. The decision to scrap the legal attack was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.

In an interview Friday morning, Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), said many of the details have yet to be hammered out. The music industry, he said, which also announced that it would no longer pursue a “broad-based legal strategy against individuals for file sharing,” has drawn up a new anti-piracy plan whereby the RIAA would notify participating ISPs when it discovers their customers engaging in what it claims are illegal downloading activities.

Nevertheless while the RIAA will reportedly not file any new mass batches of lawsuits, it does intend to pursue the ones it still has pending, and reserves the right to file suit against egregious offenders.

The recording industry has lobbied for similar three-strike legislation in Europe, but the European Union has so far rejected the notion of banning file-swappers from the Internet as too severe — while France alone has sided with the record labels and moved to enact such a proposal.

Throughout their attempt to keep the number of illegal file-sharers in check while the legal market for digital music took off, with two weeks left in the year, legitimate sales of digital music tracks soared for the first time past the 1 billion mark, up 28 percent over all of last year, according to Nielsen Soundscan.

“We’re at a point where there’s a sense of comfort that we can replace one form of deterrent with another form of deterrent,” said RIAA Chairman and Chief Executive Mitch Bainwol. “Filing lawsuits as a strategy to deal with a big problem was not our first choice five years ago.”

Notices seem to be a better solution when it comes to banning, warning or preventing this kind of irregularity. In other words, under the new plan, the RIAA will send notices to ISPs that identify the IP addresses of suspected file sharers. ISPs will then send warnings to their customers and then cut them off if the users fail to curb their illegal downloads. Details are still being worked out, but most reports said downloaders might lose their net connection after the third notice. The termination could last anywhere from three months to a year.

It’s not yet clear which ISPs have been negotiating with the RIAA, but policing the network and sending notices to subscribers regarding misuse has never been top on the agenda of most. There have been instances, however, where certain ISPs have voluntarily helped content providers keep copyrighted content from being illegally distributed on their networks.

© 2007 – 2008 – eFluxMedia

via Music Industry Drops Lawsuits.

Let’s just lay the cards on the table.  My family is not a normal family.  We are NOT strange like AdamS family strange, nor are we scary like Manson family strange.  But we are different.

I work in the music business, Marnie works at the alternative weekly, Rhett has been going to punk rock gigs since he was nine, Emma alternates between Hannah Montana and Acrade Fire as her favorite bands.  Marnie and I just got married after 10 years of living together.   We are politically active, opinionated, and engaged.  We are arty snotbags.

I acknowledge (maybe even embrace) that we not a stereotypical middle class family.

And now, Team MMG (as we call ourselves) have gone to Disney World in Florida.   We stayed at a resort on the Disney property, with my Mom and Dad, my sister and brother-in-law.  There were eight of us, and we were  there for seven and a half days.

Culture shock is an accurate summary of our states of mind after this experience.

Well when I say ours, I do not mean Emma.  She loved all of it, from the plane ride to Spacemoutain.  My girl, who normally wants to go to bed at 9:00pm, was up to midnight the second night there, riding rides, having fun.  And up again the next day at seven am!

But for the rest of us, well…

Rhett struggled at first with how much he is enjoying himself.  My “too cool for school” son is so devastatingly intelligent that in many every day things he has already left me behind with his rapid and logical calculations around things.  He will make a hell of a lawyer if he wants to be one (which seems unlikely).

His personal identity as a seventh grader is gig going, punk rock listening rebel. Hard to reconcile this with a ride going, Mickey ear wearing goomer.  But there you are, they are one in the same when you are in Disney World!

Marnie?  Well, she was forced back in the day to go to Disney  as a rebellious 16 year old, and she did end up reliving some of that bad place this trip.  She also managed to maintain some ironic detachment during the whole thing.  She was the voice of reasoned objectivity that was perfunctorily ignored….. “Marnie, everyone else wants to be at EPCOT for 16 hours straight today, that is the point of Extra Magic Hours!” In retrospect, we should all feel a bit bad about that.

Being at Disney is a state of being.  Why?  Because Disney is very nearly perfect.  The staff love working here.  Customer service is high quality and enthusiastic, everything is designed to maximize your enjoyment.

Disney is the height of western decadence.  Everything is over the top, and meant to keep you, the customer, happy and spending.  Your every need is their concern.  An example — – your bags are taken from shops back to the resort so you can continue to enjoy the park (ie: shop more) unimpeded.

WDW is so well run that you can hardly feel Uncle Walt reaching into your wallet again and again to take money out… and when you do you don’t mind that much.

For us as adults, the issue was simple.  The first morning I said to Marnie “you know, we have to get over ourselves.  There is no ‘cool at Disney’ and ‘not cool at Disney,’  there is only ‘being at Disney.’”    So, we just focused on ‘being at Disney’ for the week, and it sure was fun.

Buffalo Tom
Three Easy Pieces
(UMG – 2007)
This is the Buffalo Tom record you have been waiting for.

Fans of the band know that their career is one of those Sloan or Replacement style arcs. They were the “next big thing” for years and years, always selling a fair number of records, but never blowing up in the mainstream as was expected. Musicians and music fans know this band, respect their work, love the songs, but at the same time, when an icon of your musical past puts out their first album in 9 years, you get nervous. Buffalo Tom hit their stride with 1992s “Let Me Come Over”, their third record, and released two more solid records, each one breathlessly painted as “the record that was going to break them.” While I enjoyed it and think there are a couple stellar tracks, Smitten, their last album from 1998, was far from their best.

I am not going to beat around the bush. I love “the Tom.” I work in the music biz and I went to Toronto June 7, nominally on business at the NXNE festival, but really, it was to see Buffalo Tom at the Horseshoe. I own all the records except the self titled, and also own Bill’s solo record. They played a smoking set, absolutely dominating the venue with a selection of hits from Let Me Come Over up to 1998s Smitten, they were as good as I remember them being last time I saw them in 1993.

Luckily, I got to meet the band (who I am trying to book to come to our festival!) and the manager gave me a promo copy of the record. It has been in constant rotation here, in my home, office, car, ipod.

From the stellar opener “Bad Phone Call”, a Bill number with lots of harmony on the chorus with Chris, through to the closing track “Thrown”, the pacing and energy of “Three Easy Pieces” never flags. Committed fans and new converts will enjoy the thoughtful ballad-esque tracks such as “You’ll Never Catch Him,” “Pendleton,” and “Lost Downtown”, and thrill to the rockers such as a classic sounding Tom song “Bottom of the Rain” or what to me are the two surprising standouts, “Renovating” and “Gravity.”

“Renovating” is a Chris track. Chris has more songs on this album than any previous. One of the exciting things about “Three Easy Pieces” is that Bill and Chris trade of chores and verse in the same song, something they did very infrequently in the past. The track is a happy up beat sounding song, even though the topic seems to be breaking up a relationship. It is an infectious to the point of being almost poppy and I have found my whole family singing along to the “ba da da da da da da” counterpoint that runs under the verses within 24 hours of bringing the record into the house.

“Gravity” is Bill track. The driving snare is meshed with harmonica, pipes has a marching band feel to it, and comes across as celtic/irish influenced. I love the track because it has this authentic Boston rock feel to it that just works without being forced or pretentious.

This album is neither derivative nor played out, which is often the case for bands that have been together for twenty years. The band put together 13 solid tracks that, while solidly a Buffalo Tom record, bring a lot of new song-writing, musicianship and lyrical content to the table, and this shows that the band’s sound has continued to mature and get better with time. In fact, the lyrics are about the types of issues that a couple of guys in their 40s who still rock are living with day to day, and that too is done in a way that is not over played or hokey, which is also an all to rare feat.

When the band took the stage in Toronto, I looked at Bill’s ring hand and was glad to see, yes, he is married. For 17 years I have been wondering if Lonesome Billy was as sad as he sang. I want Bill, Chris and Tom to keep cranking out moving, uplifting rock, for a long time yet, and be as happy writing and performing it as I am listening! I found out that night he is married with two kids.

Good for him, and good for the band for producing a record that is as good as anything they have ever released.

It is a cruel word where your loyal scribe goes on vacation, and then all hell deliciously breaks loose in the world of massive expensive concert promotion in Halifax. Few things could compel me to put down the Corona and get off the beach in Pugwash to write a few words, but the situation between HRM and the Trade Centre Limited (TCL) is one.

TCL, headed by Fred MacGillivray, is the Provincial/Municipal organization with the wide open mission to provide “economic benefits by bringing people together in Halifax and Nova Scotia” and the goal “to be the best events destination in North America within 15 years.” It is unclear if the goal is for Halifax, or the Trade Centre, to be that best event destination.

TCL operates Ticketatlantic, Events Halifax, the Metro Centre (though this is owned by the Municipality), and Mr MacGillivray is the Chair or president of every bid and games committee that the region ever puts together, from Commonwealth Games to Culture Capital proposal.

The not very arms length not-for-profit Events Halifax has been in the news much as of late. It is responsible for scooping up Federal and Provincial money and funneling it into event projects that benefit Halifax, if your definition of benefiting Halifax is “events that take place in the Trade Centre and Metro Centre.”

Many frustrated Halifax based festivals and promoters have been told “if you want ACOA money then go to Events Halifax” and then in turn been told “if you want Events Halifax, you need to move your event into the World Trade Centre.”

Events Halifax task is “to identify events that are available to a host city and determine if Halifax can be that city.” So it was only natural for Mayor Kelly to approach them, as one of the lead partners in last summer’s Rolling Stones debacle, about the possible events he had hoped to bring this summer.

Mayor Kelly was frustrated that Events Halifax had not secured another concert for the Commons this year, so, according to news reports, he went to other private sector concert promoters and requested their help and assistance. These efforts resulted in possible concerts by the Who and Justin Timberlake.

According to news reports, the Mayor then went to Events Halifax to brief them on what was underway, and shortly thereafter, an Events Halifax partner, Montreal based Gillette Entertainment Group (owners of the Bell Centre and the Habs) put in near identical offers on the same dates for the same bands in Halifax.

Now, Halifax has two agencies and two promoters both flailing around on the world stage, looking like rank amateurs. Here they are, competing with each other, trying to convince top flight talent to come to a tertiary market where the one major concert to date, the Stones, sold 40-50% less than its nearest competing market, the more established, forward thinking Moncton.

How could this have happened? Major cities do not work like this. Big cities have good, quality, cheap facilities and sometimes tax credits, and the private sector does the heavy lifting. Halifax has the Mayor’s office competing with a crown corporation through private sector proxies and fighting over it in the media.

You have to feel sorry for the Mayor. Clearly he forgot that when briefing civil servants at arms length agencies about municipal plans for events, it is wise to get the staff to sign non-disclosure agreements, so you can guarantee that they keep their big mouths closed.

How could this happen, and how come these people have not have been fired? As a joint provincial/municipal organizations TCL and Event Halifax represent both governments and are responsible to neither. The Haywood Report in 1992 said that joint responsibility means no one is clearly responsible. He was talking about municipal services and I would argue this is one.

Why does the Province of Nova Scotia run Halifax’s World Trade Centre, and an organization called Events Halifax? These are municipal affairs. A clear chain of command with municipal elected officials at the top is what is required. TCL needs to be reigned in, and Events Halifax rolled into HRM, or Destination Halifax, the HRMs tourism agency.

—
Waye Mason is music and festival promoter, business consultant and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.

It has not been a good year for those that sacrifice themselves to lead the energetic arts and culture sector in Halifax. There is a growing feeling, hovering somewhere between ennui and abject despair, and it is expressing itself throughout the province’s creative continuum.

Halifax has never been an easy town to love if you are a creative person, or as the bureaucrats call them, “cultural worker.” The city and the province it is capital of have never had particularly good support for the arts, and if anything, the gap between expectations and support has never been wider.

In fact, many worry that the limited success we have had in the absence of adequate funding and resources has in fact made it even harder to convince government that more funding is desperately required.

Arguably, Halifax’s reputation as an international centre for art has its roots in the incredible experiment that was NSCAD in the 1970s. For a time, our humble art college was THE world leading institution in art and design.

Garry Neill Kennedy lead the college to unimaginable heights, but the support to continue this momentum, for growth and international leadership, was simply not forthcoming from the Provincial or Federal funders. Don’t get me wrong, NSCAD is still a good institution, and probably better than we deserve, but like most things in Nova Scotia the raw potential of the organization is not being realized due to insufficient leadership and lack of funding.

The situation with NSCAD can be used as a template or referent for the challenges faced by virtually every other arts agency, institution, or business in the province. From craft to film to music, from higher education to art galleries, the potential for greatness is there, but not realized.

Provincially, funding is stagnant. The current government promised to double funding during the election, and then increase the $7 million dollar budget by just $450,000. Vital organizations from the Tattoo to the Writers Federation have not seen significant increases in funding since the 1980s.

Costs continue to rise, funding does not, and the end result is decreasing programming and slashed services. Depending on who you speak too, Nova Scotia’s funding is either the lowest or the middle of the national pack, per capita. How can we lead the nation with anything less than top notch funding?

On the municipal level, the much vaunted “culture plan” has yet to result in concrete action or funding. The HRM has, I am told, over 2200 pieces of art in storage. The city has an entire museum, the Dartmouth Heritage Museum, in storage. The city has finally, after 23 months, reposted the cultural officer job that has been empty since Keith McPhail fled the position is despair in 2005.

There may be meetings underway, there may be “multi-stakeholder committees” meeting and discussing plans, but at the end of the day, the council has yet to commit serious and even adequate money to funding culture.

The most depressing example was told to me at a recent brainstorming session for Symphony Nova Scotia, where we were told that Halifax funds our symphony the least of all municipalities in Canada, with $15,000 a year. The next lowest, you ask? Edmonton at $100,000, and the support rises rapidly in other cities from there. Halifax wants world class art and music? Show us the money!

The creative energy in Halifax has never been stronger. The raw potential is there to have a cultural powerhouse, to be a centre, if not the centre, of independent arts and culture production in English Canada.

The people who sacrifice to stay in a city they love, to create and live their lives, do so in large part because they perceive that things will change for the better. They think that society wants art, wants creativity, and is willing to fund opportunities, and also, to fund not just good or adequate institutions, but amazing and world class institutions and agencies.

Halifax has the potential to be better than average. Halifax can and should be great, but the question remains, will leadership, vision, action and money come in time? Will it come before the current batch of cultural leaders end up packing up and abandoning the city in frustration, and exhaustion? Time is running out.

—
Waye Mason is music and festival promoter, business consultant and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.