In a great tribute to the mediocrity currently being propagated by the Music Industry, rock fans are spreading an old garage track recorded by Nirvana just prior to Cobain’s suicide like wildfire over GNUtella. It’s further testimony to the milquetoast pseudogrunge coming from imitators like Creed, Nickelback and Default; all of whom are clearly derivative but none of whom really match up to the works of bands like Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Mudhoney, et al.

I for one never thought Nirvana were terribly profound. I liked their music, I appreciated that they were talented, but like most artists I think that we have ascribed much greater meaning to their work than was really intended. “With the lights out, it’s less dangerous/here we are now imitators..” may not be the huge message of openness and a cry for honesty we think it is. It might just rhyme really well.

Anyway, that we have to keep digging up second-rate works by long-dead artists rather than finding new ones from new artists moving in new directions is proof that the choke hold that Big Music has on our culture is stifling the voice of artists.

More than likely, the “leak” of this song on GNUtella file sharing networks is just a cunning marketing ploy to call the Grunge Generation to arms in heading to the CD store to pay our penance. So even our attempts to usurp the grasp that the music industry has over what we hear and how we hear it, using Peer to Peer, have been co-opted.

That the vast majority of those funds will go to support a system that necessarily stifles, packages, and filters free expression is abhorrent. That the majority of what’s left over will go to Courtney Love, who has consistently exploited her now-dead husband to support the building of her own Gatsby-esque American Dream, is even more abhorrent.

-Ian.

—— http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/ Article_Type1&c=Article&cid26145760957&call_page=TS_News&call_pageid968332188492&call_pagepath=News/News&col–8793972154

Sep. 28, 05:24 EDT Nirvana reborn with a powerful song Ben Rayner

The song “You Know You’re Right” is a powerful reminder of Kurt Cobain’s talent. It says a lot about how desperately rock ‘n’ roll yearns for another “revolution” akin to the grunge boom of the early 1990s when an eight-year-old track from a defunct band with a long-dead singer ranks as, quite possibly, the single most anticipated release of 2002.

Nirvana was that good, though. And while we were all, perhaps, jumping the gun just a bit by proclaiming it the band that defined a generation — and the late Kurt Cobain the voice of that generation — the ensuing years have proven Aberdeen, Washington’s most famous sons to be much, much more than a footnote in rock history.

The accolades for the band happened even before a single, infamous shotgun blast sent everything spinning out of control and cemented Nirvana’s legendary status in April of 1994.

The online leak this week of the unreleased Nirvana song “You Know You’re Right” comes after years of flaccid, but highly popular grunge pretending by “Seattle sound” acolytes like Creed, Puddle of Mudd and Alberta’s Nickelback.

Last year witnessed the publication of an extensive Cobain biography, Charles R. Cross’ Heavier Than Heaven, and the awarding of $4 million to Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love, for the publication rights to her husband’s diaries. Cobain has been on the covers of both Spin and Rolling Stone during the past year. The band might be dead, but its legacy is everywhere.

Now, however, it appears that Nirvana might soon be everywhere again, too.

“You Know You’re Right” surfaced on the Internet last Saturday, just a day after Love announced on Howard Stern’s morning radio show that “lots and lots and lots of money” had settled her long, nasty legal dispute with surviving Nirvana members over who will administer the band’s posthumous business dealings. Love told Stern that a Nirvana retrospective would be in stores by the Christmas holidays.

There is, apparently, no shortage of unreleased Nirvana material to plunder. Guitarist Eric Erlandson, Love’s bandmate in Hole, told Spin in June he’d found a box containing 109 cassettes — demos and early mixes of Nirvana songs, live material from rehearsals and jams with friends, some home recordings of Cobain alone — in Cobain’s house shortly after the singer’s suicide.

“You Know You’re Right” is certainly a keeper. A ragged, discordant howl of pain — quite literally: Cobain repeatedly twists the word into a tortured, 10-second refrain — cut from the same battered cloth as 1993’s bristling In Utero album and riding a bassline that recalls fellow Seattle casualties Alice in Chains’ “Would,” the song was recorded three months before Cobain’s death, yet still sounds as vital and as immediate as anything making the rounds today. If there’s more where that came from, it’s probably worth raiding the vault.

Digging too deep into Nirvana and Cobain’s unreleased catalogue could, of course, sully the brilliant work produced during their abruptly truncated careers if quality control is superseded by the drive for profit and the market is flooded with substandard material.

The mercurial Love, long regarded by many as a careerist and an opportunist looking to cash in on her husband’s valuable repertoire, has already been accused by some observers of using her stake in the Nirvana songbook as a bargaining chip in her own lawsuit to free Hole from its recording contract with Geffen.

It’s tempting, too, to regard the conveniently timed arrival of “You Know You’re Right” on the Net as a shrewd, surreptitious attempt to stoke renewed interest in the band before the greatest-hits package lands in stores later this year. Still, it’s a great tune, an almost shockingly powerful reminder of how singular Cobain and Nirvana’s talent really was that takes but 3 1/2 minutes to destroy all the pale imitations that followed in Nevermind’s wake.

However it got there, sharing the song for free on the Internet is wholly in keeping with Cobain’s everyman ethic. You know the guy would have been down with Napster.

———–

Probably at stake is the severe penalty that Napster investors will pay in the acquisition. They will probably suffer a loss from the dilution of this purchase price, even at $30M — but then again they should have acknowledged this when Bertelsmann loaned the company $100M.

For BMG it’s still a big risk and they could end up owning a big pile of junk unless it’s clear that the other labels will do the deal in licensing their material for distribution via Napster. IF BMG buys Napster first, then the likelihood of the company sealing that deal is even lower — after all, why would a label want to license their content to a competitor?

To this end, BMG needs to distance itself from Napster so that all of the dominos can fall in order. Napster as a semi-independent entity is more likely to close deals with the other labels and would be more flexible to include them in the upside of the company.

Napster’s only hope is to survive with an arm’s length relationship to BMG and hope that the table in the ongoing court case takes a big turn in their favour. This will bring Big Music to the table and Napster can cut them in on corporate ownership.

So in other words, BMG’s backing away from Napster should play in its favour assuming they have enough cash to go it alone. Recent Napster layoffs will help. Judge Patel’s rulings in the big court case are probably the biggest determinant. The internal squabble is likely between the camp that understands this, and the camp that just wants to get out and wash their hands of the situation.

In any case, and I’m not much of a betting man, the odds are slim.

-Ian.

A day later, in case you live in a #^@$ing cave, Napster got burned at the stake by the San Francisco US Circuit Court, which upheld the earlier ruling that Napster IS in fact liable for the actions of their users. Sploosh! The billion dollar lawsuit will proceed.

This is the most comprehensive article I’ve found in the last couple of days.

Is it already a cliché to assert that Napster is really just the lightning rod for Big Music’s fear of the Internet?

-Ian.

—–

Tuesday February 13 6:31 PM ET Napster Prepares for the After-Life

By Sue Zeidler

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – It could be curtains for Napster unless it can forge a duet with the recording companies who have been trying to get it thrown off the air.

The wildly popular song-swapping service, which has been told by an appeals court to stop its millions of users from trading copyrighted music, must either find the cash to pay mounting bills to keep a legal fight going or reach settlements with major record labels if it wants to survive.

“The challenge for them is how to go legit and still keep their business,” said Bill Burnham, managing director of Softbank Venture Capital.

Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals supported a District Court ruling that would effectively shut Napster down but asked the lower court to modify its original ruling. An injunction could be issued in days or weeks.

As millions of songs were being downloaded ahead of the injunction, Napster vowed to keep up the fight in the courts and in Congress.

Napster’s Chief Executive Officer Hank Barry said the company has the financial resources to keep going and planned to continue discussions with record companies.

The longer Napster is shut down, however, the greater risk it faces of losing fan and brand loyalty, said Aram Sinnreich, analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix.

“This ruling will accelerate settlement talks with other major labels simply because Napster doesn’t want to go for too long time with the service down,” Sinnreich said. He said Napster was likely to sweeten terms to recording companies.

COULD NAPSTER SELL OUT?

Many Napster users, which total more than 50 million, are already looking at alternative file-swapping sites to get their songs from once Napster is shut down.

Research firm Webnoize Tuesday said an estimated nearly 91 million songs were downloaded using Napster Monday following the ruling, compared with 130 million Sunday in anticipation of the appeal court’s decision.

Analysts, such as Phil Leigh, of Raymond James and Associates believe that Napster — which to date has only received about $17 million in venture capital funding and faces potentially billions in liability costs — may run out of money.

Leigh compared Napster’s predicament to that of Scour.com, another file-sharing community that was sued for copyright infringement and which filed for bankruptcy last October.

Scour’s assets, including its name and membership lists were ultimately sold in December for about $9 million in cash and stock to CenterSpan Communications (NasdaqNM:CSCC – news), which plans to relaunch the Web site as a subscription service.

“If Napster’s active membership drops to a fraction of its current total, it may seek to sell its assets, which might include the name and the membership list,” Leigh said.

Under a deal announced in October, German media giant Bertelsmann AG (BTGGga.D) agreed to loan Napster an estimated $50 million to keep the site operating and help transform the service into a viable, fee-charging subscription service.

Leigh said Bertelsmann might be a logical buyer of Napster’s assets, which could then relaunch the service with BMG content.

“Bertelsmann is also attempting to purchase EMI Group Plc’s EMI Music Plc (EMI.L) and if it can get access to the EMI catalog, the reborn Napster under BMG ownership might have enough content to make an interesting subscription service,” he said.

Some Believe Settlements Now Likely

The recording industry knows that in order for any music subscription to work well, it needs offerings from all the labels. Now that the record industry has won the appeals court ruling, settlement talks may speed up between the labels and the service that rocked the music world.

“No other major record companies have struck a deal with Napster since Bertelsmann and that could be because the business model wasn’t adequate from their perspective and also because they wanted a strong legal opinion,” said Cary Sherman, general counsel for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which represented the labels against Napster.

“Now that they have gotten a ruling they may be more receptive to negotiations that lead to a viable business model for this kind of service,” Sherman said.

Sinnreich said the heat is on Napster to relaunch a subscription service.

“Napster can offer the labels higher royalty rates, bigger equity stakes. They’ll bend even further backwards,” he said. ”I wouldn’t be surprised if the next company on board was either EMI or (AOL Time Warner’s (NYSE:AOL – news)) Warner Music.”

He cited EMI because it is in merger talks with Napster’s partner, Bertelsmann, and Warner because its new parent, AOL, is planning to launch its own subscription service.

“I think a Warner deal with Napster is very possible. It would make sense for Napster/Bertelsmann to have a reciprocal deal with Warner, which could then use Bertelsmann content on the AOL service,” he said.

Both EMI and Warner Music declined to comment on settlement discussions with Napster.

“EMI is open-minded and is prepared to do business with people who come up with viable business models that help us achieve the widest distribution of our music to consumers,” said Amanda Conroy, a spokeswoman for EMI.

But many music industry executives remained skeptical about settlements with Napster and said that efforts to launch other subscription services would likely garner more attention.

“There are many impediments to Napster relaunching a service. They’ll have to pay for past infringements, which would be part of a settlement, and raises the question of whether or not the business would be sustainable,” one record executive said.