Loose Cannon
Posted: 4:54PM, Monday 9th August, 2010.

100 Days to the End Of The Music Industry As I Know It

Sorry to have not let off a round from the old Loose Cannon for about a month but I’ve been busy. It’s something that I’ve been planning and threatening to do for the past five years and finally, I sent the online Countdown timer to my staff for them to monitor. You see, it’s now officially 100 days to my retirement. Here’s the URL http://www.timeanddate.com/counters/customcounter.html?month=11&day=18&year=2010&hour=1+&min=18&sec=&p0=240 which is November 18 (here in Sydney) I actually turn 60 years of age November 17 in the US but we’re a day ahead here. Funnily enough, I just marked exactly 40 years in the music business a couple of weeks ago.

I entered the music business as a sound roadie two weeks after the Atlanta Pop Festival in 1970 when a friend broke his arm and needed me to help out by driving the truck and doing concerts with Tony Orland and Dawn at Six Flags Over Georgia and Argent at a college in Kentucky the next night. He figured I could do it because I had experience packing large resinous bales into planes, boats and trucks in the dead of night and I also had a great stereo system. No real skills there.

I’ve been packing boxes the past fortnight with 4000 vinyl albums, 3000 CDs, hundred of DVDs, four guitars and six 1950s valve amplifiers as well as clothes and furniture using mover-roadies to hustle them into storage and generally exhausting myself. It reminds me of when I moved to Australia in 1981, packing all those records, amps and guitars into a truck, driving it to Florida and then bribing the dockworkers in Miami to let me pack them into the hold of a cruise ship which brought me to Australia over a month at sea.

So today, I packed seven huge boxes of music business books from the past 20 years, government reports and studies on the music industry including the Price Surveillance Authority hearing outcomes, bound folders of historic music industry documents and other minutiae. I didn't want to toss it out and thought it would be best to donate it to the music business school down the street from which I have had some great interns come into IMMEDIA! I was going to give all these hundreds of books and reports to the National Film and Sound Archives Library in Canberra but who goes there and who would use them?

So in the interests of lightening my load of moving, I gave away assets to the school. And for a number of other schools that have bought our books and bulk copies of the directory in the past, I made an offer to clear us out of past issues for students as well as emptying our bookshelves in the store. I couldn't give away the vinyl; I still have a lot of time up my sleeve to rip all those records at near lossless quality. And I couldn't just turf the CDs either.

It’s only the fifth time I’ve moved in damn near 30 years and I never want to schlep that much physical music product again. Hell, I never want to move again! But since I’m closing up the business, selling the house and office combo that Lisa (who I’m having to learn to call my EX-wife now that we’re getting divorced) and I bought about 17 years ago and getting out of the music business while I’m still sucking air, I’ve had some wonderful moments. And some horrible half hours. Just like opera.

I’ve been up to the house in Coffs Harbour that we bought nine years ago, getting the lay of the land and checking in with Council to see if my idea of setting up an industrial hemp plantation (not medical) might make my land around the house green. They wouldn’t let me grow poppies. It’s not Tassie. Too bad I’ll have to toss out the tenants, but it’s collateral damage. Such is life. But they’re getting 60 days notice so it’s fair.

I didn’t like the idea of assembling my loyal, wonderful staff either and giving them two months notice that I was closing the office. It wasn’t a surprise, just an eventuality because they had heard me negotiating with three different publishers or media houses over the past year in anticipation of finding a new foster home for the Music Industry Directory. While my webmistress, Laurachel, had already resigned to go on a long girl’s holiday and maybe go back to school pursuing her avocation in rock photography, Jess and Justine are being given their iMacs as tools before they part here in late September. Justine gets to go to South by Southwest in March and running SxSW from over here is the only connection I’ll have to the music business so it’s kind of a semi retirement. But not much work.

Starting September 1, there will be a flock of homebuyers twice a week running through the home and office in Newtown, culminating in an auction September 25 on the premises through Raine and Horne Newtown, our newly appointed realtor. We’ve already started marketing the house to potential small business owners who want a lavish in-town pied-a-terre in town, close to everything. If you want a stickybeak, go to http://www.immedia.com.au/house to see what my webmistress knocked up with a few pics and my verbiage. Lisa and I managed to take two years between when we separated and put the house on the market, which was intelligent considering the state of the market. It will be interesting to see what type of people will be flowing through the house as we roll up to auction.

I had my last great Barbecue in the tropical back yard before rolling the 250-kilo cast iron Texas Mountain Smoker into storage. It was great catching up with three of my good artist manager mates and their wives as well as another music mag publisher and his family. I even had to ship off Jackson the parrot to be boarded just after that blowout since we had painters, fumes, movers and other things that would drive him crazy.

We just got the 45^th edition of the AustralAsian Music Industry Directory off to the printers today, right on time for a September 1 release. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for 23 years but it’s paid for a lot of lifestyle and now it’s time for someone else to take it to another level. Having three potential buyers is kinda neat, but selling it is like birthing an elephant. It takes a long time, due diligence, negotiations and separating the profit centre - the Directory - from the rest of the business. That’s why I figured it’s better to close down the office over a two month period and start turning off the machine as well as trimming down the staff, taking on the day to day myself.

So prepare yourselves.

Once we get the free copies of AMID 45 in the post to listings and subscribers, we will be fulfilling mail orders, but we are closing down our Music Business Books and Overseas Directories online and physical store operations. None of the potential buyers really want to do it and it takes a fanatical team to keep it bouncing along. So once we sell out of all our titles, we’ll turn that part of the website off. Go to http://www.immedia.com.au/books to take advantage of our titles and prices.

We will still be selling the physical copies of the AMID as well as keeping up the subscription site in advance of selling the title. But the next thing to shut down will be the free Daily News Feed and Velvet Rope Weekly News Column. You can almost set your watch by September 15 when the shutters roll down at http://www.themusic.com.au. There’s a great reason for it.

When we set it up about 15 years ago, I got the name TheMusic.com.au luckily. Over the years, it’s been a music business portal, but only recently I’ve been tipped to its value as a ‘white-label’ site for selling digital downloads because it has the perfect name. Since it’s separate from IMMEDIA!’s site and has an attractive name, I’m closing this industry resource and letting the good fortune of it being a generic honey pot URL help monetise my retirement.

There is a wonderful Hawaiian saying on my wall, a few of them actually.

One is “Goals are deceptive. The unaimed arrow never misses.” Which is a way of saying that sometimes life serves you a lotto ticket without you betting on your own horse. Or in my case, something that was a hobby or freemium site suddenly becomes an asset because of a change in the industry.

Another is “Age is relative. When you’re over the hill, you pick up speed.” In my case, it’s what’s happening now as five years of planning how to end 40 years of work has been accelerated by an impending divorce into a pretty cool, yet scary, ride.

But finally, it’s a tie between the two - “He who dies with the most toys, still dies.” And “There are two ways to be rich. Earn more or desire less.” And I wasn’t about to keep working for x number of years and be found slumped over the keyboard with a bunch of assets and no fun. Nor was I going to make the goal earning money. I’d rather be spending time.

So here goes… 100 days and counting!!!!

The Tipping Point at The Reading & Writing Terminals

Posted: 10:18AM, Tuesday 6th July, 2010. Updated: 10:07AM, Tuesday 6th July, 2010.

My webmistress LoRo keeps reminding me it's time to do another Loose Cannon, but it's hard to do at the end of the week when we put up Velvet Rope, our weekly news column at http://themusic.com.au/velvetrope or just after the cold dawn rounding up the Daily News Feed http://www.themusic.com.au/daily. So yesterday, the 4th of July, which is a Yank holiday, I decided to crank out another one and not just kick the shit out of Peer Group and The Music Network which I seemed to have enjoyed as some cruel sport.

I swore that every two weeks I'd write a new one of these but to be frank, I've been more into reading new ideas in the rash of books I've downloaded from Amazon's Kindle Books and Apple's iBooks sites than wanting to write myself. Three of these books we've just put on sale in physical form -- the hotly anticipated book "Fortune's Fool" on Edgar Bronfman by the great music business author Fred Goodman coming out next week, "The Rise and Fall of EMI Records" and "When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead" which is impresario Jerry Weintraub's biography.

Just like music, I rarely get physical product anymore, going instead for instant gratification of books, and I'm reading a lot more than I usually do. I find I'm reading more magazines online too -- Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Wired, Details, Esquire, Texas Monthly, Epicurious, Conde Nast Traveller and others -- that I once subscribed to as physical copies that arrived too late to be worthwhile.

But a couple of things I've decided to have to do with 'a great idea a day' in doing business and how to say more by less in an elegant approach to ideas and language. Part of this has to do with some books I've been reading like "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Dan and Chip Heath plus "In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing" by Matthew E. May and a favourite author Guy Kawasaki as well as some interesting books on the music business.

Part of the reason is that in my impending retirement, I'm working on a book myself, probably two. One is about success in the music business--why it's become so illusive and elusive as well more attainable through niche mastery. The other is that inevitable biography that too many people tell me I need to write. This was pointed out to me again this weekend when I hung out in the Blue Mountains with an old mate Geoff Weule who is a music industry character and teacher, now also retired.

I'm no fishing fan, don't do gardening, repair cars, mow grass nor smoke it and am in the start of a Dry July trying to curb another common vice as well as trying to limit overeating. There are only so many videos (I consumed two box sets on the weekend -- Curb Your Enthusiasm season 7 and Entourage season 6) and plowed through the two books above as well as previewing the Edgar Bronfman book "Fortune's Fool". So retirement looks to be interesting, considering that I'm going to embrace standup comedy as a vocation. Life was not meant to be predictable.

I find the most interesting people I deal with are those who read rather than watch terrestrial TV. They're also into music for the brain and spirit rather than repetitive rhythms that shake your rump or Raawk that pounds your ears with little substance. Like at the moment I'm listening to Lee Ritenour's 6 String Theory with guest Keb Mo, Steve Lukather, Taj Mahal, Joe Bonnamassa, George Benson, Slash, John Scofield Vince Gill, BB King and more in a variety of genres. It's not formulaic, derivative, copycat or trend driven. And it's aimed at a more mature demographic that still buys music.

Just as hard as it is for the industry to accept that physical product distribution is nearing the nadir of its lifetime (though won't go away completely) is the concept that music which appeals to a younger demographic that sees the product as disposable rather than collectable is going to have longevity with fickle listeners.

It was interesting talking to Geoff over the weekend about how he believes the death knell of music sales came as a result of it being overpriced and also pretty much one-priced. Albums with $200,000 recording budgets cost the same to consumers as ones that had less than five figure budgets. And now with the price of songs being pretty much uniform with the ability to cherry pick the hits rather than being forced to buy the album for the two great songs, it's happening again.

Not that my habits are any cultural indicator. I don't go to JB for discount hit CDS, or to the three record stores within three blocks of my Newtown home office for anything whether it be, back catalogue or current pop darlings. I honestly can't remember when the last time I bought a physical music product at a retail outlet but I know exactly how many albums I've downloaded from iTunes in the past month (17). Same with books, I can get sample chapters via Amazon to read as quickly as I can get samples of the music to buy and download almost instantly without setting foot outside. The store is always open and it's loaded onto my portable media device without having to find a CD, unwrap and open it, insert in a drive, rip it and reverse the process to put it away.

About the only physical books I buy are cookbooks and I see that changing too though I think I have enough to last me a lifetime of chopping and boiling. With movies, I opt for Quickflix for delivery of my choices by mail at $30 a month while in the US I got my first taste of downloading films and TV series frivolously. Which tempts me, as I know it does other consumers overseas and more recently as a beginning with local wired folk here.

There are three major tipping points that are happening at the moment that I think will cause immense disruption as well as opportunity. Hats off to the book "The Tipping Point: How Little Things can Make a Big Difference" by Malcolm Gladwell whose other books "Outliers: The Story of Success" and "What The Dog Saw and Other Adventures" are also inspirational in this time of riotous change.

The first is happening this week in Tasmania where the first step of the new national broadband scheme is being switched on which will deliver 30-100 times the speed and content to the temporal lobes of users who have spent too much time waiting, waiting, loading, displaying. I know how much of an investment in download speed has made in my own productivity but at a cost most consumers could not afford... until now.

The second is the new generation of portable tablet computers, 3GS and 4G phones as well as the portable wireless hubs which free the consumer to read, create, be entertained by and work on the run or the fly. Just as the Walkman had revolutionised the listening of music a mere 30 years ago, so has the iPad, Kindle, iPhone and other data devices rocked my world and our planet in an incredibly short time. It's come at a cost that consumers couldn't afford... until now.

Thirdly, it's the cresting of waves of content in all genres and ubiquitously available instantly to immerse the user in new areas of enlightenment. Or pleasure. And now at a cost that consumers could not afford. Until now.

But finally, it's the access of thoughts from people like me here, to Bob Lefsetz's screeds, to bloggers and other great minds of our generation delivering instant access of knowledge, theory and provocative thought pro-actively to people across the globe instantly, free.

From the time I first started using email in 1984 with a small portable computer through the Entertainment Systems International online service. This was outlined in a 1986 article in Billboard's front page article "Music Business Entering Age of Computers" as archived here.

My how things have changed!

Til next fortnight.

Oh and by the way, for those of you who want to check out the three great books I mentioned at the beginning of this Loose Cannon, they are here below:

Because of the hotly anticipated book "Fortune's Fool" on Edgar Bronfman by the great music business author Fred Goodman coming out next week, we are advance ordering copies for our regular readers as well as adding two other new titles - "The Rise and Fall of EMI Records" and "When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead" which is impresario Jerry Weintraub's biography.

You'll see info on these titles below which we will be shipping to pre-orders next week and we have a special package for all three for $110 (inc GST + Postage) for winter reading. You can order off the IMMEDIA! books site at http://www.immedia.com.au/books or you can order by phone with Justine on (02) 9557 7766 or email justine@immedia.com.au with your choice of books.

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Fortune's Fool: Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Warner Music, and an Industry in Crisis
By Fred Goodman - $35
A 336 page hardcover book by Fred Goodman, author of one of our biggest selling music business books "Mansion on the Hill", it's being released next week in the US and we are advance ordering copies for those who want to get it fast.

"Fortune's Fool" probes further into the record business after conducting three years of interviews with Seagram's Edgar Bronf-man Jr., CEO of Warner Music Group since 2004. The 1960s glory days of WMG (the Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Bros. labels) are only a memory. Bronfman, who lost billions in failed deals, has a great passion for the entertainment industry, yet he faces huge difficulties because WMG has been "blown off its foundation" by "the gale force of cyberspace." What does the future hold if free digital copies are available of any recording? Beginning with Bronfman's birth, Goodman covers his "dynastic destiny" from rebellious teen and anointed Seagram's heir to his move into the film industry and Broadway, gaining full access to a trust worth millions on his 25th birthday. Covering the transitions from LP to CD, the rap controversies, musicians, mergers and acquisitions, hustlers and heavyweights, this hefty, well-researched book traces the trajectories of such companies as Apple, MCA, and Vivendi as CD sales plummeted, and the music business became a world of iTunes, MP3s, and online marketing.

You can read a preview review just published in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/media/04shelf.html?src=busln

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The Rise & Fall of EMI Records
By Brian Southall - $37.50
278 Pages hardcover Written by an EMI Music veteran of 15 years, Brian Southall also wrote the history of Abbey Road and Northern Songs. Electric and Music Industries Ltd (EMI) first saw the light of day in the UK in 1931. In a visionary move for the gramophone age, it manufactured both hardware (recording and playback equipment) and software (the records and tapes its machines would play). For over half a century, EMI dominated both sectors, its music division eventually becoming the most successful in the world with a roster that at various times included The Beatles, Maria Callas, Frank Sinatra, Cliff Richard, Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, Queen, Robbie Williams, The Spice Girls, Kate Bush and Kylie Minogue. Then in the 1990s, things started to go wrong.This title explores and investigates EMI's extraordinary decline from the greatness over two decades of rejected takeovers, unsuccessful mergers, executive changes, profit warnings, artist and staff cuts, press criticism and never-ending speculation. It includes interviews with many key players including former EMI Group/EMI Music executives Sir Colin Southgate, Jim Fifield, Eric Nicoli, Tony Wadsworth, David Munns, Rupert Perry, Ray Cooper and Jon Webster. He has also interviewed many managers, music journalists, financial analysts and rival record company executives. The result is the definitive account of a major international company's travails. It is also an eye-opening expose of the speed at which the music industry has changed.

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When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead: Useful Stories from a Persuasive Man
By Jerry Weintraub - $32.50
304 page hardcover just published in April. Hollywood power player Weintraub, now 72, is always in control and goes to great lengths to prove it: besides having managed musical legends like Presley, Sinatra and John Denver ("I cooked him from scratch"), Weintraub once closed a deal by faking a heart attack, and won the respect of one of Chicago's most powerful men, Arthur Wirtz, when he cursed Wirtz out for making him wait (Wirtz would go on to become one of Weintraub's mentors). Weintraub's also produced plays, TV shows, movies (from Nashville to the Ocean's 11 franchise), and more, summing up his talent simply: "When I believe in something, it's going to get done." Edgy and honest but refreshingly spare in his criticism of stars, colleagues and family, Weintraub can be forgiven for glossing over speed bumps in his career (one failed business lost $30 million before it closed in the mid-'80s) and occasionally showing his age with wandering rumination. As Weintraub repeatedly states, he is not a star, which perhaps that explains the disappointing omission of photos. Still, with a bold voice, a storied career, and a cast of superstars, his memoir makes a rousing insider tour of some five decades in the entertainment industry.

In the words of Weintraub: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-weintraub/when-i-stop-talking-youll_b_539088.html.

So if you want to order these books to be shipped hot off the place to you, call us on (02) 9557 7766, go to our secure online store at http://www.immedia.com.au/books.

Peer-ing into Future for Poor Trade -- or Peeing on it

Posted: 12:53PM, Friday 11th June, 2010. Updated: 1:06PM, Friday 11th June, 2010.

Here I am back at my desk after a little over three weeks on four islands in Hawaii taking the vacation of a lifetime while back home in Sydney it was bleak, rainy and there was panic in the heart of our opposition. It was fun to watch from faraway as I took in some amazing music shows, rolled on the beach, scuba dived the depths and played with the new iPad while dining Hawaiian style and sampling new pinots of my old country. It reinforces my philosophy that “Anyone can work hard, overwork or become a workaholic. Anyone can make money, strive for more coin, accumulate bank and blow it. But spending time is the art of life.” I choose time over money because it’s a much more satisfying currency than working your ass off for a black buck, so to speak.

In advance of turning 60 in six months, I did the rounds of my medical specialists to take tests and determine if there was anything grossly wrong with my heart, lungs, blood sugar, eyes and general health. That was before I left and I just got the results on my return. Despite all of my abuse in younger years, a heart attack at 36 when I went through that workaholic habit, and diabetic for about 15 years, I am still defying medical logic by not having succumbed like too many people I know younger than me that have died from stress, nerves, accidents or disease. Sure, I need to lose weight and now that’s my next battle with myself. In the meantime, I’m having a lot of fun with the gloves off taking a few well-aimed swings. And with close to a month of being away, I thought I’d lob a round from the Loose Cannon over the bow of the good ship Music Network, which looks to be sinking slowly across town as more key staff leave Peer Group, clients look to follow and they got caught grossly copying our humble Music Industry Directory trying to make their own Black Book.

It looks like even more staff are abandoning ship over there at the scow LolliPeer as the Adamiral watched off the poopdeck for a week with heart palpitating. We knew a while back that senior account manager Sarah Crane was ankling from inside info and she’s about to turn up at EMI Music June 21 as their new Consumer Marketing Manager. This may not bode well for major client Toohey’s Dry who are rumoured to be looking elsewhere for client management now that Sarah is exiting and fellow account manager Jess Collins jumped ship last month. It also appears that The Brag magazine’s Advertising Manager Mark Browning has left according to inside sources, though this is not officially confirmed.

We can confirm though that The Brag has little to boast about in terms of page count and ad revenue against opposition Drum Media. Drum had 84 pages this week while Brag lagged at 68, 20% behind which seems to be the rule for the street mag. But watch out next week as a major innovation in street press debuts in Sydney that will send a shudder up the spine.

As for The Music Network, it’s Notworking bigger than ever with the relaunch being somewhat of a premature spurt of editorial followed by an impotent anticlimax. In a feverish series of redundant industry emails trying to inject relevance into its reportage, it’s failed with shock headlines of overdoses, celebrity stories and death-watches. And it hasn’t done itself any favours with its uninformed coverage of the Shock Entertainment Group internal restructure with the breathless news breaker “Shock shut down of Shock Publishing”. That made it look at first like Shock as a whole was closing and was certainly a slat at the company which had paid for it’s 21^st birthday advertorial articles late last year and also brought TMN revenue from other advertisers congratulating Shock.

That demonstrates a lack of sensitivity which is compounded by TMN’s lack of integrity in trying to rip off our Music Industry Directory in order to get revenue for their falling ad and subscriber base as well as hoping to draw traffic to their new website. It’s fairly transparent and it’s already a joke. Certainly with us folk at IMMEDIA! when we had a peek at their Black Book (apt name too).

We knew they were trying to copy our listings a few months back when they sent a series of emails to our contacts that were listed in the 2009 issue with their info reproduced straight from the book. Though they claimed not to be copying us and asked permission for listings, the response was so bad that they had to ask three times. And now they have sent more emails trying to bulk up their content without much result. Except they got caught copying directly.

I was in the airport in Honolulu last week having that last pina colada when I got pinged that the Black Book was up (TMN still sends me emails) so I thought I’d have a quick check against our phony listings -- which would have not been able to approve their reproduction -- and sure enough, within a minute, I found our fake Freelance Writer listing copied exactly into their directory.

As we noted in last week’s Velvet Rope,

“The telling listing was in Freelance Journalists in which TMN's interns copied Peter Fricke's listing without doing their research. I should know... I'm Peter Fricke's doppelganger, the name coming from noted Rolling Stone journalist David Frickes. Here it is, though the TMN folk will probably take it down now on reading this with horror. We saved a screenshot just in case.”

And sure enough, they took it down immediately out of absolute embarrassment, but here are the screenshots -- the first one is the page with the listings of freelancers, the second with Peter Fricke’s details.

click the image for the full-sized screen shot

The irony is that the phone number was disconnected last year and the email address several months ago, so that there was no way Frickes could have approved.

But there’s more!

We got an email this week with the following header

The Music Network -Wednesday, 10:48 AM
Black Book listing on The Music Network

In it, they told us right off,

“The Music Network website is now live!

You have been identified as a business either in or servicing the music industry and as such a listing for your business has been included in our Black Book Industry Directory.”

"IMMEDIA! is best known for its printed and online industry directories. The AustralAsian Music Industry Directory is published each March and November since 1988 and published its 44th Edition in March 2010."

Address: 20 Hordern Street, Newtown, NSW, 2042
Phone: (02) 9557 7766
Fax: (02) 9557 7788
Email: info@immedia.com.au
Web: immedia.com.au/ambc

So even if we didn’t want our personal details published to the public at large, we had no choice. And as proof of their ineptitude in direct copying, they even managed to mangle the listing online and in their email (wrong section, wrong information). But there it was on their site at http://www.themusicnetwork.com/directory?category=MUSIC+CONFERENCES%2C+TRADE+FAIRS%2C+INDUSTRY+EVENTS+AND+AWARD+SHOWS&sub_category=LOCAL&business=Australian+Music+Business+Conference which has probably been taken down when they read this on Friday. So here is the screenshot

click the image for the full-sized screen shot

What you see is supposed to be in the Music Conferences, Trade Fairs, Industry Events and Award Shows as the AustralAsian Music Business Conference and instead of having that info, had other stuff unrelated to the listing. “IMMEDIA! is best known for its printed and online industry directories. The AustralAsian Music Industry Directory is published each March and November since 1988 and published its 44th Edition in March 2010.”

I know you’ve seen about enough of this and so have we. Looking at their Black Book, it’s inaccurate, a rip off, a fraud and it reads like it was assembled by a bunch of interns cobbled together in the desperate hope of being able to take our content and make it appear that they did it.

We have a staff of four people who constantly update our directory in print and online from our own work, not the work of others. We are rather pedantic about accuracy, spelling and also protecting the privacy of our listings so that they are not in the general public’s view (i.e. we don’t put them up free online so every fan, kid, hacker, wannabe and nutter can access phone numbers and email addresses). We keep the AMID in a ‘walled garden’ where as a professional sourcebook, it’s available by subscription only and if you want to get the physical book, it’s a daunting $55 which eliminates the pests from glomming contact details.

So you ask, are we going to sue them? Hardly. I don’t really give The Music Network much time as they have corrupted what was once a respected trade, lost all of their credible staff and are now leading the way by fraud and content theft. No need to waste good money on lawyers when it’s likely that there won’t be anything left to collect fairly soon.

As a famous wise man once said, “There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey.” Sure, The Music Notwork has stolen something and made it free, but is it worth it? I think in the end, it wil be their demise.