Saw the last couple of hours of the Nelson Mandela birthday concert last night. Wow. And if you missed it, here is the absolutely fantastic Amy Winehouse!

The Golden Stave lunch was tremendous this year. They raised a huge amount of money for a variety of charities that focus very specifically on children and young people - as usual. There were the predictable auctions, raffles, and Chuggie berating the crowd as is his wont. And there was some super entertainment.

One piece of entertainment that was very special was to see Jack Thompson, the actor, playing harmonica. Here is is with John Lyons (I think that is his name) playing fiddle.

A tip of the hat to Steven Noble for sending me the link to a video by Gerd Leonhard about Music 2.0.

Gerd has a really interesting take on how the music industry needs to focus on what the consumer wants to buy and how and where she wants to engage, rather than the music industry focusing on how they want to sell their products to the consumer...

The problem that remains of course is that the ecosystem in the music business is much more complex than people generally realize. And the key area which is not easily understood is the role of the songwriter. The songwriter assigns his or her rights to a publisher and often the publisher assigns some limited set of rights to a collecting society. Somewhere in there one of these organizations license the record producer to enable the production and replication of the master recording. Its at this point that it becomes seriously difficult, and nowadays more than ever.

The reason for this is that when the music business was young and pre-digital, there was a significant cost associated with manufacturing, warehousing, printing, distributing product. With the advent of digital that cost goes virtually to zero. But the regulatory structure that is in place means that publishers (and through them, songwriters) are still being paid as if the record company had all that overhead.

The result is that the margins going to the record companies have increased massively. The publishers - I imagine - want a bigger slice of the cake....

The reality of course is that they should all move their focus onto how to make a transaction easier for the consumer. And that is the focus of the video and book by Gerd. Definitely worth looking at.

Here is an interesting and great resource for when there is nothing to watch on cable!

FreeDocumentaries.Org has an enormous library of material that is riveting viewing!

They say that they honour all copyright laws, although I think that they may be pushing the whole idea of "its better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission" line.

Here is the trailer for one movie that they have in the library...

Those guys at Home Page Daily get on to some great video material!

Check out this new band. One of the best videos I have seen in a long while!

I discovered a fantastic new online comic called Shooting War. Click here for the online version of the comic.

Here is the trailer for the book:

After I heard the song (earlier post) I thought I would try to find out about the album...

Interesting to see that John Fogerty has re-signed with Fantasy Records.

I represented Fogerty's publishing in the late 80's during the period of Eye of the Zombie. And I also ironically knew a bit about his past, when he had been signed to Saul Zaentz's Fantasy Records... Met Saul along the way through Steve Shurtz who used to run the recording facility.

And of course, everyone in the business knew that John Fogerty and Saul Zaentz had a long lasting legal action and were bitterly opposed to each other.

Then a couple of years ago Zaentz sold Fantasy to Concorde as part of his estate planning. So presumably Fantasy under its new ownership has worked out a deal with Fogerty that gives him what he wanted all along and gives Concorde a new album that is going to set the back catalogue on fire.

And by the way.... in this world of continuing complaint by the people in the record business about how bad things are because of downloads, isn't it great to see so many John Fogerty tracks on YouTube so that people like you and I can listen to them and make up our own minds about what to buy. I am going out today to buy the Revival CD. Has to be the best thing that I have heard in the last year. Oh and by the way there is a track on it called Long Shot that has to be the closest thing to AC/DC that I have heard since Angus stopped wearing short pants.

This is the question that the LA Times posed in a story about the writers strike.

First the music industry was disintermediated by the internet, and now the movie and TV industries are waking up, courtesy of the writers, to the fact that the only game in town is Google.... and perhaps Microsoft.... or Apple.

These are the companies that make money out of free content, where of course 'free' is a proxy for ad supported.

I was in the music business for 30 years give or take a year. And I left the business partly because there was no sense of magic anymore. Back when I first was signed to CBS Records in the UK in 1967 and then when I came to Australia and joined the business side of the deal there was a fine sense of madness about what we did. The people who had the zany ideas for the promotion, for the song, for the record, for the gig... these people came to the fore.

Then as adult supervision took hold, the business was dominated by marketing metrics. And out of marketing metrics you get a monoculture of profit now at any cost.

I remember saying here in the early 90's when the record companies were resisting the government's efforts to have them drop prices, that the internet would do for the record business what the ACC failed to do. The fact that the record industry thought that they could hold back the tide was an act of supreme arrogance. The same thing is happening to the other parts of the content industry in Hollywood now. It is a sad indictment on the intelligence of man that some people think that they can control price points in a world that wants content to be free, and now is able to make it so.

That is the legacy of digitization.

Google is in control. Essentially by saying, "we don't want to be in control of anything... except the ad insertion".

For those people who visit this blog and are interested in my new book.... it is going quite well thanks!

I am working on getting the first 50,000 words polished to get to Mary Cunnane, my agent. And then I find out whether the rubber hits the road or not!

During the last two months as I have particularly focused on the 60's and 70's - London, the music scene, traveling the hippie trail - a smorgasbord of experience at a very rich time in social history, I have been motivated to find out "what happened to...?" You know how at the end of some movies, the closing credits say, " George X became an investment banker and married a princess. Joan Y was indicted for being a serial killer... etc. etc".

Well it has been fascinating tracking down a few of the protagonists from my life who I have lost touch with over the last 30 years.

In the last month or so I caught up with Louise Denver, who was one of the most daring investigative video journalists around during the 60's. She is living in Sydney now. I spoke to David Redom, who was her partner. He was also one of the top rock photographers in London in the 60's. He, sadly, has a degenerative neural disease and is in a nursing home just out of London.

In the last week I had a call from Rob Gold, who was the keyboard player from Kate, the band I was in. I had left a message on his phone a few weeks back and then forgotten about it. It was great to catch up with him. Rob has been a manager and publisher ever since that time we were in a band, managing Tim Rose who wrote some great songs in his time.

And then a few weeks ago I had dinner with Simon Napier-Bell. He and I became friends in the 70's after I had come to Australia. Simon, of course, managed Wham! But he was at the centre of what was happening in the music scene in London in the 60's too - he managed the Yardbirds, and produced them. And Simon has more great stories about the music business than anyone on the planet has a right to!

Memories of exciting revolutionary times, crazy times, people and events.... they are so much richer for sharing with others who were there.

While doing the research I also came across some reviews for the band and a picture....

Here it is straight from 1968! Kate....