This Week In News

Happy Friday, everyone. You know what that means: This Week In News. (And you thought it was gonna be another post about OK Go, didn't you?)

Battle Hymn
As music wars continue, ASCAP lays out a "bill of rights" for songwriters. ASCAP, the oldest organization representing songwriters and artists in the United States, is set unveil a "bill of rights" for songwriters and composers to ensure that musicians get paid for music distributed on the Web. The document, which ASCAP unveiled Thursday morning in Los Angeles at its annual conference, the ASCAP Expo, comes as the music industry is moving to dramatically reshape its future.
Sam Gustin, Conde Nast Portfolio

5 Things You Didn't Know: Copyright
Copyright constitutes only one aspect of intellectual property law, but since copyrights are far easier to obtain than patents or trademarks, for example, they tend to affect a significantly larger portion of the population. The arrival and evolution of both the internet and the web have altered the landscape of laws protecting intellectual property. Since they are repeatedly bringing these statutes into mainstream news, we felt it was an appropriate time to present five things you didn't know about copyright.
Ross Bonander, AskMen.com

1000 True Fans Is All You Need
The long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales. Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail? One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans.
Kevin Kelly, The Technium

What Can You Legally Take From The Web?
Web sites and bloggers beware: copyright law applies to you too.
Kirk Teska, ieeespectrum

Full Text Of Orchard's MySpace Letter To Labels
Digital distributor The Orchard sent an email expressing concern over how MySpace Music may be treating indie artists and labels. Here is the full text of the original email from Orchard CEO Creg Schol.
Hypebot

Guitarati Sees A Rainbow Where Others Se Music Genres
Guitarati unveiled its dramatically different method for organizing music Tuesday and it turns out to be ... color. We've had our eye on the music site since February, when its operators promised to "unfold a different way of music discovery that will blow the audience off their feet." Now that the first iteration of the concept is online, we're impressed by the freshness of the approach, but we're still on our feet, so to speak. [Sort of like a high-tech mood ring?]
Eliot Van Buskirk, Wired

And here's some oddball stuff:

Rocker Eyes "Holographic Touring" to Save Planet
Serj Tankian, the frontman for Los Angeles rock band System of a Down, is so dedicated to saving the planet that he wants to launch a virtual concert tour to reduce his carbon footprint. "I've had an idea for a long time, which might sound a little crazy, but I really want to look into holographic touring," Tankian told Billboard. "I think we could reduce our need to travel if we could project ourselves into meetings and concerts. We have the technology, and we're not using it right now.
Billboard

Song Charts: Can You Decipher the Titles?
Music fans have developed an unlikely new internet craze — devising charts to illustrate song titles and lyrics. The meanings of popular hits are hidden within pie charts, bar charts, graphs and tables, which other pop anoraks have to decipher to reveal the name of the song. The craze began on the photo-sharing website Flickr but has now spread across the internet. More than 700 so-called "song charts" covering almost all styles of music have already been submitted to the original Flickr group.
The Telegraph UK