Music Publishers Getting Clue?

RED HERRING | Gracenote Frees Lyrics

“We’ve been in a real catch-22 situation,” noted Nick Firth, chairman and chief executive of BMG Music Publishing, which has signed with Gracenote. “It’s kind of difficult to go after the illegal sites when you haven’t got a legal alternative.”

Of course, music publishers are not the same thing as the recording industry. But it’s still nice to see some of them state what seemed obvious to most of us.

In the Buzz Out Loud podcast in which they mentioned this story, they also alluded to the fact that Gracenote reappropriated the CDDB from a community project into a commercial site with very harsh usage restriction. Similar things happened with several of the early community-built online projects, including IMDb (though the IMDb remained somewhat more community-friendly). Will the whole “Web 2.0″ projects avoid CDDB and IMDb’s fate?

Tikiboom, RocketBarTV

The latest Rocketboom episode is a cross-over with TikiBarTV. With speculation that LaLa might have been considered as a replacement for Amanda Congdon, the cross-referencing is even more likely to generate buzz.

Yes, as many have been saying, the new personalized/community-oriented syndicated online distribution systems for content (all these “Web 2.0″ things based on versions of RSS and Atom) like blogs, podcasts, and vidcasts/vlogs are like an “echo chamber” or some other metaphor about self-referential, inward-looking, insular communities with rather high clustering coefficient. Cliques, so to speak. But not really elitist per se. And, in fact, not at all close-ended. Just groups which are their own little universe.