Capitol/EMI is the smallest of the so-called Big Four major record companies. Like the other majors EMI been bleeding money over the last several years, but EMI has been bleeding talent as well, having lost signature acts such as the Rolling Stones and Radiohead since their 2007 purchase by private equity company Terra Firma. Rumor has it that Queen is talking to other labels. And EMI just lost a suit over downloading to Pink Floyd, an act that has been with the company for over 40 years. In addition to being seemingly unable to restructure their debt covenants successfully, EMI doesn’t seem to get the internet either. The recent departure of OK Go is a case in point.

OK Go is the group that brought you that wonderful “Treadmill Video” in 2006 (featuring the group dancing on treadmills to their song “Here It Goes Again”) that went viral in a heartbeat. As group leader Damian Kulash wrote in a New York Times Op Ed: “As the age of viral video dawned, “Here It Goes Again” was viewed millions, then tens of millions of times. . . . To the band, “Here It Goes Again” was a successful creative project.

It is difficult to peruse any avenue of pop culture these days without running across a video, a review, or at least some commentary on Lady Gaga. She’s everywhere. Granted she scored five top ten singles in 2009. And, truth be told, her opening performance at this year’s Grammys with (Sir) Elton John was captivating, if overblown. But then, everything at this year’s Grammys was overblown, from Beyonceé extravagant song and dance medley amid a gaggle of dancers who looked like starship troopers wearing World War II-era Nazi helmets to Pink’s cirque-du-soleilesque performance, suspended high above the audience (mostly upside down), while being drenched with water.

This kind of overproduction is a clear indicator that after a decade of its worst losses in history, the music industry has returned to the practice of crowning superstars. As the Boston Globe’s Ben Sisario put it, the music industry “reversed its recent trend of showering acclaim on modest sellers, sticking instead to the biggest names in entertainment,” or at least entertainers like Lady Gaga, or the young Taylor Swift, whom they hope will be able to generate mega-sales for years to come.

In 2003, Steve Jobs railed against music subscription services, telling Rolling Stone that “People want to own their music.” Now it appears that Apple might be changing its iTune. Apple’s recent $80 million plus purchase of music subscription service Lala suggests that the company that made it easy (and legal) to download digital music files to your iPod or computer might now be envisioning the future of music as a big jukebox in the clouds. One big question is where this will leave users? Another is where it will leave musicians.

People thought Jobs was prescient when he opined in 2003 that music subscription services “are going to fail. Music Net’s gonna fail, Press Play’s gonna fail … . You don’t want to rent your music.” He was right about that. And more recent ventures have borne him out; RealNetwork’s Rhapsody and Best Buy’s current incarnation of Napster have yet to show any real results. So why Apple’s change of tune? In a word — smartphones. Storage strapped hand-held digital devices have wrested some control from wireless carriers over which mobile apps one can use (including music apps), but they can’t compete for storage with the 160 GB of music one can store on a computer.

Then along came imeem — a social media network whose music locker service allowed users to store 80GB of music on their servers, which could then be streamed to a smartphone.

I begin my course on the Social History of Popular Music with a unit on blackface minstrelsy—a 19th century form of entertainment in which white performers with blackened faces parodied their perceptions of African American culture. Students are usually shocked to learn that this practice constituted part of the foundation of US popular music. The class ends with a discussion of the degree to which images of minstrelsy can still be found in our popular culture. Well, I am here to report that minstrelsy is still alive and ill. In the past few of weeks a couple of dramatic instances of the use of blackface have surfaced in the media.

In early October 2009, the Austrailian TV talent show Hey Hey It’s Saturday Reunion presented a Michael Jackson tribute act called the Jackson Jive, who performed in blackface. Taken aback, judge Harry Connick Jr. gave the group a “0.” “If they turned up looking like that in the United States,” said Connick, “Hey, hey, there’s no more show.” Ironically, the same group had appeared on the same show 20 years earlier doing the same performance and won! Here is their performance:

The October 2009 issue of French Vogue, which is dedicated to “supermodels,” reportedly used no black models and, adding insult to injury, model Lara Stone appears in a 14-page spread in blackface.

HONK! Festival – Oct 9-11 – Davis Square, Somerville

HONK! Is a new name for a time-honored tradition of street music that is acoustic and mobile, activist and engaged, borrowing repertoire and inspiration from a diversity of traditions: It’s New Orleans; it’s Klezmer; it’s Samba—with all the passion and spirit of Mardi Gras and Carnivale.

HONK! is totally fun, free, completely non-commercial, inclusive, participatory, and community-based.

Imagine the scene: Activist marching bands from across the country and around the world fanning out to Boston neighborhoods on Friday Oct 9; two dozen bands honking their hearts out for free in Davis Square all day Saturday, Oct 10; then struttin’ and strollin’ our way to Harvard Square on Sunday Oct 11 for rousing performances at Oktoberfest; wrapping up the weekend with a killer all-band blow-out at the historic Somerville Theater in Davis Square on Sunday night at 8 PM.

HONK! Schedule

Friday, Oct 9, 3 – 6 pm HONK! on Boston: Visiting bands play alongside local community bands in East Somerville, East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Chinatown and the Boston Common

Saturday, Oct 10, Noon – 9 pm HONK! on Davis Square: 25 activist street bands, from around the country and beyond, perform outdoors for free

Sunday, Oct 11, Noon – 2 pm HONK! Parade down Mass Ave.

Rock with You (1979)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/207127/rock_with_you.jhtml

Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough (1979)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/15223/don_t_stop_til_you_get_enough.jhtml

Billie Jean (1983)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/26708/billie_jean.jhtml

Beat It (1983)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/26721/beat_it.jhtml

Thriller (1984)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/13322/thriller.jhtml

We Are the World (1985)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/41071/we_are_the_world.jhtml

Bad (1987)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/111954/bad.jhtml

Man in the Mirror (1988) http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/206759/man_in_the_mirror.jhtml

The Way You Make Me Feel (1988)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/208859/the_way_you_make_me_feel.jhtml

Smooth Criminal (1988)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/8895/smooth_criminal.jhtml

Black or White (1991)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/18164/black_or_white_long_version_.jhtml 

Remember the Time (1992)
http://www.mtvmusic.com/jackson_michael/videos/99091/remember_the_time.jhtml

In the continuing saga of discontinuing its strategy of suing individuals for file-sharing, the music industry has just scored one of its biggest awards ever. On June 18, 2009, Jammie Thomas-Rasset was convicted of sharing 24 copyrighted songs. Federal law allows the recording industry to recover $750 to $30,000 per infringement, but in this case the jury decided to raise that figure $80,000 per song because they found the infringement “willful.” That comes to a whopping $1.92 million for the music industry. As Ken Port, a lawyer who has been following the case, told the Washington Post, “They now have a verdict they can use in other cases around America. The prices that they will charge for settling is going to go up.” Thomas-Rasset was originally convicted of copyright violation in a 2007 trial and was ordered to pay $222,000. She was granted a retrial, in part because the presiding judge was convinced that the fine was excessive. The new judgment is more than eight times the original sum. Kiwi Camara, one of Thomas-Rasset’s attorneys, said: “There really is a problem with the statute, because she’s been fined $1.9 million for stealing 24 songs that went for about $1.99 on iTunes,” slightly overstating the cost of songs on the site.

If you have been following the peer-to-peer file-sharing saga from Napster through Grokster, Morpheus, and KaZaA, you may know that a new chapter has been added. On Friday, Apr 17, the verdict was announced in the closely watched Swedish trial of IFPI vs The Pirate Bay: All four Pirate Bay founders, accused of “assisting in making copyright content available,” were found guilty, and sentenced to a year in prison and fines totalling approximately $3.5million. In keeping with The Pirate Bay’s philosophy of information sharing, co-founder Peter Sunde (aka Brokep) posted the verdict on Twitter, in effect releasing it to the world, before it was read aloud in Stockholm District Court. Sir Paul McCartney told NME that he thought the verdict “fair.” Another member of the Pirate Bay Four, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (aka Anakata), however, said “the record companies can go screw themselves.”

Naturally, the music industry sees the verdict as a huge victory. But it is unclear whether the judgement has any practical value at this point. The appeals process could drag on for years. Furthermore, the site itself was not on trial, only the four founders. And they insist that The Pirate Bay, reportedly the largest host of BitTorrent trackers in the world, will continue.

After suing some 35,000 individuals since 2003, ranging from a pre-teen living in New York public housing to a 71 year old grandfather from texas, the music industry finally announced on December 19, 2008, that they were discontinuing the controversial practice, which had become nothing short of a new multi-million dollar revenue stream for the industry. Well, kinda/sorta. While they have stopped initiating new suits, they are plowing ahead with those already in progress, even though that seems to fly in the face of the logic of their recent decision.

One of the cases that seems to be going to trial is RIAA vs. Joel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old doctoral student in physics at Boston University, who stands accused of downloading seven songs illegally from a peer-to-peer network when he was 17. For this, he faces potential damages of more than $1 million. But Tenenbaum’s case has an interesting twist. His lawyer, Charles Nesson, a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, petitioned District Court Judge Nancy Gertner to allow the trial to be streamed over the internet, and Gertner agreed.