While Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray and a handful of Democratic Senators were busy outflanking their Republican colleagues on the right in the we hours of the morning of May 27 by crafting the most conservative immigration measure to hit the state in a good long time, Zac de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine was equally busy spearheading a musical boycott of Arizona, where the most draconian immigration law in the country (SB 1070) has already prompted significant outrage. “The Sound Strike”—as the boycott is called—has attracted outspoken musicians from Kanye West to Sonic Youth, with others getting on board as I write. (The full list of artists who have joined the Sound Strike can be seen at their official Website.) They are protesting a law that has been widely criticized for encouraging law enforcement to detain anyone who looks Latino. Why Massachusetts would want to get on that bandwagon remains a mystery.

The Sound Strike has yet to attract any of the big name pop or rock acts that can sell out stadiums and no country acts have yet joined the cause. But it has galvanized Latino artists across the musical spectrum. Linda Ronstadt, an Arizonan of Mexican descent, has spoken out against the law. Larry Hernandez, Billboard’s Latin Artist of the Year, called the law “deplorable” during his acceptance speech. And Colombian-born Shakira flew to Phoenix to meet with the city’s Mayor Phil Gordon, who opposes the legislation, and to denounce the law as “a violation of human and civil rights.” Those who have signed on to the boycott as of this writing include Juanes, Calle 13, Los Tigres del Norte, and Café Ta Cuba.

A boycott of this nature has special significance for many of the popular Mexican-American acts such as singer-songwriter Jenni Rivera, Espinoza Paz and Conjunto Primavera that regularly tour Arizona. Attendance at their concerts was already down due to what Phoenix Vice Mayor Michael Nowakowski called “the fear factor.” Apparently local law enforcement has been conducting “crime suppression sweeps” of fans exiting these popular concerts. Such “sweeps” do not occur at rock or country concerts. As Alfredo Gutierrez, chairman of the economic sanctions committee of Somos America, a coalition of human rights and religious groups that is leading opposition to the law, told the New York Times: “It’s a purely racial, Hispanic thing, ethnic profiling at its worst.”

Boycott organizers have promised to continue to get artists to boycott Arizona and have planned further activities like a project modeled after the Sun City anti-apartheid video, which urged artists not to perform at the Sun City entertainment complex in then-apartheid South Africa.

It would be a shame and a setback if an Arizona-like fear factor came to Massachusetts. Perhaps the music community in this state should mount an offensive to head that off at the pass.

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. To the record company, it was a successful, completely free advertisement.” So what did EMI do in response to this fortuitous situation? They disabled the embed function for all their videos on YouTube.

Going viral, by definition, doesn’t happen from only one place. The way tens of millions of people get turned on to a video is by having it embedded in countless blogs, fan sites, and by video aggregators. In the case of the “Treadmill Video,” the numbers tell the story. “When EMI disabled the embedding feature,” according to Kulash, “views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000.” EMI, of course, defends the decision because they only receive royalties when the video is viewed on YouTube. But the irony here is that, given their deal with YouTube, Kulash estimates that EMI’s take from the “Treadmill Video” was just over $5,000. The cost of that decision? Losing 90 percent of the viewers who might have bought the music.

These are the kinds of decisions you get when you put people who don’t understand music or the internet in charge of music corporations. The label recently got into hot water with Pink Floyd for selling single downloads from the group’s concept albums, which is specifically prohibited in Pink Floyd’s contract. Winning such a suit is more likely in a place like Great Britain where copyright law includes the notion of “moral rights,” which protect the artistic integrity of a work. Concurrently, CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti unexpectedly resigned. His replacement? Charles Allen, former chief executive at the British television company ITV and an adviser to Goldman Sachs, the people who brought you our current economic meltdown.

There is some sense that Pink Floyd was being somewhat disingenuous with the suit. As New York Times reader mikesteel2 commented, “the group has no problem with radio stations playing individual songs ‘out of context’ as well as performing individual songs in concert . . . And what about all of those greatest hits collections?” Still, in a larger sense, EMI doesn’t seem to be able to get its economic act together or avoid alienating some of its top acts. And putting a music corporation in the hands of a former consultant to Goldman-Sachs just can’t be a good idea for music.

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.

While there will probably be a place for superstars in the music industry of the future, gone are the days when a single-minded focus on a handful of artists will be able to sustain an entire industry. Have mainstream record executives learned nothing from the downloading debacle that has already brought them to their knees? If the experiences of downloaders tell us anything, it’s that the music business would do well to pay attention to those “modest sellers,” because in the longtail digital economy that is upon us, they are the key to future profitability. Once you remove the constraints of bricks and mortar storage and sales, modest sellers in the aggregate will rival the superstars for market share. And if one of them goes viral, they can make it big without the massive promotional overhead.

Another lesson from recent music industry misfortunes has been the value of touring. What happens in the rarefied atmosphere of superstars doesn’t always give us an accurate picture of what’s going on at street level. Case in point: the January live shows of Lady Gaga and a Latin-pop group many of you have probably never heard of called Aventura in New York City. For all her hype, Gaga performed four shows at the 6,000-seat Radio City Music Hall, while Aventura booked an equal number of dates at the 19,000-seat Madison Square Garden. That puts Aventura in the same league as touring performers like Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, Madonna, and Billy Joel. So why is it that that Lady Gaga gets booked on the mainstream talk show circuit, while Aventura, according to Jim Farber of the NY Daily News “has the profile of quickly rejected contestants on ‘American Idol’”? And, when will we get to see Aventura as the opening act on the Grammys?

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. Their Android and iPhone apps looked promising but for one problem: once a user uploaded their music to imeem’s servers they could stream it at will, but they couldn’t download it again, which amounted to another form of digital rights management (DRM). Financially, imeem faced an even bigger problem: their revenues didn’t cover the fees that the major labels charged them to license their music.

MySpace Music tried to address that issue by granting the major labels an equity stake in their new venture. Here the problem was an uncoordinated rollout and a failure to include the indie musicians and labels who formed the backbone of MySpace’s artist pages. Interestingly it appeared that imeem could solve that problem. Imeem’s earlier purchase of a faltering Snocap (developed by Shawn Fanning, inventor of the original Napster) had provided imeem with a technology for content identification and registration that would enable independent artists and labels to control the online distribution of their music through Snocap’s embeddable storefronts. MySpace apparently saw it that way too. They picked up “certain assets” from imeem’s foreclosure for the fire sale price of under $1 million.

Now here’s the rub: Not included in the sale was imeem’s debt to the more than 110,000 independent artists who had been selling their music through Snocap’s storefronts. These artists have little or no chance of recouping their sales revenue and the servers that hosted their storefronts have been taken offline. As usual, as the various players in the music industry jockey for future position, struggling artists are usually the ones left out in the cold. Let’s see if Apple can do it better.

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. Here’s one shot by photographer Steven Klein:

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. to “Reclaim the Streets for Horns, Bikes and Feet” featuring all bands plus Bread & Puppet Theater and many other local arts and community organizations, from Davis Square to Harvard Square Oktoberfest celebration

Sunday, Oct 11, 2 - 6 pm Bands perform on HONK! stage at Harvard Square Oktoberfest

Sunday, Oct 11, 8 pm - midnight Blow-out final show at Somerville Theatre in Davis Square ($10 admission)

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