Free The Grey Album! Today is Grey Tuesday!!

Danger Mouse remixed Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatle’s White Album, called it the Grey Album, and released a mere 3,000 copies. EMI is demanding the remix be killed, They don’t want royalties, they just want it dead. Meanwhile, it is important to note that Jay-Z’s label has made no such protestations and indeed, quite the contrary, encourages remixes like these.

So, faced with this grumpy dinosaur called EMI, artists are retaliating.

Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse’s Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI’s attempts to censor this work.

Grey Tuesday  has links to dozens of sites hosting the files, while Illegal Art details file sharing programs.

From Grey Tuesday:

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z’s the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one.

But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone (”an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time”) and the Boston Globe (which called it the “most creatively captivating” album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

Illegal Art points out:

“EMI isn’t looking for compensation, they’re trying to ban a work of art,” said Downhill Battle’s Rebecca Laurie.

“Special interests, including the major labels, have turned copyright law into a weapon,” said Downhill Battle co-founder Holmes Wilson. “If Danger Mouse had requested permission and offered to pay royalties, EMI still would have said no and the public would never have been able to enjoy this critically acclaimed work. Artists are being forced to break the law to innovate.”

I’m reminded of a hip hop artist some years back responding to a James Brown complaint that his records were being sampled, saying Hey, when James Brown’s career was nosediving, we were the ones who kept him in the spotlight. EMI might consider the Grey Album could easily introduce whole new generations to the Beatles White Album.

What’s happening now in the music business is a phase shift. The old ways are vanishing, new paradigms are emerging. Smart labels that get it, like Jay-Z’s, will survive and prosper. Will EMI? I doubt it.

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More on global warming

An article from 2000

The storms that hit the Netherlands this year pelted Britain, France and Italy even harder and left much of the midlands and south under water, flooding the historic city of York. The floods shut the country down for several days when trains could not run. Two weeks ago, Britain’s Prince Charles publicly blamed the weather on global warming. He then blamed global warming on the thoughtless use and pursuit of technology.

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The Bell curve in oil supply. Are we at the top?

From the always fascinating Isen.blog

Princeton Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert’s Peak, The Impending World Oil Shortage, which I reviewed in 2002, has an update on world oil production dated January 16, 2004. To review, Hubbert’s Peak says, in essence, that world oil production will peak sometime in this decade, “never to rise again.” Deffeyes, looking to tune up his prediction, writes:

At the end of December, Oil & Gas Journal published their oil production figures for calendar year 2003. From 2000 to 2003, world crude oil production has been essentially flat, which is to be expected as we roll over the top of the bell-shaped Hubbert curve. . . . There was some speculation that the year 2000 might stand as the single largest year of oil production. (Production in 2001 and 2002 was not as large as the year 2000.) However, 2003 squeaked ahead of 2000 by one-half of one percent. The important news is that growth has essentially stopped.

This is Big News, but you won’t read it in the ‘papers.

An energy analyst wrote in response to the post

We are in the process of changing the definition once again. The new definition will include tar sands, LNG, Deep/ultra-deep water, etc.

Once changed, there looks like plentiful supply until past 2020.

Fuel switching is a big issue . . . the question is not if, but when. Can we make the switch successfully and profitably? Jump too soon and we may be over invested in capacity before demand exists (the question currently facing LNG, and by extension hydrogen), jump too late and all the good opportunities may be gone.

This analyst did, in effect, say yes there is going to be a shortage unless we do something major, like fiind whole new ways of getting oil or converting to another power source.. However, if oil is much harder to get, won’t it then be much more expensive? And I’m a little leery of someone, who faced with a shortage, simply redefines the terms so there’s magically more of it.

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