Blog Archive for April, 2008

Performance rights organization ASCAP recently created a Bill of Rights for Songwriters and Composers to “clarify the entitlements that every music creator enjoys.”

1. We have the right to be compensated for the use of our creative works, and share in the revenues that they generate.
2. We have the right to license our works and control the ways in which they are used.
3. We have the right to withhold permission for uses of our works on artistic, economic or philosophical grounds.
4. We have the right to protect our creative works to the fullest extent of the law from all forms of piracy, theft and unauthorized use, which deprive us of our right to earn a living based on our creativity.
5. We have the right to choose when and where our creative works may be used for free.
6. We have the right to develop, document and distribute our works through new media channels - while retaining the right to a share in all associated profits.
7. We have the right to choose the organizations we want to represent us and to join our voices together to protect our rights and negotiate for the value of our music.
8. We have the right to earn compensation from all types of “performances,” including direct, live renditions as well as indirect recordings, broadcasts, digital streams and more.
9. We have the right to decline participation in business models that require us to relinquish all or part of our creative rights - or which do not respect our right to be compensated for our work.
10. We have the right to advocate for strong laws protecting our creative works, and demand that our government vigorously uphold and protect our rights.

Being songwriters, we obviously support this kind of thing. If you’d like to show your support (especially if you’re a songwriter yourself) you can add your signature here.

About ASCAP

We’ve been members of ASCAP for years now, both as writers and publishers of our music. They’re a Performance Rights Organization that collects roylaties on behalf of songwriters and publishers from places like radio stations and television channels that use their music.

Remember… wow, it must have been a couple years ago at this point… remember when we “launched” the “beta” version of something called “Sinch TV?” It’s OK, I’ll give you a minute to think. It was sort of a non-event but it was semi-significant if only for the fact that we finally got most of our videos online in one place (YouTube) and in an easy to watch format. Other than that, there wasn’t much to look at.

Last night, without any sort of planning ahead, I just decided to launch a new Sinch TV. I’m not exactly sure how I pulled it together… I think the allergy medicine must have had something to do with it. But by about 1:30am we had a new site.

We’re still in the process of adding all the stuff we had on YouTube and we’ll hopefully have some brand new stuff as well. Bear with us while we get everything worked out. It’s been like 2 years at this point so I’m sure you can wait another week or two.

The new site is built on two services/applications that we would recommend to anyone:

• Wordpress: an open source blogging platform

• Viddler: a video sharing site.

This site (Sinch.net) is actually built on Wordpress, so it’s probably nothing new to anyone who pays attention to that sort of thing. And we’ve actually had a few of our videos on Viddler for a while now, but never really made it a point to let anyone know.

Why the move from YouTube? Well, to be honest, the fact that I found a Wordpress theme specifically made to work with Viddler videos had a lot to do with it. But it’s also (I think) a superior site to YouTube in a couple of ways, mostly centered around the commenting features. Also we can upload much larger videos than YouTube allows.

If you’re looking for something more immediately noticeable, you can add comments to specific points in a video. You can’t do that on YouTube. So, now if you want to comment on Mike’s ball shaking technique, you have that ability. This also means that you can comment on our videos without leaving our site, even though they are just embedded videos coming from Viddler. To comment on a YouTube video you have to click through to their site and use their controls.

And the second cool feature we like is the ability to record video comments without leaving our site. If you have a web cam, you can just click “Record or Choose Video” underneath the comment form and record your own video responses to our videos. You can do something similar on YouTube, but again you’d have to leave our site to do it.

Note: Apparently there’s a bug in the theme I used that prevents the videos from showing up on some pages in Safari. Until we get it worked out, you can try another browser or check out our videos directly on Viddler