Spotify sued for "incalculable" damages

Spotify's admission just before Christmas that some of the data it uses to assign royalties is a bit broken could end up being costly. Former Camper Van Beethoven and perpetual thorn in Spotify's side David Lowery has just filed a class action lawsuit against the company, claiming copyright theft:

“Spotify has — and continues to — unlawfully reproduce and/or distribute copyrighted musical compositions … to more than 75 million users via its interactive commercial music streaming service,” the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, read. ” … Indeed, Spotify has publicly admitted its failures to obtain licenses for the musical works it distributes or reproduces or to pay royalties to copyright owners for its use of their Works.”

The initial suggestion is USD150million in damages, but the lawsuit suggests the final figure might be "incalculable".

Spotify hope you don't notice them quietly admitting their mistakes

Christmas Eve, when people are too busy arguing over whether eggnog is an emulsion or just tastes like paint to pay much attention to what's happening in the business world.

Christmas Eve, when Spotify admitted they might not actually be paying people the right amounts:

"One of the most difficult challenges is the lack of accurate data as to who owns the rights to a specific track, especially when it comes to songwriter and publisher rights," James Duffett-Smith, Spotify's Global As Head Of Publisher Relations wrote in a blog post. "In many cases, the ownership of the rights are not even finalized when a record is released; in many other cases, rights are held by multiple parties, rights change hands, and rightsholders remain entirely unclear."

"This is a global problem – outside the U.S., publishing rights organizations and collecting societies who receive royalties on behalf of songwriters and publishers face similar challenges," he continued. "And it is a complex problem – we are committed to solving it, but it is going to take significant time and effort."

You'll note they're not actually going to pay any more money, but they're pledging to try and make sure those portions of pennies go to the right people.

Joe Elliott doesn't like streaming services

Streaming services, amirite? They're like the work of a demon. A minor demon, perhaps, but a demon nevertheless. Tell us why, Joe:

"I signed up for the Apple one, Beats. It's kind of semi-evil, because whoever owns Spotify is worth more than 50 times than Mick Jagger, who's been in this business for 50 years. And that's just not right.

Mick Jagger, according to The Richest, is worth 360 Million Dollars. So to be worth fifty times that, you would have to be an eighteen-fold billionaire. 18 billion is roughly the GDP of Honduras.

Just to be clear: Daniel Ek is not Honduras. In fact, according to Time, he's worth 300 Million Dollars, which puts him behind Mick Jagger in terms of wealth.

Obviously, the point Joe was trying to make was that it seems absurd that a person who works in the tech industry is worth a lot of money compared with someone who works in the music industry for fifty years.

Although that doesn't make sense generally: it's not like the tech industry away from music is known for being a place where the bosses take home tiny pay packets.

It also doesn't make any sense in this specific case. First of all, it could be possible that Mick Jagger had just invested incredibly badly, or had been generous with his money.

Secondly, although Mick has been in the industry fifty years, Ek's not exactly a newcomer - he started when he was 14, so nearly twenty years, and he made a fortune selling his first advertising business. So it's not like he's built his money up entirely from not making Mick Jagger even richer.

Also: both these people have obscene amounts of money. Even if Daniel Ek was fifty times richer than Jagger, that would mean Jagger had six million dollars. You can buy a bionic man with that.

But you had a point, Joe, to make:

Because when you read stories about Lady Gaga getting 127 dollars for 60 trillion plays, or whatever, you're thinking, this is bullshit.

Well, yes, there were stories five years ago that GaGag got USD127 for a million streams - it's funny that Elliott was spot-on with the amount there, when so many of his other figures are grossly overestimated in favour of his argument, but then I think we all know people in our own jobs who do that.

But why was GaGa doing so poorly out of streaming? Not because of the semi-evil streaming services, but because of the fully evil record labels:

[In] some explosive comments made by Gaga's ex-manager Troy Carter. Carter states that Gaga's label, Universal Music, cheated the artist out of streaming royalties due to her from Spotify and other streaming services during the height of her pop popularity.

Carter, who is no longer handling Gaga's career but is active as a music and technology entrepreneur and investor, said, "We've always gotten screwed from record royalties ... So when you look at it, the live business and the merchandise business have always been the bigger piece of the pie. And with record labels, I think it's more of just chickens coming home to roost. Well, let's rephrase that: labels made a significant amount of money off of Spotify that didn't match up to the artist royalty statements ..."

How evil of Spotify to, erm, not be party to the main point where artists are getting ripped off.

Anything else, Joe? Do you perhaps have an "I can remember when it was all trees round here" argument to offer?

And when you get on Spotify, it's very insular. Which the whole industry has become. Everybody is on headphones now. It's just Zombieland, and we're all guilty of it. I do it too, but only when it's necessary, like on an airplane.

Yes. People listening to music on headphones. In the old days, people used to go to their bedrooms to be insular and listen to music. How can Spotify have ruined that by, erm, inventing headphones or something or... what?

Pandora pony up for pre-72 recordings

Before 1972, recorded music in America wasn't "protected" by copyright. Some streaming services have been taking advantage of this to stream vintage tracks without feeling the need to pay for the rights.

The RIAA wasn't happy about this, and so threatened Pandora with court to demand payment.

Before it came to this, Pandora was bullish:

In response, Pandora issued a statement to The Hollywood Reporter: "Pandora is confident in its legal position and looks forward to a quick resolution of this matter."

The resolution was pretty quick, but, erm not in Pandora's favour:

Pandora Media Inc. will pay $90 million to record labels to settle a dispute over oldies, the Internet radio giant said Thursday.

The agreement with the group of labels -- composed of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Capitol Records and ABKCO Music & Records -- resolves yet another major battle over royalties for recordings made before 1972.

So, are Pandora upset? Apparently not. Oh, no. This is, honestly, the outcome they were hoping for:

Pandora Chief Executive Brian McAndrews, in statement, said the company was "excited" to have the dispute resolved. "We pursued this settlement in order to move the conversation forward and continue to foster a better, collaborative relationship with the labels," he said.

Yeah. Thank god, eh? All they wanted to was make a massive payment and knock a fifth off their share price. That was all Pandora ever wanted. All they asked for. They're excited. Real excited.

Good news for Sly Stone

A court has awarded Sly Stone five million dollars in lost royalties.

Let's just hope his former lawyer and manager held on to the cash so they can give it back...

Pandora nudges past the billion dollar mark

Pandora has passed a significant moment in its business: it's paid the billionth dollar out in royalties. Music Ally reports:

A big number from McAndrews in the earnings call, claiming that Pandora has paid “over $1bn, yes, $1bn in all-time royalties to artists, publishers and labels”

To artists, publishers and labels, although that's almost certainly not in descending order of size of share.

Still, it's a lot of money. It may actually be a crippling amount of money, as Pandora's losses are heading in the wrong direction:

Witness its latest quarterly financial results, where the company beat analyst predictions, yet still saw its share price fall by 10%. That’s partly due to the company continuing to report net losses: $11.7m in the last quarter compared to $6.9m in Q2 2013. This, despite decent revenue growth: a rise of 43% year-on-year to $218.9m.

If your revenue grows by half, and your losses are damn-near doubling, you might have a pretty fundamental problem. Unless you've got a plan.

There was no news on Pandora’s global expansion plans – “We don’t have anything to announce at this point, but we do see longer-term. Our vision as I mentioned is to reach billions of people around the world,” said McAndrews.

Pandora don't appear to have a plan.

Spotify really hate being compared with iTunes; compare selves with iTunes

You know what really upsets Spotify's head of label relations in Europe, Kevin Brown? It's when people compare his lovely service with iTunes:

"I don’t see iTunes as our primary competitor - that’s YouTube," said Brown, criticising labels that decide to keep albums off Spotify in favour of exclusive deals with iTunes. "We’re still put in the same bucket as iTunes by some labels, whose music then appears on YouTube. That drives me nuts."

Boy, if he hates being compared with iTunes rather than YouTube, this is going to drive him over the edge:

"Some of our partners are saying Spotify is now generating more revenue each month across Continental Europe than iTunes[...]
"Given that download sales are declining and Spotify is growing rapidly, particularly in the UK, it is only a matter of time before Spotify is bigger than iTunes across Europe as a whole."

That's someone inside Spotify putting the service in the same bucket as iTunes. Brown's going to be fighting mad with them, yeah? Who was it who did such a terrible thing?

Spotify's head of label relations in Europe, Kevin Brown, told industry site Music Week.

Oh.

Steely Dan: Palmer wants more

David Palmer, who - up until 40 years ago was singer in Steely Dan - is suing for money he believes he is owed:

Palmer claims his work on the band's early tracks helped to give the act its signature sound, but insists he has been paid just over $8,000 (£5,000) in royalties from radio play.

Curiously, Palmer only sang lead on the two tracks he did because ABC records executives insisted; he also provided some of the high notes and backing vocals on other tracks. It's not clear how much he's after.

Tiny royalty cheques

There's a post over on Aux TV which gathers some of the tiny royalty cheques that some artists have recently received.

Some of them are genuinely astonishing, like this one:

That's Camper Van Beethoven & Cracker's David Lowery getting a million streams on Pandora and pocketing less than twenty dollars for their efforts.

We've been here before, of course: how suprised you'll be depends on if you want to compare that figure with what they would have earned if they'd sold a million copies, or if it had been played on traditional radio to an audience of a million listeners.

There's also this one:

Mike Schleibaum getting a cheque for a penny.

Now, there's an element of Esther Rantzen here - is it really worth sending out a cheque for a single cent?

Of course not; that's ridiculous. But then the question would be what should the cut-off point be for rolling a royalty over into the next round of payments? Ten cents? A dollar? Is it really worth sending out a cheque for anything less than ten dollars?

Except... if Mike is earning cent, if Music Reports didn't send its cheque until he'd amassed even ten dollars, it'd be a very long time before his mailman would be called upon to spring into action.

More to the point, if Music Matters took a sensible-sounding line of not triggering a cheque until earnings reached ten dollars, and they've got, say, a million clients who potentially could have nine dollars ninety nine in their accounts, suddenly there's a "Music Matters sitting on ten million dollars of artist's money; artists haven't received cheques in forever" scandal blowing in the opposite direction.

So everyone gets an expensively-administrated, disappointing cheque every time.

(There's a bigger question of why they're sending sodding cheques in 2014, like they're settling debts incurred at a card table in Pemberley, but that's for another day.)

Besides the idea of sending a tiny cheque, though, there's the question of why it's a tiny, tiny cheque in the first place.

Schleibaum got some fun out of his micropayday:

“This is what we call, “BIG TIME!,” he wrote on Facebook. “Don’t worry..big news is coming but for now..we got to spend all this cash!”

Hang on a moment, though. Music Reports mostly handles licencing for local TV affiliates, some cable networks and other small users of music, like greeting cards companies.

Schleibaum has two main jobs in music. The first is as a member of melodic death metal band Darkest Hour who, good as they are, seem unlikely to have their music featured in a Happy Birthday card or soundtracking a sports package on the Fox affiliate in Boise. So, presumably, you wouldn't expect that much cash to flow from that angle.

He also composes music for television - if you tapped your foot to the beds on MSNBC's Charles Manson and His Followers, you were enjoying Mike's work. But presumably this work is done with the channels buying out all rights in the work - which means that again, Mike would expect his payment cheque to be fairly small.

So perhaps the surprise is not that there's a cheque, but that there's a cheque at all.

[Thanks to Michael M for the link]
[UPDATED 18/2: Rewrote a paragraph to make it clearer that the royalty cheque is from David Lowery, out of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven]

Skinny Puppy demand their fee

Having discovered that their music was being used in Guantanamo as part of - remind me, what's the current sanitised phrase for 'torture' they're using at the moment? - Skinny Puppy have sent a bill:

"We heard through a reliable grapevine that our music was being used in Guantanamo Bay prison camps to musically stun or torture people," founder cEvin Key told the Phoenix New Times. "We heard that our music was used on at least four occasions."

"So we thought it would be a good idea to make an invoice to the US government for musical services," Key added.

The surprise is that the team from PRS - who I'd assumed had left no business unbothered for one of their licences - hadn't yet made it to Cuba to insist that the US Military get a little sticker for the door.

Spotify simultaneously incredibly generous, unbelievably mean

Brilliant news, everybody: Spotify are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into rights' holders pockets:

According to Spotify, its new site is designed to provide additional insight into its operation through the use of data and business analysis. As part of that, Spotify said on Monday that it has issued $1 billion in royalties since its inception in 2009. At this time last year, its total royalty payout was at $500 million, meaning during 2013 alone, Spotify has coughed up $500 million in royalties.

On its new Web site, Spotify also tries to make the case that it's exceedingly generous with artists. The company claims to pay nearly 70 percent of its revenue in royalties, adding that "we believe that this is the fair approach to take."

That's excellent, right? Especially since a lot of that cash would never have been handed over in the past, as people would have been simply sucking the tunes off the internet.

I'll go and make dip. We'll have dip and pie to celebrate, right?

Hang on... you look quite glum, Music Week:

As part of a new site specificially built for artists, the company reveals that it has recently paid out an average of $0.006 and $0.0084 per stream to rightsholders.

That figure is presumably a mix of streams on its premium service (thought to be around $0.01 per stream) and its ad-supported free service.

Maybe no pie, then.

Of course, much of this money will, anyone, end up in the key-locking cashbox of labels rather than going towards artist's desire to purchase food and soap.

Spotify reckons that its royalties are roughly double those of YouTube, and more than treble those of Pandora, on a like-for-like basis; it also suggests that a "niche indie album" could earn about three thousand dollars a year. This obviously raises a question of what they consider a niche indie album to be - to me, that sounds like something in the area of a death metal band covering Trembling Blue Stars, but I suspect they could be thinking of something a bit more Primitives-sized.

It's not terrible money, but you really wouldn't be giving up the day job on this alone.

Oooh, Betty: Whitey asks TV company why he should work for nothing

Betty TV are making one of their exciting new TV series - probably something about someone young and sexy being sexy, or possibly about someone not young and sexy having their insecurities exploited for an hour on the telly - and thought Whitey might like to be part of it.

Obviously, they weren't going to pay. Whitey was, understandably, unhappy:

"I am sick to death of your hollow schtick, of the inevitable line 'unfortunately there's no budget for music', as if some fixed law of the universe handed you down a sad but immutable financial verdict preventing you from budgeting to pay for music. Your company set out the budget. So you have chosen to allocate no money for music. I get begging letters like this every week – from a booming, affluent global media industry.

Why is this? Let's look at who we both are.

I am a professional musician, who lives from his music. It took me half a lifetime to learn the skills, years to claw my way up the structure, to the point where a stranger like you will write to me. This music is my hard-earned property. I've licensed music to some of the biggest shows, brands, games and TV production companies on earth; from Breaking Bad to The Sopranos, from Coca-Cola to Visa, HBO to Rockstar Games.

Ask yourself – would you approach a creative or a director with a resume like that, and in one flippant sentence ask them to work for nothing? Of course not. Because your industry has a precedent of paying these people, of valuing their work.

Or would you walk into someone's home, eat from their bowl, and walk out smiling, saying, "So sorry, I've no budget for food"? Of course you would not. Because, culturally, we classify that as theft.

Yet the culturally ingrained disdain for the musician that riddles your profession leads you to fleece the music angle whenever possible. You will without question pay everyone connected to a shoot – from the caterer to the grip to the extra – even the cleaner who mopped your set and scrubbed the toilets after the shoot will get paid. The musician? Give him nothing.

Now let's look at you. A quick glance at your website reveals a variety of well-known, internationally syndicated reality programmes. You are a successful, financially solvent and globally recognised company with a string of hit shows. Working on multiple series in close co-operation with Channel 4, from a west London office, with a string of awards under your belt. You have real money; to pretend otherwise is an insult.

Yet you send me this shabby request – give me your property for free. Just give us what you own, we want it.

The answer is a resounding and permanent NO.

I will now post this on my sites, forward this to several key online music sources and blogs, encourage people to reblog this. I want to see a public discussion begin about this kind of industry abuse of musicians … this was one email too far for me. Enough. I'm sick of you.

NJ White

Betty - which is part of Discovery - has found time between shooting episodes of 'Look How Poor People Live' and 'Look At How Rich People Live And Do The Sex' to issue a statement of their own:

A Betty spokesperson said: "We use a collective licensing system that ensures both the recording artist and composer are paid. We apologise for any confusion and we have contacted the artist to clarify this. We would never use music without permission and going through the proper procedures."

Odd that; Whitey clearly understands the licensing business, yet Betty thinks its request has "confused" him. Odd.

Thom Yorke challenged over consistency

Thom Yorke, as we all know, despises Spotify. Not quite enough to pull Radiohead music from the service, but certainly enough to keep his less-lucrative side projects away from it.

Writing on Hypebot, though, Eliot Van Buskirk points out an even odder inconsistency in Yorke's position:

Do you know which on-demand services pays less than Spotify per stream, and doesn’t even include a premium version for people who might be willing to pay (although there have been weird rumblings about that)?

YouTube. And Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace music is all over that on-demand music service, including in the above video, which includes the entire Atoms For Peace album. XL Recordings, Atoms for Peace’s label, has official versions up there as well.

The last time we ran the calculations, the musical force of nature Psy (remember him?) made about a third of a cent per view from his monetized music on YouTube.
[...]
one recent estimate put Spotify payouts to one artist at .4 cents per song.

In other words, regardless of who owns it, Spotify pays out more than YouTube. The two numbers are closer than one might imagine, considering that over six million people pay for Spotify, and nobody pays for YouTube, but there they are.

Curious.

Thom knocks off Spotify

Thom Yorke has pulled his music from Spotify.

Relax, it's only the solo stuff and Atoms For Peace at the moment.

Why has Thom done this?

Yorke pitched in to the debate. "Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile shareholders will shortly be rolling in it. Simples," he tweeted, and added as a riposte to critics that the suggestion his move was pointless missed its purpose: "'Your small meaningless rebellion is only hurting your fans ... a drop in the bucket really.' No, we're standing up for our fellow musicians."

This set-up - musicians working hard for peanuts while shareholders cream off the cash - is a totally unheard-of situation in modern music, sweeping away, as it does, the previous arrangement whereby the major labels were run as charities and bold, experimental music cascaded onto the shelves of HMV. Back in the past, the labels looked after musicians and made sure that any singer or drummer able to afford to hire a good lawyer five years in could renegotiate the initial deal in which they'd signed away everything for something close to nothing and make enough to eat at least twice a week.

It's true that you won't make much from a handful of listens on Spotify. But is there a better way for new music to be discovered?

Nigel Godrich, Yorke's producer, has an idea:

"Streaming suits [back] catalogue. But [it] cannot work as a way of supporting new artists' work. Spotify and the like either have to address that fact and change the model for new releases or else all new music producers should be bold and vote with their feet. [Streaming services] have no power without new music."

Really? This is such a schoolboy error that I can barely even look at it without feeling awful for Godrich.

He's suggesting that this is a thought process that would happen:
- I fancy listening to music. Shall I go to the service that has all the music I've enjoyed all my life, or shall I go and listen to that service that has no songs I've ever heard before?

Some people will do the latter; but they're probably the people who would be off looking for new music everywhere anyway.

What Godrich is suggesting is akin to, say, HMV only stocking records that are year old, and another shop stocking new music only.

But even the most aloof of indie stores knew they had to have some Rolling Stones or Bob Marley in the racks, if only to tempt people over the doorstep in order to ram Chvrches into their hands.

There have been numerous attempts to build new music sites on the internet - many were just as cynically motivated by 'cheap' non-major music as Spotify are motivated by paying light royalties. I think it's fair to say that none have had any real breakthrough.

Yorke is right, up to a point - you won't get rich off Spotify. You might, if you're lucky, add a few pennies to your income.

And an artist like Yorke can afford to turn his back on Spotify without disappearing.

But if you're starting out, I'd think long and hard before getting off the high street.

Warner Chappell faces unhappy returns

Warner Chappell has had a nice little business going over the last few years, collecting money from the rights it owned to the song Happy Birthday. Even Nancy Reagan singing it to Ronnie once got a terse demand for cash dispatched to broadcasting networks.

Except... maybe they don't own the rights at all. Filmaker Jennifer Nelson was asked to pay to include the song in a documentary she was making. But rather than hand over the cash - USD1500! - she started to dig. And she's not sure the song belongs in copyright:

Nelson's company Good Morning to You Productions Corp claimed: "Irrefutable documentary evidence, some dating to 1893, shows that the copyright to Happy Birthday to You, if there ever was a valid copyright to any part of the song, expired no later than 1921". Their class-action lawsuit, filed on 13 June, directly challenges Warner/Chappell's ownership of the song, whereby the publishers collect thousands of dollars every time a film, TV show or musical act buys a licence to perform it.

It could be expensive for Warner Chappell if a judgement goes against them - they'll have to return all that cash they've been raking in for years; and it could be as much as fifty million dollars.

iRadio: Can you feel the excitement?

Can you hear the world, holding its breath, for the launch of Apple iRadio?

Nope, me neither.

The sheer lack of people who say "you know what I wish? I wish I could stream music through the iTunes interface" has always been noticeable.

It's likely that Apple will make the service a success, simply through plonking the iRadio button on homescreens of devices, and maybe there'll be something to the service unveiled today that makes it essential, or desirable, but it's hard to see the problem with music streaming that needs Apple to solve it.

AllThingsD tries to describe what we can expect:

[It] should function like an enhanced version of Pandora — that is, it will be a free streaming music service that gives users more control of their songs than standard Web radio, but less than full on-demand services like Spotify.

That's... uh, clear. The idea is that the tracks you hear will be half-determined by you telling it what you want to hear, and half it scanning your iTunes history. You know that time you bought the Crazy Frog to burn onto a CD for a joke for your brother? THAT will be the guiding light that iRadio seizes on to build your playlists. That, and the thirty unplayed episodes of OpenSouceSex.

Even so, I'll bet Spotify and Pandora are feeling uncomfortable this morning.

Interestingly, Apple have only just managed to pull Sony on board. Are the majors happy?

The majors publishers had looked like they were going to be the holdout because Apple initially offered to pay them a rate of 4.1% of its advertising revenue, while the publishers had been withdrawing digital rights from the U.S. performance rights organizations BMI and ASCAP because they wanted higher rates. BMG, Sony/ATV, UMPG and Warner/Chappell executives had privately said they were seeking rates of 10%-15% of iRadio’s advertising revenue. But when Apple agreed to a 10% rate, Warner/Chappell last week signed the deal and now so has Sony/ATV.

Getting more than double Apple wanted to pay. That's quite a strong move by the majors. Let's hope they don't do that thing where they suddenly get insanely greedy.

While publishers will get 10% of revenue, they privately are calling this an introductory rate, meaning that after the iRadio service establishes itself, they expect that rate to increase. Likewise, they also say they expect Pandora to match the deals they are doing now with Apple.

"We won't hold our ground when we have the advantage and Apple really needs us for launch. Oh, no. What we'll do, right, is wait until the service is established, and carrying itself along under its own sheer weight of numbers. At that point, when we've got massive sums of cash flowing in from Apple, we'll be in a really strong position to threaten to refuse to take that money any more unless they give us more. At the same time, with Apple crushing Pandora into near-obscurity, that'd be exactly the moment to ask Pandora to give us more of the less money it's making. Genius plan, eh, guys?"

Revenue stream

Here's an interesting statistic - although there's more-or-less acceptance that streaming royalties aren't massive, they still account for 22% of revenue at Beggars Group.

Also interesting: Cooking Vinyl's Richard Leach expects YouTube to become the label's most significant source of revenue.

Getty offer to turn Soundcloud into pounds. At a price.

You know how, if you're happy to not be fussy about what happens to them, you can ask Getty to take care of commercial licencing for your photos on Flickr?

They're about to start offering a similar service on Soundcloud.

The upside is that, if your music is there, and someone wants to use it on a film or in a podcast, Getty will make the process very smooth.

The downside is that, because Getty are interested in scale and flogging rights with an industrial approach, there's not much room for artists to control what happens to their music. You sign up for Getty to be not just your middleman, but your manager, too. The ratecard is fixed, the artist hands over any power to object if, say, an anti-abortion podcast wants to use a song from an abortion supporting singer.

Although Getty have a cookie-cutter approach, they're charging quite heavily for it, as Hypebot explain:

If the music is licensed, the artist receives just 35% of the upfront licensee fee plus 50% of Getty Images' share, as publisher, of any backend performance royalties.

It might be frictionless, but given Getty merely wait until someone asks to use the music and pushes a bit of paperwork around, it's hard to see why they're helping themselves to such a large slice of the cash.

Gordon in the morning: Cash in the Oasis attic

How does Noel Gallagher feel when Beady Eye play Oasis songs? He's not worried, he claims:

“Beady Eye have my permission to play my songs and they should do whatever they like.

"I say he should go around the world, do those songs and fill out the PRS (performing rights) forms.”

Hmm. I know Noel is attempting a brave face here, but does he realise it makes him sound like he's on his uppers, desperately hoping Liam might knock out a live version of Wonderwall so he can afford a can of beans for tea?

Def Leppard clone themselves

Def Leppard have got the hump with Universal taking the lions' share - or, rather, the Leppard's share - of their royalties, and have recorded 'forgeries' of their old stuff:

The band's frontman Joe Elliott said to Billboard that the disagreement has led to the band deciding to phase out their recordings for Universal and replace them with a whole new collection of their songs, which they're calling 'forgeries'. "We'll just replace our back catalogue with brand new, exact same versions of what we did," he said.

There's a glorious philosophical conundrum here - are these now new originals? Are the cover versions? Could the 2012 studio version of Pour Some Sugar On Me be considered merely a later take from the original suspended 1987 session?

This is a different class of re-recording from, say, Kate Bush's director's cuts reworking of earlier albums, as the Lep (as they must never, ever be called) are trying to recreate the songs exactly as they were; it's closer to those soundalike albums ("sings the hits of") which unsuspecting parents would buy children to make Christmas mornings so disappointing in the 1970s.

It's not quite the unique event you might think; certainly, back in 1981 Flux Of Pink Indians launched their own Spiderleg Records with a cloned version of the '1970s Were Made In Hong Kong' ep they'd made for Stortbeat Records as The Epileptics a couple of years earlier. That was over a royalty dispute, too.

[Thanks to @jamesthegill for the tip]