2010: “The ©loud Sucks” vs “Only Toys Buy Their Paint”

Looking back at the past year it started with Google’s musicblogocide, continued with Facebook’s series of privacy blunders, appeared to come to a close with Wikileaks/Anonymous publicly clashing with governments and corporations, and yet managed to surprise us with Soundcloud being forced to take position on Copyright.
I haven’t had to deal with Copyright-related rejections since a few years back when my meta-capitalist charlatan scheme to copyright the Copyright symbol was promptly denied. But in an ironic embodiment of the spirit of Christmas my attempt to share the last MoGlo radio show of the year through Soundcloud was blocked. What I can broadcast freely in the analog world of airwaves via radio companies on two coasts (New York’s WNYE and Seattle’s KEXP) cannot be gifted digitally anymore through my favorite cloud platform.

The first immediate result of the Soundcloud Christmas special will be that *if* DJs continue to use it for posting mixes, they will not include tracklists in the description - I know I won't. A huge part of the appeal of Soundcloud was the fact that the mixes gave exposure to great unsigned music (hosted on Soundcloud again). The track that triggered the block on my latest MoGlo mix was 'Villa Donde' by King Coya from Zizek (the infringement claim was from Nacional Records) - apparently in 2010 digital cumbia completed the Copyright circle (while ZZK retweeted my Dec 16 promo of the new Chancha Via Circuito album). Digital cumbia is a great example for this changing dynamic, since it is a genre that gained its international momentum primarily because of the existing ecology of music creation, sharing and distribution (in the form of blogs, YouTube videos and of course Soundcloud).

The more interesting result though was that it triggered a blogo-storming of speculation on the possible alternatives:

First was Wayne’s prescient post (from December 13!) which traces a range of possibilities and partly anticipates a Web 3.0 retreating from “the clouds” back to servers and archives (and Rozele brilliantly anchors the discussion with the Situationist poster seen in the beginning of this post).

Then Timeblind's “Only Toys Buy Their Paint” (a quote from 'Bomb the System') came somewhat in conflict with Ripley’s appeal to proactive mobilization with focus on the infrastructure of the digital community (with one of the commenters memorably concluding “the ©loud Sucks”).


So here's to the next most likely unexpected development of the theme in 2011!



You can download the blocked MoGlo show here and get the tracklist here.



PS. And in yet another twist of demarcation of Wikileaks frontlines, Soundcloud apparently deleted Assange’s dubstep mixes