Texas sues Sony over spyware on CDs

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Warners Festival of Mushroom swallowing

Warners, one of the "big four" remaining multinational record companies left have purchased Festival/Mushroom one of the two "sub-majors" left in Australia (the other being ABC records). Festival dates from the 50's and was bought by News Limited in the 60's. In the late 90's News acquired Michael Gudinski's majority holding in Mushroom and merged the two labels long with Mushroom Distibution to form Festival Mushroom Records. The ACCC approved the merger pronouncing that it was: "… unlikely to result in a substantial lessening of competition…" and that
"…some countervailing power is held by retailers in the wholesale recorded music market."

So we know who the mushroom is in this story, but who is the badger and, more importantly, who is the snake?

Read the ACCC decision.

Gudinski swallows Festival publishing

The publishing arm of Festival was not part of the recent deal with Warners. It has been purchased by colourful music identity Michael Gudinski to go with Mushroom publishing which he held onto when he sold his interest in Mushroom Records some years ago. Gudinski's reportedly stated that he was "…very proud to be able to acquire a piece of the history that we shared and to continue the heritage."

Given that the "Big Gud" sold his interest in Mushroom records for a reported $40 million some years ago and that the rumoured price he paid for Festival Publishing was in the single digit million $ area, pride might not be his current dominant emotion!

Big Gud does big swallow

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The gig was a success -
but the musicians got screwed

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Granted, this statistic is extremely hard to collect in any verifiable form. And I haven't read the full report. But the conspicuous absence of any statistic, of however small and compromised a sample, about musicians' wages seems to me typical of institutional attitudes towards the music industry.

Have we all simply accepted that musicians do it for "love"? Or have we swallowed the industry myth that, if you work hard and make all the right connections, you'll achieve financial success in the end?

We need to work to both collect mmore and better data about how musicians are getting paid, and, if the hundreds of anecdotal reports I have heard about pitifully low pay rates for musicians throughout most of the industry prove true, we need to find ways to redress the problem revealed.

NMIT, the instigator of the State of Play report, is a major and reputable educator of professional musicians in Melbourne. I hope to see included in next year's State of Play an attempt to feature statistics on the wages of musicians. Hopefully this will help the public to gradually learn that, yes, the gigs are going great guns, but the musicians are getting screwed.

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