- We live in a tiny village on Vancouver Island in British Columbia.
Friday was Canada Day, but it was also the start of a 10 day festival in Victoria, the Big City. Music performances and all kinds of other cool events are happening. So my wife and I bought passes for ourselves and our eight-year-old daughter and headed down.
Driving back from Day Two, yesterday, we tuned into the CBC news and heard a report on the Live 8 show in Barrie, Ontario. An interviewer was asking people what the performance, featuring elderly stars of yesteryear, was being staged for.
‘It’s a party, man. And it’s FREE!’ That was probably the most common response. ‘Yes,’ the frustrated interviewer would say. 'But what’s it for?'
‘I dunno. Hehe. But it’s FREE!’ Or ‘ Uh, something in Africa?’ ‘Raising money for something?’ Or 'To help HIV research?’
We caught most of the broadcast and no one we heard answered that the Canadian Live 8, and the other shows going on around the world, were to raise public awareness of the terrible poverty in Africa, and to encourage government leaders at the July 6 G8 summit to do something about it.
Towards the end, the CBC played a sample of the kind of thing you could hear ---- U2 and Paul McCartney doing The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Immediately after, it was transmitted by satellite to the BBC Television Centre in London, and relayed to UK broadcaster Capital Radio, says a Universal Music Group press release, which goes on:
"A direct digital recording was captured there for Universal Music, which edited, mastered and transmitted the track to its production centre in Hanover, Germany. The final master was sent to the company's global electronic distribution warehouse in the US, followed by real-time delivery to online retailers around the world, for sale as the first Live 8 download."
Sgt. Pepper Mk II was on sale as a digital download an hour later and, “The unique recording is available to buy through more than 200 online music stores and services in 30 countries, including www.Live8Live.com, and the proceeds from the download sales are being donated to Live 8."
UMG is owned by France's Vivendi Universal. It's the world's largest music company and one of the Big Four record label cartel owners. As such, it never does anything out of the goodness of its heart. Never.
The Sgt. Pepper online release was a cold PR stunt. Pure and simple. But that's OK. It demonstrated exactly how incredibly effective p2p can be in a hard-core commercial context and maybe it'll wake the labels up.
It'll also be interesting to see how much was raised, how it's broken down for distribution after various expense accounts have been paid, and where the money will actually end up.
