And, typically, the pattern is that the industry freaks out and tries to stop the new technology, but eventually someone duct tapes on a new bit of copyright law to cover it. Here’s the thing about copyright law: historically, as new technologies come along, copyright has a lot of trouble dealing with them. You can read the whole complaint here (or embedded below), though I warn you: to understand it, you need to go pretty deep into the arcane nature of music licensing. But right before the new year, it turned into an actual lawsuit against Spotify that he’s hoping to turn into a class action. Mostly this has been idle, if frequently misleading, whining. So his concern is always that these companies are somehow “cheating” him and his friends out of money. He appears to pine for the “old days” when there was less competition and a clearer career path for musicians like himself. When he was first getting attention over this it was about iTunes, but lately it’s been things like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube. Lowery, if you don’t know, is a decently successful musician who has ranted against any new service or business model for musicians. I tried to be objective in the analysis, but some will likely suggest that’s impossible given his years-long attacks on me. So, take the following with that caveat in mind. Every so often someone sends me a link to a blog post he’s written and it’s almost always laughably wrong (for example, in one recent story he falsely claimed that “Google” is on Spotify’s board - because a former Google exec who is no longer at the company also happens to be on Spotify’s board). We covered a few stories about him a few years ago, and he seemed to take it ridiculously personally, and continues to attack me with false and misleading claims. We generally don’t talk much about musician David Lowery around here any more.
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