Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Annie C - U soul me



Found this really cool track from Miss Annie Crummer on a vhs, nice mid-90s triphop production vibe. It was a single off her 1996 album The Seventh Wave, on Warner Music. When I posted it to my Youtube account, unfortunately Warners blocked it for New Zealand viewers, which was a bit stink.

I was able to get a contact to email at Warners NZ, and they kindly unblocked it. Why they would block an artist they released on their own label is beyond me. Especially for an NZ On Air-funded video. Let the taxpayers see it, peeps.

But this is something of a big problem with Warners, especially around the Flying Nun catalog. Although Warners no longer own the FNun catalogue, I'm guessing they clearly still have the artists listed in their database that Youtube use to source their copyright warning and geoblocking.



Russell Brown recently highlighted on Twitter the case of former member of the Headless Chickens Grant Fell, who uploaded some videos of his old band, only to have Warners block them for NZ viewers. At least their version of Abba's Supertrouper is still up!

Russell writes about this problem, noting "... Warner Music’s continued and unwarranted assertion on YouTube of copyright over the Flying Nun Records catalogue it no longer owns – each geoblocking claim needing to be sorted out on an individual basis – is probably not the only problem of its kind..." in a post discussing the launch of Kim Dotcom's new service, Mega.

At the Mega launch, Dotcom talked about his his yet-to-be-launched Megabox service, that will give artists a lion's share of the sales, 90%. That's nothing new. Bandcamp gives artists 85% of every sale. Creating an online service that cuts out the record labels is not new or innovative. Perhaps folk in the media can wake up to that and stop blindly repeating Dotcom's assertion on this like it was fact. If you asked some local independent musicians, they'd tell you they're already using Bandcamp very successfully, so why would they go with Megabox....

Anyways, the Annie Crummer video was directed by Mark Hartley. This single peaked at #21 in the NZ singles charts, and the album peaked at #5. The single also featured a rap remix produced by Anthony Ioasa, with Three The Hard Way on vocals.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I recall hearing when U Soul me came out that Annie went to Paisley Park MINN and worked
with Prince on this track which made sense at the time cos you can hear there's something
of his funky vibe in it.