Independent Record Labels Sign MySpace Deal

More interesting -- and welcome -- news on the music industry front, from a Jan. 21 Reuters story:

Merlin, the new agency representing the world's independent music sector, has agreed a deal with digital music company Snocap which will allow its labels' music to be sold from Web sites such as MySpace. The group announced the deal at the annual MidemNet music conference in France, saying it would allow thousands of independent labels across the world to sell digital downloads of their music from their MySpace pages and other sites.

Merlin was launched on Saturday to secure licensing deals with emerging media such as MySpace and YouTube. The group said it would act as the "fifth major" in the world with a view to rectifying the "poor cousin" status of deals previously offered to independent labels. Snocap, founded by Napster creator Sean Fanning, will use its retail initiative called Mystore which enables music to be downloaded from Web sites. The Mystore and MySpace tie up will launch in the "near future".

The downloads will be sold in the MP3 format, meaning they can be played on any portable music player including the iPod. Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes can only be used with an iPod while music from such popular services as Napster and Rhapsody cannot be played on the mass-selling device.

The agreement, the first of its kind, will be offered to all members of Merlin. "This immediately opens up what is currently the most popular Web site in the world to the independent labels," Merlin Chief Executive Charles Caldas told Reuters. MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe told Reuters last year that the group hoped to be one of the biggest digital music stores available. The hugely popular social networking site Myspace is owned by News Corp.

The independent record label sector makes up for 30 percent of the music sold worldwide, with the rest from the four majors -- Vivendi's Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI Group and Warner Music Group.

Download-Only Song Hits Top 40 in UK

Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog notes a BBC story that the British band Koopa "could become the first unsigned group to land a UK top 40 hit thanks to new chart rules. Chart rules were changed at the start of January to count all digital single sales, even if there is no CD version."

Two other interesting points from the BBC article:

• These guys are no overnight sensation. They've been together for seven years, and they've played about 500 gigs in the past 3 years. No doubt some MySpace-only band without the chops to play live, or whose music couldn't be reproduced live, will hit the charts soon (there are bands that got signed to a label after conquering MySpace, but Koopa has done it without label help). But Koopa's success shows how critical building a live following can be. (By the way, I've got nothing against music that can't be played live. After all, that's one reason the Beatles quit the road, so they could make something like Sgt. Pepper.)

• Just as the band is making do without a label, its fans are probably bypassing online stores and buying the song with their cell phones, paying £1.50 to send a text message and receive a code to download the song on a computer. "The average 16-year-old doesn't have a credit card but they've got a mobile phone," the manager explains.

Will Saudis Ban the Letter ‘X'?

Apparently not a joke, according to an article in the New York Sun:

The letter "X" soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the
mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

The new development came with the issuing of another mind-bending fatwa, or
religious edict, by the infamous Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and
Prevention of Vice — the group of senior Islamic clergy that reigns supreme on
all legal, civil, and governance matters in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The
commission's damning of the letter "X" came in response to a Ministry of Trade
query about whether it should grant trademark protection to a Saudi businessman
for a new service carrying the English name "Explorer."

"No! Nein! Nyet!" was the commission's categorical answer.

(Courtesy of Christianity Today's Weblog.)

Nice Tune

"Put Your Records On" - yeah, that's the name of the tune, by Corinne Bailey Rae. I heard 15 seconds of her on NPR and then found an out-of-sync video at YouTube. Silly lyrics but the song is quite nice.

Mormonism and Christianity

I found an interesting essay by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus at First Things from several years ago on the question "Is Mormonism Christian?"

As usual, Neuhaus sets the right tone:

We are obliged to respect human dignity across the board, and to affirm common discernments of the truth wherever we find them. Where we disagree we should try to put the best possible construction on the position of the other, while never trimming the truth. That will become more important as Mormons become more of a presence, both in this country and the world.

He then explores the history and structure of Mormonism, and the predictions and prospects for its growth worldwide, before grappling with the question itself:

The question as asked by Mormons is turned around: are non–Mormons who claim to be Christians in fact so? The emphatic and repeated answer of the Mormon scriptures and the official teaching of the LDS is that [Catholics and Protestants] are not. We are members of "the great and abominable church" that was built by frauds and impostors after the death of the first apostles. The true church and true Christianity simply went out of existence, except for its American Indian interlude, until it was rediscovered and reestablished by Joseph Smith in upstate New York, and its claims will be vindicated when Jesus returns, sooner rather than later, at a prophetically specified intersection in Jackson County, Missouri.

Nauhaus is not being snarky; Mormons believe that the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County, and that Jesus will return there. (I'll have you know I was born in Jackson County... hmmmm...)

And here we come to the serious disagreement over the nature of God and man:

Mormonism claims that God is an exalted man, not different in kind as Creator is different in kind from creature. The Mormon claim is, "What God was, we are. What God is, we will become." Related to this is the teaching that the world was not created ex nihilo but organized into its present form, and that the trespass in the Garden of Eden, far from being the source of original sin, was a step toward becoming what God is. Further, Mormonism teaches that there is a plurality of gods. Mormons dislike the term "polytheism," preferring "henotheism," meaning that there is a head God who is worshiped as supreme. If Christian doctrine is summarized in, for instance, the Apostles’ Creed as understood by historic Christianity, official LDS teaching adds to the creed, deviates from it, or starkly opposes it almost article by article.... Christians in dialogue with Islam understand it to be an interreligious, not an ecumenical, dialogue. Ecumenical dialogue is dialogue between Christians. Dialogue with Mormons who represent official LDS teaching is interreligious dialogue.

With Mitt Romney filing his presidential exploratory papers today, we'll be hearing more about his Mormon faith, and Neuhaus's piece provides interesting background.

But when it comes to politics, I'm not too concerned that Romney is a member of the LDS.

What I am still concerned about is his very recent conversion on abortion and gay marriage. See this post for some links on this.

"Saddam Film Terrible"

Carol Iannone's comments over at NRO's PhiBetaCons blog on the way Saddam's execution was conducted sums up my feelings exactly:

Despite what has been posted here on various arguments for the morality of executing Saddam, I am afraid that whatever value his death might have had for the new Iraq will be dissipated by the awful film of his last moments. There is good reason that we no longer have public hangings and executions. Of course they have to be witnessed, and maybe this one had to have some official footage in order to assure people that it had taken place, but what I have seen of the evidently unofficial film (and I guess no precautions were taken to insure against that) is an absolute disgrace, a violation of the whole procedure, removing it from the level of higher justice and putting it on the level of tribal vengeance.

The film could even support the argument against capital punishment. In a film of this low level, looking like something that could have been done in the depths of the gulag, we do not see the cruel dictator who committed crimes against against humanity being executed honorably and in a dignified way—in a manner of death more humane than he inflicted on others—in order to serve justice, but a poor helpless human being having his God-given life taken away by ordinary men who have somehow been given power over him, some of whom taunted him in his last moments. And his executioners being hooded did not carry the idea that they were personifications of abstract justice, but suggested in that context the primitive, hooded, faceless murderousness of the Middle East that we often see in parades and funerals. Terrible, terrible, terrible, and another sign that Iraq is nowhere on the rule of law and that we have been utter fools to think that this society even understands the meaning of those words at this point. And the execution being done around the time of a Sunni holiday, that makes it even more of a transgression and an embarrassment.

Wheat and Weeds has a good post that discusses how to apply the Catholic Church's teaching on the death penalty to someone like Saddam. But it seems to me that IF you are going to execute a tyrant, I'm afraid we've just seen an example of how not to do it.