grey tuesday – take a stand for the right to sample
downhill battle, the label that put out the grey album by dj danger mouse, is organising grey tuesday this coming tuesday 24.2. as a day of protest to take a stand for the right to create sample based music. the fierce legal battle from EMI that downhill battle is facing deserves all the support! and of course pieceoBlog will participate!!!
here’s the whole text of the email i just received. click
Hi,
We noticed you linked to a story about the Grey Album. It seems like
copies of the Grey Album are definitely making their way to people who
want them, but we thought it was vitally important that we *insist* on
sample-based musicians’ right to create, and on the public’s right to
hear the amazing music they make. EMI wasn’t just trying to stop DJ DM
from selling the album, they sent cease and desist letters to some
websites that were making it available for free. EMI acted to stop
people from hearing this piece of fun and inventive music, and that’s
just not right.
So we’re organizing an online-protest of sorts–called “Grey
Tuesday”–to take a stand and pretend, even if only for 24 hours, that
we don’t live in a culture where the legal environment ensnares
musicians. The idea is that this Tuesday, February 24th, as many sites
as possible mirror the Grey Album and/or turn their page “grayscale”
(i.e. no color) for the day. We’re also calling for people connected
to independent radio stations (college, commercial, internet) to get
the entire Grey Album played at some point on Tuesday (possibly along
with the Beatles and Jay-Z sources).
We’ve been pretty successful so far with our attempts to provoke debate
about sampling and copyright. Check out this article from Wired that
we got going:
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/
0,1412,62276,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2 or have a look at our press
page: http://downhillbattle.org/press.html We’re pretty confident
that, if there’s a reasonable level of participation, we can translate
this “online event” into some serious coverage in mainstream press that
tons of regular people will read.
And what regular people think about sampling and copyright matters,
especially when the future of the music industry is almost entirely up
for grabs.
So please, check it out: http://greytuesday.org
and email us to join: greytuesday@downhillbattle.org