American Idiot mashed up

[Andrew]

From BB (http://www.boingboing.net/)

American Idiot mashed up

Cory Doctorow: American Edit is a concept mashup album that combines American Idiot with lots of eclectic material. I love the remix with the Dr Who theme!

Link (http://www.americanedit.net/)

Thanks, DD8!)

[Andrew]

BB (http://www.boingboing.net/)

Dean Grey Tuesday: Save American Edit mashup album!

Today is Dean Grey Tuesday, a net-wide day of protest over Warner Brothers attempt to censor a stupendous noncommercial mashup album called American Edit that remixes Green Day's album American Idiot.
For today, websites across the Internet are mirroring the American Edit album and/or turning their page-backgrounds grey. Mashup albums don't hurt the sales of the albums they sample -- at worst, they have no effect on sales, at best they can promote them. Artists who are signed to major labels can avail themselves of labels' legal departments when they want to remix others' work and get their samples cleared. Indie artists, hobbyists and fans don't get legal assistance from labels' high-priced fixers. This is pure patronage: in the old days you couldn't make art unless the King or some bishop granted you permission; today you need permission from a studio executive.

The labels admit this. Last year, EMI made headlines by censoring DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which remixed the Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. I raised this with an EMI representative at London's Creative Economy conference and she shrugged it off: "What's the problem? We later hired Danger Mouse to make a mashup album for us."

The problem is that copyright law is supposed to decentralize the process of making art, moving the power to authorize art from royalty to the marketplace. Labels have no business setting themselves up as arbiters of what art can and can't be made.

Happy Dean Grey Tuesday. Up yours, Warners.

Link (http://americanedit.org/home/ae/)

posted by Cory Doctorow at 04:05:26 AM permalink | blogs' comments

[Andrew]

From americanedit.org:

When I first started "Dean Gray Tuesday", it wasn't intended to be a protest of the mass it became. Quite honestly, I expected most people to write me off as an avid fan of the Dean Gray project and move on with their day. My original hope was to have perhaps 12 people help host files as a method of load balancing to avoid having a large number of downloads from a single site.

In 14 days, over 200 Web sites had formally signed up to participate in the protest. They told two friends, who told two friends, who told two friends... and suddenly the word was out. "Dean Gray Tuesday" suddenly had over 149,000 Web sites and blogs around the world spreading the word about the protest -- offering their own personal take on why a cease & desist was delivered by Warner music and what impact it would have on copyright, musical creativity, and the Green Day fan base.

I also began to receive hate mail from a few half-cocked teenagers who wanted to see me die. Which I continue to find strange. I'm not sure how wanting to advocate for remixes and home music production by borrowing from the DIY Punk ethic of grass-roots music promotion made me an enemy of the state, but, oh well.

On the official Green Day VIP "Idiot Club" site, there were comments from some of the most dedicated Green Day fans who loved the mash-ups and were distributing them on their own FTP servers to other "Idiot Club" members outside of the "Dean Gray Tuesday" effort. A few dedicated Punks didn't like the new production put on the Green Day album, but that is obviously to be expected.

In the end, here is how Dean Gray Tuesday went down:

12:00 AM - Launch of protest. Over 200 protestor Web sites registered went active.
01:30 AM - Spent 90 minutes weeding out registered protestors who did not participate but used the registration process to drive traffic to their own home pages or to spam visitors with pop-up advertisements. I had to delete about 40 Web sites from rotation.
06:00 AM - Spent 30 minutes re-validating sites and only weeded out another 4 or 5 sites that were not participating.
08:00 AM - Began receiving emails from sites who wanted to be added to the rotation who were already hosting files for the protest on their own -- added about 60 sites.
01:00 PM - Had received nearly a dozen emails from Green Day fans who had received cease and decist letters recent not for participating in Dean Gray Tuesday, but for posting lyrics, photos and artwork of Green Day on their fan sites.
10:00 PM - Multiple protestor sites shut down due to massive traffic and bandwidth cost supporting Dean Gray Tuesday visitors and downloads.
12:00 AM - End of protest.

In the end, americanedit.org received over 390,000 visitors in 24 hours. We were mentioned on two Canadian radio stations, several local television stations, a dozen college radio stations, NBC, Spin Magazine, and who knows what else. Rumor has it, there will be a write up in the Australian press of Rolling Stone magazine in February.

More (http://americanedit.org/home/ae/)