Stream and Scream
If you stream music on your blog or website, you’ll scream your head off when someone issues you a bill of $1,000. BLOGGERS who stream the latest hits to their websites will not be able to do this for free any longer. Non-revenue websites that stream music — other than radios and broadcast stations — now have to pay fees ranging from $1,000 for fewer than 10 songs, to $10,000 for 50 songs. This is according to a new rule that was implemented on Jan 1. Announcing this yesterday, Dr Edmund Lam, chief executive officer of the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore (Compass), said: "Currently, the trend is that we see an increasing number of bloggers that copy music into their web pages without obtaining the legitimate corporate licenses."
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It’s not all bad, actually. For people armed with snail-speed computers, it’s good news to know that you can now surf that favourite webpage or blog [without the existence of background music], without having to worry about your laggy computer. =)
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On a lighter note however, I was at NTU last evening, supporting Claire in her EEE Superstar competition in my own little way. I was holding complimentary tickets, and queued up at the counter [long queue, a la Hello Kitty style], but later realised that complimentary tickets holders, need not queue at all, but instead just need to enter from another entrance. -.-" Waste time leh!
There were 8 contestants, but they had intervals for every 2 performances by the contestants. Simply put, a dance was performed after every 2 contestants had their go at grabbing the mic. Yeah, the faulty mic. But it didn’t diminish the first contestant’s [his name is Lee Hin, whom Claire said was her idol!] singing prowess. =)
Everyone sang pretty well, but there’s no WOW factor that made me go "OMG! She’s got the singer’s voice!" Or something equivalent. Everyone was good, but there’s seemingly no explosive factor in anyone’s voice at all.
Anyway, it was an interesting experience, because the "boring" [as labelled by most people] engineering students were such jokers when it comes to playtime. They implemented a live SMS chat, where students would be able to send in their SMSes for them to be displayed on the screen. If I relate what some of those messages were, it’ll prolly not be half as interesting [must be there to find it funny!]. So I’ll leave it as that, but there were more sabotages than anything else. =P
Then we were informed that there was SMS voting, and no judges. -.-" The thing about 100% judging by the audience, is that the results will tend to be skewed towards the side of unfairness. Unless you’re one of the appended types:
1. You’re Mr/Ms Popular (with half the audience in the auditorium as your friends)
2. You’re Mr/Ms Cutie Pie (naturally people will vote for you, since they’ll be too mesmerised with you to care about other contenders)
3. You’re Mr/Ms Singer (you are a true blue singer, one verse from a song is enough to WOW your audience to drop their jaws or whatever)
4. You’re Mr/Ms Filthy Rich (you get your 20 domestic helpers to vote for you, WITHOUT having to be physically there at the competition)
You’ll confirm win if you fall into more than one of the above categories. =) Incidentally, I heard that the winner, contestant number 8, didn’t have most of his friends physically there. He texted his non-available friends what number to vote for, and that’s all it takes.
Nonetheless, Claire enjoyed herself and the experience, that’s what counts, isn’t it? Winning isn’t that important, if you have learnt something from the experience. =D
Anyway, Kelly Poon was there as a guest performer, and she sang 4 songs, one of which was from her new album. I must say that although she needs more stage performing practice, her singing was superb. That’s the difference of a trained voice.
The last time I was at TalentQuest 2005 [at NUS] as part of the audience, the contenders sang much better than the guest performers [Mimi & Gu-Er]. -.-"
Damn. I miss those times. =/ Sign me up for TalentQuest, anyone? Kidding.
