The record label for Art Brut here in the United States and their U.S. promoter both gave this site explicit and direct approval to post certain Art Brut tracks last week. I still have the emails saying we could do so. Now, "Reverb House" in the UK says they are Art Brut's publisher and that I must take them down. A couple of questions arise.

Wouldn't the record label let the publisher know it was sending these out for publication? And, wouldn't the publisher check with the record label when it sees this sort of thing? Apparently not on either count. It is a shame that the band has trust to their careers to entities that obviously don't communicate.

The band has to rely on these people to protect their interests and are obviously too busy to oversee every communication that goes out. So, we can't blame the band for having to alter our publication. One thing we can do though is to not trust these entities any longer when it comes to communications.

We can't simply post and take down posts without consequences. We are a Google News source and all of our posts go out into the Google News wires via our RSS feed. The RSS feed incorporates the title of the post. If we change or remove a title (not the body) it throws off the feed and we get temporarily knocked out of the Google News system. So now we have a title we can't change because it is already in the wire system linked to the RSS feed. Changing these on occasion is not a bid deal. But, if you have to do this often Google may eventually tire of these kind of problems and cut you off. If we are cut off it is obviously detrimental to our ability to survive as a publisher. So, we try to be careful. If a label says, for example, that we can only post mp3s for a certain time we don't even post them at all so as to not have to worry about making changes later. There was no such restriction in this case. Indeed, just the opposite.

The PR company trumpeted the release of the mp3s. Taking precautions, I contacted the label before posting. The label confirmed that it was ok to post the mp3s. Now, we get a "take down" message (a polite one) from the publisher. A simple case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Hopefully these people will get their act together and, for Art Brut's sake, communicate better with each other on other issues.

Labels: Art Brut