Links for February 19, 2016

Warner Music Pays $14 Million to End 'Happy Birthday' Copyright Lawsuit

“The judicial determination that ‘Happy Birthday’ is in the public domain also has substantial value,” states the memorandum in support of the settlement.... “After the Settlement is approved, that restraint will be removed and the Song will be performed and used far more often than it has been in the past. While there is no way to make a reliable estimate of the increase that will result, there can be no dispute that the increase will be substantial.”


Every Recording of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie 1″ Played at the Same Time

What he’s done is taken multiple renditions of the piece and layered them atop one another. There’s a joke about being hit by either a ton of bricks or a ton of pillows, and how either way it’s a ton — at some point weight trumps texture. Landis’ experiment reveals that amassed pillowy music doesn’t gather in density so much as exaggerate its inherent properties: a cloud becomes the sky.

How Erik Satie Foresaw Brendan Landis’ Excavation of His “Gymnopedie No. 1”

Landis, to the contrary, can point to the ambient legacy of “Gymnopedie 1,” to the egoless quality of Satie’s famous “Musique d’Ameublement,” and especially to the composer’s “Vexations,” in which a single musical phrase is repeated 840 times. Landis’ technologically enabled reworking of Satie might take “Vexations” as its strongest precedent: Satie played one thing many times to hear the differences; Landis played many versions of one thing at the same time to hear the differences.


Interactive visualization of the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart from 1989-2015.