“Beatles tribute returns to Chickasha in January” plus 1

Beatles tribute returns to Chickasha in January

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 07:37 AM PST

CHICKASHA — It's been 40 years since the breakup of the Beatles, but the group's popularity shows no signs of diminishing.

Whether it's conquering the video world with the popular Beatles Rock Band game, or fans now being able to download Beatle songs on iTunes, the Fab Four seems to stay in the spotlight.

Earlier this month, Beatles fans observed the 30th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, who along with Paul McCartney, helped write most of the bands songs.

So with that in mind, local concert promoter Bruce McGrew has decided to bring the nations' top Beatles tribute show back to Chickasha. Liverpool Legends, billed as "The Ultimate Beatles Experience" is an award-winning show that is based in Branson, Mo.

The group was founded by Louise Harrison, sister of the late Beatles member George Harrison.

"It's just an amazing show," said McGrew. "We've had a lot of people asking if it would be coming back." more time?"

The concert in Chickasha is set for 7 p.m. Jan. 31 at the High School Activity Center auditorium. Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. Tuesday. All seats are reserved and ticket are $20 each, with no service charges or handling fees.

Those wanting tickets can make reservations by phone (no credit card needed) by calling OK Music Show at 243-7252.

Liverpool Legends have twice been voted Best Show in Branson. The concert begins with the band performing as the early Beatles, and takes the audience through the various stages of the band's career, including the Sgt. Pepper's era and the Abbey Road days, complete with different costumes, instruments, even hair styles to reflect what the band was doing at the time. All of the music and singing is performed live.

You can find out more about the group at HYPERLINK "http://www.LiverpoolLegends.com" www.LiverpoolLegends.com

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Before iTunes, who sold The Beatles online? This guy

Posted: 14 Dec 2010 11:10 AM PST

The Beatles famously kept their music off digital download services until coming to iTunes only weeks ago—but that didn't prevent numerous creative attempts to offer the valuable songs. Norway's state broadcaster even released the music in podcasts in early 2009 before having its experiment shut down over licensing issues.

But the strangest, ballsiest attempt at selling The Beatles online came from Hank Risan, the head of a company called BlueBeat. In late 2009, BlueBeat began offering The Beatles (and many other recordings) for sale at a mere quarter per track, all of which Risan claimed was perfectly legal. Indeed, he claimed that the tracks BlueBeat sold weren't the original Beatles tracks at all, but Risan's own creations, made through "psycho-acoustic simulation." No one could quite figure out what this meant—but it sounded an awful lot like running the original recordings through some sort of filtering software and claiming that a new "work" had been created.

This was always a dubious legal theory, and a federal judge has finally shut it down for good. What makes the story even odder? Risan was a pro-DRM crusader who has said he wanted to save music from the pirates.

"Obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language"

BlueBeat was sued almost immediately after offering its tracks for sale, and one of the key issues in the case over the last year has been how exactly Risan created his "psycho-acoustic simulations." Here's his own extended description of the process. Parse it as you will (and if you can):

To create "pure sound" simulations, I purchased CDs of sound recordings over the counter. I made one ephemeral copy of each recording, as authorized by section 112, destroying same shortly after the simulations were created. The original sounds were partitioned into segments for observation. These segments were analyzed by artistic operators who, employing principles of psychoacoustics and advanced harmonic analysis, synthesized an independent parametric model of the sounds. A firewall was utilized to preserve independence between the sounds of the model and those of the original recording. I destroyed the ephemeral recording. Positing assumptions as to the location of the microphone and spacial relationship to the voice and instruments involved in a given recorded performance, the artistic operator then generated and fixed new sounds by selecting new capture points and new source points in a new virtual three dimensional computer-stage environment. The simulation, thus created, contained new and original spherical source point waves…

When propagated to the human ear and processed by the brain, the new sounds contain some parameters, such as loudness and rhythm, that may be perceived to resemble those in the original recordings, while others, like pitch, timbre and space may be perceived as markedly different. During the process of creating the simulations, all five artistic parameters of sound are adjusted by the human operator. The adjustment is not a mechanical process, but a subjective, interpretative one. The result is an original sound recording that reflects the artistic opinion of the operator: A live, original performance within a specially created virtual 3-D staging environment…

Between 2002 and 2003, I created and subsequently destroyed more 70,000 psychoacoustic simulations, because they did not meet my artistic expectations of what a live musical performance should sound like.

In Risanworld, this process created a "new" recording, much like a cover band brought into a studio to produce a cheap Muzak-style knockoff of a pop song. Risan claimed to have the licenses to cover this activity, and to have paid all the proper royalties. In fact, Risan actually tried to take out his own copyrights on the subsequent recording.

Beatles: no longer for sale

Capitol Records, which sued BlueBeat, spent its court filings engaged in a search for le mot juste to describe the sheer terribleness of what Risan had done.

"Defendants are engaged in music piracy of the most blatant and harmful kind," said the complaint. "Perhaps the most shocking aspect of Defendants' conduct is the willful and overtly defiant manner in which they are acting… Indeed, in a brazen display of contempt for Plaintiffs, Defendants are offering for immediate download, at the price of 25 cents per track (or approximately $2.50 to $4.00 per album) the entirety of the newly-released Beatles 'remasters' box set. Not only was this box set released just last month by Plaintiff Capitol Records, and only on compact disc… but it is well-known throughout the music and business community that the Beatles catalog has never been released for digital download."

As for the "psycho-acoustic" stuff, Capitol recording and mixing experts weighed in with depositions, assuring the judge that although the resulting recordings might differ on the bit-by-bit level from the originals, they were mere manipulations of the original recordings, not a new performance.

The judge agreed last week, issuing summary judgment against BlueBeat. "Risan's obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling,' i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation." It certainly didn't help Risan's case that BlueBeat tried to claim that its recordings were new but were also performed by the original artists. The Beatles' albums, for instance, were listed as recorded by "The Beatles" and the proper record company and CD release dates were displayed on the site.

Risan has also been CEO of a company called Media Rights Technologies (MRT). Back in 2007, MRT sent letters to Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Real, demanding that they adopt an MRT DRM scheme that could allegedly foil streamripping. If the companies didn't comply, MRT said it might sue them under a patently bizarre interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The fact that Risan created and sold DRM was not lost on Capitol Records in the BlueBeat case. "Ironically, while publicly touting their purported commitment to anti-piracy and legal music distribution," said Capitol, "Defendants are themselves engaged in one of the largest piracy operations on the Internet."

The Beatles

Tuesday, December 21, 2010