If you are a musician or a composer, you probably have a basic understanding of how one makes money in your profession. However, as one very successful professional musician once said, “The times they are a-changing.” The good news is that music revenue is rising again in the age of... Read more
I make my living as a composer and lyricist, working in collaboration with playwrights to make new musicals for the theater. I have a lot to say about sheet music, and I’ll get to that, but I’d like to start by drawing your attention to World Intellectual Property Day.... Read more
In 1973, fresh out of film school, I wrote and directed the dramatic short No Lies, an important film because of its open, and unfettered, discussion of sexual violence against women. Today, No Lies is included in the National Registry and in the curriculum for film theory, women’s studies, and anthropology... Read more
Last month, CreativeFuture asked you, our followers, what you thought about platform responsibility. Little did we know that, in the meantime, the issue would start taking over the front pages of our newspapers and websites! In a nutshell, the issue is whether Google, Facebook, and their Silicon Valley peers should... Read more
The red carpet, with its history of fame, success, and glamour, carries a royal air wherever it appears. Just walking on it can create a sense of confidence – as evidenced by a joke on NBC’s Parks and Recreation that finds government staffer Tom Haverford showing off a pair of... Read more
Dear Mr. Cerf, You have many admirers for your pioneering work in the launch of the internet, and we count ourselves among them. You earned your unofficial sobriquet, the “Father of the Internet,” by envisioning a utopic network on which data and research could be shared freely around the world... Read more
In the mid-to-late ‘90s, the internet was just beginning to enter American homes with the promise of bringing us closer together. This was a world where people read their email – if they even had it – through America Online, connected with strangers in chat rooms, used bygone search engines... Read more
Even before your favorite films hit theatres, many were first screened at film festivals. For the past 85 years, festivals have been vital to the global film industry and popular culture at large. They have opened doors for generations of emerging artists, fulfilled dreams, heralded shifts in the kinds of... Read more
We have a long and frustrating history on piracy and other copyright matters with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). We’ve said it before – EFF sometimes does good work. That’s what makes their predictable intransigence about piracy so incredibly frustrating and tiresome. Recently, EFF weighed in against efforts by the... Read more
[The] latest piracy threat [is] even more worrisome to the music industry: stream ripping. – Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2016 Recently, Taylor Swift debuted her latest single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” online to great viral fanfare – quickly smashing records in its wake. On YouTube, the song’s... Read more