It has been long while a since I’ve done a Monday Miscellany but it’s time to bring it back!
A few things caught my eye in the last week that I wanted to share quickly:
Credit: Netflix
First, Netflix has ordered an Elvis spy cartoon called Agent King. Elvis’ widow Priscilla Presley is a co-creator, which somehow simultaneously makes it more and less weird. In the end, I love Elvis and I love spies so I will definitely be checking it out once it comes to fruition. I hope that the animation style matches the promo pic!
Credit: C-SPAN
While this occurred a few weeks ago, it just landed on my radar last week. Kevin Erickson of the Future of Music Coalition went before Congress to discuss the Music Modernization Act…with puppets! I applaud him for trying to simplify what must be one of the most labyrinthine areas of intellectual property. If you are unaware of how songwriters and recording artists earn their money, in sum it is a brutal system that has been ad-hoc’d together as new technologies came on board. It leaves the artists with actual pennies instead of receiving real value for their work. Oh, and it forces them to rely on others to calculate and collect most of their money for them. This of course works great since people in the music business are notoriously upright and moral. 😐 But that is a post for another day. Right now, check out the video (if you want to see the whole thing, here it is):
.@future_of_music Director on Music Licensing: "Last year, as I was running around the hill working on the Music Modernization Act, I had enough staffers say: 'This is so complicated; can you explain it to me like I'm five?' So, I got some puppets…"#MusicMoguls pic.twitter.com/DhrmN6urR7
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 29, 2019
Need more on the Music Modernization Act? Try here and here. Yep. Still confusing.