In yet another example of its failure to get a grip on Internet reality, the music industry - Germany’s GEMA Association this time round, has somehow managed to win a court case in Hamburg - where YouTube has been held to be fully accountable for its users’ uploads - at the point of upload.

The only model that can work for Social Media (User-Contributed-Content) - is post first, then screen and remove when copyright or other issue are reported; trying to screen everything at the point of entry just is not feasible or workable in any sense. YouTube is currently one of, if not THE most important Music discovery and promotion vehicles. The number of tracks / artists that YouTube has introduced me to is innumerable - and the amount of revenues I alone have contributed to said artists in singles / albums downloads surely pays for the odd track that is posted without permission from the copyright holder. The copyright holder can of course initiate removal requests for copyrighted material - which until now has been allowed to be actioned within 24 hours. The current system is fair and just, and most importantly is one that should work for all concerned - bar ignorant and greedy music industry types.

These Germans obviously don’t see the benefit of music promotion, which is possibly why so few German acts make it into the global mainstream. As a counter example, Sweden’s relatively tiny pop industry is immensely powerful in comparison to size of population - whilst Germany is the largest music marketplace in Europe, but contributes very few Internationally successful acts.

I have never been one to deny companies or artists a means of revenue - of course artists deserve to get paid for their work - but the process that GEMA is trying to introduce will ruin things for everyone - including their members. There’s lots of very successful record labels running their own YouTube Channels - and making ’reasonable’ revenues from them - a lot of labels are partly responsible for copyright infringed material - by failing to adequately service the latent need for their new music - like in any market, where there is demand, there needs to be supply - and people will generally orientate towards a quality product at the right price point.

The music industry has long felt the need to exert ’

This project is the culmination of a year’s work (for the Graphics!), in some ways it could be said to be the culmination of Affino’s 15 years of development. We have long wanted an elegant means of showcasing the extensive Affino Features Set - and we have takled it a number of ways previously - trying to do a complete features listing (100’s of individual elements - now archived for being too large), and the much celebrates ’Periodic Table of Affino Elements’ - which has 128 listed features - yet still needs further essential additions.

This time it was going to be simpler, yet more detailed, more illustrative at the same time, and punctuated with some lovely iconographic and obviously meaningful pictures and screencaptures. We hand-picked a list of 50 key features as we saw them; alas ’Affino Messenger’ still remains to be re-developed in HTML5 (some way off), but the other 49 can now be found listed on the pictured Affino Features screen; they are as follows:

The intention is that they serve as a great reference for all of us, customers new and old - in getting a full and proper picture of Affino, and reminding us of useful features, functions and utilities that we were thinking of making use of but never quite got round to implementing on our site/s.

Last year I blogged about catching the year’s first big music festival courtesy of YouTube - who broadcast live form the 5 stages over the 3 days. I raved about the really clever interface - how they included hashtags into their live updates - and how slickly the whole thing worked, including the uninterrupted streaming broadcast itself.

This year the layout of the interface was even better - with the current and upcoming bands listed in the centre, and the updates off to the right. It was interesting to see the addition of the ’Login with Google+’ option - although I never saw a Google+ originated post - they were about 70% Twitter Updates, with 30% Facebook - I even logged on myself to post updates during the Azealia Banks and Miike Snow sets.

I did not really start watching properly until the Saturday - and thus caught a mix of highlights and full live gigs by the following artists:

• AWOLNation
• Azealia Banks
• The Big Pink
• Buzzcocks
• Childish Gambino
• Datsik
• Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg + Eminem, Fiddy, Warren G, Wiz Khalifa et al.
• Florence & The Machine
• Kaiser Chiefs
• Kasabian
• Miike Snow
• Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
• Radiohead
• Santigold
• SBTRKT
• Swedish House Mafia

I would have loved to have seen, but missed these:

• Amon Tobin
• araabMUZIK
• Borgore
• Dada Life
• DJ Shadow
• Feed Me
• Flying Lotus
• Frank Ocean
• Girl Talk
• Justice
• Kaskade
• M83
• Noisia
• SebastiAn
• The Weeknd

I always compare YouTube’s coverage of this with the BBC’s coverage of its main music festivals. I think the actual live streaming and the social experience is better by YouTube, but overall the BBC still leads - as they provide so much better supporting materials - and actually post up much more of the video highlights - only 76 Videos are listed on YouTube’s Coachella Page - and these are individual tracks, whilst for the BBC there is normally an extended highlights (circa 30 mins.) plus a couple of individual great moments from nearly all the featured performers - a number of the videos on Coachella Live are not even the best moments from those sets.

On my somewhat dodgy Talk Talk connection, I was astounded to get a totally seamless experience over the whole event - did not drop out once - and switching between the 3 live feed options was butter smooth!

As I’ve said before, I&