Despite my constant screaming into the abyss about how the culture does not need fictionalized television representations of the 2016 election, it looks like we’re getting another one.
For millions of people around the globe, Facebook is the platform of choice for keeping in contact with family and friends. For artists and other creators, it’s a great way of raising a profile and reaching out more personally to fans.
With two crowd-sourced albums under her belt, UK-based full-time busker Charlotte Campbell is regularly in touch with the public through performances on the London Underground. She also uses Facebook to keep up with fans, but a few days ago her entire experience came to an abrupt halt after she was banned from the platform.
Charlotte’s crime was to post a 15-second snippet of her cover of Ed Sheeran’s song Castle On The Hill, together with a link to the full track on her YouTube channel.
“I love Ed Sheeran’s music and always cover his songs for my busking repertoire,” Charlotte informs TorrentFreak. “I find them easy to learn because I play them on repeat at home so I know all the lyrics by heart.”
However, the musician’s tribute would land her in hot water after being flagged as copyright infringement by Sheeran’s record label Atlantic/Warner. Charlotte was informed that she’d been banned from her own Facebook page for the next three days. If she did it again, she’d be banned forever, Facebook warned.
“I had no prior warning or previous offences to my knowledge. Doesn’t sound like much but for an independent musician making my living from music, Facebook is my primary promotional tool and I’m already struggling to get heard, it was quite deflating,” Charlotte adds.
Charlotte says that it’s taken her months of daily work on Facebook and YouTube to get her videos seen by a regular 10,000 people, so the three-day ban felt like a lifetime to her.
“I’m heartbroken, it’s just so frustrating. I’m a tiny artist, I’m tiny, she says.
But while Charlotte’s reach is currently pretty modest by Sheeran’s standards, something magical happened yesterday afternoon. It could raise the singer’s profile in a way she could never have predicted.
After Charlotte was banned from Facebook, some of her fans took to Ed Sheeran fansites to complain that after paying tribute to the star, Charlotte’s reward was to lose her voice online. Amazingly, word reached Sheeran himself, who dropped in on Charlotte’s Facebook page to give his support.
“Just seen your video, [the ban] definitely has nothing to do with me. I bloody love seeing people cover my songs. One of the best things I get out of this job is seeing other people find enjoyment too,” Sheeran wrote.
“I asked what’s gone on and apparently it’s a bot that Warner have that works on some weird algorithm (I have no idea what that means) but it’s just bad luck that it was your video,” he explained.
While popping by to offer support is great, Sheeran went a step further, promising to sort out the problem with those concerned.
“I’ve had a word, and i’ll get it sorted. Sorry again. Keep doing what you do, tis ace,” he said.
That Sheeran took the time to get involved in this issue came as a big but welcome surprise to Charlotte.
“I’m not sure I’ve really processed it, to be honest, I still feel like I’m dreaming!” she tells TF.
“I felt so relieved that it wasn’t Ed Sheeran who had personally rejected my cover! And it really restored my faith in humanity and in Ed himself.”
While it’s commendable that Sheeran got involved, people shouldn’t be too surprised. The artist is on record saying that copyright infringement helped shoot him to stardom, so a cover version won’t be of any concern to him.
“Illegal file sharing was what made me. It was students in England going to university, sharing my songs with each other,” he recently told CBS.
Of course, it’s disappointing that Charlotte has had to suffer at the hands of Warner’s cruel copyright bots. Ironically, though, this whole episode is now set to raise her profile, hopefully by a lot.
“I really had no idea that Ed would see my video about this so I couldn’t have dreamed that anything would come of it. Now I guess I hope that I’ll be on Ed Sheeran’s radar and next time he’s looking for a support act I’ll pop into his mind. Or at the least he’ll pop by my busking spot one day and join me for a duet!” Charlotte concludes.
If the rumors are correct, Sheeran may well be headlining the Glastonbury Festival this summer and that Pyramid Stage is awfully big for just one person. We know someone who’s probably free that day…..
A Christian mommy blogger has canceled her family's trip to Disney World, because Disney put a gay person in her bestiality and Stockholm Syndrome movie.
Conservatives are black-hearted, shitty people. #FOX
Are they not aware that 1- refrigerators are almost always supplied by a landlord, even in the lowest income houses, 2- You can get a working microwave for like $50 (cheaper if you get it used, saw one just the other day at Salvation Army for like $10), 3- Coffeemakers are literally like $15 at Walmart. The level of cluelessness upper class poor-hating Republicans have is appalling.
even if they were expensive they are BASICS. Conservatives really want poor people to perform poverty and live in squalor.
”A just-released study commissioned by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and conducted by researchers at Child Trends, an independent nonprofit research organization that specializes in child health and development, found that if the full range of contraception options available to women through Planned Parenthood health centers were used by all U.S. women ages 15 to 39 who were not seeking pregnancy, the unintended-pregnancy rate would be reduced by 64 percent, the unintended-birth rate would decrease by 63 percent, and the abortion rate would drop by a staggering 67 percent.
All of this, researchers found, would translate into $12 billion in public health care cost savings annually, reducing the public costs of unintended pregnancy by half.
The findings are all the more staggering on the heels of this weeks news that the Trump administration made an informal proposal to Planned Parenthood that their place as a provider of Medicaid and Title X — the federal family planning program — services could remain intact if the reproductive and sexual health care provider would stop providing abortion care. Further complicating the issue is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) replacement bill finally introduced by House Republicans last night, which would both roll back Medicaid expansion and also cut off all funding to Planned Parenthood for a year, a one-two punch to those who rely on Planned Parenthood as a safety-net provider for their reproductive health care and family planning.”
Many people do not know this about me, but I have been on Snap benefits. I lost a job in 2009, shortly after the Great Recession, and I had nothing. I had to wait in lines at a food bank to get two small grocery bags of canned food, some toilet paper and a bar of soap a week and I applied for and received SNAP benefits.
Let me tell you, there was no luxurious eating. Unless, you think a diet of pasta, rice, beans, canned veggies, canned tuna, peanut butter and bread IS opulent. If you think going down to the Wonder Bread factory and buying their expired products is lavish, being on SNAP is the life for you.
But even if I did buy as much expensive food as I could, who cares what anyone else eats? It is a set amount of money each month. If someone wants to blow all $126 they get a month on one meal, who am I to say no. They are the ones that are going to have to figure out how to eat for the remaining 89 meals that month.
Should we require that “Welfare” Recipients eat garbage so that you can feel better than them?
On average they get about $1.40 a meal in SNAP benefits. Basically, we are requiring them to eat garbage, but still, that seems like too much for you.
"Paul Ryan says insurance can't work if healthy must pay more to subsidize the sick. But this is exactly what happens in every employer plan."
Paul Ryan spent the morning giving a deeply dishonest presentation, with PowerPoint no less, on Trumpcare. But one part sticks out as being just mind-numbingly bad and unbelievable.
x
Paul Ryan says insurance can't work if healthy must pay more to subsidize the sick. But this is exactly what happens in every employer plan.
This is exactly what health insurance is. It's what all insurance is. You pay into a pool that covers disaster for any and everyone else who has paid into the pool. That's just how it works. It's, like, the definition of insurance!
Seven. Years. Seven fucking years Obamacare has been the one thing Republicans have been obsessing over and their big brain, their chief wonk, their intellectual leader doesn't know how health insurance works. No wonder they elected Trump president.
actually!!! dogs can somewhat understand cuteness!!!
in Moscow, homeless dogs send the cutest members of their group to beg for food. so dogs understand the basic concept of cuteness, at least. which leads me to wonder if dogs get insecure about how cute they are.
if there are any dogs reading this, i want you to know that you are adorable and i love you!!! yes, even you!!
Whether you’re at a butcher shop or the grocery store, butchers will do all kinds of things to make your meal prep easier. For example, if you don’t need all the meat in a package, kindly ask if they’ll split if up for you.
Honestly, who the fuck read Morning Glories and said to themselves, "Hey, let's make this guy watch Winter Soldier, and then have him write Captain America?
them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT
biologist:
Like literally the only reason we didn’t go extinct is because we are aggressively social creatures who community organized and helped each other when faced with disasters that drove other species over the brink.
(Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)
(The answer was yes because wolves are also aggressively social and they adopted the strange tall not-wolves just as eagerly.)
humans @ wolves: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll let us pet them?
wolves @ humans: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll pet us?
it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.
example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.
(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)
thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.
the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground - the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.
pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.
so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.
so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.
Sooo many audiobooks. And not just digital, either. I'm blessed to live in an area where the librarians have the support to promote audiobooks they way (mostly) want to.
For millions of people around the globe, Facebook is the platform of choice for keeping in contact with family and friends. For artists and other creators, it’s a great way of raising a profile and reaching out more personally to fans.
