In Billboard ($), the magazine’s “With the Brand” columnist, Josh Rabinowitz, says the time has come to award a Grammy for best song and use of music in a commercial. His five arguments:

1. With a flailing record industry in full effect, many of the significant recording “players” of the academy world have migrated to the branding music world. Thus, in effect, the Grammys can continue to support their industry.
2. With the dissolution of meaningful radio, advertisements—whether on TV, in cinema or on the Web—are bridging music from artists big and small, known and not, to the masses. Feist’s breakout via an Apple commercial is a most relevant, current example of this. But how many more can you name without really thinking?
3. Some of the biggest artists are creating music specifically for ads, in partnership with brands, and they are just beginning to be nominated for Grammys. Nas, KRS-One and Kanye West, along with producer Rick Rubin, earned a nod for the Nike ad track “Better Than I’ve Ever Been.” And the Lifehouse song “From Where You Are,” created specifically for an Allstate ad, debuted at No. 61 on the Billboard Hot 100 last fall.
4. The brands, like Wal-Mart, Target and Apple, are becoming key distributors of recorded music in the States.
5. As younger people embrace mobile and digital technology as their sole means of gathering information, communicating and accessing their entertainment, it’ll be the music from ads and brands that blare and/or purr through their headphones. Why not stay in tune with the future consumers of music?

This is a long-overdue proposal. My only complaint is that it is too timid. We can look forward to the day when Head On commercials get nominated for Best Picture—and those Ketel One magazine ads make the Booker Prize shortlist.

The New York Post has an unexpectedly substantive story about the funds from the settlements the majors made with the various file-sharing networks some years back. If you recall, Napster alone shelled out more than $250 million to three of the four major labels. (Sony/BMG by that time had corporate connections to the service.)

None of this had yet been disbursed to the artists. (They are the ones the record companies are fighting for, right?)

A contingent of prominent artist managers claims that little to none of that money has trickled down to their clients. They are now considering legal action.

“Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for,” said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others.

“Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don’t get paid soon.”

The story talks to an unnamed company source who said that after legal fees there wasn’t much left. The writer also quotes Irving Azoff, who says that some labels are trying to assess the money against unrecouped advances.

Ars Technica notes the year anniversary of the RIAA’s war on college students with a chat with RIAA prez Cary Sherman.

As Billboard noted in a column I mentioned last week, CD sales are down another nearly 20 percent for January from last year. The effect the RIAA’s campaign against its customers is having can only be described a truly excellent. Sherman is now in the precise position of a captain of a sinking ship directing his crew to take pot shots at the rats leaving it.

But Ars is polite.

Here’s how the numbers look after a year. The RIAA has sent out 5,404 letters in 13 “waves” to over 160 colleges and universities. Of the 5,003 settlement letters sent prior to the batch of 401 that went out last week, “more than” 2,300 of those have resulted in the targeted students settling with the RIAA. 2,465 students have been hit with lawsuits, and all of those are moving through the legal system at different rates. At $3,000 per settlement, over 2,300 settlements translates into at least $6.9 million.

There are other numbers you can generate from those figures. For instance, let’s estimate, I don’t know, $5,000 in RIAA legal fees for each of the cases it pursues. Multiply that by the roughly 2500 cases, and you have more than $10 million. Even if the group’s legal fees are half that, it’s still a wash financially, before you take into account the millions more its silly media campaign costs. And, as the continuing decline in sales indicates, it’s obvious the group’s war is having no effect.

You want to call the effort quixotic, but Don Quixote wasn’t sadistic, vengeful and grim.

The interview is mostly filled with Sherman’s spinning whatever questions Ars asks. Like this:

“Our basic survey data is that the majority of consumers don’t have a problem with the lawsuits,”   [Sherman said]. “You would never know that from reading blogs and websites, [but] when you go out to the general public, our favorables/unfavorables haven’t changed at all.”

But of course, among not the general public but music fans, one suspects the group’s unfavorables have changed. (On the other hand, it’s possible they couldn’t go any lower!) There are two interesting discussions. One is when Sherman contends that the leveling off of activity on the music networks is a result of the RIAA suits. But a rep from Big Champaign, which monitors such activity, says it’s simply a case of market saturation.

The other is when Sherman is asked why Harvard is absent from the list of schools the RIAA has targeted. Ars speculates that it’s due to the industry’s being afraid of teeing off some of the legal talent at Harvard. That seems a little thin; a lot of colleges and universities have serious law schools, right?

As R. Kelly awaits trial in Chicago on child porn charges, a new sideshow on the R&B star’s personal life has opened up. It turns out he was boffing his publicist’s daughter.

You’re probably wondering how old the daughter was; fortunately, she’s 21, which is pretty old for Kelly, who is 41 and has been involved in at least three child-sex or child-pornography investigations.

The woman, Maxine Daniels, is the daughter of Regina Daniels, until recently a longtime publicist for Kelly, and George Daniels, who is described by the Chicago Sun-Times as a “noted music retailer” in Chicago. George Daniels has accused Kelly of having an inappropriate relationship with his daughter.

After Regina Daniels’ departure, Kelly’s camp released a statement, saying,

It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage expressed by George and Regina Daniels over R. Kelly’s relationship with Mr. Daniels’ adult daughter, Maxine. The fact is that they had no problem with the relationship—indeed, they encouraged it—while Ms. Daniels was on Mr. Kelly’s payroll.

The statement continues:

It was Regina Daniels, then working as a publicist for Mr. Kelly, who persuaded him to attend her stepdaughter’s 21st birthday party. And it was Regina Daniels who shortly thereafter gave her stepdaughter Mr. Kelly’s private phone number, with the admonition: ‘Don’t tell your father.’ It was only after Ms. Daniels resigned her position to avoid being fired for incompetence that her stepdaughter’s relationship suddenly became an issue for her and her husband.

There matters stood, until the daughter, Maxine Daniels, came out last week to say what really happened. Her version, given to a Chicago Sun-Times reporter, is this:

I take full responsibility for my actions. My stepmother and father didn’t know about my relationship with the singer because I knew and he knew that they wouldn’t approve … so I tried to keep it a secret, but when my stepmother found out about our relationship, she resigned because she felt that Rob had ‘crossed the line’ by dating a girl that he has known since she was 7 years old.

The “crossed the line” phrase comes from a statement from Regina Daniels when she left Kelly’s employ: “There are some lines you don’t cross.”

Let’s see: Over the 14 years she worked for him, R. Kelly married a fifteen-year-old, lied about it, and then was forced to have the marriage annulled; had a video tape become public showing him performing a variety of sex acts on a girl—including urinating on her—police say was in her early teens at the time; and had a digital camera surface containing what police said were photos of him having sex with another underage girl. (Kelly goes on trial on charges stemming from the videotape in May; charges from the digital camera were dropped after a judge in Florida disallowed the search of the house that produced the camera. )

Those are the documented charges against Kelly. Even by the elastic moral rules of the music business, the lines that Regina Daniels thinks you can cross seem pretty out there.

(By the way, how can you assess the competence of a publicist who has a client like that to work with? The amazing thing about Kelly is that he has been able to continue his career in the five full years since the videotape came to light, enabled not just by a seemingly incompetent court in Chicago but also the radio stations that continue to play his music, the promoters who book his concerts, the other artists who record with him, and the fans who buy his tickets. Isn’t it weird that he’s allowed to tour, where young girls pay money to be in the same room with him? )