One of the parts of online fandom that’s sometimes hard for stars to deal with is that sometimes your fans don’t love all your decisions. That’s apparently been the case with Usher fans who, as I understand it, aren’t thrilled with his choice of fiancée. Ok. Whatever. But here’s where it gets interesting.

There’s a fansite called UsherForever. Just stop and think about that title for a second. UsherForever. Could be a group for people who had been ushers at some theatre sometime? “Usher” is not just a name, it’s a word. But anyway. So this fan site’s been going strong for a while, its clearly a slick labor of love by an Usher fan. But when she dared criticize, Usher and the lawyers moved in:

Imagine if someone was happy to work, without reward, building a massive shrine to you and your work. You might be happy to think of all this promotion going on, not costing you a cent.But what if that person then disagreed with you - perhaps pointing out that you were making a bit of a fool of yourself?

It would probably be wise to take advice like that as well-meaning, even if you chose to ignore it.

Not so Usher: After fansite Usherforever.com called his open letter to bloggers “petty”, Usher then got pettier, sending a legal demand that the site’s URL be transfered over to his record label.

Even guilty-pleasure site TMZ.com took a break from Lindsey, Britney, and Paris to write a post headlined “Usher F**ks With The Wrong Fan” :

Erika Jackson, webmaster of usherforever.com, tells TMZ that she’s been hit with a full-scale legal blitz from a tag-team of both Usher’s personal lawyer and his label’s lawyers, and claims that the trouble started earlier this year when she refused to turn her site — the self-proclaimed “biggest Usher site” on the Internet — into a sanitized official site. (The legal threats were first reported by the New York Daily News.)

The comments on TMZ are well worth a quick browse and it’s not pretty for Usher. Some excerpts:

Usher is going to lose his fan base if he doesn’t stop this foolishness. So what if people don’t like your fiance!!! The sun’s not going to stop rising and shining because people don’t like Tameka; your world isn’t going to come to an end!!! Geez!!!

He’s going to lose many of his fans over this. What he is doing is career suicide.

…ha ha! usher’s an idiot! nice going, mr. invincible! way to bite the hand that’s feeding you!. know what? there are already too many fish in the pond, too many ushers waiting in line to take your job. bye bye!…

Now there are a few who say that Jackson is using his name to make money (she has ads on the site) and he’s got the legal right to the domain, but I’m looking forward to seeing this play out in court, if it ever really gets there. She is providing something he’s not — a place for his fans to congregate. His music may be copyrighted, but I don’t think that being his fan is something he can copyright. (I’m curious if any lawyers reading think there’s a shred of legal turf for him to stand on, my guess is NO).

In either case, if you want a sanitized site, make your own. Fans get to say what fans want to say. Ha ha.

Musicians and fans are so far ahead of the labels on “piracy” and DRM that increasingly one wonders whether ultimately either will have much use for labels at all. The Register has a short story up about Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, who argues that the labels should have known they’d lost the battle in 1997:

“If you turn back the clock when all this stuff was still on the horizon, the key realisation to have made was that we had lost the war already,” Rowntree told OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly technology law podcast. “That’s what I was going round telling everybody 10 years ago, saying ‘the horse has bolted, there’s no way of undoing what has been done already, the only thing you can do is to try and turn your business around so that you turn this into a plus rather than a minus’.”

Rowntree advises digital rights advocacy group the Open Rights Group and has been a vocal opponent of the mainstream record industry’s policies of chasing individual file sharers. When told that the last Blur album was leaked on to the internet he reportedly said “I’d rather it gushed”.

Rowntree said that the major labels’ policies of putting digital rights management (DRM) technology on music CDs to attempt to stop them being copied and shared backfired spectacularly.

“I’d rather it gushed.” I love it! He’s got some other points characterizing the people who “pirate” that are worth reading. The RIAA and its cohorts can sue until hiring lawyers eats every bit of gross income they’ve got and people are still going to rip and exchange music. Some things can’t go backwards.

I am not sure I like this whole idea gaining increasing currency that the new business model for music has to be advertising. I’m not clear on where these ads are supposed to be, but I’m pretty sure I’d rather pay money than have my music packaged with ads.

I’d like to see a model where somehow the fans channeled money right to the musicians, who could pay labels for any services they needed. Reverse the hierarchy so the labels work for the bands instead of the bands being horses in the label’s stables.

File under unintended consequences:

As you may have heard, the musician Akon apparently gyrated a little too much with a girl a little too young, resulting in Verizon pulling sponsorship of the Gwen Stefani tour he’s opening. Bad news for online fans:

One effect of the move was the cancellation of a contest.

One fan of Ms. Stefani, April Van Zandt, of Landers, Calif., said she and several friends she had met online had labored on a home-made Gwen Stefani music video for a Verizon-backed contest that was withdrawn because of the company’s move. Ms. Van Zandt, 27, said she and her friends — fans whom she has become close to but never met — were hoping to win the contest, in which the prize was a trip to California, so they could meet for the first time. “I would think they would lose some business over this, not just me,” said Ms. Van Zandt, who added that she has a Verizon phone. “People are very upset.”

No deep insights on that one except that the pullout seems a little excessive.

Please forgive light if any posting these next few days as my computer undergoes intensive therapy in hopes it will relearn how to do things like start up. Three words you never want to hear: fatal hardware error. Lesson for us all: BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! (Boy am I glad that I do!) Another lesson learned: write your passwords down somewhere. My computer remembers all of mine so I don’t have to and it’s been very frustrating trying to retrieve them from deep memory (fatal access error), root directories, scraps of paper here and there, etc.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released yet another terrific report setting the blogosphere afire. This one shows just how many American adults are just not that into the internet:

According to this, there are about 23% of American adults who are really digging what the net offers them, 8% using it who are getting tired of it, 20% who use either mobile media a lot but not the net or who use the net but resent it, and then you’ve got almost half the population who’s curious but inexperienced, or just don’t give a hoot about the net.

There are countless ways to spin this, but I think the message in terms of reaching one’s audience is pretty clear: When you rely on the internet, and only on the internet, to get your message out, you are automatically eliminating most of the audience. Now people certainly ought to keep coming up with new ways to use the net to reach and coordinate fans (including fans with one another), but as we swoon over each and every clever new web-based campaign for this and that, let us not forget that unless that campaign also has some connections to things that do not happen on the internet, they’re looking at an audience smaller than they should be. The net is great, but so are other kinds of communication.

Does the internet compete with “real life”? This has been one of the (most annoying and) most repeated concerns for about twenty years now, and the answer still seems to be “no.” Digital media are changing our patterns of behavior in important ways, but they are not leaving a decimated trail of old ways in their wake. Some activities we used to do in old ways (watching TV?) may get replaced with an online version (YouTube?), but other things — like having face-to-face conversations and phone calls, hanging out with friends, and taking advantage of community resources like museums and concerts — seem to be either unaffected or slightly increased by online versions of the same.

Now it seems we can add listening to digital radio to the list of online activities that don’t threaten their offline counterparts. According to a study reported in the New York Times:

As a group, fans of digital radio do not listen to traditional radio less than everyone else. In fact, they listen to slightly more, according to a study recently released by Arbitron and Edison Media Research.

The study was conducted through random telephone interviews with 1,925 Arbitron diary keepers, and it lumped together satellite subscribers, recent Internet-radio listeners and anyone who had ever downloaded a podcast.

The data suggest that, generally speaking, fans of digital radio are seeking to supplement, not replace, traditional radio. “Heavy users of digital media don’t think, ‘If I’m doing this more, I’m doing the other thing less,’ ” said Bill Rose, an executive with Arbitron.

This is such a neat parallel to the findings regarding interpersonal communication. And music downloading.

The message I take from this is: Digital radio is traditional radio’s FRIEND, not its enemy. Hurt one, and you may damage the other. Look to work the synergy instead of shutting down the new. Is it too much to hope that this could inform the future of the digital radio licensing fees debacle that seems poised to pull the rug out from under Pandora and every other online radio broadcasting in the U.S.?