TimR

My understanding is he was called out about it a long time ago. Showed no signs of reining in, and just doubled down.

I'm 56, I don't own a CD player. I do buy T-shirts if they look good and I can wear it in the high street or pub without looking odd, stand out or edgy. There might be mileage in producing CD like cardboard inserts with a personal userID and link to a download area containing special editions and bonus tracks not available on Spotify. People can then visit the area, sign in with their userID. Then either add that to their Spotify app as a download or burn to a CD. However, the point of having free sharable music, is that your audience grows exponentially through word of mouth and then people come to your gigs, buy t-shirts and tickets. Important now that hardly anyone listens to the Charts...

It used to be very noticeable when playing in pits, and when recording. I don't think I've ever noticed it in pub bands. Sometimes you can become sensitised to things, once you hear them, you can never unhear them...

If only there were some kind of age verification system in place... The whole problem with the Internet, is you cannot identify the person you are communicating with. Even the banks who have tons of fraud prevention measures in place, cannot be 100% sure.

It's very easy to 'police'. Someone complains, they investigate. If your moderators have been doing their job, you won't have an issue in the first place. If something does slip past the moderators, the very fact you have active moderators with policies in place protects you and any children. No one is going to be patrolling the Internet looking for problems in the off chance they'll find them.

Technically its fraud if people are paying you money to do it. He's not just "pretending to play guitar". But, I was just commenting on the fact that proceeds are often recovered.

Often it will be the cost and likelihood of recovery vs the amount recovered. No one is going to pay thousands of pounds to recover a few YouTube royalties.

It's just jumping on the latest trend. Beato wasn't going to do anything until loads of people hassled him. A lot of the YouTubers had interviewed him and been taken in by him, so guess they do have a personal axe to grind.

The procedes of crime are quite often (if not usually) confiscated.

I think he's miming to unknown artists work and passing it off as his own. That's not the same as playing cover versions in a pub, where the original artist is known and is probably getting performing rights payments. Nor is it the same as Mini Vanilli, miming to a bunch of recordings someone else wrote and played, and was paid for knowing that would happen. Not to mention countless musicians who were sneaked in the back door while the band were having a break, to ghost play on recordings, and not even the band realised it wasn't them on the record and probably still don't know to this day.

You have an extra finger on your right hand as well!

Or Jam Evening. Too early for me I'm afraid but would have been good to pop along.

Not in a pub. Trying to get everything as loud as a drummer who is trying to fill the pub will always lead to feedback and the rest of the band not being able to balance their sound and/or hear each other. Get the vocal mic level right first. That's just a case of ringing it out and finding the feedback point.

Sounds like your whole band are fairly new to this, or haven't been playing long together. At rehearsals you should be playing at an appropriate volume and getting used to how the balanced band should sound. Too many rehearsals and consequently gigs descend into loudness wars. If you can't get it right in rehearsals you'll never get it right at gigs. The line check at the gig should be basically vocals to get the right volume and make sure you're not getting feedback on the stage area. Each musician should then do a line check to make sure they're getting signal at an appropriate level. Then fine tune during the first song. Remember that someone sitting in the guitarists 'amp set to kill' zone will always think the guitar is too loud, while the guitarist standing next to the amp with his speaker blasting past his kneecaps is always going to think he's too quiet.