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A new website has sprung up, protesting EMI’s

cease-and-desist order issued to DJ Danger Mouse and his Grey Album.

The music industry giant demanded that the DJ

stop selling copies of the album, which was a clever mixture of Jay-Z’s Black

Album and The Beatles White Album.

www.greytuesday.org

is urging fans to stand up and protest the music industry’s "copyright

cartel" and is seeking to enlist websites to post the entire Grey Album

for download on February 24, to protest EMI’s attempt to ban the album.

Organized by Downhill Battle, a "music activism

project," the website and the organizers have no affiliation with Danger

Mouse, who complied with EMI’s cease-and-desist order.

"We think that the right to sample and musicians

to make their music and the people’s right to hear it is really important to

our musical culture," Downhill Battle’s founder Nicholas Reville told AllHip-Hop.com.

"We want to stand up for that and we don’t want corporate lawyers pushing

us around."

Reville also said that the major label’s vast

power and influence is one of the reasons Hip-Hop producers don’t sample music

as much as they did in the past.

"Speaking directly to Hip-Hop sampling is

something that has been around since the beginning. In terms of mainstream Hip-Hop,

you heard more sampling in the 1980′s because it was before the crackdown came.

Now the Hip-Hop you hear on the radio like songs produced by The Neptunes or

Timbaland use a lot less samples. The copyright regime makes it impossible for

even the wealthiest producers to do a lot of sampling. That means that this

group of five corporations are just shaping music in a certain way. Their saying

you can’t make this kind of music, you have to make this. No genre is more effected

by this copyright cartel than Hip-Hop People assume producers moved away from

that but they can’t afford it due to the labels."

Reville said he wasn’t worried that his brand

of Internet civil disobedience would bring serious repercussions, adding "if

they want to come after us, they are going to make it more of an issue. It will

get bigger and prove our point."

Downhill Battle also created the innovative TuneRecycler,

aimed at taking the unused winning codes from Pepsi’s campaign with Itunes,

in which 100 million songs are given away under Pepsi caps.

According to USA Today, Pepsi expects that only

10-20% of those caps will be redeemed, meaning an estimated 80-90 million caps

will end up in the garbage.

TuneRecycler allows unused winning caps to be

redeemed at the website. The winnings are then given to the "few great

independent labels in the iTunes store that give their musicians up to 40-50

cents, right from the first sale."

The company is seeking to avoid paying any of

the major labels, saying that most of the artists included in the promotion

are still in the process of recouping huge amounts of money and that they will

in fact, rarely benefit from the Itunes/Pepsi collaboration.

"We look for the labels that are on Itunes

that have a good reputation for treating artists fairly. The TuneRecycler is

more of a symbolic gesture. We want people to think about were the money comes

from and where it goes. We want to get more support for the independent musician

and less support for the major label monopoly."