Thirty Days Hath September . . .

. . .  and I needed nearly all of them to coax autumn into my life. It finally came in on Monday, a windy, gray, chilly day, as I ran errands to the sound of Van Morrison’s Back on Top. It really is the best autumn album of all, and I should have known it would bring the season in.

If the album were by anybody else, I’d probably share a track here. But Morrison wants you to buy the record in order to hear it. That’s not a unreasonable request, but the paradigm for getting people to buy has changed in recent years. Internet publicity is a major component of promotion today—but Morrison didn’t get the memo. Early in 2008, he dispatched an outfit called Web Sheriff to Internet precincts near and far with orders to remove almost everything with his name on it—not merely posted tracks, but lyrics, video, and still pictures. Web Sheriff even went after sites that linked to such things without having posted them directly. And they’ve been on the case ever since. (I heard from them once, out here in this relatively quiet corner of the web, not with an official cease-and-desist, but with a “we appreciate your interest in Van Morrison” post that was undoubtedly intended to show that they were keeping an eye on me.)

So I was pleased to note last night that Van has started up an official YouTube channel with authorized video postings. Except every video includes a giant watermark that obscures the entire viewing window—which makes me wonder just what the hell’s the point.

As much as I love Van Morrison’s music, his attitude toward the Internet is silly, and ultimately bad for his career. Here’s why: There are lots of us on the Internet who respect and appreciate Morrison’s artistry, and whose interest in his music poses absolutely no financial threat to him—yet he treats us like we were breaking into his house to steal the flatware. His decision to shut down the fan site run by Michael Hayward at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver last year was as counterproductive a thing as I’ve ever witnessed—Hayward’s site was scholarly, he didn’t make a dime from it, and the articles and reviews on the site likely did more to promote Morrison’s back catalog than Morrison has done himself. Morrison should have been honored that Hayward was fan enough to create such a site without an economic incentive to do so. Instead, he had the place torched.

Record labels and recording artists who don’t get the new way of doing business in the digital age are going to find themselves left out of it. By assuming everyone on the Internet is a pirate, Morrison has proven he doesn’t get it. (Hell, the Beatles and EMI didn’t go after everybody who posted tracks from the recent remasters, and they’ve got more to lose than Morrison does.) It’s a basic tenet of business that you’ve got to spend some money to make some money, and in the digital era, you’ve got to give away some music to sell some music—just like you had to get it played on the radio back in the day. This idiotic watermarking of his videos is only the latest manifestation of Van Morrison’s unwillingness to understand how things work now.

So if you’d like to hear a live performance of “When the Leaves Come Falling Down,” a track from Back on Top which might be the single most gorgeous thing the man’s done in his brilliant 40-year career, click here, but don’t bother trying to watch. He doesn’t really want you to anyhow.