In a memo issued this afternoon, MTV Networks performed a near-180, relenting to complaints from freelancers who were told last week their benefits would be cut. "We've implemented a process for evaluating freelance and temporary employee positions for possible conversion to staff positions," reads the announcement from JoAnne Griffith, MTVN's executive vice president for HR. "This process is currently underway." Freelancers will now have the choice to continue with their current health plan—including dental!—or sign on to MTV's Aetna plan. Either way, they won't have to make the decision until February of next year, nearly three months after the original deadline set by the company last week. Full memo after the jump.

Video guy Nick McGlynn hung out this afternoon with the outraged Viacom contractors. (Freelancers? Permalancers? Slave labor?) Actual employees in the eyes of the law, probably, considering how one staffer described her freelance staff. "They're here everyday, these guys comes in Monday to Friday, Saturday, Sunday, weekends, holidays, everything, to work and make this channel run," she told us. Steady paychecks render such commitment completely obsolete—most fully employed people we know support a wide-ranging interpretation of the conventional five-day-workweek. Best slogan heard at the (first!) Viacom Networks Walkout Of 2007: "No one sucks dick for free." (Also great: "No pills, no 'Hills.'" Ha!) Damn straight—we don't even tongue-kiss for anything less than one employer-sponsored retirement plan and a reasonable deductible.

Last night, video guy Richard Blakeley and I headed down to the Hammerstein Ballroom to ask Viacom freelancers how they were, you know, feeling about getting Scrooged just in time for the holidays. Are they all revved up for the planned strike on Monday? "What strike?" said one guy. We're also thinking about adopting the kid who told us that he's currently unattached but if "he or she were, he would be at home." Oh honey, it really is probably time to give up the ghost on that "she" pronoun. Adorable. Inside, a huge glass snow globe was set up on stage; hired actors had a protracted "snowball" fight in it all night. Excessively pricey street theater is an oxymoron, we think. (Particularly indoors!) Very few senior managers were in attendance, though CEO Judy McGrath showed up briefly. Brave. Bonus! More party pix after the jump.

The MTVN freelancers' petition we'd found its way to us just now and these downtrodden drudges have a plan! It includes subterfuge and silk-screening. "Wear your custom permalance T-shirt Thursday night at the Holiday Party," the petition suggests. "In addition to getting drunk and making out with co-workers Thursday night, let's make a statement!" Rioting contractors are encouraged to conceal their fightwear under whatever proper party attire they can afford. The full outrage is after the jump.

Singer/songwriter/guitar-hero John Mayer, known in the Valley for his onstage appearances with Steve Jobs to demo Apple's GarageBand software, isn't living up (or down) to his onstage claims that he spends a lot of time alone in his bedroom — you know, with his guitar. Gossip rags report that Jobs's musician buddy was seen shnozzing with both Shrek voice actress Cameron Diaz and Friday Night Lights star Minka Kelly on separate dates over the weekend. We can only surmise that Jobs's reality distortion field works on actresses, too.

Permalancer rebellion! We hear the indentured slaves over at MTV Networks are passing around a petition addressed to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. In it, they threaten to go to the IRS over the recent elimination of their benefits. The deadline for Viacom's serfs to sign paperwork for the new system is Friday, which is a good excuse for them to get completely obliterated at tomorrow's MTVN holiday party at the Hammerstein Ballroom—a party that we hear cost the company a million bucks. (Doesn't that just fall in line with the new attitude of "efficiency" touted at yesterday's HR meeting with contractors!) We would just love to see a copy of this mutinous document.

Non-staff employees at MTV Networks had a meeting with the company's HR department this afternoon. Nearly 200 attended, and the HR person running the meeting said, "If we would've known so many of you were going to show up, we would've ordered lunch to help soften the blow." Lunch or no, it didn't go over so well! "It's a sinking ship. I think we're all fucked," is how one employee put it. Human resources had no plans to discuss any of the changes with their contractors, we're told, but supervising producers demanded the meeting take place. Attaway middlemen, tell 'em!

Here's what we hear from what we believe has truly become the Viacom sweatshop. (One Viacom permalancer estimates that almost 50% of the staff are contract workers at this point.) A 50-hour workweek will now be standard, at least at MTV Digital (which means no overtime until after 50 hours, and no overtime at all for higher-level people, like producers and segment producers), and all will go from a day rate to an hourly rate. Healthcare, which was offered to permalancers after a staggering year of service, will now be offered only to employees who have worked 1,280 hours (25 of those 50-hour workweeks) in any one division. And that's the catch: Get transfered, as often happens, from VH1 to MTV or the like, and you start over on that clock.

We hear that Viacom contractors will be informed today that their paltry five days of vacation time have been cut—to zero. Rumor has it other perks are also on the chopping block. Maybe the Viacom dining hall's automated massage chairs will now be off-limits to lowly contract workers. Tell us more, please!

Magnetic Fields cellist Sam Davol, whose most famous song is The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side, has sold his downtown Manhattan loft and moved to Boston, where he and his wife bought a 2,200 square foot apartment for $1 million. [NYT]

If you came to Californication without knowing much about the Showtime series, you'd be forgiven if you'd have expected the familiar Red Hot Chili Peppers song "Californication" to play under the show's titles; failing that, you'd think at least some reference to the band's hit 1999 album of the same name might figure into the action or back story. As it turns out, however, no permission from the band was secured by the network or the show's creators, who merely saw in the lexical hybrid a catchy, succinct term covering the shows primary themes of fucking and life in Southern California.

Tasked with the peculiar and peculiarly thankless job of explaining Cam'ron to your mom, Times pop nerd Kelefa Sanneh does more than keep up with the Frere-Joneses. He also has steadily built up a jaw-dropping catalog of double and single entendres based on the recordings, videos, and live performances of the surrealist and probable pederast Robert Sylvester Kelly, as Friday's review of a show in Columbus, Georgia (you know, the seventh borough) reminded us.

As CNET points out, it's all about the business ties. U2 lead singer Bono is the most stylish managing director at Elevation Parters, the Sand Hill private equity firm. Elevation cofounder Marc Bodnick is on the board of directors of iLike. Hence, the arrangement. Bonus for close students of the Valley's real social networks: Marc Bodnick's wife is Michelle Sandberg, the sister of Google executive Sheryl Sandberg, who's married to former Yahoo Music chief Dave Goldberg, who's an iLike advisor. Got that?

Two weeks ago I ran a gantlet of pushy ads to buy local nightclub tix from Live Nation, the Beverly Hills-based event promoter for whom Madonna dumped her record label. Now, Live Nation is spamming my private inbox with a fat HTML brochure. The baloney line: "You have received this email because you are a member of the Live Nation mailing list, which you joined free of charge and without any obligation when you previously provided your email address to us in connection with the purchase of tickets." Yes, of course I checked every opt-out button. Yes, I knew they'd add me to their list anyway. But I really wanted to see Debbie Harry and I'm too busy to futz with multiple email addresses. Coming up on Boing Boing: How this new business model for musicians is so much better for me than shopping at Tower Records.

Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who encouraged his fans to steal music, had a favorite site to steal from. It was Oink, the music-sharing site that got shut down last week, as he told New York:

In the unlikely event that it's slipped your mind, today marks the official release of the most anticipated comeback in the history of music, Britney Spears' Blackout, a record that the erstwhile pop-star, her label, and the intermittently estranged children who want their momma to start earning a living again desperately need to make the public forget about the vagina-flashing, VMA-trainwrecking desperation of her post-In The Zone life.

Shawn Gold is out as MySpace's senior vice president of marketing and content, we keep hearing. It seems few at News Corp. or Fox Interactive Media will miss him, from the tart-tongued reports of his exit. Gold, previously an executive at AOL's Weblogs Inc., touted himself as MySpace's "chief marketing officer," a title he didn't hold. His pretensions to the C-suite, as well as a clash with MySpace's European marketing chief, Jamie Kantrowitz, may have cost him his job. And then there's the curious question of what, exactly he did at MySpace. On a social network, users ought to provide both the marketing and the content. True, bands have found MySpace to be a congenial environment to promote their tours and music. But MySpace's own efforts to market its video channels have proved more laughable than lucrative.

Dear label-hating pundits who gush about Madonna's oh-so-innovative deal with Live Nation: Have you tried to buy anything from Live Nation's site? All I wanted was tix to a local show at a midsize club. Live Nation splatted my screen with so many upsells, signups and talking audio popups that I felt like I'd walked into the old Tower store on Newbury Street. Live Nation surcharged me nine bucks a pop for general admission seats. My print-at-home passes (left) were lost amid pages of tree-killing, color-ink-squandering ads. I Photoshopped the tickets onto one clean page for printing, solely for my own peace of mind.

Here: An ode to WNBC film critic Jeffrey Lyons set to Belle and Sebastian's "Get Me Away From Here I'm Dying." Also of note: an appreciation of the deceased Popeye's on 13th and 1st set to New Order's "Love Vigilantes." [Fetus Fervor]

John Markoff at the New York Times is reporting that Microsoft will be making a product announcement Tuesday in San Francisco. As far as announcements go, this one looks to be a snoozer — Bill Gates will be on hand to announce "unified communications" — which is corporatespeak for "we upgraded our IM client." To make the announcement more palatable, it seems that Gates is taking a cue from Steve Jobs's Apple keynotes and bringing in some musical accompaniment. Want to know the difference between Microsoft and Apple? Bill Gates's idea of cool is 62-year-old guitar hero Eric Clapton. Sad when the "surprise" of your "surprise performer" is that he's still alive.