What is a Deadhead? How do they get that way? Why, dear God, WHY? Daniel Chamberlain attempts to answer this question.

He does note that “only by avoiding actual Deadheads was I able to become a Deadhead” and that his latent Deadheadism “causes my girlfriend to worry that at a certain point of saturation, she’ll come home from work to find me reeking of patchouli oil, clad in vibrant pajama bottoms and a tank top decorated with capering bears, my dilated pupils being the only reason I haven’t yet found something to juggle.” A deeply frightening cautionary tale.

Charles Arthur from the Guardian nails music industry bollocks to a wall. The article is worth reading (the data was quite interesting to gather), but this chart shows the smoking gun:

Now, that’s journalism.

Remember Davenport Lyons? Their clients who discovered that it was actually ruinous to get a reputation with paying customers as RIAA-like thugs certainly do. They’ve been all but silent of late.

However, a new UK law firm, ACS Law, appears to be doing the same things: sending out legal threat letters demanding between £400 and £700, but disappearing with no further response when questioned more closely. TorrentFreak details the unearthly similarities and gives a nice list of questions you can send if they ever contact you.

WFMU is a fine New York-based “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT”-format public radio station. They have a blog with a fine selection of the weird goddamn shit they broadcast. And now, they have, in collaboration with a few likeminded radio stations and organisations, launched the Free Music Archive: “It’s not just free music, it’s good music.” Go forth and get downloading like a bastard.

This week, the cheap shitty MP3 player is filled with improvised noise. I have entirely too high a tolerance for this sort of thing if it’s the right genre, in this case early industrial — all those albums from the eighties released in limited editions of a few hundred for the Artist’s Shit market.

You might be suffering from Artist’s Shit if:

• you’ve bought a box set of anything ever, particularly ten or more live recordings by one band.

• you have MP3s of twenty remixes of any single song.
• you have over twenty gigabytes of MP3s you haven’t listened to yet, and if you do it’ll be once in your life and probably never again.
• you bought all the Damage Manual remix albums Martyn Atkins is pushing on eMusic.
• you bought the supar l33t everything edition of Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails.
• you have a copy of “The Laughing Gnome” for any reason other than to sell it on.

Recovery involves realising (a) you cannot buy souls on a record (b) you wouldn’t want to if you could.

Some music was much more fun to make than it will ever be to listen to. “Oh no, the Tombliboos are under the delusion they’re Miles Davis or equivalent!” You are not Miles Davis and nor are these people.

p.s.: the NWW list contains vast vistas of suction by any sane measure.

TALKIN’ ABOUT, Degeneration, Thursday (NNME) — With the conviction of The Pirate Bay administrators having immediately abolished all filesharing, the EU has approved an extension of sound copyright to seventy years past the point of theoretical death, and death to seventy years past actual death.

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Google now gives away legal downloads in China. And thus the official market catches up with the kids with 500GB USB drive parties.

Meanwhile, Nokia’s only-a-wafer-thin-slice-of-DRM Comes With Music service is all but dead, with 23,000 users total in the UK. Gosh, etc.

Back in my day, we had to search the dial for radio that didn’t suck and search the city for the one record shop that didn’t suck. And pay money for music! On pieces of plastic!

Now culture is preserved endemically. I see records on Australian indie MP3 blogs with thousands of downloads — the original was a pressing of 500, twenty copies even leaving that city.

To sell records, you need to (1) compete with every record ever made; (2) convince people who can get your music free to want to give you money; (3) after they’ve already listened to your record repeatedly (“try before you buy” can be assumed). If you can make people want to give you money for a record they’ve heard lots of times that competes with every record ever made … then you can sell a record.

The scarce commodity is people’s attention. The only telly I watch is YouTube to amuse my baby daughter, and even that has a hard time keeping my attention more than sixty seconds. I load my MP3 player with fresh stuff and dispose of the weak links daily.

Which catches your attention, a rock journalism blog or an MP3 blog? Industry news gets readers, before the bitterness becomes terminal. Live performance can be written about, but you never see that linked from the MP3 blogs. And I’d have to leave the house.

Where’s room for the modern Lester Bangs? Does good rock journalism require music to be hard to get for dancing about architecture to substitute? Or just never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width bloody-mindedness?

Where have you gone, Byron Coley? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Iron Maiden has a global fanbase, they even played Poland while it was still in the Soviet Bloc, but there is no better illustration of that than this film and what happened to me while I watched it.

The film, produced by  Sam Dunn, a metal fan and anthropologist, and Scott McFadyen who made Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey, covers the band on the first leg of their “Somewhere Back In Time” tour in 2008, and the first concert of the tour was in Mumbai, India. A guy sitting next to me in the cinema leant over as the film was starting and told me that he’d been at that concert and that he wondered if he ended up in the film. Tashi, as I later learnt his name to be, indeed ended up in the film in several audience shots and also in footage from their press conference in Mumbai.

The amazing cinematography, not just in the concert sequences but in aerial shots of Flight 666 (Iron Maiden bought their own Boeing 757 for the tour which carried the band, crew and all their equipment, captained by their singer Bruce Dickinson who has a commercial pilot’s licence), and almost access all areas to the band, their crew and the fans, make this worthwhile viewing even for those who are not fans of the band.

But for those that are, some of Iron Maiden’s most popular songs in DTS, combined with the concert and backstage scenes, makes the film as exhilarating as seeing them live. By the end of the film all the fans in the audience were singing along and clapped when the credits rolled.

Film site: http://www.ironmaiden.com/flight666/

Today’s Penny Arcade.

I was hoping The Boat That Rocked would at least be fictionalised reality about British pirate radio in the sixties, in the manner of Twenty-Four Hour Party People. It’s not — it’s a story invented from whole cloth reminiscent of historical events.

I wanted rocknerd kicks all through the night and didn’t get them. This film gets worse the more you think about it afterwards. Emotional manipulation and the comedy of embarrassment. All a bit Richard Curtis.

I wonder who the DJs were supposed to be. The Tony Blackburn character’s obvious. But no John Peel character is an unspeakable omission. Bill Nighy is perfect as the station owner. I also wonder how well they did on the Prime Minister and Cabinet. (The minister of technology at the time was Tony Benn, who I can’t see behaving quite like that.)

The most stirring scene is (highlight for spoiler) the abandoned records floating underwater. Because they’re the character I’m most interested by. Way too mainstream though.

One to watch on DVD if you happen to be in the room at the time.

MIDEM, Cash from Chaos, 1977 (NNN) — The Performing Right Society and UK Music have come out strongly against YouTube and Google for not just handing them both buckets of money.

The furore started when the PRS demanded that YouTube pay them more money or remove their members’ videos, and YouTube removed their members’ videos. “It is clear they are too powerful,” said Feargal Sharkey, whose bank account died before he got old, “because they were actually able to just tell us to bog off. I am sick and tired of bogus outsiders who spout unworkable utopian visions. Instead, they should give us money because we want it. Just like the record companies used to … er, hold on, I’ll start again.”

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Dot.com winner Paul Graham writes on why TV lost — computers + television = computers. Of course as much is watched as ever, but the products (you and me) are getting entirely too uppity for business comfort. The broadcast model is as healthy as major record companies.

I work in media. The future of television is YouTube or similar. We know this. It’ll take a few years before the Internet is a better television than television, i.e. when your connection is a better delivery mechanism than DVB-T over the air. On the other hand, convenience beats quality every time.

We each sit comfortably in the lounge on our own laptop, watching videos as the whim takes us. The younger teenager uses YouTube as her personal jukebox. Even broadcast television (BBC Cbeebies for the toddler) is streamed live over the net. I have a television, and proudly pay my licence fee. I can’t remember when I last switched it on.

Saw a girl on the tube with a Get Hip Records bag. I told her I approved. I’m contemplating my own half a ton vinyl albatross rather less cheerfully. I’ve lugged this thing behind me for fifteen years. I want rid of the damn thing.

This involves (a) a lot of ripping vinyl to digital (b) getting rid of the physical objects.

Quite a lot of it is indie rock which literally exists in the world only on a thousand pieces of vinyl, so the right place would probably be a library who cared, which would mean in Australia, with me donating the shipping as well. Anything in the vinyl pile that exists on CD can bugger off. A few things (not more than a few crates) I’ll want to keep.

There’s a lotta cassettes to rip too.

The CDs, of course, go to FLAC then get used for, I dunno, skeet shooting.

That takes care of most of it, I think. I’m sure I’ll get all this done before I die.

The RIAA is on the skids. The record companies are pulling support at a fantastic rate; what will be left will be a smaller group composed of pieces of the RIAA, IFPI and BPI. Still pursuing DRM and similar pixie dust. Remember when you’d only ever heard those four letters as the reason your turntable sounded tinny plugged into the wrong inputs?

*cough* And then there’s the other sort.

Today’s music is Bullshit 3¼, a 1970 psychedelic prog album in Hebrew (with titles in English) by Danny ben Israel. The music is deeply fucked up and smoking remarkable quantities of crack in all sorts of ways. It could be just what I needed.

Update: In lab tests, this album really, really annoys Lady Gaga-loving teenagers when you put it on as housecleaning music.

From The Guardian: 1970s rock stars with their parents. “Life photographer John Olson’s extraordinary pictures of the biggest rock stars of the 1970s at home with their folks.” We all want Frank Zappa’s living room.

It’s not just Microsoft’s DRMed music at twice the price, which will be as popular as a Zune running Vista. It’s the PR guy’s answers. Let me translate for you:

“Oh dear God, kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé’s a car crash, I wish I could be laid off, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

Ron Asheton has died aged 60, apparently of “natural causes” with no suspicious circumstances. LOOK, PUNK ROCKERS, THIS JUST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE OLD AND STUFF DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH “NO SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES.” p.s.: Damn.

Almost fifty years ago, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson died in a plane crash with some guys called Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. His family exhumed him last year to move his remains to a more visible location with a life-sized statue.

So his family are selling his coffin. A 16-gauge steel casket. On eBay.

Now, that’s industrial.

“Most remarkably, his thick brown hair was still perfectly coiffed in his familiar, 1950s flat-top.” Phew!

From Jed: Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips has a double-necked guitar where one neck is a Guitar Hero controller. “He went with the Guitar Hero controller because he feels that it’s replacing regular guitars in childrens’ perception of how guitar is played.” Oh dear.

Never mind. How about a few rounds of Guitar Praise? Shred with the sounds of Contemporary Christian Music! All praise!

Festival had a truly spectacular decline and fall. When it finally died, it seems it was bought by Warner, who, being helmed by the Godlike genius Edgar Bronfmann, deal with back catalogue by sitting on it and never allowing its rerelease under any circumstances whatsoever, because that’ll definitely beat the MP3-spreading hordes on their home turf. This is why you can’t get hold of a damn thing released by Mushroom or Festival ever, except what Michael Gudinski took with him to Liberation.

What we used to call “ghetto blasters” in the 1980s are too heavy and annoying and expensive in D-cells. In the modern age, you need a shirt that annoys people for you, from any MP3.

When building MusicSeer (now inactive) in 2002, Brian Whitman needed a way to ferret out bad user information. So he wrote something to generate 10,000 nonexistent band names. Many of which of course now exist. See how you go.

Any Church album recorded after 1990 is complete shite — tedious stoner hippy noodling with no songs at all and far too much pot. After Gold Afternoon Fix, I was thrilled to get Priest = Aura in the post, then I played it and couldn’t remember a note. Went “wha … ?” and played it again. All 70 minutes. One quick smoke at Spot’s too many.

So here’s a nice thing: the demos for Gold Afternoon Fix. Found on a cassette thrown in the studio bin. Remember when the Church wrote singles?

(A Box Of Birds from 1999 is also good. Because it’s all covers. They still play songs really well, they’ve just given up writing them.)

(The relentless negativity of “music industry terminally stupid, BitTorrent at 11″ wears me down too. I’ll try to talk about actual music more often.)

It must be INTARWEB PIRATES, not games being set to outsell CDs and DVDs put together by next year. Not that I plan to start covering games in any way at all. Except maybe collecting versions of “Still Alive.”

The epic tale of how Deathboy supported Tricky. Includes handy hints on getting a free hotel stay.

Why not cheer up your readers with a string of album giveaways? The Times gives you music for global financial crises: Closer by Joy Division. I always thought the imminent threat of instant nuclear death was a vital factor in making eighties music (the proper stuff) great; let’s see what a Great Slight Economic Downturn can bring.

Customers loathe and despise DRM. What’s a marketer to do? Advertise products as “DRM-free” when they’re nothing of the sort! After Sony and Nokia comes MySpace. Their “DRM-free” service involves music that can only be played over the Internet while you’re sitting at the computer on their web page having your eyes gouged out by the tasteful graphic design they’re famous for. I look forward to their explanations to Trading Standards if they try selling this one in the UK. I also look forward to the MySpace equivalent of these.