ACTA is the “everything and a pony” Christmas wish list of the media companies. Everything down to the Internet becomes illegal. Such treaties rely on people not getting wind of them … because when the implications hit the media, people shit. Get off your arse and write to your MP.
From 1956: the lost work of genius of car stereo. You can tell it’s genius from its independent rediscovery (check the video).
Of course, the real alternative to the iPod is a cheap Chinese MP3 player labeled “MP4″ (a blatant lie you wish the MPEG LA would bother wielding their considerable trademark dicks concerning). They’re cheap, they play music, they’re cheap and they’re cheap. Dreadful interface firmware — I got mine free from a friend who wanted to smash it to bits with a toffee hammer — but you can change that. There’s no gadget someone won’t hack.
The Edsel of music players, its very name signifying miserable failure, has broken the heart of even its greatest fan.
It’s time to clean up your act when even Keith Richards suggests you may be overdoing it.
Yahoo! Music is shutting down, and its DRM servers with it. All four of you who bought a track there are losing it shortly. This sort of thing is intrinsic to the model. iTunes still has the same problem, but obviously not enough people have been badly burnt. Meanwhile, the DRM-free world will stay stuck with MP3. Yay.
Update: Yahoo has said it will compensate both its customers.
The BPI’s latest wheeze is a deal with six large British ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and Sky) to send “hundreds of thousands” of warning letters to customers they think are stealing music. These are the same letters Virgin Media has been sending out already. (Not that Virgin Media can actually make their customers hate them any more than they do.)
This move is a stalking horse to a compulsory ISP music license, as first pushed by Feargal Sharkey and now by Billy Bragg. At which point no-one ever buys a CD or individual download in the UK ever again, as they will in fact have paid their fee. And the UK music industry never grows again. If only I could believe their suicide would work out so immaculately.
Update: The British government has a secret target to cut 80% of illegal filesharing by 2011, assuming they’re in power that long. One wonders by what process that goal was set.
Going by the trailer, the Watchmen movie might not actually suck. The costumes are right, the scenes are right … the sculpture on Mars is right … even if it makes a tedious movie, it’ll win on eyecandy.
Prisoners can’t have CDs, they’re too easy to make into shivs. They don’t have Internet. So selling them cassettes is a lovely business. See also Boing Boing comments — cassettes retain their popularity in Saharan Africa, where CDs die of dust.
“I love The Economist. It’s like a really rational guy on crack.” They finally read The Pirate’s Dilemma (think of pirates as researching new markets much faster than companies have time to) and have a piece on how maybe the toddler-with-guns ownership ethics of the recording industry might not be the most financially productive way to go. The reader comments are suitably sceptical on the article’s unexamined assumptions.
(So, did any reader of cassette-using age not have a pile of tapes from back when they didn’t have money for records? Anyone saying “me!”, I don’t believe you.)
If you’re on LiveJournal, there’s now a Rocknerd syndicated feed. I’m also making regular summary posts to aus.music. I’m also trying out the Subscribe2 plugin to give email alerts for new posts. Your ideas on other nice extensions are most welcomed.
A pile of tapes by Delia Derbyshire — that’s Miss Blind Lemon Radiophonic Workshop herself — have shown up retrieved from her attic. Proper electronic music, from back when you needed to build the damn thing before you played it — “I think she got a bit disheartened and a bit bored with it all when the synthesizer came along and it all became a little too easy.” The tapes are being prepared for wider release.
It’s hard to convince someone they’re being sold snake oil if they think their income depends on it:
“I made a list of the 22 ways to sell music, and 20 of them still require DRM,” said David Hughes, who heads up the RIAA’s technology unit, during a panel discussion at the Digital Hollywood conference. “Any form of subscription service or limited play-per-view or advertising offer still requires DRM. So DRM is not dead.”
No doubt NASA say the same thing about why faster-than-light travel isn’t dead. Clap your hands if you believe in DRM! Under whatever name.
Peter Lee from Disney told The Economist in September 2005, “If consumers even know there’s a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we’ve already failed.” So that’ll be failure, then.
And now, a story.
As slushpiles go, the stuff on Jamendo is surprisingly not an excretory avalanche of hopelessly stunted clueless ambition devoid of talent. In the bleepy shit, I was quite pleased by Warforge, EndZeit-Effekt and particularly Philos Deploys. The gimmick is that it’s all under one of the Creative Commons licences and artists get some cash from ads and donations. Somehow it hasn’t decayed into the last refuge of the musical bedroom masturbator. I urge you to check it out before it sucks.
(Before the Internet, only music industry professionals got their faces shoved in just how many bad records are released. Why do you think so many come to hate music? The worst musical slushpiles are songwriter competitions — worse than band demos because they don’t require the lifewaster to get anyone else to agree. “All unsolicited demo recordings to be submitted on SDHC or CompactFlash card of 8GB or over. Extreme III or better, please.”)
There’s cultural preservation, and then there’s the K-Tel blog. “A place for those K-Tel style classics.”
Andrew C. Bulhak buys a drum machine program. He uses it for years. He discovers his stuff is stuck inside it and he can’t get it out. What does he do? Reverse engineers it, of course. (Slides from Dorkbot talk.) Possibly the obscure format is commercial secrecy, but more likely (as is usual in these cases) it’s just appropriate shame. Binary-coded centimal?
You can fool much of the press quite a bit of the time, but the markets don’t care if you run baby-mulching machines — only if you just can’t mulch them any more. Despite ever-fatter 5″ disks … low-res convenience beats hi-res nuisance every time.
The median live broadcast viewer age for the five US networks is over 50. Fox News clocks in with a median over 65. If they want the tasty 18-49 demographic, they need to get the cable and YouTube viewers. I’ve watched more video in the last year than the ten before that, most of it YouTube fripperies to amuse my baby daughter. The rest being Weebl & Bob. Wonder what the BBC iPlayer numbers are.
The old rocknerd.org domain is now in the hands of a domain squatter. Looks like you’re now reading the real remaining Rocknerd. Hi, Ben!
For those who enjoyed The Thing On The Doorstep, I give to you: Phoenix Hairpins, Capa Nostra Syndicate, Ghosts In The House, Habit Of Sex, Fantasmi Macchina and Soundhead. For the crusty beginnings of the Post-Punk Offshoot That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
