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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