My house has teenagers in it. They are actively interested in music, read Kerrang! (which is now a land of sensitive boys with floppy fringes ripping off bad Metallica solos) and are in every way the desperately desired target demographic of the music industry in general. They own a few precious favourite CDs, but mostly they get music off YouTube. They use it as their jukebox. Quite a bit from official label channels.

The execs have finally noticed and, as usual, are channelling their inner Gollum. Streaming services (YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, last.fm) are now considered a bigger problem than piracy, because they’re not the cash cow CDs were. Note that this is the legal and paid-for channels they’re complaining about.

The kids don’t listen to radio, or any similar rigidly controlled stream fed to them on a provider-consumer model. The execs’ dilemma now is how to advertise the music without people being able to hear it. Or something. Analyst Russ Crupnick suggests creating some form of “artificial scarcity.” Let me know how that works out for you.

“We never really made the digital transformation,” says Crupnick. No shit.

Apple is in talks with the majors to finally outdo CD, with 24-bit audio downloads. Current iPods can’t play it, and lossless stereo 24/96 compressed files are around 17MB/minute or 1.2GB for 70 minutes — or, as Linn already sells, nearly 3GB for 24/192 stereo, and multiply by three for 5.1 … but what price this against getting you to buy your collection again? Until they do what most recording tools do these days and go to 32-bit floating point.

In the early 1990s, I tried very hard to become a serious Anthony Burgess fan. A Clockwork Orange is absolutely first-class and probably my favourite novel of all time. Burgess was an incredibly intelligent and erudite man, and my other favourite is Homage to Qwert Yuiop, a collection of his book reviews (which I strongly recommend, even as I curse its lack of an index).

However, all his other novels suck. All of them. Over the course of a few years I read as many as I could get my hands on, in the desperate hope of more Burgess greatness. Every single one was mediocre at best. Humdrum writing and story, lots of showing off, occasional attempts at epic, but nothing coming together properly. I can authoritatively state that A Clockwork Orange was a freak event: he accidentally wrote something that was significantly greater than everything else he did, and would never again get within a mile of it.

Here in the future, this is much easier. I recently heard a great track, “Herzlos” by Absurd Minds, a German EBM (bleepy “industrial”) band, on a compilation. Enormously interested by this, I went in search of more of their stuff. As it turned out, I had the opportunity to hear their complete works — every note they’ve recorded from 1996 to the present. All of it. The lot.

And guess what? That track was a freak — everything else they’ve ever done is mediocre at best and inept at typical. In fact, the original version of “Herzlos” also sucks — the good version was a remix by a third party. (And the lyrics, oh God. I’m glad they’re in German.)

The band is not important. The important bit is that even a burst of true brilliance will no longer let you get away with selling us pigs in a poke. This alone is why the majors are going DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, and musicians who still think the world owes them a living with them.

For my birthday, my darling girlfriend just gave me some shitty, shitty eight quid laptop speakers from Curry’s, to serve as cruel and vicious Truth Boxes for mixing in LMMS! They’re powered from USB, they do 0.5W RMS total (5V at 500mA), they’re about 2.5″ in diameter each, the bass barely exists and they are just what I wanted, because if I want a mix that survives anything it has to work on these. Listening to stuff through them is revelatory. For added cruelty, mix in mono. I am most pleased.

You’re young? Never got into the Australian mainstream in the ’80s when it was happening? Annoyed that most of Mushroom’s output is not available anywhere because Warner are idiots? You’d like to catch up? Sassbandit points out our dear friend “nzoz[year]” on YouTube — a different username for each year. 1983, for example. A good start for stuff that was at least slightly popular with someone that you can then try to track down unavailable vinyl of, given Warner are too stupid to rerelease it even digitally. Did I mention that Warner are fuckwits enough times yet?

(For the indie stuff of the day, the canonical compilations are Tales from the Australian Underground and Do The Pop!, both of which are pretty much essential.)

Cry moar, n00b. Activision has cancelled the whole Guitar Hero franchise. Harmonix, creator of its main competitor Rock Band, was sold off, and MTV Games closed entirely, a few months ago.

Android phones are hugely popular, and now the most popular smartphone in the world. Google would love a music store for Android to compete with iTunes, only it has to be even better than iTunes. They have the record labels themselves mostly on-side. What do customers want? To be able to re-download stuff they’ve bought and paid for. Who doesn’t want that to happen? The publishers. And Sony.

Thomas Hesse from Sony says: “We are very uncomfortable with a model where you can just throw anything into the cloud and stream it, if what you threw into the cloud was not legitimately purchased.” Never mind we already have that — it’s called RapidShare. YOU’RE ALREADY COMPETING WITH FREE. PEOPLE WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY ANYWAY. YOU’RE REFUSING IT. AAAAAAAA