You can buy a halfway-decent electric guitar for $100. Add $40 for the 1/4″ instrument->USB connector. So why not make a “Guitar Hero Expert Edition” for people who actually want to learn guitar and have more fun practicing? And who don’t want to be wankers playing with toy guitars. Make it usable as an at-home practice amp too (since all the necessary code would be written already), and you justify the cost of adapter+game immediately.

You could even make it compatible with Guitar Hero controllers, so you don’t lose the social aspect for friends who don’t actually play guitar.

Anyway, I’m just rambling. Maybe something like this exists already.

Still, there are one or two worthwhile ideas in there. Name your extreme metal band after the international villains du jour - Banking. Or, if you’re less cosmopolitan, Republicans. Axolotl Carcass has a certain ring to it, as does Carrot Slays Republican (a bit absurdist that one, I think. Probably fans of Deerhoof). Personally I’d probably go with Patty Stench, the Northern Flashers (nice image), or (my personal favourite) Ouch.

And let’s say nothing about the inclusion of Discharge and Hole, OK?

(I guess I’ll find out the hard way what WP does to this comment.)

Seen similar in Second Life - people screaming (boycotts etc) about someone else ripping off their clothing design - which was photoshopped from an actual real fashion store. Stealing from the fashion store wasn’t a problem.

[*] Not as a mass storage device. I hear it’ll do them if you talk Microsoft MTP to it.

Look at chip music, and the ay-riders etc. Not a new thing..

They do. Every now and then they think of something to try against the second-hand market. They recently put forward a plan to make a royalty payable on all second-hand recordings sold.

“Hi Dave. How’s Eng-er-lund?”

The weather in London is identical to Melbourne. I mean, IDENTICAL. Except no forty-degree days in summer.

“Let’s take it from my personal experience. My site (www.janisian.com ) gets an average of 75,000 hits a year. Not bad for someone whose last hit record was in 1975. When Napster was running full-tilt, we received about 100 hits a month from people who’d downloaded Society’s Child or At Seventeen for free, then decided they wanted more information. Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they’d found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But? that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn’t include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows.”

Janis, you go girl.

By the way, why don’t record companies object to the massive amounts of second-hand recordings that are sold? The overwhelming majority of my collection is from opshops, Dixon’s etc.

Hi Dave. How’s Eng-er-lund?

But I’ve got my leather jacket, I’ve got my notepad, I’ve got my pen. Don’t have glasses, but I do have contacts. Time to rocknerd!

That list of allowed HTML tags below claims to work but didn’t in the submit queue. Let’s test: bold italic emphasised strong … seems to work in the preview … let’s see what happens when I hit ‘add’.