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.)

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

And the customers despise it: Macrovision, DVD regions, non-CDs, iTunes, HDMI, hifi systems that won’t let you use the digital SACD or DVD-A output. They got screwed over by Liquid Audio, then Microsoft PlaysForSure, then Yahoo Music shutting down. And Apple is getting distinctly weird lately.

But the industry lust for control is so overwhelming that, burnt and burnt again, they’ll keep trying. Offer stupid amounts of money for a physical impossibility and someone will claim to be able to do it for you. Ladeez gemmun, I give you the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem. Formerly known as Open Content, this one will work for sure. (Even if the press embargo failed.) This time. No unpaid copies or downloads ever again. You betcha.

(No Nokia, Samsung or LG in this everyone-but-Apple list. No movies on mobiles? Epic fail.)

Keith Cameron wrote earlier this year in the Grauniad of all places about the re-release after twenty years of “My Pal” a much loved Australian indie single by God whose members went on to work with Spencer P. Jones and Bored and form Hoss and Powder Monkeys.

I know that the original single got a fair bit of air play on campus radio in the USA, but didn’t know it was known in the UK, unless John Peel played it!

[Update] I’ve just been advised that John Peel played “My Pal” on his show in 1988 and it was taped by a friend that still remembers it, thanks Marge!

Of course, it’ll probably help if you’re not a dickhead.

(KaZaA is so 2001, darling.)

From the same company that brought you the Black Velvet Wesley Crusher.

Thanks to Joel Silbersher for the heads up.

The only problem is that no trace of the case’s existence can be found. Several posters to the Open Rights Group mailing list have failed to find any mention of such a case in court lists. Neil Dunbar of the list notes that the Patents County Court Diary will publish all cases as of October 2007. The Patent Courts Diary (PDF) “has no listing for this trial, although it does reference other trials for 22 July, when DL claim the judgment was handed down.”

A mysterious missing judgement, and a press release reprinted without the faintest nod to fact-checking? It’s August.

Update: Actual journalism found in the Daily Mail! (Warning: Daily Mail.) It appears to be a default judgement against an unemployed single mother, Isabella Barwinska, who didn’t show up to court (despite BBC report to the contrary). Lotsa luck collecting.

The hard part is photos of entertainers. Bad live shots, fan snapshots and so forth under a proper free content licence always supersede something that isn’t free content. (Looking pretty isn’t the mission — reusable and remixable content is. So we’re hardarses about it.)

I’m wondering a useful way to reliably get entertainment industry promo photos to flock to us. The third-best shot of the shoot, say. I suspect the worst fan snaps would be an incentive. So where and how do we publicise this? (I’ve asked this before.)

(If you’ve taken decent photos of someone with a Wikipedia article but no good pic, we’d love ‘em. I’m slowly going through my own twenty years’ photos. CC by-sa is fine, and requires your name staying attached to the image details page. Follow in the steps of Joichi Ito.)

(Mind you, I still so so so want one of these.)

Bonus: The earliest known sound recording — 1860, seventeen years before Edison.

(1944 Marxist sociology is often indistinguishable from rock journalism. Or how-tos.)

(Bonus link: a magnetic thing that actually does something useful.)

(My current yak shaving is reripping all my CDs as FLAC. Disk is so cheap.)

(spotted by Jed)

Someone must be making a packet convincing executives that customers will buy what you tell them to, not what they want to. What’s the killer feature on the Blu-Ray release of Sleeping Beauty? Chat, messaging to and from phones, video greeting cards and quizzes for loyalty programme points! ‘Cos there’s vast untapped consumer demand for expensive stuff that’s like the Internet except shit.

At least Pixar’s been allowed to tell the rest of Disney that if you make a sequel, it’s gotta, y’know, not suck.

Update: Yahoo has said it will compensate both its customers.

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.

(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.)

“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.

Its voice was so low that at first he could not make out what it said. Then he made it out. It was saying that it thought it could get well again if industry analysts believed in DRM.

Peter flung out his arms. There were no industry analysts there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Fruit and Flowers, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls with straws up their noses, and naked office runners in their baskets hung from trees.

“Do you believe?” he cried.

The RIAA sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to its fate.

It fancied it heard answers in the affirmative, and then again it wasn’t sure.

“What do you think?” it asked Peter.

“If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let the RIAA die.”

Many clapped.

Some didn’t.

A few rocknerds hissed.

The clapping stopped suddenly; as if countless editors had rushed to their offices to see what on earth was happening; but already the RIAA was saved. First its voice grew strong, then it popped out of bed, then it was flashing through the room more merry and impudent than ever. It never thought of thanking those who believed, but it would have liked to get at the ones who had hissed.

Only joking. The RIAA died. Because DRM doesn’t exist.

(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.”)