Opinion – Rocknerd

Spotify’s extruded pop product substitute is worth it for the industry outrage.

12 July, 201717 July, 2017 Industry, Media, mp3, Opinion, Pop 1

Spotify outrages the record industry by not giving them even more free money. The actual listeners are fine with this.

Master Quality Authenticated — “high-resolution” audio with … lossy compression.

17 May, 201721 May, 2017 Audio, Opinion 8

An audacious innovation in the “high-resolution audio” field: hi-res audio that does lossy compression. And the record companies love it.

Warner does a deal with YouTube. The record industry is outraged!

8 May, 20179 May, 2017 Industry, mp3, Opinion, Your rights 0

Warner has signed a completely expected deal with YouTube, because they do great business with each other and fully wish to continue. The music industry is hilariously outraged that Warner did the obvious deal with a fantastic and essential publicity outlet.

The music industry’s sense of entitlement. How to get the money rolling again.

4 May, 20175 May, 2017 Industry, Opinion, Writing 0

Eamonn Forde opines at The Quietus that the reports of the record industry’s rebirth are greatly exaggerated.

You’d almost think there’d been some sort of horrifying plummet in people’s financial circumstances.

On “data-driven” discovered genres, artistic conversations and faces in clouds.

3 May, 20177 May, 2017 Opinion, Writing 0

I am sceptical of the “data-driven approach” to cultural discovery. It reifies statistical artifacts, filter bubbles and faces seen in clouds.

Why Spotify wants some Blockchain; how music industry Blockchain dreams work.

27 April, 20177 August, 2017 Industry, mp3, Opinion 6

A detailed examination of why music industry Blockchain (capital B) dreams are not going to work out.

The Spotify-Universal 2017 deal, with windowing, probably won’t change much.

5 April, 20177 April, 2017 Industry, mp3, Opinion 0

Apart from revitalising the torrent sites, but everyone seems to have noticed that bit now.

Record labels want money YouTube doesn’t earn, just because Google has some and they’d like it.

3 April, 20177 April, 2017 Industry, Opinion 1

With cites that they know this money doesn’t actually exist yet.

Music journalism: still dead, thank goodness.

26 March, 20175 May, 2017 Opinion, Writing 5

“Can music journalism exist at all?” “Do Music Journalists Matter Anymore?” I mean, if you have to ask …

All these streams will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

20 March, 201721 March, 2017 mp3, Opinion, Record, Writing 1

There is no “cloud”, there’s just someone else’s computer. Will we find a listener who cares?

Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)

5 February, 20173 May, 2017 Audio, mp3, Opinion 25

Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. And you can still download the last version.

Virtual Reality: it’s the new 3D! Expensive, consumers don’t want it and it makes you throw up.

14 December, 201615 December, 2016 Film, Games, Opinion 5

3D technology has been the next big thing for only the last sixty years. It offers amazing improvements over ordinary moving images: darkness, muddier colours, blurriness, headaches from watching for more than twenty minutes and slower action sequences so the viewer doesn’t bring up their last meal.

The time has come to listen to Ethernet cables.

25 November, 201617 May, 2017 Audio, Opinion, Writing 7

The sound with the Pearl becomes lighter and has less impact and detail compared to the Supra. Stereo image shrinks, but more obvious is a reduction in detail. Changing to Cinnamon with only one switch in my network produces a surprising result.

What the death of What.CD fails to mean for all of humanity.

19 November, 201631 December, 2016 mp3, Opinion, Your rights 0

There’s a lot to be said in favour of massive copyright violation in the interests of cultural preservation, but “fixed targets are stable and sustainable in a world including the record companies” is not any of it.

Aestheticblogging.

15 November, 201615 November, 2016 Opinion 1

aestheticblogging basically taught me to have feelings, that werent anger.

Why Blockchain won’t save the music industry, and Imogen Heap wants to spyware you.

6 November, 201615 December, 2016 Industry, mp3, Opinion, Writing 1

The blockchain book I’m writing; a couple of short excerpts from the music section I drafted about half of today.

Death in Rome: Max Martin did nothing wrong. And the touchier aspects of neofolk.

2 November, 201612 July, 2017 Industrial, Opinion 3

Death in Rome do neofolk covers of pop. And what’s neofolk? Well.

Hip-hop and post-punk synthpop: Ich habe der fahr’n fahr’n fahr’n auf der Autobahn blues.

30 October, 201629 March, 2017 Opinion, Pop, Post-Punk, R'n'B 0

I don’t often see it noted just what was happening with early hip-hop and English and European synthpop in and from the post-punk era. Hip-hop histories gloss over it, and the reconstructed histories of techno somehow jump straight from about 1988 back to Kraftwerk, as if all that stuff from 1978 to 1984 never happened.

J. G. Ballard and music. How to write the entire New Wave into being.

25 October, 201615 May, 2017 Industrial, Opinion, Post-Punk, Punk, Writing 0

Post-punk’s favourite writer, who didn’t listen to music himself. It’s all about the images.

Culture is not about aesthetics redux: scented candles in a human face, forever.

20 October, 201620 October, 2016 Industry, Musician, Opinion 0

A retrospective on Rocknerd’s 2013 one-hit wonder “Culture is not about aesthetics. Punk rock is now enforced by law.” What musicians are now faced with.

Theodor Adorno wrote all the Beatles’ songs as a Cultural Marxist assault on America. Possibly.

13 October, 20161 May, 2017 Opinion, Pop, Rock 4

One of the finest conspiracy theories in popular culture is the claim that Theodor Adorno, a main figure in the Frankfurt School of “cultural Marxism” fame, secretly wrote all the Beatles’ songs.

Radio and television finally admit, in 2016, that they’re competing with the whole vast Internet.

29 September, 201620 May, 2017 Media, Opinion, Radio, Television 3

The mass media have suffered the effects of the Internet much in the manner of the record industry, as consumers, conclusively sick of their shit, withdraw their attention. Their worry has gone from piracy to … being ignored.

The streamingpocalypse first hit the record industry in the 1930s. It was called radio.

27 September, 201620 May, 2017 Industry, mp3, Opinion, Radio 1

The music industry occasionally forgets that entertainment is an optional expense, consumer confidence is a critical material condition for what they do, and when times are tough people stop spending.

Rowland S. Howard and his albatross, “Shivers”. (And more.)

24 September, 201624 September, 2016 Opinion, Post-Punk 1

Rowland S. Howard plays his albatross “Shivers” on ABC TV Studio 22, 25 November 1999. The band is Rowland with Brian Hooper on bass, Mick Harvey on drums and Edward Clayton Jones on keyboard. And a lot more stuff.

On this day in 2015 … gettin’ piggy with it.

20 September, 201615 March, 2017 Opinion, Sex, Television 0

At approximately 10:20pm BST on Sunday the 20th of September, 2015, the image of the Daily Mail‘s Monday front page hit Twitter. And Britain exploded.

Book review: Stephen Witt: How Music Got Free (2015, 2016).

13 September, 20166 February, 2017 Industry, mp3, Opinion, Writing 0

This purports to be the story of the last twenty years of the record industry, told by one of the kids who collected MP3s in his college dorm just before Napster. It isn’t the story of the MP3 revolution, but it is some stories, only one of which is seriously important to the claim in the title. But the details mostly aren’t wrong.

The Hugos, the Sad Puppies and 1970s science fiction paperback covers, which were ridiculous.

4 September, 201610 September, 2016 Opinion, Writing 12

The thing that really struck me about Hugo vote-stackers the Sad Puppies was founder Brad Torgersen’s lament that he could no longer tell from the cover of a science fiction novel what it was about.

Witch house: I’d make myself a majickal sandwich.

25 August, 201626 August, 2016 Dance, Goth, Industrial, Musician, Opinion 0

Witch House is a made-up genre that became real. It was invented as an in-joke and now goth DJs claim they play “witch house”. Perhaps the secret ingredient is the gr▲†u‡†Øu§ Un‡cØd3.