The economics of piracy

This is fascinating: Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy

Suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts. A lawmaker might, without for one instant doubting that shoplifiting is a bad thing, question whether this is really the optimal use of federal law enforcement resources. The CEO indignantly points out that shoplifting kills one million adorable towheaded orphans each year. The proof is right here in this study by the Wal-Mart Institute for Anti-Shoplifting Studies. The study sources this dramatic claim to a newspaper article, which quotes the CEO of Wal-Mart asserting (on the basis of private data you can’t see) that shoplifting kills hundreds of orphans annually. And as a footnote explains, it seemed prudent to round up to a million. I wish this were just a joke, but as readers of my previous post will recognize, that’s literally about the level of evidence we’re dealing with here.

iTunes Match: get a better music library for £21.99

iTunes Match, Apple’s music-in-the-cloud service, is very good – but it’s worth a look even if you don’t want or need cloud-based music. For your £21.99 you get two things: a backup of your entire music library (more than 10,000 songs, in my case, saving me the hassle of getting a bigger backup disk) and an upgrade for all your low bitrate music.

If you’re anything like me you’ve been ripping CDs and buying downloads for years, and back in the day file sizes mattered – so you’d rip at, say, 160Kbps to get as much music as possible on your player. Now, though, space isn’t the issue it used to be, and if you listen on good speakers or good headphones you can hear the flaws.

The problem is that actually re-ripping all that music (assuming you still have the CDs) is an enormous job: as of yesterday I had 6,500 songs at lower bitrates.

That’s where iTunes Match comes in. It takes a while, but it works brilliantly.  Jason Snell explains how to do it.

Illegal downloading and Adele

Simon at No Rock’n'Roll Fun has written a typically excellent piece about the BPI’s latest sales figures.

Despite all this “chronic” piracy going on, Adele’s album has sold more copies in a year than any album has ever sold. More than a Michael Jackson album managed in a year, even the good one. More than a Beatles album ever managed to whisk out the shops in twelve months. More, even, than the third Charlatans album sold in a year.

So, how come Adele’s album was not only immune to the chronic piracy, but thrived in a world so stricken? Had there been secret umlauts sewn into the hemlines of the choruses, rendering it impossible to torrent?

Were any of the many pirate-busting measures deployed? Did the pre-release circulate solely on a tape glued into a Walkman? Was every copy watermarked? Did a fleet of fake files get launched onto the internet to foil downloaders? Did Derren Brown hypnotise the world so that if they typed ‘Adele 21 free’ into Google they’d die?

Nope. The success of Adele’s album seems to be nothing to do with avoiding piracy, and more to do with sticking out an album that people liked and wanted to buy.

Worth remembering the next time you see the entertainment industry demanding new laws and filtering to fight the menace of piracy.ikoni

A brief review of the stupidly expensive SuperDarts headphones from Atomic Floyd

Part 1: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts 

Shit, I’ve just wasted the best part of £200 in Amazon vouchers. They sound okay, but you don’t spend that much money for something to be okay.

Part 2: Thoughts on listening to music with Atomic Floyd’s SuperDarts after turning the volume right up

HOLY FUCK!

Yes, they’re stupidly expensive, but the sound is really quite extraordinary. They were recommended by my Techradar colleague James Rivington, who reviewed them here. I think he quite liked them.

The REM best-of is superb value for money

The deluxe version of the REM best-of (“Part Lies, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011) on iTunes is superb value for money: 40 songs and a further twelve videos for £11.99.

If you’re interested, the videos are for Radio Free Europe, Talk About The Passion, Fall On Me, The One I Love, Orange Crush, Losing My Religion, Man on the Moon, What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?, All The Way To Reno, Leaving New York, Supernatural Superserious and Uberlin. That last one’s from the most recent album and is a beautiful wee song.

See you at the overpriced reunion tour in ten years…

“Not just the funniest group in the world, but something serious and valuable, too”

A lovely piece by Taylor Parkes on the genius of Half Man Half Biscuit:

Even now, there’s still this perception of Half Man Half Biscuit as a comedy band: a post-punk Grumbleweeds, the indie Stilgoe. No group in history can have been so woefully misunderstood – Half Man Half Biscuit are, in fact, an antidote to wackiness, a bulwark against zaniness. Fiercely principled, highly literate, sometimes very close to angry, these are songs of open defiance; their real targets, more often than not, are stupidity as a leisure option, the hollowing-out of British culture, the slow death of the post-war settlement.

This bit cracked me up:

‘Excavating Rita’ is – despite its wince-inducing title – a beautifully complex song about a grief-crazed Betterware salesman whose devotion extends to necrophilia. Poignant, tragic, grimly explicit, sympathetic and horribly funny, it’s hard to imagine anyone else attempting a song like this

[Via TonyK]

No more adventures in hi-fi

I love REM, and while I’m not surprised they’ve split up – that’s been on the cards for a decade, maybe more – it’s still a wee bit sad. Unless there’s a reunion tour somewhere down the line I won’t get to see them live again, and there won’t be any more records as weird and wonderful as New Adventures In Hi-Fi. It, like most REM albums, was hit and miss, but when REM got it right they were astonishing.

The Scottish New Music Awards

The Scottish New Music Awards have been and gone, and they appear to have been as awesome as the voting form suggested: when I tried to place a vote for an artist I know, the form wouldn’t let me continue unless I voted in every other category – which means I was expected to vote for the best Scottish music teacher, the best Scottish sound engineer, and various other best-things which I didn’t have a clue about.

Needless to say, I didn’t bother lest I be the man responsible for making Scotland’s second-best music teacher think he or she was the first best. Imagine the consequences.

Anyway… The Pop Cop describes a thrilling line-up:

In the Artist of the Year category, two of the five nominees were 57-year-old Dougie MacLean and fellow veteran Dave Arcari, a relative spring chicken at 47. There was also Sandi Thom who, should you need reminding, hoodwinked the public into giving her 15 minutes of fame before said public escorted her to the exit.

I know Mr Arcari, and he’s a nice bloke. Talented, too. But he, like Maclean and Thom, hardly qualifies as “new music” – unless by “new music” you mean “new music from people who’ve been on the scene for ages”.

Mind you, it sounds like it was a star-studded affair.

The 2011 Scottish New Music Awards… will feature many new and unsigned acts as well as a guest list of celebrities from the global music industry. Some of the guests already confirmed include Nazareth, members of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, cast members from Still Game, former X-Factor winner Leon Jackson and many personalities from Radio and Television. Guaranteed to be a star studded event.

I realise Scotland isn’t exactly awash with famous people but for an event that the organisers had the brass neck to claim was “similar” to The Grammys and The Brits, is that really the best they could cobble together?

If you’ve even a passing interest in the Scottish music scene, you’ll love the Pop Cop’s full post. I’ll leave you with my favourite bit:

In an evening of amateurishness, the biscuit was well and truly taken by the room’s faceless voiceover man who, with genuine panic, announced just after 8pm that the ceremony was running precisely one hour and 20 minutes ahead of schedule… “if any bands feel like getting up and playing, we’ve got hours and hours of radio time and award time to fill”

Apple’s cloud music service sounds good

This could be interesting. Businessweek:

Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars.

Sounds good, but of course price is going to be the key factor. The article suggests that it might be rolled into MobileMe, the£60-per-year cloud sync service Apple currently offers. That makes sense: MobileMe’s been due a revamp for a long time, and the rumours have been suggesting a music angle for a few months now.

“128 seconds that made people so happy”

I spotted this on MetaFilter: a superb and desperately sad article about the rise and fall of Bill Haley.

After ten minutes or so Billnitzer would bring him his food. But usually he was thinking about something, so he ignored it. After a while, though, he’d start to shift in his seat and look around. And then he’d start to hum. Billnitzer, refilling his coffee cup, knew the tune—everybody knew that tune. It was “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” the best-selling rock song of all time. She smiled, because she knew what he was doing. He was giving people around him clues. He wanted people to hear him and say, “You’re Bill Haley, aren’t you?”

But they rarely did.