Archive for February, 2005
Labels: downloads should be more expensive
The Financial Times reports that record labels are pushing for an increase in the cost of downloads.
Some leading music labels are in talks with online retailers to raise wholesale prices for digital music downloads in an attempt to capitalise on burgeoning demand for legal online music.
Fan mail
This is a new one: hate mail as a result of slagging off a computer-generated, helium-voiced chicken. Over to you, “Ray”:
YU FUKIN BASTRD SWEETY THE CHICK IS GREAT I HOPE YU BURN IN HELL TLK BOUT SET IM ON FYA ID RAVA SET YU ON FYA!!! WOT HARM IS IT DOIN 2 NE1?? FUK ALL SO HUSH YA MOUTH LIL RAT
Sperm theft
Love in the 21st Century: Boy meets girl. Boy gets jiggy with girl. Girl “steals” boy’s sperm. Girl uses said sperm to impregnate herself. Girl sues boy for maintenance. Boy sues girl for fraud and emotional distress.
“She asserts that when plaintiff ‘delivered’ his sperm, it was a gift — an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee,” the decision said. “There was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request.”
[Via MetaFilter]
Sony-BMG: “What matters to us is the consumer experience. So we’re going to make it worse.”
I wish I’d stayed in bed this morning - yet another news article has got me foaming at the mouth. This time it’s Reuters, who reports that Sony-BMG is getting serious about copy protection on CDs. Apparently it’s because customers are crying out for CDs that look like normal CDs, cost the same as normal CDs, but don’t work as well as normal CDs. Of course!
The news isn’t all bad, though: to compensate for selling you a sub-standard product, Sony-BMG will give you additional content, or as I prefer to call it, “crap”:
Sony BMG expects that by year’s end a substantial number of its U.S. releases will employ either Sunncomm’s newly enhanced MediaMax or First4Internet’s XCP to address piracy concerns. No matter which technology a CD uses, it will include such extras as photo galleries, enhanced liner notes and links to other features.
As Sony BMG’s Jordan Katz explains:
…the company wants to alert the industry that it is implementing the content-protection technology, because extensive consumer research indicates widespread customer acceptance of it.
BMG has used MediaMax on a number of titles, including Velvet Revolver’s “Contraband” and Anthony Hamilton’s solo album. In all, it has shipped more than 5.5 million content-enhanced and protected discs, which have been met with positive consumer reactions, according to Katz.
So in one paragraph there’s “widespread customer acceptance”, and in the other there’s “positive consumer reactions”. I call shenanigans, because Sony BMG is combining two very different things.
First of all, acceptance isn’t the same thing as approval. The copy-protected Velvet Revolver album reached number one not because it was copy protected, but because people bought the CD without considering copy protection; remember that the overwhelming majority of music buyers don’t faff around with digital music or iPods. So the album was bought in huge numbers *despite* being copy protected, rather than *because* it was copy protected. It’s only when those consumers get on board the digital music bus that they’ll discover they’ve paid for crippled CDs.
Meanwhile, hardcore users could bypass the copy protection on the Velvet Revolver album with ease. Is it available for free on the various file sharing networks? What do you think?
There’s another issue with the copy protection. The end user licence agreement on the US Velvet Revolver album contained this little gem:
Your rights to use the Digital Content are conditioned on your ownership of a license to use and possession of the original Compact Disc (CD) media and are terminated in the event you no longer own or possess the original CD media.
In other words, if you accept the licence - which you must do in order to play the music - then you agree that you won’t make a backup of your music. If you break or lose the CD and don’t delete the music from your computer, you’re a criminal. Nice.
Secondly, the “positive consumer reactions” are almost certainly to do with extra content. If someone were to ask you:
Would you like CDs that gave you extra goodies such as videos or photos?
Most people would say yes. However, if the question was:
Would you like CDs that give you extra goodies, but which won’t let you play them on your iPod, which might not work in your car stereo and which are likely to become unplayable much more quickly than normal CDs?
then the answer would be very different. So for example:
Would you like a free pint of lager?
Yes please!
How about I give you a free pint of lager? All you need to do to get it is to let me kick you repeatedly in the testicles for eight hours.
No thanks!
The latest generation of copy protection will let you copy a CD three times, but again there’s more to this than meets the eye: unless the technology is very different from the current versions I’ve seen, the music you’ll be able to copy will be an inferior, compressed version rather than the CD audio. And as most copy protection systems use Windows Media, that means that the record labels won’t let you play the music in the audio software of your choice, and they won’t let you transfer the music to your iPod. If I’m wrong, please let me know.
Even if you don’t plan to transfer CDs to your iPod, copy protection makes CDs less valuable. The technology adds errors to the disc in order to prevent computer drives from reading the music, and those errors make the CDs much more likely to fail in normal CD players. In the current issue of PC Plus, I’ve got a big article about Digital Rights Management technology; it includes a vivid illustration of the problems with CD copy protection:
In one particularly memorable instance in February 2004, the BBC radio programme You And Yours discovered that some copy protected CDs wouldn’t play in Volkswagens, as there were too many (deliberate) errors on the discs for the CD players to handle. On the show, a record industry spokesperson blamed Volkswagen and said “manufacturers must be aware of specifications that have changed considerably since 1980.” As Volkswagen pointed out, the Red Book CD standard hasn’t changed at all and its players are fully Red Book compliant; the problem is with the crippled CDs, not the in-car players.
From the consumer’s perspective, copy protection technology offers no benefits whatsoever - and lots of negatives. Sticking a few photos and liner notes on a crippled CD doesn’t compensate for that, and Sony BMG is being very sneaky by suggesting that approval of extra content is therefore approval of copy protection. If you want to keep your music collection legal but don’t want to be locked into a world where record companies dictate the hardware you use to listen to your tunes, then there’s only one solution: avoid Sony releases and give your cash to labels with a more enlightened attitude towards their customers.
Update, 1 March
Copyfight links to an analysis of consumer attitudes towards copy-protected CDs. It seems that whether you rip music or not, two-thirds of people would rather have a more expensive, unprotected CD than a cheaper, copy-protected one. Hardly “widespread customer acceptance”.
A wheely stupid idea: speed spies in every car
The Sunday Times reports that the European Union wants us all to have digital spies in our cars.
Black box recorders could be installed in all new cars under a European Union ruling.
The aircraft-style equipment would also act as a tracker, using global positioning satellites to record the location and route of a vehicle and to tell how fast a driver is going and whether seatbelts are being worn.
Like most dumb ideas, the plan will apparently improve our safety - but by its very nature, a black box recorder only records what has actually happened, rather than what’s going to happen. So if you get pissed out of your head and drive into a gaggle of schoolchildren, the black box won’t prevent you from killing anybody; all it can do is record just how fast you were going when you hit them. And in most cases, we don’t need black boxes to record that information, as the police and insurance firm accident investigators can usually identify the specific circumstances of any crash by checking tyre marks, vehicle damage and so on.
The thought of satellites monitoring our cars to check whether we’re wearing seatbelts - hardly the most pressing problem on the roads, not least because (unless I’ve missed the headlines about people flying through their windscreens and hitting pensioners like bizarre, fleshy cruise missiles) refusing to wear a seatbelt doesn’t put anyone other than yourself and/or your passengers at risk - seems like overkill, and of course it is. Nothing about the proposal makes sense, unless you’re utterly paranoid.
Which, of course, I am.
The black box proposal doesn’t make sense if the boxes are passive devices, boxes that merely record data for future use. If, however, the boxes are active - they can take action based on the data they record, or based on external stimuli - then they become much more interesting (and scary). If the box were to include an electronic speed limiter - something you’ll find in lots of modern cars, particularly performance ones - then it could respond to electronic speed limit signs. Drive into a “twenty’s plenty” zone and the speed limiter would kick in; you can mash the loud pedal as much as you like, but the car would stick religiously to the speed limit. Or the box could control your engine and braking in much the same way today’s anti-theft systems work: if for whatever reason an official wants to stop you, they simply hit a few keys on the keyboard and your car glides to a halt and locks the doors until the police arrive.
I find that sort of thing sinister, not because I’m a boy racer - after a few near-misses in my early 20s, my driving style is akin to that of a paranoid pensioner - or because I enjoy mowing down pedestrians (as much as I’d like to, sometimes) but because yet again it changes the relationship between us and the state. While some people do indeed drive like maniacs, most of us don’t; yet smart black boxes treat us all like criminals, monitoring our every move on the assumption that sooner or later, we’ll break the law. We’re no longer free agents, innocent until proven guilty; we’re all criminals, who must be watched at all times to make sure we stay honest.
My main objection, though, is much simpler. Governments and technology go together like puppies and napalm: whenever a state - particularly the UK, whose track record in IT is abysmal - comes up with a bright technological idea, it makes a huge horse’s arse of the project. It invariably misses the deadline by years, costs a million times more than budgeted, and doesn’t work properly - and if you’re one of the people whose data gets messed up, fixing the problem can be a hugely complicated and frustrating exercise.
Black boxes in cars, then: hugely expensive, of dubious merit, with awful implications for civil liberties and almost guaranteed to be a cock-up from day one - which means they’re almost certainly going to become mandatory. Perhaps instead of worrying about making smarter cars, we should try to find smarter politicians.
The future’s bright. The future’s orange
Humour comes from unexpected places, such as Glasgow’s bowler-hatted, sash wearing community. According to The Evening Times:
TOURISTS flock to Glasgow to watch Orange walks that cause no more trouble than the average football match, says the Grand Orange Lodge… the parades helped ease sectarian tensions.
…The [Orange Order] official also said: “The council must be careful not to create a situation where the prejudice and animosities of militant minorities are pandered to.”
I may be small. I may be sweet. But baby, I know how to move my feet
If the headline doesn’t mean anything to you, you’ve been spared the horrors of UK satellite television, where mobile phone ringtone firm Jamster is attempting to drive the entire country insane. The headline comes from a song performed by Sweety The Chick, a cartoon character that’s designed to be cute:
The song starts off quietly, with Sweety making bashful eyes at the camera; it then goes mental in a horrific lo-fi Eurodance style, with the melody approaching frequencies that are only audible to dogs. And thanks to the frequency and repetition of satellite TV advertising, the little bastard’s on my TV every ten seconds.
Sweety is the successor to Crazy Frog, a rather alarming looking cartoon frog that mimed to an old internet joke (remember the idiot test, where you saw a picture of a racing car and then heard a child making car noises? It’s that one) and which again was on TV every few seconds. I’m ashamed to say that a friend of mine has Crazy Frog as the ringtone on his phone, and as a result I’m never going to speak to him again. He should consider that a lucky escape, because whenever I hear Crazy Frog I want to start smashing things with hammers.
I don’t want to smash Sweety with hammers, though. No - I want to stab the little bastard with knives, boil him in oil, set him on fire, cut him into little pieces, set him on fire again, rub his face in a cheese grater, cover him in acid, jump up and down repeatedly on his head, cut him into even more little pieces, set fire to the pieces, and then fire him into space through a giant cannon. And once I’ve done that, I want to track down each and every employee of Jamster, lock them in tiny boxes and fill the boxes with itching powder, ground glass and maggots while the Sweety Song plays at earth-shattering volume through headphones I’ve nailed to their heads.
Nah, you’re right. That’s not nearly enough punishment. I’ll ponder this some more.
For god’s sake Microsoft, kill this ad campaign
“Your potential. Our passion. Our website isn’t working.”
OK, I added the last bit, but if you enter the URL in Microsoft’s current print ads (www.microsoft.com/uk/potential) you get the reassuring message:
The system cannot find the file specified.
You’d have thought someone would check that the URL in the ads actually worked, wouldn’t you?
Luckily it’s not too much of a disaster, because the advert’s not going to persuade any sensible person to check out the site. Microsoft does a lot of things very well, but advertising isn’t one of those things - and the current campaign is particularly bad.
The print ad (similar versions run on TV) shows some kids in a tree house, and a chalk outline of a jet has been superimposed on top of the pic. The copy runs like this:
We see
The King of the SkiesChildren dream of flight, to soar. These dreams become their potential. And with the right tools and a little help, they’ll make them more than their passion; they’ll make them their life. This is just one of the infinite possibilities that inspires us to create software that helps you reach your potential.
There’s a PDF of the ad on Microsoft’s web site.
As an indication of how persuasive that ad copy is, I had to refer to it not just to quote it, but halfway through each sentence because my mind had drifted away. It’s nebulous nonsense that says absolutely nothing, but which does so at huge expense. The TV spots are just as bad: something about a school, or something. I can’t remember. There are some other press ads, too. One of them is called “hat”. I can’t remember anything more about it.
For god’s sake, Microsoft, kill the campaign and shoot whoever greenlighted it. And then shoot them again, just to make sure.
Why do men’s magazines suck?
Following on from yesterday’s post about Hunter S Thompson wannabes, I’ve been thinking about men’s magazines and wondering: why do they all suck?
They really do, especially when you compare them to women’s magazines. Women’s mags are often derided for being formulaic, but it’s a formula that works: a bit of fashion, a bit of health, and a few “eek!” features to talk about during your lunch break. Oh, and the “number feature” - a cover line with a strange number, such as “297 ways to change your life!”. Marie Claire is arguably the best - its feature stories are always fascinating and beautifully written - but I’m developing a growing respect for R (”Real”) magazine, Red and a few others. These are all magazines that treat their readers with respect, and which fulfil the old journalistic mission of informing and entertaining in equal measure. I’m a huge fan, particularly of R Magazine.
On a brief tangent, the numbers features amuse me: check out the cover of women’s magazines the next time you’re in a newsagent, and you’ll see that they all do it. Here’s an example:
Heh. Back to the point…
Of course, there are plenty of dull, celeb-obsessed women’s magazines or hideous coffee-morning titles, but none of them are as depressingly bad as the men’s magazines - which have degenerated dramatically in recent years. When Loaded first came out it was fresh, funny and hugely entertaining; now, it’s a magazine for idiots. Early editions of FHM were hilarious, but now it’s a combination of dull SAS stories and half-naked “celebrities” whom I’ve never heard of, together with laughably unbelievable “true women’s confessions”. It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressing: with each issue, the interviews with z-list female celebrities become even closer to the wish-fulfilment of a pornographic magazine’s letters page. It’s pornography for people too young, too insecure or too short to reach the top shelf of the newsagent. Most depressing of all, it’s still a damn sight better than the lad weeklies, Zoo and Nuts.
Here’s the current blurb for FHM magazine.
And here’s a recent Loaded cover.
To be fair, FHM, Loaded et al are at the low end of the market; as Andrew O’Hagan wrote last year, they’re the glossy equivalent of the Sun. But the supposedly high-brow magazines suck, too, albeit for different reasons. Arena’s confused - it can’t make its mind up whether it’s going after GQ readers or Loaded readers, and falls flat between the two; GQ and Esquire feature the odd bit of decent writing but the columnists are dull, there’s far too much fashion (and the fashion’s insanely expensive, too) and the target audience clearly earns or aspires to earn a six- or seven-figure salary; and so on. So I find myself in magazine limbo: too old for FHM and Loaded, too poor for GQ or Esquire, too lazy for the various health and fitness mags and too young for the various political/current affairs titles.
Perhaps the problem is that there’s no real need for a men’s magazine, because most other magazines are for men. Computer magazines are largely read by men. Car magazines are almost exclusively read by men. Music, film… men men men men men. But I’m still convinced there’s a gap in the market, a need for a male equivalent of Marie Claire or even R Magazine. A magazine that isn’t aimed at sniggering schoolboys, that doesn’t write ten-page features on the correct way to wear cufflinks, that doesn’t tell me that I need to spend 18 hours a day in the gym to get the perfect body, that doesn’t cover a single subject (cars, gadgets, books, music) and that doesn’t hate, fear or envy women. A magazine that doesn’t make me skip 90% of its pages. A magazine that I wouldn’t be embarrased to have in my house. A magazine that, I suspect, doesn’t exist.
Maybe such a thing does exist, but if it does I don’t know where to find it. Any pointers appreciated…
Fancy a movie?
If you’re in Glasgow this weekend, you can catch the award-winning Manasarovar at the GFT: it’s on at 2pm on Sunday 27th, and 8.45pm on Monday 28th before starting the rest of its run in the UK.
From the Manasarovar web site:
Manasarovar is a love story that ends before it begins.
Ravi Roy (National Award winning Atul Kulkarni) meets Malathy Chandran (Neha Dubey of ‘Monsoon Wedding’) in a city in India on a short visit and falls in love with her. Unable to respond to his mischievous advances she rejects him. A few years later Ravi’s brother, George (Zafar Karachiwala) happens to meet Malathy. She learns from him that Ravi had disappeared and her past comes back through the letters they wrote to each other. She realizes that her predicament was one of no choices. With an aching mind she leaves for Manasarovar where all conflicts, regrets and pain end.
Manasarovar is about coincidences that hurt people.
As writer-director Anup Kurian explains, the film was made for around £20,000 using a 16mm camera bought from eBay, and it’s gone on to pick up a shelf-full of awards and festival appearances including Official Selection at the London Film Festival and Best Film and Special Jury Prize at the Mumbai international film festival.
I don’t think I’ll be able to catch the screenings, but if you go along let me know what it’s like - I do like the sound of it.