Archive for May, 2008
Digital music: still shit
Record labels are losing their battle with digital piracy as the number of people who regularly download songs legally falls back, research will claim today.
That’s in the UK where, by an incredible coincidence, the overwhelming majority of digital music is still sold with DRM.
Elsewhere in the Guardian, in a piece by Tim Anderson:
“The industry has finally been able to get some hard data about how removing DRM restrictions from legitimately purchased tracks affects piracy,” says Bill Rosenplatt, DRM specialist and president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “The statistics show that there’s no effect on piracy.”
So if people aren’t downloading legally, what are they doing? Surprise!
While 28% of music fans have paid to download music from a legal download store such as iTunes or 7 Digital, just as many have tried downloading from an illegal filesharing site.
Tellingly, 22% have carried on sharing files illegally, but only 14% have continued to download tracks from legal sites.
As ever, you can use a single album to demonstrate the problem. Let’s take Madonna’s Hard Candy, the Deluxe version with three remixes tacked on the end.
- Full quality CD version from Tesco, Amazon etc (without remixes) - £8.93 to £8.99
- DRMed, standard quality iTunes with a digital booklet - £9.99
- DRMed, unknown bitrate WMAs from Tesco Digital - £10.97
- DRM-free, 256Kbps MP3s from 7 Digital with a digital booklet - £10.99
- DRM-free, 320Kbps MP3s from torrents with scans of the CD artwork - nowt
True, the CD version doesn’t include the remixes - or “filler”, as it probably should be called - but given that digital is much cheaper to produce than the physical version, charging eleven quid for a download with a couple of extra mixes makes me want to torrent the Madonna album out of sheer spite. And I don’t even like Madonna.
In the UK, digital music is all over the place. Most music is still protected WMA (Windows) or AAC (iTunes), and while unprotected music is beginning to go mainstream it’s far from perfect. iTunes Plus is still being conspiciously ignored by most of the labels. Tesco now offers MP3s (of unspecified bitrate), but its selection runs to just 40 albums, most of them older than the universe. Play.com has a better selection at £6.99 for unprotected albums (of variable quality - most are 320Kbps, but some are 192), but there are huge gaps in the catalogue and £6.99 is still rather expensive for something whose manufacturing cost is essentially zero. Nice to see Half Man Half Biscuit in there, mind you.
If digital music was some new-fangled technology then the current mess would be forgivable, but it’s nine years since Napster demonstrated the power of P2P for distributing music, eight years since AllofMP3.com suggested an alternative, and seven years since the birth of Bittorrent and iTunes.
So why on earth is digital music still a mess? Former A&R man John Niven may have the answer.
Today you can walk into Asda or Tesco and pick up an LP for seven or eight quid. Back in the mid- to late nineties a new release routinely cost £12 to £15 - nearly £30 in today’s money. Factor in manufacturing costs of a few pence per unit and a royalty rate to the artist of about a quid and you’re have a profit margin to make Third World sweatshop owners wince.
It seemed that the artificially inflated good times would roll for ever.
Music business to Apple: give us more cash, for no good reason
Apple want to sell over-the-air downloads - that is, music you buy over the phone network - and the record companies want to charge more for them. As ever, John Gruber nails it (but he perpetuates the HST misquote about the money trench*):
The music labels think we should pay more for a song downloaded from a server that isn’t theirs, over a network that isn’t theirs, because, well, just because.
* I know, I know, but it really annoys me - not least because I misquoted it once myself. The full quote, from Generation of Swine, is: “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
A thorough film review by Mrs Bigmouth
Speed Racer: shite.
Evernote: organise your life
Evernote looks interesting: it’s an information organiser for PC and Mac with some clever features including web clipping and the ability to email photos to it from your mobile phone. It then scans the pics and runs character recognition on ‘em. It can also store audio and video, and seems happy with Office files and PDFs.
It’s in beta (by invitation only) just now, but if you want a go I’ve got a bunch of invites kicking around. Just ask for one in the comments.
Sick as a dog
It’s a typical morning in Bigmouth Towers. Baby Bigmouth has woken up an hour earlier than is fair or decent, and she’s dragging her dummy along the bars of her cot like a lifer in a maximum security prison. We get up, bleary eyed, and we hear the thundering of paws as Megan, Destroyer of Shoes, charges up the stairs to the baby gate, waiting for her chance to give Baby Bigmouth a good morning lick. As ever, I go to say hello to Megan, put on the coffee machine and have the first cigarette of the day.
But Megan isn’t at the baby gate. She’s on the sofa, flat on her back, jerking. Her mouth is foaming. I go over to her and she clearly doesn’t know who I am or what’s happening to her, and she bares her teeth and does the kind of barking you see on TV programmes with titles such as “when good dogs eat kids”. Something weird is happening, she thinks, and that baldy bloke is responsible. If he gets any closer I’ll eat his face.
I shout up to Mrs Bigmouth, “don’t come downstairs”. I grab the mobile, go outside and call the emergency vet number. They tell me that Megan’s having a seizure. She’ll be okay in a bit.
Sure enough, by the time the call is over Megan’s at the back door, sad eyed. I let her out and she immediately nuzzles into me, desperate for affection. I reassure her that everything’s OK and try not to blub.
I Google. It could be poison - Megan loves diving into gardens and chewing things she shouldn’t, and this is weedkiller, pesticide season. We make sure anything we use is kid- and pet-safe, but other people might not. Megan’s been sick, it might be that. It could be a reaction to a bite, or some rubbish she’s chewed when we weren’t looking, or something in the water when she was trying to drink an entire stream.
We go to the vet. Heart, temperature, other things, all okay. It’s epilepsy, the vet tells us. No cure. If it happens again, which it probably will, we’ll need to put Megan on phenobarbitol. Unfortunately that’s really bad news for her liver, so we’ll have to give her more meds to deal with that. It’ll probably take a few years off her life, too.
The thing is… if she’s got epilepsy it’s idiopathic epilepsy, which can’t be detected: it’s a process of elimination, the diagnosis when everything else has been ruled out. Yes, the vet did temperature, listened to her heart, but they didn’t do blood tests or anything else. The appointment was 3 hours after the seizure, so any symptoms from things such as poisoning may have been and gone by then. I don’t know. Those of you who have dogs - have you ever encountered a seizure that happened but didn’t recur? Or is the vet right in diagnosing epilepsy without checking in detail for anything else?
Should NME become a freesheet?
An interesting suggestion from No Rock’n'Roll Fun as NME unveils the seventy-third redesign this year:
Maybe the logical thing to do would be to abandon charging - perhaps except for subscribers, who could pay to ensure their supply - and try to build the readership that way. It might make more long-term sense than another relaunch every six months.
The full post takes an in-depth look at the NME’s latest new look. The verdict isn’t exactly a massive thumbs-up.
Fake Steve Jobs: Dell isn’t another Apple
With all the comedy and election stuff he writes, it’s sometimes easy to forget that Fake Steve Jobs is an excellent observer of the IT industry. This post is excellent: in response to an article suggesting Dell can bounce back just like Apple did, he pinpoints the things that made Dell successful and explains why they’re no longer relevant.
The other PC makers knew they were caught in an abusive relationship with their channel but it took them a decade or so to unwind the old relationships and sell direct like Dell did. Game-changer here was the Internet which made it easy for anyone to set up their own Web store and build direct relationships with customers. Dell’s advantage got erased.
[squeezing suppliers]… Trouble with this “innovation” is that the advantages it creates are fleeting. What wiped this one out was a little place called China. Have you heard of it?
PCs are, of course, a commodity business - so to stand out, you need to be better than everybody else. As FSJ writes:
To sustain an edge in any market you must make better products than your competitors, consistently, over and over and over again. Just making the same products as everyone else but taking a little friction out of the system can give you an advantage, but only a temporary one.
Database craziness - it’s not just the government
Shop staff who have been sacked or resigned while under suspicion of dodgy behaviour could soon struggle to find work, as some of the UK’s top retailers are set to share information online about their employment history.
As The Register notes, you can be listed on the database if you have “left a job while under mere suspicion” of dodgy deeds. As the TUC says:
this register could lead to people being excluded from the job market by an employer who falsely accuses them of misconduct or sacks them because they bear them a grudge. An individual may not be aware they have been listed and have no right of appeal.
Kill Your Friends: good on music, sub-American Psycho story
John Niven’s book, Kill Your Friends, is set in the music business at the height of Britpop. Niven knows what he’s talking about - he was an A&R man at the height of Britpop - and his protagonist’s rants about the music business, consumers and the general bovine stupidity of artists clearly come from experience. Pity the opening quote, Hunter S Thompson’s “cruel and shallow money trench” is a misquote (HST was talking about the TV business).
Here’s the book blurb:
It’s not dog-eat-dog around here…it’s dog-gang-rapes-dog-then-tortures-him-for-five-days-before-burying-him-alive-and-taking-out-every-motherfucker-the-dog-has-ever-known. Meet Steven Stelfox. London 1997: New Labour is sweeping into power and Britpop is at its zenith. Twenty-seven-year-old A&R man Stelfox is slashing and burning his way through the music industry, a world where ‘no one knows anything’ and where careers are made and broken by chance and the fickle tastes of the general public - ‘Yeah, those animals’. Fuelled by greed and inhuman quantities of cocaine Stelfox, blithely criss-crosses the globe (’New York, Cologne, Texas, Miami, Cannes: you shout at waiters and sign credit card slips and all that really changes is the quality of the porn’) searching for the next hit record amid a relentless orgy of self-gratification.
But as the hits dry up and the industry begins to change, Stelfox must take the notion of cutthroat business practices to murderous new levels in a desperate attempt to salvage his career.”Kill Your Friends” is a dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.
As a satire on the music industry, Kill Your Friends is pretty much peerless. (Real) A&R stupidity is mercilessly skewered, artists of all stripes get it in the neck and one particular rant, a Trainspotting-esque monologue about bands who want record deals, should be printed in 72-point type and nailed to the wall of every rehearsal room in the world. Some of the fictional artists are clearly drawn from real ones, like the self-indulgent drum’n'bass superstar and the band producing sub-Radiohead whiney nonsense, and many of the music business characters appear to be thinly disguised versions or composites of real-life characters.
As a novel, though, it isn’t great. Niven’s going for an American Psycho thing here, but American Psycho did it much better. You can’t help but think Niven should have written a memoir rather than a novel.
Don’t have a cow, man
You know the expression “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb”? A former police officer seems to be taking it as a motto. Not only has he been charged with sexual assualt on humans, but he’s also been accused of getting oral sex from a cow.
Additional charges have been filed against former Moorestown police officer Robert Melia after allegations surfaced last week that he performed several sexual acts with livestock, specifically cows. Melia, 38, of 126 Cottage Avenue in Moorestown has been charged with four counts of animal cruelty after purposely and knowingly tormenting an animal, specifically by having a cow perform fellatio
[via Fark]