Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Spotify: go big or go home

    Nice piece by Bob Lefsetz on the whole Spotify thing:

    The truth is, if you’re a superstar, there’s still plenty of money in music. And superstars are the future, because no one’s got time for any less. Just like there’s one iTunes Store, one Amazon and one Google, we don’t need a plethora of me-too acts, we just need excellence.

    It’s a bit more complicated than that, of course, but what it boils down to is this: the money in music isn’t where it used to be. For bands who don’t already have a following, streaming services are marketing channels, not cash generators.

  • How to make money from music

    An excellent piece by Eamonn Forde in The Guardian: if you can’t make money from streaming, how can you make money from music? The answer: get played a lot on Radio 2 or play a private gig for someone rich.

  • “Wasting my young years” is a great song

    Radio Scotland’s been giving this quite a lot of airplay recently, and quite right too: it’s lovely.

  • Another solution to the quiet iPhone 5 problem

    I’ve mentioned a few times that the iPhone 5 is much quieter than the iPhone 4/4S on some headphones, such as my Atomic Floyd Superdarts, and I suggested using the Denon Audio app to boost the volume. It’s better, but it isn’t perfect: if you’re trying to address a lack of low-end thump, as I am, it runs out of puff long before you’re happy.

    There’s a more elegant solution, but it’ll cost you £20: the FIIO E6 headphone amp. It’s good for ten hours between charges, it’s the size of a large postage stamp and it’s bloody brilliant.

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    If you’ve moved to the iPhone 5 and feel your headphones now lack oomph, this’ll solve your problems. I’m really impressed by it.

     

  • Ooh! I’m being pirated!

    JasonW informs me that Coffin Dodgers is actually being pirated (as opposed to being listed on sites that don’t actually have it). It’s here if you’re interested, although the download links try to get you to sign up for things you don’t need and install things you don’t want.

    The book is also available legally on Amazon, of course. Only 99p!

  • Worried about kids making in-app purchases? Change this setting

    Unscrupulous app developers are in the news again today, with parents suffering “bill shock” when the kids buy expensive in-game items without the parents’ permission. There’s a setting in iOS that makes such things possible even if you don’t share your password with your kids, and it’s a good idea to change it.

    It’s in Settings > General > Restrictions > Allowed Content (I’m assuming you’ve already used Restrictions to set some parental controls; if not, you need to click Enable Restrictions in here). By default In-App Purchases are enabled, and where it says Require Password, the default is 15 minutes. What that means is that if you enter your password to download a free app, the password is then stored for fifteen minutes – and during that period apps can sell expensive in-app purchases without asking for the password. Some kid-targeted apps are well aware of that.

    The simplest thing to do is to disable in-app purchases altogether, but if you don’t want to do that then you really ought to change the Require Password setting.

  • Thom Yorke, Ingenue unplugged

    This is just lovely. One of AMOK’s stand-out tracks stripped down to a single voice and piano.

    (From ITV’s Jonathan Ross show, May 2013)

  • Ten things technology is rendering redundant

    A fun wee thing I did for Techradar: ten digital-age dodos.

     

  • Website paywalls work, except when they don’t

    Paul Carr of NSFWCorp on the problem with some paywalls:

    Porous paywalls for journalism make as much sense as a coffee shop giving free lattes to anyone who comes in just twice a week but then charging fifty dollars a cup on the third visit. That’s a hell of a loyalty scheme, and a great way to encourage people to settle for just a couple of free cups of coffee rather than drinking more and having to pay.

  • “She consulted some kind of magical bullshit machine”

    Me on Techradar, writing about real world retailers’ troubles.

    In recent months we’ve seen lots of big names go belly up, citing too-high rates, rents and parking charges, as well as Amazon’s tax avoidance and dodgy downloads. There’s no doubt that it’s tough out there, and of course every retail job loss is a tragedy for the people put out of work.

    But it’d help if some businesses’ strategy for combating the internet threat wasn’t “deliver the most miserable shopping experience imaginable”.