Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

Carrie’s books | Carrie’s band

Author: Carrie

  • Digg-ing a hole

    Digg, the social news site formerly valued at around $200 million, was sold this week for a paltry $500,000. It’s been a long time coming, as I wrote in .net last year:

    There’s an old saying about websites: if you can’t work out what product the site is selling, then the product is probably you. It’s something website users often forget, which perhaps explains how people can get so angry when you slightly change a logo or layout. “This site, for which I pay nothing, has changed very slightly! I’m angry and demand compensation!”

    It can be a pain dealing with such complaints, but it turns out that the alternative is even worse. If you make it too obvious that the punters are your product, that they’re the computerised cows in your online abattoir, they tend to stop mooing and start moving. If enough of them escape, they can bring your entire business crashing down.

    Just ask Digg.

  • Word magazine is dead, and Q’s gone a funny colour. If you love a mag, subscribe

    A nice piece in The Atlantic on the demise of the much-loved Word magazine:

    But the recently announced demise of The Word, a nine-year-old British rock monthly, hurts more than most. The Word did something that seems beyond most of its competitors now: It breathed. Even at its most list-tacular, there was nothing assembly-line about it. When it puts out its final issue this week, the best music magazine anybody published in the last decade will be officially dead.

    If you’re looking for intelligent life on planet rock, many Word contributors now write for the revamped Q magazine, but it isn’t looking too clever: the current issue has a subscription deal offering 12 issues for just £12, which to me looks like a panicky move to protect a magazine on life support. If you haven’t seen Q recently it’s well worth your time, and at £12 for a year it’s a steal.

    Of course, the problems don’t just affect music magazine: the internet, the economy… you know the score. More than ever before, subscribing to the magazines you love isn’t just about saving money; it’s about ensuring that they can continue to delight you month after month – and these days subs can be for digital issues as well as, or instead of, dead-tree ones.

    Here are a few links to some of my favourites:

    .net  |  PC Plus |  MacFormat  |  What Laptop, Tablet and Smartphone  |  Tap!  |  Edge  |  Private Eye

    (Those subscription links aren’t an affiliate thing; I’m not getting any cash if you take out a sub to anything) 

  • Ooh ooh pointy thing

    Me, at Techradar, on why IMAX is better than 3D.

    When you consider all the cons of 3D – the price, the stupid specs, the hurty-eyes bit when you look at the background and it’s all blurry – against the single pro, which is that at some point you’ll be able to go “OOH OOH POINTY THING POINTING AT ME OUT OF THE SCREEN”, because nobody’s ever seen that in a cinema before… it’s proof that Hollywood thinks you’re an idiot.

    I can make my point in just three words.

    Top Cat 3D.

  • “Session musicians and computer experts produce a near-exact imitation of the original after hearing it on the radio”

    I’d never heard of this: artists being covered before they release their records. From The Telegraph:

    Copycat versions of popular songs have been widely available since digital downloads took off a decade ago.

    The practice sees session musicians and computer experts produce a near-exact imitation of the original after hearing it on the radio. The copies are sold on websites such as iTunes and Amazon, typically for 79p a track.

    Previously, however, the copies have only been released after the original version became popular.

  • Apple’s iPhone: quite good

    The iPhone is five today.

    Tech journalists like me are paid to be the Waldorf and Statler of technology, the grumpy old men in the Muppet Theatre’s balcony pouring scorn on everything they see, but even at my most jaded and cynical I can’t help being excited about where we are now.

  • OEMs in the firing line

    Me, on Techradar, writing about Microsoft’s Surface and Google’s Nexus 7:

    By getting Asus to make millions of exceptionally cheap Nexuses, Google isn’t saying “Hey, guys! Make these!” to the other OEMs.
    It’s throwing a tablet party, and the other OEMs aren’t invited.

  • Creative Bloq: a new site for creative types

    Permit me a quick plug: Dan Oliver, formerly of .net, has a new project: Creative Bloq. Promising a daily dose of design inspiration, the site aims to bring together the best content from the creative side of the Future Publishing portfolio – .net, ImagineFX, ComputerArts and so on – as well as commissioning original content. If you’re a creative, techy type it’s well worth your time.

  • If nobody is willing to pay you to do something, then it isn’t as valuable to the world as it is to you

    David Lowery of Cracker has been getting lots of attention for his long verbal kicking of an idiot. The short version: a girl boasted about never paying for music, and Lowery basically told her that when you download, you’re forcing musicians to kill themselves.

    I think both sides are rather overwrought here, so hurrah for legendary producer Steve Albini, who takes issue with the idea that musicians – almost uniquely among artistic fields – somehow deserve to be paid lots of money for what they do:

    If nobody is willing to pay you to do something, then it isn’t as valuable to the world as it is to you. You then decide if it’s worth doing for its own sake. If it isn’t, quit. If it is, carry on and who knows, maybe people will see value in it later and reward you. If not, you’re still doing something you want to do.

    Albini’s argument is that the war on free is over, and free won. No amount of arguing on the internet is going to change that, so you either need to adapt to the new realities or get out.

    my point is that there’s no return in trying to enforce these rights once they die a natural death, but there’s plenty of return in building a new paradigm that embraces the free sharing of music. The old way of monetizing recordings is over, and an industry still clinging to it is doomed.

    Albini isn’t saying that’s a good thing (or a bad thing). It’s just a a thing:

    Why is there no booming sculpture industry? Why are there no help wanted ads for mimes? Some creative work is valued more than the rest, and which art is so beknighted changes over time. In the near future you’ll see a lot of work for phone ap design, much less for magazine layout.

    Creative work is not primarily work, it’s primarily creative, and people do it because that’s how they want to spend their time. Its a rare confluence of circumstances that makes money change hands for it, and players in the game need to have quick feet.

    One of the arguments used in these debates is that it’s all very well saying artists need to tour, but what if they can’t or won’t?

    If your music/art is not making money in the commercial sphere and you’re not willing to perform live, then the only ways you can make a living would be through the generosity of a patron, academia or grantsmanship. Those avenues are unaffected by content being available for free on the internet.

    Downloads have changed the industry. Of course they have. But the truth about music is, like most creative arts, the overwhelming majority of people who do it aren’t financially rewarded for doing it. Even the really successful artists were a minority. Creative industries are famously low-paid: the majority of novelists, for example, earn a pittance – and those are the supposedly successful ones. Most don’t earn anything at all.

    As Mick Jagger put it back in 2010:

    people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

    Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

    So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

    This is not unique to music. Technology destroys industries. Check out the Yellow Pages next time it falls through your letter box, reduced from A4 to A5, hundreds of pages to a handful. Check out the state of high street retail, or travel agents, or Blockbuster video, or anything else whose business model disappeared overnight.

    The boom in recorded music was due to control and scarcity: the only way to get music was to buy it on a physical disc or cassette, and the people who made the discs and cassettes controlled supply. That’s gone, and you can mourn its departure all you like, but no amount of online censorship or tracking is going to make it come back again. The kids value videogames and internet connections and iPhones more than they do music.

    Recorded music is no longer special. The money has moved, and if your motivation is money then you need to move with it.

  • Where’s the bass?

    If any of you have been to arena gigs recently, you might be able to answer my question: where’s the bass?

    It’s a genuine question: bass guitars are good, but unless you’ve actually got your chin on the stage it’s pretty much impossible to hear them at arena gigs. The rockier the band, the worse the problem gets – and if you’re not a huge fan, in some cases entire songs go by and you’ve absolutely no idea what they were or whether they were any good.

    Is there something about those suspended PA rigs that means there aren’t enough bass bins sitting on the ground any more, or are soundmen and women just mixing things to make the kick drum as loud as possible at the expense of everything else?

  • “New and similar to Coffin Dodgers”

    According to an Amazon.co.uk email, if you liked CD you’ll like Chris Brookmyre’s When The Devil Drives and Where The Bodies Are Buried, Iain Banks’ Stonemouth, and Bateman’s Turbulent Priests.

    Thanks to Jamie Thompson for sending it to me: he’s right, the recommendations are unlikely to be reciprocated…