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This was posted on Jockrock by Commander Keen. I haven’t seen the original. Dear Member You may have read the news stories this week about Google blocking access to ‘premium’ video content on YouTube in the UK as a result of their not agreeing a new licence with PRS for Music. Premium content appears to… [more]
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It’s Tuesday! First up: why the YouTube/PRS spat is bad news for musicians. Ultimately, though, the spat is like watching two bald men fighting over a comb. On one side we have a multi-billion dollar corporation demanding that musicians pay the price for its inability to find a properly profitable business model; on the other… [more]
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From the official blog: PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us – under PRS’s proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in… [more]
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What a brilliant, brilliant review. Anthony Lane: The bad news about “Watchmen†is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don’t have to stay past the opening credit sequence—easily the highlight of the film. As David Hepworth writes: There’s something… [more]
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Nice piece on Rock, Paper, Shotgun about proposals to enforce the age ratings on video games: I’d argue that enforcing age ratings on games is perhaps essential, and not because I’m worried about seven year olds playing GTA IV. I’m worried about 31 year olds not being able to play GTA IV. [more]
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A slightly inflammatory piece by me on Techradar: why the music industry doesn’t deserve government help. Now, like General Motors, the record companies are hurting – and like General Motors, they want the government to save them. GM wants cash; the record companies want ISPs to act as their policemen, while the Digital Britain report… [more]
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Wired Magazine has a fascinating piece about the rise of the netbook: For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they… [more]
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Between now and the 17th of March .net’s giving away free subscriptions via the mag’s Twitter account. More details here. [more]
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More words on the Internet. First, six companies Google should buy including, yep, Twitter: Google’s search spiders are amazing things, but they can’t do what Twitter Search does: let you see in real time what six million people are saying. Bringing Twitter into the fold could work in two ways: as a search tool in… [more]
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I wrote this four years ago: 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 Today’s Guardian reports that Arena is to cease publication after 22 years. In the same post, I wrote this: Perhaps the problem is that there’s… [more]
Read me in books
My debut memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was a Scotsman book of the year and Damian Barr’s Literary Salon book of the week, and it was shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards book of the year in the Discover category.
My latest book, Small Town Joy, is a celebration of queer influences on and queer artists in Scots music and is out now.
I’m also a contributor to the excellent anthology Fierce Salvage, which is also out now.
