Another music industry attempt to deceive people...

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/05/ben-goldacre-bad-science-music-downloads

This article in the Guardian shows how the attempts by the music industry to claim that illegal downloading is costing them enormous sums of money per year continue to be undermined by the sheer ludicrousness of the claims. As The Sun newspaper breathlessly reported:

Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.

As writer Ben Goldacre points out:

That's about a tenth of our GDP.

Hmmmm. At this point I begin to smell a rat. We have a credulity issue right there. Let's drill into this a bit more:

But what about all these other figures in the media coverage? Lots of it revolved around the figure of 4.73bn items downloaded each year, worth £120bn. This means each downloaded item, software, movie, mp3, ebook, is worth about £25. This already seems rather high. I am not an economist, but to me, for example, an appropriate comparator for someone who downloads a film to watch it once might be the rental value, not the sale value.
In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press? Plenty will have been schoolkids, or students, and even if not, that's still about a third of the average UK wage. Before tax.

By now it should be clear that these numbers are, to put it mildly, rather exaggerated. But...wait for it:

Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

So...we have a recording industry body that multiplied its monetary loss estimates by a factor of 10 before publishing them? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked...and people wonder why the recording industry cannot gain any traction for it's plight? Maybe if they were to stop producing hyperbolic crap like this, stop suing their customers, and eat some crow, they might stand a chance of survival. However, I am not holding my breath...

06.13.2009 • Music Industry • PermalinkPermalink

Podcasts may be coming!

Ever since I became a sentient being I have been a good talker...so, working on the principle that it is shame to waste natural talent, I am looking at adding podcasts on music topics to this blog. The podcast will supplement the "music I'm currently listening to" series of postings.
There are some technical questions to be answered, since I do not want to put out sub-standard crap. Watch the blog for further announcements.

05.13.2009 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

Well, this article puts me in my place as far as iPod usage is concerned...

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/30/smallbusiness/bling_your_ipod.fsb/index.htm?postversion=2009050106&iref=werecommend

From the pages of CNN we find an article about a start-up that will retrofit iPods with larger hard drives. The example used is a bit humbling for me:

Like many consumers, John Mayberry was looking to upgrade his iPod. The IT technician had 50,000 songs stored on his computer, but his 60-gigabyte iPod maxed out at 12,000 songs.

Hmmm...50,000 songs...I don't think I have much more than 20,000. It seems that I have work to do...however, the start-up might be of interest to several of my friends and family whose iPods are full. I don't think I am going to exhaust the disk capacity on my 160Gb iPod any time soon.

05.3.2009 • Music • PermalinkPermalink

This Month's Listening - April 2009

John Martyn - Andy Kershaw BBC show 2008
This is maybe the last live recording from John Martyn, who died in January at the early age of 60. The highlight is a deep, resonant version of "Glorious Fool", Martyn's 1980 song about the rise of Ronald Reagan ("out of the West came a Glorious Fool.."). This version, with Martyn's gruff vocals, inventive guitar solos, and a cleverer multi-layered keyboard and synth backing, functions almost as an epitaph for me.

04.20.2009 • Music I'm Currently Listening To • PermalinkPermalink

R.I.P. John Martyn

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martyn_(singer)

Sad news that John is not with us any more...but not unexpected, since he seemed to be in poor health...his was a life lived hard and rough, with many twists and turns and personal and artistic setbacks, but like many true artists he was able to channel emotions into his musical output, musically, lyrically and vocally.
Having been exposed to his music via listening to "Solid Air" and "Inside Out" late at night at my friend's house, I remember going to Salford in 1974 to see him (the gig before the concert which was released on "Live At Leeds"). He had Danny Thompson and John Stevens with him, and they meshed beautifully together, especially on "Solid Air", where Stevens' brush drums sounded like rain and wind combined, they were so subtle. He brought Paul Kossoff on towards the end of the set, and although Paul did look a little spaced-out, he was still playing beautiful guitar solos and lead parts. It was a great and magical evening.
Later on John switched gears and sounds and took up electric guitar mostly full-time, which did not sit well with many fans (however, he once remarked that what really pissed people off was that he started wearing a suit on stage). He wrote one of the two great eviscerations of Ronald Reagan with "Glorious Fool" (the other is "B Movie" by Gil Scott Heron, another artist who has been fighting demons for a long time), and produced the amazing "John Wayne" from somewhere else in the early 80's. The definitive reading of this tune from "Down and Dirty - Live" features John's growling, snarling vocals in front of David Gilmour playing lead guitar, and is only slightly spoiled by the use of sampled drums from Miles Bould. More recently, he took over other folks' tunes on "Church With One Bell", which very few artists doing cover versions can do - most of them end up like facsimiles of the original, but when John sang them it sounded like he owned them (in fact, it sounded like he had written them). In guitar playing terms, I remain semi-convinced that The Edge should be paying royalties to John Martyn - many of his U2 guitar stylings are little more than re-treads of John's Echoplex patterns from the early 1970's. Anybody who has listened to "Outside In" can detect the line of descent from there to many U2 guitar parts.

Rest In Peace John.

UPDATE - The radio station WNYC broadcast a tribute to John as part of its regular series "spinning on air" last week.

02.7.2009 • Artists • PermalinkPermalink