taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

RTE reports that 4 record companies, EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music, have brought a High Court action to compel Eircom — Ireland’s largest ISP — to prevent its networks being used for the illegal downloading of music:

Willie Kavanagh, Managing Director of EMI Ireland and chairman of IRMA, said because of illegal downloading and other factors, the Irish music industry was experiencing a “dramatic and accelerating decline” in income. He said sales in the Irish market dropped 30% in the six years up to 2007.

EMI and the other companies are challenging Eircom’s refusal to use filtering technology or other measures to voluntarily block or filter illegally downloaded material. Last October Eircom told the companies it was not in a position to use the filtering software.

(I wonder if those dropping sales in the Irish market comprise only CDs sold by Irish shops? 2001 to 2007 is also the time period when physical sales have given way to online shopping on a gigantic scale, especially for music.)

The Irish Times coverage includes another interesting factoid, which appears in a lot of press regarding this case:

Latest figures available, for 2006, indicate that 20 billion music files were illegally downloaded worldwide that year. The music industry estimates that for every single legal download, there are 20 illegal ones.

A little research reveals that that figure comes from the IFPI Digital Music Report 2008. I’d have a totally different take on it, however. In my opinion, the figure is probably correct, but not for the reasons the IFPI want them to be. There are a number of factors:

• it’s bloody hard to buy legit MP3s online. You can buy all sorts of shitty DRM-laden formats, or rent access to files that “expire”, or buy MP3s in certain jurisdictions but not in others, or on certain platforms. So this is the main reason, in my opinion, why legit music downloads are a lot lower than they could be – because it’s tricky to get a legit download!

  By contrast it’s a lot easier to log in to a filesharing service and download high-quality, DRM-free MP3s. Consumers have indicated that DRM frustrations drive them to filesharing sites, and no less than the Executive Vice President of the MPAA recognises this. (It looks like the IFPI dispute this, however.)

• people, given the opportunity, tend to download free music, whether or not they plan to listen to it. It could be called the “radio effect”; they might listen to it, or they might not, there’s no pressure. If they have to pay for it, however, they’ll only download the stuff they really want. I definitely noticed this when the legal download site EMusic switched from an “all you can eat” model to a certain number of files per month; I immediately stopped downloading tunes speculatively, and restricted myself just to the ones I had already decided I wanted.

• on BitTorrent filesharing sites, downloaders need to maintain high sharing ratios — so they download files just in order to re-upload them, regardless of whether they want them or not. (so I’m told. ;)

There’s more commentary on the 20-to-1 figure here.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 also notes:

“2007 was the year ISP responsibility started to become an accepted principle. 2008 must be the year it becomes reality”

Governments are starting to accept that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should take a far bigger role in protecting music on the internet, but urgent action is needed to translate this into reality, a new report from the international music industry says today.

ISP cooperation, via systematic disconnection of infringers and the use of filtering technologies, is the most effective way copyright theft can be controlled. Independent estimates say up to 80 per cent of ISP traffic comprises distribution of copyright-infringing files.

The IFPI Digital Music Report 2008 points to French President Sarkozy’s November 2007 plan for ISP cooperation in fighting piracy as a groundbreaking example internationally. Momentum is also gathering in the UK, Sweden and Belgium. The report calls for legislative action by the European Union and other governments where existing discussions between the music industry and record companies fail to progress.

So it seems Ireland is the vanguard of an international effort by IFPI members to force ISPs to install filtering, worldwide. It seems the same happened in Belgium last year — and I reckon there’ll be similar cases elsewhere soon.

Either way, I doubt this will be good for Irish internet users.

(PS: while I’m talking about buying MP3s online — a quick plug for 7digital. Last time I used them, I had a pretty crappy experience, but the situation is a lot better nowadays. They now have a great website that works perfectly in Firefox on Linux; they sell brand new releases like the Hercules and Love Affair album as 320kbps DRM-free MP3s; they support PayPal payments; and downloads are fast and simple — right click, “Save As”. hooray!)

Some other blog coverage: Lex Ferenda with some details about the legal situation, and Jim Carroll.

Update: EMI Ireland seem to be singing from a different hymn-sheet than their head office… interesting.

Update 2: I’ve taken a look at the Copysense filtering technology, and how it can be evaded.

Tags: eircom, filesharing, ifpi, ireland, isps, law, mp3, music

A friend of a friend writes:

Unless you are pretty good at avoiding the media, you will be aware that Dustin the Turkey has been chosen as one of six finalists for RTE’s Eurosong, the winner of which will go on to represent Ireland in the Eurovision Song Contest in Serbia in May.

What you may not be aware of is that I wrote and recorded the song with him and need your votes to help get me to Serbia!!!

The TV show will be broadcast live on RTE this Saturday Feb 23rd, at 7pm. It is a televote (a la X-factor format), so get your mobile phones ready. The results are at 9:45pm.

The song, Irlande Douze Points, is a parody on the current types of songs, acts and block-voting in the Eurovision. It may make your ears bleed a bit, you may ask yourself why, but what the hell, send someone you know to the final!!!

Apparently, Dustin urges the contest judges to “give douze points to Ireland, for its lowlands and its highlands, for Terry Wogan’s wig and Bono’s leather pants. We brought you Guinness and Westlife, 800-years of war and strife, but we all apologise for Riverdance.”

Check out the outraged reactions from Ireland’s past Eurovision “winners”:

Frank McNamara, who wrote two of the Irish Eurovision winners, asked whether RTE, the state broadcaster that selected the six acts, was “giving two fingers” to Irish ’song’writers. “I think it is absolutely disgraceful.”

Shay Healy, who wrote Johnny Logan’s Eurovision hit What’s Another Year?, wondered “how any bunch of grown-ups could come up with this as a solution”

Phil Coulter thought that Eurovision was going “down the tubes”.

The choice on Saturday is between a turkey puppet taking the piss in a Northside accent, and such po-faced “serious pop” mawkfests as ‘“Double Cross My Heart” performed by Donal Skehan’ and ‘“Time to Rise” performed by Maya’. snore. You know it’s got to be the turkey.

Here’s the official Bebo page, and the Facebook group — and here’s the song itself:

Update: actually, here’s another, higher quality clip — with an entirely different song! Let’s hope this is the one…

Update 2: he won. Dana and the other professional Eurovision types have been chewing wasps, it’s hilarious!

Tags: dustin, eurovision, ireland, music, pranks

Apparently EMI are now offering their DRM-free MP3s via 7digital, so I thought I’ve give the newly-revamped 7digital site a go. Results were a little mixed, unfortunately.

I found a couple of tracks I wanted which were available as MP3 format, clicked the “purchase” button beside them, and they were added to the “basket” on the right-hand side. Pretty typical stuff, if you’ve used EMusic or iTunes. Then I created an account, chose to pay using Paypal, paid a couple of quid and all was well!

The good stuff:

• the website works great in Firefox on Linux, and was nice and speedy.

• the range of music seems pretty good; most of the catalogue is WMA-only unfortunately, but most of the new releases now seem to be coming out with MP3 as an option.

• it’s very easy to pay by credit card or with Paypal.

There were a couple of glitches, however.

First, it allowed me to buy a file, then not give it to me. My first tester track was the Soulwax remix of ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ by Gossip. I happily added it to my basket, checked out, and paid — then when I got to my ‘Your downloads’ page, I was presented with this:

Gossip - Standing In The Way Of Control (Soulwax Nite Version) / 6:54 / Released 24.06.2007

No download links etc… hmm. A quick check of today’s date reveals that the 24th is a week from now — the track hasn’t been released yet! It seems this isn’t yet “available as a digital release” for some reason, despite the fact that as far as I can tell it’s been out for ages on CD. The only way to spot this in advance of purchase is to look at the “Digital release date” on the album info page and compare with today’s date; there’s no other notification that you’ll be buying a prerelease, and will have to wait to get your digital mitts on what you buy. Grrrr.

OK, next one; my other tester track was the title track from the new White Stripes, Icky Thump. At least this one was available. Now, supposedly we’re getting 320kbps MP3s, right? Not so, it seems — this one was 192kbps, a fact that’s only revealed once you’ve already paid for the tracks. Double grrr…

(it turns out, by the way, that only the “EMI content” is delivered in 320kbps format. I guess the other MP3 labels are sticking with 192kbps.)

So, two for two, both of the test downloads turned out to be wonky in one way or another. A bit disappointing. I hope they’ll improve though — there seems to be a new willingness to offer a decent MP3 music-download service there… and this is still more convenient for me than having to boot up a Windows virtual machine to use the iTunes Music Store.

They could really do with signposting exactly what you’re getting more clearly, though; in particular, being able to search by available format and bitrate would really help.

Tags: 7digital, ireland, music, reviews, shopping, uk

Optimo have a new mix up — the First Hour Mix:

Here’s the fourth in a brief series of mixes where we present something a little different. This mix isn’t really a mix in the conventional sense but rather 17 tracks blended together. To us, the first hour of Optimo, or to be more accurate, the ‘Espacio’ part of Optimo (Espacio) is a vital part of the night. It is our chance to play absolutely what we like without thinking about the dancefloor.

It’s a great mix — certainly not dancy, but some really interesting tracks here. The Optimo guys put together some really great music.

In fact, I went to see them play last Saturday — or, at least, myself and a couple of mates tried to. Supposedly, they were supporting The Juan Maclean at the Bud Rising festival over the weekend, but the show was such a shambles, without anyone having a clue when it started or who was on stage at any time, I’m pretty sure we missed their set entirely.

On top of that, it was EUR20 in, and to add insult to injury, the only lager on sale was Budweiser! I mean, I wouldn’t mind that if the “Bud Rising Festival” deal meant free entrance, but charging 20 squids and then cutting off the supply of decent booze as well, is just a crime.

Ah well, the Filthy Dukes were pretty good at least.

Tags: bud-rising, budweiser, dublin, festivals, ireland, live-music, mp3, music, optimo, sponsorship

I’ve realised I like the endings of songs; whether I like a song or not, entirely depends on how it ends.

Apple’s iPod shuffle algorithm is incredible. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time listening to it, and I’m sure it’s not random; I think it’s picking next tracks based partly on the similarity of metadata between the current and candidate tracks, which is quite neat as an automated mixing technique.

So is it random? Google says:

• yes
• no; a commenter on that article notes the same thing I’m talking about
• yes
• no; can’t say I’ve noticed the Beatles getting a push on mine
• yes
• and finally, no answer here, but a pretty cool stats experiment

Tags: apple, ipod, mp3, music, randomness, shuffle

Via Cory at Boing Boing, here’s a great Wired post-mortem on how all the corporate vested interests (including Apple!) turned a nice concept for a new, music-playing mobile phone, into a useless, DRM-hogtied, designed-by-committee turd.

That’s worth a read, in itself. However, what really blew my mind was this:

Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president of Nokia and head of its multimedia group, has bad news for the [music] labels. … He pushes a couple of buttons on the [phone's] keypad. Up pops Symella, a new peer-to-peer downloading program from Hungary. As the name suggests, Symella is a Symbian application that runs on Gnutella, the P2P network that hosts desktop file-sharing apps like BearShare and Limewire. It was created earlier this year by two students at a Budapest engineering school that for four years has been exploring mobile P2P in conjunction with a local Nokia research center.

Symella doesn’t come installed on the N91; Vanjoki downloaded it from the university Web site. “Now I am connected to a number of peers,” he continues, “and I can just go and search for music or any other files. If I find some music I like and it’s 5 megabytes and I want to download it - the carriers will love this. It will give them a lot of traffic.”

I had no idea the platform was that open, at this stage. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next…

Tags: apple, design-by-committee, filesharing, flop, itunes, motorola, mp3, music, p2p, phones, via:boingboing

Linux: the MythTV hacking continues (infrequently). Here’s the latest – a way to play music from my laptop, with sound output via the Mythbox.

Tags: laptop, linux, music, mythbox, mythtv, output, sound, way

Security: Ross Anderson, crypto and security guru extraordinaire, moonlights as – wait for it — a street bagpipe player:

I play the pipes (the Great Highland Bagpipe and the Scottish smallpipes). I played competitively as a teenager, and thereafter paid my way through university by working as a street musician in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Denmark.

NOOOOOO! ANYTHING BUT THE BAGPIPES!!!

Only joking. But yes, he really does play the bagpipes. And that submission to the EU’s consultation on the management of copyright and related rights is worth a read, to get an idea of how the new increased enforcement of music copyright has had chilling effects on the viability of the UK’s folk music scene. (found via Karl-Friedrich Lenz.)

Tags: bagpipe, copyright, crypto, extraordinaire, great, guru, music, player, security, street

War: A couple of war links, I’ll keep it short. ;)

High-profile air strikes ‘killed only civilians’. ‘The American military launched some 50 air strikes designed to kill specific targets during the Iraq war, it emerged yesterday, but none of them found its mark. Instead the air strikes had a high civilian toll, according to military officials serving at the time.’ Still, it sounded good, like as if CSI were doing all the war strategification and stuff ;)

And: the
Pentagon ‘Torture Memos’ took some tips from the torture techniques used in Northern Ireland in the 1970s.

Music: Licensing row mars iTunes launch. UK indie labels report that ‘where Apple has spoken to labels the terms on offer have been commercial suicide’, and as a result, they won’t be selling their tunes via iTMS Europe.

I agree with Mark Twomey on this one — bad move. This (and the prices!) reduce the Euro-iTunes offering to about the usefulness of whatever that one is that Real.com have (you know, the one you can’t even remember the name of) – and nobody in Europe buys major-label music online anyway.

Tags: air, couple, high-profile, mark, music, none, time, toll, war, yesterday

Music: Ever wondered what the lyrics to Plastic Bertrand’s classic belgopunk tune really said? (Apart from ‘I am the king of the divan’, that is.) Wonder no more. (…ok, maybe these are a bit more likely. ‘Ey up!’, indeed.)

Mail: Google Mail front page. It has MXes — but they don’t answer yet. No SPF record yet, either ;)

Funny: XCP - the XML Control Protocol ‘is a drop in replacement for traditional Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. With the advent of XCP/IP, connection-oriented networking will finally move from the legacy environment of inscrutable bits and bytes to a structured, human-readable world relying upon XML. XCP is the first 4th Generation Protocol, or 4GP. It is designed for a networking environment that is very fast and very reliable - the Internet of today!’

Tags: belgopunk, control, environment, mail, music, networking, plastic, protocol, tune, xcp, xml

EU: EU Reporter (PDF) thoroughly trashes the new law:

The legislation as structured is opposed by lawyers and judges, who have said that large corporations will be able to slap pre-emptive injunctions on small manufacturers and put them out of business without any fear of having to pay compensation if their action proves to be no more than to gain commercial advantage.

Music companies will get the right to demand raids merely on suspicion of a breach including on private homes.

WITHOUT PROOF factories could be closed, assets and bank accounts frozen by opportunist actions based on patents claims, Greg Perry, Director General of the Brussels-based European Generic Medicines Association told EU Reporter. …

Pressure from the current 15 Member States is being blamed by a large swathe of industry for rushing bad legislation into law. Surprisingly, one of Britain’s largest corporations has slammed both parliament and Council saying: ‘It will take many years to undo the damage that this legislation has the potential to do.’ Unsurprisingly the corporation, normally close to the British Government, refused to be named.

Tags: action, advantage, business, compensation, eu, fear, law, legislation, music, pdf, reporter

Linux: I’m really getting into KDE 3.2. I’ve been looking for a music player that is better at handling large collections of MP3s better than the venerable XMMS, without much luck:

iTunes is, of course, the ‘gold standard’, but is Mac/Windows only, so that’s not going to work on my Linux machine.

Rhythmbox is getting there as an iTunes clone, but right now is woefully incomplete. It fails to play lots of my music, has serious interface shortcomings — you can rate songs, but then there’s no way to use those ratings, and you cannot edit any of the tag metadata in the released version.

JuK is the new KDE music player app. Initially, I wrote it off — it uses the clunky interface of ‘one big list’, at first glance.

But after Rhythmbox managed to confuse itself sufficiently so that it would only open as a 3-pixel-high window (seriously!), I gave JuK another try. Summary: it kicks ass.

It turns out that the multi-pane ‘artists, albums, and tracks’ mode of iTunes and Rhythmbox isn’t actually necessary, since JuK improves on it using a very nifty dynamic ‘Tree View’ mode.

Another nice feature is the MusicBrainz integration; it has built-in support for querying MB’s servers to get correct tag data for your music. In fact, its tagging support is fantastic — this is unsurprising, as it looks like it started off as a tagging app.

Being a well-written KDE app, it exposes some nifty scripting support via DCOP, and a quick look-over with KDCOP reveals a nice set of APIs — for example, running dcop juk Player playingString tells me the name of the track and artist playing right now. I’m not sure if there’s a way to register for callbacks on events like ‘track change’ just yet, here’s hoping…

No sign of rating support just yet, though; my dream player would allow me to rate my tracks, and then make a dynamic playlist which selects tracks by rating, playing the top-rated ones more often and never playing the bottom-rated ones. Here’s hoping it’s in the pipeline ;)

All in all, though, it looks like I’ll be giving JuK a try.

Tags: app, interface, juk, kde, linux, mode, music, player, rate, rhythmbox, support

Social: It’s a blogsplosion! (neologism, Creative Commons license, cheers.)

First off, we have Old Rottenhat, a fantastic group-weblog featuring several old mates of mine, musing on music (Eoghan), psychogeography (Delaney), quitting work (Dr.), and random comments (Krossie). It’s great reading.

Next, Tom has finally set us up the blog in the form of Linux and Goblins, ‘your home for neither of the above’, with some trademark Tom-style moaning, half-baked ideas, and pestering of some politician git called Phillip Boucher-Hayes.

Both are now firmly ensconced in the sidebar, and on my daily list… an RSS feed for Old Rottenhat can be found here, and I’ll be making one for Tom too when I get the chance.

Tags: blogsplosion, commons, creative, eoghan, license, mine, music, neologism, old, rottenhat, social

Music: … from CDWow selling us cheap CDs. Paddy forwards on the news — ‘CDWow.ie will now charge EUR 3 on every CD sold from their Irish site. And they wonder why people download music illegally…’

It seems that IRMA and the BPI both joined forces in this case against CDWow, hence this decision affects Ireland, too. The record industry are very happy — ‘it is not the consumer that will suffer, just CD Wow’s profit margins.’ Not entirely clear how the consumer doesn’t suffer due to a 3 Euro surcharge, but I’m sure they have it all worked out.

Globalisation where it suits the producers, rather than the consumers, is the name of the game here.

More at The Register.

(Thanks, Paddy!)

Tags: bpi, case, cdwow, consumer, decision, download, eur, music, news, site

Politics: G2: Tales of Tel Aviv.

Tomer, aged 33, a promoter in the music business who personifies Israel’s lost generation, the soldiers of the two intifadas: ‘There’s no prize any more for being a good soldier or a good citizen, we all have a mental scratch - for some of us it’s a scar, for others it’s a Grand Canyon. The saddest thing for me is seeing people in their mid-20s with such an empty look in their eyes. All the symptoms are of people losing hope, of seeing no solution.

At the moment I’m trying to promote the Geneva accords as much as possible. We’ve all made so many mistakes in this region, what else have we got to lose? But mainly, I’m just sad.’

Tags: business, citizen, generation, music, politics, prize, promoter, scar, scratch, soldier, tomer

Web: What’s the link between Debian Linux and Dueling Banjos? Any ideas? No? Well, according to Debian Weekly News of September 16th, 2003, it’s become what’s called a Google-flop:

No Dueling Banjos from Debian. Some of the most bizarre mails on debian-devel over the years have been repeated requests by various people for the sheet music for dueling banjos. Several list subscribers have been eager to assist the posters in their search. Jim Penny called this the Dueling Banjo Effect and explained that this has become a self-perpetuating Google-flop. People use Google which points them to Debian to get this sheet music, and the act of asking reinforces Google’s notion that Debian is a good place to get the music.

(thanks to Rick Moen for pointing this out on the ILUG list.)

Tags: banjos, debian, dueling, google, google-flop, link, linux, list, music, sheet, web

Music: Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Tags: gear, head, hentai, industry, look, music, obsession, paedophilia, pop, schoolgirl

Warren Ellis on pop:

The American music industry … seems to have sunk into a bizarre obsession with paedophilia. Britney Spears has gone from schoolgirl gear to a deeply strange hentai look, little-girl head stuck above great shiny plastic boobs, singing in a Minnie Mouse voice. No wonder she was being stalked by a shifty-looking middle-aged Japanese bloke. He probably had a suitcase full of tentacles to use on her. Christina Aguilera gifts us with the vision of a twelve-year-old girl in leather chaps and a rubber bra.

He’s right, you know… I blame porn-addled middle-aged music biz producers, myself. (Found via the null device.)

Tags: gear, head, hentai, industry, look, music, obsession, paedophilia, pop, schoolgirl

Music: So the current news on the Irish web scene is the Irish Recorded Music Association, Ireland’s very own mini-RIAA, attempting to sue cheap CD vendor CDWow.ie out of the Irish market.

CDWow sell CDs cheap, by shipping from Hong Kong. Yes, the price differential between Hong Kong and Europe is so big that even considering the shipping costs, it works out significantly cheaper for the consumer.

The IRMA page on the issue is hilarious, with vague threats of ‘credit cards floating through cyberspace’ (whatever that means), and comments like: ‘Remember every CD Wow purchase is a nail in the coffin of an Irish job’, because so much of the bland, multinational, big-music-industry output is produced in Ireland. Suuuure.

Read on at the Boards.IE discussion. ‘Doctor J’ on that forum notes:

I saw a Ween cd, manufactured in the USA, on sale in HMV for EUR44.99 last night.

• CD Universe - EUR14.99
• HMV.co.uk - UKP17.99
• Tower.co.uk - UKP9.41

Are IRMA seriously suggesting it is in the interests of the Irish consumer

to be ripped off by almost EUR30???

Tags: cdwow, consumer, eur, hmv, irish, music, news, recorded, scene, ukp, web

Music: Delta Force (The Observer) — you couldn’t make this up:

‘I ask T-Model if I can hear him play. ‘Let’s go,’ he says and we get into his big blue 1979 Lincoln Continental and drive across the railroad tracks to a corner house in a part of Water Valley I have never seen before. An old man with one eye and no teeth is in a wheelchair on a rotting front porch, trying to attach a prosthetic leg to his stump.

‘Hey Pete!’ yells T-Model. ‘Y’all got any elec-quickery up in there? We fixin’ to play a little music.’ ‘Hey bluesman, you come on. We got electric,’ says Pete and then his leg falls off with a clatter. ‘I ain’t never gonna get used to this damn fool leg.’

Tags: continental, corner, delta, drive, force, hey, leg, music, observer, odel, railroad

Music: Audio Lunchbox — let’s just quote the key parts of the FAQ:

• Audio Lunchbox is the premiere digital download destination for the best new independent music.
• ALL of the music on Audio Lunchbox is DRM-free. There are no technology imposed usage restrictions on the files you download. You can listen to the files you download however you like as long as it’s for your own personal use.
• Every track on Audio Lunchbox is available in two formats: MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.
• Browsers known to work with our service include Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Galeon, Epiphany and Konqueror.
• Anyone in the world can download tracks from us.

Good answers!

The music isn’t quite there yet — all I can find is current LA favourites, Death Cab for Cutie, but I can wait. For now, it’ll go alongside Epitonic as a good source of decent MP3s; and I hope the selection builds up well…

Tags: all, audio, destination, download, drm-free, faq, lunchbox, music, premiere, quote

Art: Jason Salavon: Selected projects, 1997 - 2003.

Salavon operates by taking data from various sources (DVDs of late-night talk shows, homes for sale in various states, MTV’s 10 Greatest Music Videos of All Time, Playboy centerfolds, etc.), then statistically combining them and converting that into another image, movie, or whatever.

The results are excellent. Check out Homes for Sale and Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized).

I remember somebody asking me what I thought ‘computer art’ (sic) should be like, after I dissed yet another lame pixellated Photoshop/Flash thingy. Now I have something to point at ;) I’m well impressed.

Tags: art, dvds, greatest, image, mtv, music, playboy, sale, talk, time, videos

Music: This is great. Microsoft’s general manager for the Windows Digital Media division, Dave Fester, on iTunes for Windows:

If you use Apple’s music store along with ITunes, you don’t have the ability of using the over 40 different Windows Media-compatible portable music devices. When I’m paying for music, I want to know that I have choices today and in the future.

Oh, the schadenfreude. (I wonder how many MP3-compatible portable music devices there are?)

Tags: apple, digital, division, itunes, manager, media, microsoft, music, store, windows

Music: Indie Labels Debut At iTunes Music Store: ‘I happened to notice a Thievery Corporation release from Eighteenth Street Lounge Music in the ‘Just Added’ section…doing some more exploring, I found releases from Matador (Interpol, Pizzicato Five) and Nettwerk (BT) as well.’ (thx Karlin !)

Hmm — that’s good news for iTunes, but pretty bad news for EMusic. Those labels are all very well-represented on EM.

Wonder if I can run iTunes under Wine?

Tags: corporation, debut, eighteenth, indie, labels, music, news, release, store, thievery

Bits: BarbieOS, a cutdown version of Debian from Mattel. Really. ‘BarbieOS 1.0 is the result of almost a year’s worth of marketing research into what pre-adolescent girls want in a mobile Linux solution aimed at being a desktop replacement.’ (via Ben)

Great site — also has US.BLAST.D Worm Wreaks Havoc on US Post Office, Mail Delivery Halted (’Until a patch can be created by Microsoft and deployed by the MCSEs who maintain the nation’s critical infrastructure, President Bush has urged all Americans to lock in a safe or a drawer all of their pens, pencils, stamps, white paper and envelopes so that they cannot be exploited by the virus and used to write out more copies of itself.’

– and An Open Letter from RIAA President Hillary Rosen to Music Pirates Everywhere (’Currently an RIAA-backed online service known as Pressplay allows users to subscribe for $18.95 a month to a small library of popular works and listen to them via half-quality audio streams if they have broadband connections. Users may download 10 songs a month to burn to CDs if they wish. Pressplay exclusively supports the Windows Media Audio format, and therefore each song benefits from active scripting support, expiration dates, copy protection and proven Microsoft security. With embedded scripts, each song can also enhance the user experience by opening web pages featuring more music they might like to buy. After only 8 months online and a strategic partnership with AOL, Pressplay currently boasts more than 100 subscribers and is growing every day.’)

Spam: Bayesian comment filter for Movable Type, nifty. Pity it’s still using the Paul Graham method, which is not so hot. (thx Antoin!)

Tags: barbieos, bits, cutdown, debian, microsoft, month, music, online, pressplay, song, version

Music: All good things must come to an end. EMusic has been bought out by some bunch called ‘Dimensional Associates’, and will no longer offer its excellent download service; instead you’re limited to a measly 40 MP3s per month. (For context — last time I downloaded some listening material was on Monday, and I picked up about 80 MP3s in a single sitting.)

They’ve shut down their message boards; third-party discussion groups are filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth; and worst of all, I can’t even download the remaining stuff on ‘My Stash’ (the downloads-to-do list) because they’re overrun with rats deserting the sinking ship. (no reflection on the rats — I’m one myself.) Either that, or they’ve just turned them off; which is annoying as I had lots of music lined up to download when I got a chance.

This is very bad news — Apple’s iTunes is full of crappy music, Mac-only, and DRM-crippled; Rhapsody is Windows-only and DRM-crippled; there’s really no other legal MP3-download option.

I guess I’ll just have to go back to buying 1 or 2 CDs every few months when I’m buying stuff from Amazon (which I do nowadays anyway, in addition to EMusic) and just listening to the radio in general instead.

Thanks anyway, EMusic, for introducing me, helping me get into, or helping me rebuild my collection of such great music as:

• Ladytron
• Lemon Jelly
• Belle and Sebastian
• TRS-80
• Yo La Tengo
• Pepe Deluxe
• Layo And Bushwacka
• Asian Dub Foundation
• The Pixies
• Stereolab
• Johnny Cash
• Future Sound of London
• Freq Nasty
• Matmos
• Cornershop
• Thievery Corporation
• Cocteau Twins

It was great while it lasted.

Ah well, I guess I’ll save a tenner a month, which I can put towards the GameFly subscription…

Tags: bunch, dimensional, download, drm-crippled, emusic, end, month, music, offer, stuff

Comedy: some Spinal Tap snippets:

• a review of a live performance, noting the demise of the band’s own Web-based music downloading service, Tapster — David St. Hubbins is quoted saying ‘they shut down Tapster out of force of habit.’
• Derek Smalls notes regarding Tapster, ‘It has to start with saying, ‘look we’re worried about being ripped off’, so we started TAPSTER ourselves…so we’re ripping ourselves off. If a problem comes up, we’ll sue ourselves and we’ll pocket the difference.’ (guess this was before the aforementioned shutdown.)
• The A-Z of Spinal Tap: ‘For U2’s Popmart tour, the show’s designer Willie Williams and the band decided the group should emerge from a giant lemon.’ … ‘The Edge comes down from the stairs, and to start his guitar he has to kick a switch on his foot-pedal. Well, he ended up on his hands and knees, feeling around for the pedal. Later he said to me, ‘There I was at the debut, the premiere opening night, and this voice came into my head: I’m Derek Smalls.”
• So, as mentioned in the movie, Nigel and David grew up in Squatney, East London. But did you know that Derek Smalls grew up in Nilford — ‘a ‘very small, very wretched, very dire little place’ on the River Null, near Wolverhampton. Also known as Nilford-on-Null.’

Tags: band, comedy, demise, music, null, performance, review, service, spinal, tapster, web-based

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music v2.0, via MeFi.

Not bad at all! It actually has 2 Congo Natty tracks listed — even if it gets the name wrong for one of them ;) I’ll nitpick, though; the categories around drum and bass, ragga jungle, jungle, and breakbeat are a bit randomly-connected together; they didn’t really tie together that way at all IMO. And he randomly decided that hardcore should be renamed ‘breakcore’, created a new category for all that gabba shite, then called it hardcore. But hey… if you’re going to try to make some kind of sense out of it, you have to break some eggs, and never mind — there’s lots of nice samples!

BTW I can’t believe he lists Rob Hubbard’s theme music to Zoids in the Techno/VGM category. Has someone really released that?

And in passing, I should note, the description for ‘Not Trance’ under ‘Trance’ is spot on. As are many of the other recent trance/house-related categories. And, alright, some of the recent d’n'b categories too…

Tags: category, electronic, guide, hardcore, ishkur, jungle, mefi, music, natty, trance

Leni Riefenstahl dead at 101 (CNN). Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the 1934 Nazi propaganda film, is rightly famous — it’s technically excellent — but became a millstone around her neck for the rest of her life. To my mind, this lesson illustrates that an artist (or scientist) can never divorce the work one does from that work’s implications to society.

Music: 12-year-old sued for downloading music. ‘ ‘I got really scared. My stomach is all turning,’ Brianna said last night at the city Housing Authority apartment where she lives with her mom and her 9-year-old brother.’ Way to go, RIAA.

Spam: Paul Graham: a spam filter that fights back. Basically auto-spidering URLs found in spam messages as a form of anti-spam DDoS.

Tags: cnn, film, leni, millstone, music, propaganda, riefenstahl, spam, triumph, work

Gary Robinson points to an announcement of a new music service, BuyMusic.com — the announcement notes ‘users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of … iTunes … to transfer the music purchased to multiple computers and portable devices, or to burn it to compact discs.’

How do companies like this get funding? Surely it’s obvious that people are not going to sign up for services where they are stuck with crippled DRMware, and don’t actually get to own what they buy. ‘Here’s a car. Oh BTW — you’re only permitted to drive this within 5 miles of your home, it’ll conk out if you go any further.’

I suppose it’s hardly surprising, but BuyMusic.com informs me that my browser and OS are not welcome, in a surreal throwback to 1999. Ho hum, I’ll stick with EMusic, thanks…

In other news, I’ve just signed up for a mailing list called geowanking. Official: best name ever!

Tags: announcement, btw, buymusic, car, com, drmware, freedom, funding, music, service

Audioscrobbler is cool. Check it out — this is its log of my xmms listening habits, neatly cross-linked and referenced. (The cheesy ‘Liberty X’ listens were Catherine, I swear.)

Anyway, AS is a bit like Napster’s ‘explore other person’s music collection’ feature, which was cool for picking up recommendations — but this one is based on actual plays, and without the link to a service that the RIAA would want to see shut down ASAP. ;)

It can come out with some pretty bizarre results — for example, ‘people who listen to Thievery Corporation also listen to Radiohead’, according to this. Mind you, that’s probably correct…

Prediction: I’ll wind up being top of the list for listening to Acen’s tunes by the end of 2 weeks. That’s the plan at least ;)

Tags: audioscrobbler, bit, catherine, collection, feature, liberty, log, music, napster, person

a message on Dave Farber’s IP list tipped EMusic.com as a little-known alternative to Apples new music store. So I took a look, and whaddya know, it’s incredible! Here’s the key points:

• A fantastic selection of my favourite genres: roots reggae, dancehall, ambient and drum and bass. This is exactly the stuff you can’t find on P2P nets nowadays, and it’s not on Apple’s store either. EMusic is not so hot for the top-40 stuff, but let’s face it, I will never want to listen to Britney’s latest anyway.

• ‘Try before you buy’ 30-second track tasters, so you can listen to
  • the tune just enough to see if you like it before committing.
• A flat monthly rate of 10 bucks, for 50 tracks a month.

• Download as plain old un-DRM-encumbered MP3s. So it’ll work fine on my Linux desktop, and pretty much any music-listening device you can possibly imagine for the next few years.

Wow. I’m so signing up for this. I think in 10 minutes I’ve identified my next 6 months’ listening material…

Tags: alternative, apples, com, emusic, list, look, message, music, store, stuff

Wired: The Civil War Inside Sony.

By rights, Sony should own the portable player business. The company’s first hit product, back in the ’50s, was the transistor radio, the tinny-sounding invention that took rock and roll out of the house and away from the parents and allowed the whole Elvis thing to happen. A quarter-century later, the Walkman enabled the kids of the ’70s to take their tapes and tune out the world. But the 21st-century Walkman doesn’t bother with tapes or CDs or minidiscs; it stores hundreds of hours of music on its own hard drive. And it sports an Apple logo. ….

Where the iPod simply lets you sync its contents with the music collection on your personal computer, Walkman users are hamstrung by laborious ‘check-in/check-out’ procedures designed to block illicit file-sharing. And a Walkman with a hard drive? Not likely, since Sony’s copy-protection mechanisms don’t allow music to be transferred from one hard drive to another - not an issue with the iPod. ‘We do not have any plans for such a product,’ says Kimura, the smile fading. ‘But we are studying it.’ ….

What’s changed since the original Walkman debuted is that Sony became the only conglomerate to be in both consumer electronics and entertainment. As a result, it’s conflicted: Sony’s electronics side needs to let customers move files around effortlessly, but its entertainment side wants to build in restraints, because it sees every customer as a potential thief.

Tags: civil, drive, entertainment, ipod, music, product, sony, the, walkman, wired

Daphne Oram, one of the pioneers of electronic music, has died. (BBC)

Almost un-noticed by the wider world, one of the pioneers of electronic music has died. Without Daphne Oram, we may never had known what the Tardis sounded like. Electronic music - as much a part of today’s life as whistling a tune to yourself - grew up amid milk bottles, gravel, keys, and yards of magnetic tape and wires. These were the sort of tools typically scattered around the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and 60s, when they were used to generate wonderful and ethere