EMI: just another brick in the wall?
March 10, 2010 at 3:11 pm | Posted in music | 1 CommentTags: albums, CD, court case, dark side of the moon, downloading, echoes, EMI, itunes, legal action, mp3, pink floyd, the wall, tracks
I was late to the Pink Floyd party, I’ll admit; I wasn’t a fan until I saw their televised Live 8 performance in 2005. Criminal, I know. Hell, it took a drunken evening with a housemate at the start of my third year before I obtained a copy of the undeniably great The Dark Side of the Moon.
The thing with the album, though – and particularly with the epic sprawl of double-album The Wall – is that it works best as an album. There are stand-out tracks, of course, but it’s best heard in sequence and in full. Though in the case of The Wall, I’d recommend not viewing the accompanying film, because it’s chock-full of creepy and unnerving images. But God, what a concept.
Pink Floyd are suing EMI over online royalties; their tracks, the band say, should not be sold individually. The likes of iTunes allow for albums to be downloaded on a track-by-track basis – something that we’ve all got used to in recent years – but which Pink Floyd’s contract with EMI is too old to have allowed for.
Should artists be allowed to control how people listen to their music in such a way? Sure, albums are designed to be listened to as such, but CD players have ‘ship’ and ‘shuffle’ buttons. Even if you buy music in a physical format, you can still rip it onto your computer and only import selected tracks onto your mp3 player. Essentially, once you’ve bought the music, it’s upto you how you listen to it.
Also, I’d be interested to know the band’s views on compliation CDs, given that you can buy Echoes (The Best of Pink Floyd), which spans multiple albums.
Cracking tune, but just imagine how much better it sounds in its full context, replete with reprises and all:
I see you shiver with antici…pation…
January 27, 2010 at 4:35 pm | Posted in music | 1 CommentTags: beggars group, downloading, ed o'brien, mp3, musicdna, piracy, radiohead, spotify, tommy boy
In quite possibly the most underwhelming musical development since Susan Boyle, a new digital music format has been unveiled. The not-particulartly snappily-titled ‘MusicDNA‘ format has been adopted by indie behemoth Beggars Group, US label Tommy Boy and, um, seemingly nobody else.
The format was developed by the same people – geniuses, arguably – who were behind the creation of the MP3. How it differs from their previous offering to the digital world, though, is in the added content which it allows: artwork, song lyrics, even Twitter feeds (which are publicly and freely available online, anyway). It’s also, apparently, likely to be more expensive than current MP3 downloads. Right.
It’s hoped that this will be the saviour of the music industry – which is, after all, either dead or dying (depending on who you believe). And it’s all your fault: you there, scanning the internet with your beady little eyes, feverishly clicking away on any free music you can get your mouse on. Or not, according to Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien.
But, I think, this new format completely misses the point. People who download music don’t neccessarily want to have artwork and lyrics with their music; they don’t care about these things. They just want free music; they could easily look at artwork and lyrics online. Or buy the CD, which would give them all these as well as a tangible copy of the music.
I can’t speak for everyone who downloads pirated music: I next to never do it myself, simply because Spotify is far less hassle, not to mention far more legal. But I do know that, if I care enough about an album, I’ll buy it. On CD, not MP3. And I can’t say that MusicDNA is likely to sway me away from this: if it costs more than an MP3 album, it’ll probably cost the same as a CD.
I do agree with Ed O’Brien when he says: “You’ve got to licence out more music – have more Spotifys, more websites selling more music. You’ve got to make it slightly cheaper to get music in order to compete with the peer-to-peers.”
I have no idea what’s going to save the music industry. I just suspect that this isn’t it.
Ed O’Brien doesn’t just talk sense:
What about you?
Surprise surprise
November 4, 2009 at 12:16 pm | Posted in music | Leave a commentTags: downloading, filesharing, internet, survey
Sometimes I think that people really, really like stating the obvious.
A survey by Demos has shown that people who download music illegally spend more on music than those who don’t. This seems to come as enough as a surprise to be deemed newsworthy, but surely it’s just common sense?
In my experience, people who download music don’t do so out of some misguided belief that they’re “fucking the system”; they do so because they genuinely love music and want to hear as much of it as possible.
I’m not defending filesharing (although I also don’t claim to be entirely innocent of downloading); I accept that it’s a complex issue which is having very real effects upon the music industry.
One of the best adverts I’ve seen against fileharing is this:
It’s a blog post by Future of the Left which was made into an advert by UK Music, and which ran in the Guardian.
I do think that this brings home the human implications of what is often in danger of becoming a purely technological debate perfectly.
Yet it doesn’t surprise me that those who download spend more money on music than those who don’t. What does surprise me is the amount that people apparently spend – £77 per year on average for downloaders and £44 for non-downloaders.
Isn’t that very, very little? Or is that just me?
I’m sorry, I just can’s resist posting this:
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