Category: Music
-
Somewhat surprising news about vinyl from The Guardian: The format was supposed to have been badly wounded by the introduction of CDs and killed off completely by the ipod-generation that bought music online. But in a rare case of cheerful news for the record labels, the latest phenomenon in a notoriously fickle industry is one nobody dared…
-
Rather bizarrely, The Mail on Sunday (a UK newspaper) is giving away Prince’s new CD today. I can see that it makes sense financially – Prince will get more from the newspaper than he would as an advance from a record company – but I find it hard to believe that MoS readers would be…
-
Sunday’s SCMP had a story about CD Wow (subscription required): A group of British record companies is suing a Hong Kong firm for £41.13 million (HK$638 million) in royalties it was ordered to pay by an English court. The companies are asking for the enforcement of a settlement agreement with Music Trading Online (HK), which…
-
Go to Pandora, and you will be greeted with this rather depressing message: Dear Pandora Visitor, We are deeply, deeply sorry to say that due to licensing constraints, we can no longer allow access to Pandora for most listeners located outside of the U.S. We will continue to work diligently to realize the vision of…
-
I knew this would happen. I started using Pandora, and now it seems that it’s under threat, as the BBC reports: US webcasters will face sharp rises in royalty fees that could be "fatal" to the nascent industry, a coalition of web broadcasters has claimed. The increases will start on 15 May and will eventually…
-
I found this article (The Importance Of Zero In Destroying The Scarcity Myth Of Economics) and the subsequent debate about how to earn revenue from recorded music, quite fascinating: So, for example, basic economics tells you that a free market will push prices towards their marginal costs. If their marginal costs are zero (as is…
-
Steve Jobs has suggested that record companies should drop DRM (Digital Rights Management) and simply sell downloaded music in an unprotected form. This would allow users of iPods to download from anywhere, and also users of other MP3 players to buy from the iTunes store (which still hasn’t launched in Hong Kong). I am using…
-
Buy an iPod? No, not me, they’re over-priced and not really that much better than any other MP3 player. That was my view, so about a year ago I bought a small Creative MP3 player. Nothing much wrong with it, but it’s not exactly user-friendly. So now I have an iPod Nano. The GUI is user-friendly, and…
-
The SCMP had a story (War on piracy recruits 200,000 youthful spies – registration required) on Tuesday about children being encouraged to report illegal download sites. Which is all very well, but where are the legal alternatives? If you have a phone or PDA with a built-in MP3 player is there any legal way to…
-
As I’ve mentioned before, I have almost given up buying music. If you live in Hong Kong it seems to be impossible to buy music from services such as iTunes and Musicmatch, and I’ve heard so much about copy protection and CDs that cannot be played in computers that I take fright if I see…
Ordinary Gweilo 