Posted by: RFM on: May 8, 2009
Peter Kirwan writes over at Wired (UK edition) on the surprisingly healthy state of the music industry.
It turns out that – surprise! – they can’t be trusted. The industry that exploited artists and ripped off fans for decades is – it seems – exaggerating when they whinge about how online “piracy” is killing them softly [...]
Posted by: RFM on: March 14, 2009
BoingBoing have a thing for ukulele music at the moment, and because of this I learned about BandCamp, which is a WordPress-like web tool that allows you – the artist – to create and manage your own web site, with downloadable tracks, album artwork, and so on.
It looks cleaner and less cluttered than MySpace, and [...]
Posted by: RFM on: March 9, 2009
BBC NEWS | Technology | YouTube to block UK music videos.
A clash of two competing institutions: one old media, one new (Google, who own YouTube). Why do music videos get made? Is it to promote and sell music? Which is presumably quite effective, in conjunction with YouTube. So why demand higher royalties from YouTube? Cue [...]
Posted by: RFM on: February 22, 2009
The Times Technology blog ha gathered together a Top 20 tracks remixed by Microsoft Songsmith, with predictably hilarious results.
This is a great example of user-generated content, with the audience using the software for something other than what it was intended to do. The original cheesy Microsoft ad was awful enough (you can see it at [...]
Posted by: RFM on: January 16, 2009
Via BoingBoing comes this excellent YouTube video, which rebuts the case made by European media producers to extend mechanical copyright in Europe from its current 50 years.
It’s important stuff, because the message from the entertainment industry is always on the side of… the entertainment industry, and does not give any kind [...]
Posted by: RFM on: November 23, 2008
I’ve noted in the press of late that there seems to be a bit of a downer for Pro Tools. This would be puzzling if it wasn’t obvious that the phrase “Pro Tools” is used in the media to stand for a certain amount of inauthentic or dishonest tinkering with original recorded material. I first [...]
