Wednesday 25 March 2009

Great songs from the Morethanmusic show

Thursday 12 March 2009

BBC enter the hacking arena

And now the BBC are illegally hacking into peoples computers. What is the world coming to.

Wednesday 11 March 2009

Billy Brag

I used to have a lot of time for Billy Brag, but he seems to have picked the wrong side in the latest round of musicians verse the internet.

Here's how I see it. YouTube is good, they are paying money, some of which makes it's way back to the artists. The artist, especially the ones with nice publishing deals, are demanding that Google pay them more money because they are seen on YouTube because the Google empire makes a ton of money.

There are a number of things wrong with this. Firstly YouTube is a great promotion tool for music and most artists want their videos available. If you are smart you can use this to sell more by making it easy for people to buy your stuff on the internet. So the problem is that Google is not making YouTube full off adverts to try and make more money off each video viewed.

So a bunch of musicians who are failing to make money and adapt to the new internet age are telling the king of the internet how to run YouTube. This is the company who knows how to make the most money off free content and is saying look its good for us both and will get better over time.

What's the problem then? Let's face it, these people can make money by spending a few months making 60 minutes of audio and then living off it for years to come. How many other artists (painters, photographers, sculptures) would love to have this business model. So musicians will finally fall into the same level as photograph has now fell. There is not as much money, but you can still make money off it and the is so much free content that most people will not pay for it.

If this happens it's not the end of music. People will still make music and go to gigs and concerts. Some people will still spend a percentage of their money on music.

So why are people live Billy Brag trying to keep the internet full of adverts and keep the price of music artificially high so they can make more money? Don't the realise how lucky they are, there is hundreds of thousands of band out there who could fill their shoes and not mind the smaller amount of money the internet generates. These will be the stars of the next generation.