Recently in Music Category

2010 is the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. We've had a special series of In Our Time earlier in the year, the president of the Society, Martin Rees has given the Reith Lectures, and there've been numerous talks and lectures.

Over the weekend, the Royal Society's annual summer exhibition moved to the Southbank Centre where it has became the See Further Festival. All around the South Bank and Royal Festival Hall, were exhibits of what British scientists are currently doing. Various research labs and companies were present with live demonstrations explaining the practical applications of what they're doing.

Amongst many things I saw over the weekend were a new holographic method being developed for finding landmines, what we can learn from how insects navigate, and the development of an incredible new magnifying lens. And they're just a handful of the exhibits. On Friday, I saw Material World's Quentein Cooper interviewing someone about volcanoes, and reporters from a variety of international media talking to the scientists involved. Elsewhere, a little girl was being CT scanned by a large pink Siemens magnetom. And Festo had an Air Penguin that was very gracefully flying through the enclosed Royal Festival Hall's atrium and was as elegant a flying machine that I've ever seen.

Outside the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory roadshow seemed popular, with Dr Yan in attendence.

The exhibition is open to next weekend, and if you're near London, is well worth a visit.

The reason that I reached the exhibition so early is that on Friday the "Premiere" of 2001: A Space Odyssey with live orchestral accompaniament was taking place. I first saw this film in one of its re-releases (they still used to do things like that in the late seventies) with my dad and brother at the Barnet Odeon. It is one of the few times I'd experienced an intermission in a film. Indeed, so unusual was such a thing, that I remember wondering whether the projectionist hadn't just introduced it on the cinema manager's orders so that he could sell more Kia Ora and popcorn. But it left an indelible memory - not least as 9 year old tried to understand "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite".

To my young mind, it opened with a tediously long sequence involving apes - "The Dawn of Man". But I remember watching and being mesmerised nonetheless. The moment that one of the apes throws a bone skywards and it becomes a spaceship heading towards an orbiting space station, accompanied by the Blue Danube, is one of cinema's most glorious moments. The piece is roughly 11 minutes long, and Douglas Trumball's effects, still stand up perfectly fine today. I guess that working with Arthur C Clarke for verisimilitude, Kubrick's ceaseless quest for excellence meant that he did as good a job in 1968 as anyone could do today.

For this production, Warner Bros had gone back to the film's audio master and separated the music cues from the dialogue and sound effects so that the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices could be added in live. While music is vital to 2001, it's actually used relatively sparingly; think of those scenes where all you can hear is Keir Dullea's breathing within his spacesuit. Conductor André de Ridder had a timecode alongside him to ensure that the cues were all met in timely manner.

Kubrick's widow, Christiane, introduced the evening's event, and noted that Stanley would have been shocked for his wife to have been speaking in public (when she sat down near me, and I realised that I was surrounded by friends and family, I must admit to being quite thrilled). Famously reclusive, it seems uncertain whether he would have attended at all. He might not have been completely taken with the projection. While the picture - I suspect an HD version - was pin-sharp, and perfect technically, he might have been a little annoyed that the orchestra needed any light to work beneath the screen.

Yet, all said and done, it was a wonderful experience, and was given a standing ovation at the end.

It's a long time since I properly watched the film. Although I have an early version of it on DVD, it's not great. So it was interesting to note some of the things Kubrick and Clarke got right about their film. While Pan Am may not have survived, the commercialisation of everything else seems right (the space station is basically a Hilton). Meals on board are "microwaved". On board Discovery One, the two pilots are seen using devices that are staggeringly similar to iPads! (The chap in front of me also noticed this, and was so excited that he had to tell both the person to his left, and right). A news broadcast comes from BBC 12. Sadly Kubrick wouldn't have known that BBC Executive would be reigning in their channels rather than expanding them from the current main 4 TV services.

Anyway - it's unclear if and when this event might be seen again. But I do feel a need to return to Clarke's novel.

I'm beginning to lose count of the number of times I've seen Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra playing their big band jazz, but it doesn't really matter, as it's a joy to see them every single time they're in the country.

This time around it's an especially good treat as they're actually in residency at the Barbican for a few days playing a series of concerts and events not just for ticket payers, but for school kids, youth orchestras and the local community in general.

When I arrived at the Barbican a youth jazz orchestra was playing to a rapt crowd in the Barbican's foyer, and it just got better from there.

We had the traditional three rows of a by now very familiar group of musicians playing pieces from the early swing era of the 1930s, including pieces from Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton amongst others. Marsalis, as ever, introduces each piece and generally seemed to have a really good time enjoying guest appearances from Elaine Delmar and Christian Garrick.

A chap near me who I'd initially thought was an official photographer given his DSLR and position, turned out to be something of a dancer, and just couldn't help himself at one point!

A wonderful evening.

Incidentally, the performance was being recorded on video for archival purposes, but also, we were told for CBS News' 60 Minutes for broadcast later in the year. I counted at least three video cameras recording the concert including one that was positioned three seats along for me. Although we don't get 60 Minutes in the UK, I'll try to keep an eye out for the programme's broadcast.

Marsalis himself is playing at least a couple more concerts including one I'm really looking forward to going to at the Hackney Empire on Sunday night. But anyone in London should definitely try to get along to Victoria Park on Saturday where there are some free open air concerts.

As a side note to those who come here for radio and media bits and pieces, it's worth pointing out that jazz as a music form has just about completely been handed over to the BBC. Although Jazz FM still exists on some DAB multiplexes as well as Sky and the internet, the last major commercial stations to play jazz - Smooth FM (once itself Jazz FM) - is currently trying to persuade Ofcom that even the minimal amount of jazz it does still broadcast is too much.

Over the weekend I read a really good piece in the new issue of Word magazine written by Eamonn Forde that detailed some of the more famed musical “squabbles” when it’s discovered that an artist has “ripped off” another artist, usually by sampling them without permission. The most recent example mentioned in the piece was a supposed Eddy Grant sample to be found in the recent Gorillaz single Stylo.

Other examples include Enya who was famously sampled by The Fugees, and of course The Verve’s use of a Rolling Stones piece.

But the article was mostly about the compensation that artists can and do demand, with the preference being for song writing credits as opposed to a lump sum.

I was thinking again about this when I was reading today about the story behind the new Shakira song that’s been adopted by FIFA as the official anthem of World Cup in South Africa. As this piece explains – along with a whole series of other similar tales – the song is “derived” from a Cameroonian song popular in the army, but recorded in the 80s by a band made up of military members. It was enormously popular. Indeed, as this piece explains, it’s been used a lot in both Africa and Latin America.

Now I may be late to the game here (I had no idea until last night that 1. James Corden has recorded a World Cup song and 2. it’s reached number one. I should say in my defence that it was simply a case of not reaching the remote control fast enough after last night’s game between Germany and Australia) but this was all news to me.

Anyway, it’s all well and good hearing about these, but something nobody’s yet explained to me is this:

Why do artists continue to do it?

With the internet, iTunes, YouTube, sites like whosampled.com, and anybody being just an email away from spilling the beans, you simply can’t get away with sampling or re-recording someone else’s work without being caught. Did Shakira’s people really think nobody in Cameroon would notice? The song’s been very popular across the whole continent by all accounts.

To be honest, the Eddy Grant question is a little more interesting as to my non-musicologist’s ears, it’s the same four or five notes in both songs and not a direct sample as such. I’m not sure where a song is unique or is just a collection of different notes. But nonetheless, if I was Gorillaz, I’d still expect Eddy Grant to ask the question. He’s not a musical “nobody”.

(This photo has nothing to do with the concert, but I took it down the road from the BBC's Maida Vale studios).

I'd never been to the BBC's Maida Vale studios. But this evening I was off to them to see the BBC Concert Orchestra playing the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood's new piece as Composer-in-Association (not Residence as the notes claimed) - Doghouse.

A deluge of rain gave a nice soaking to the hundred and fifty or so people queuing outside the studios just before we were let in.

There was a full programme recorded live with a Radio 3 presenter - Sara Mohr-Pietsch - introducing pieces or back announcing them as we heard them. Conducting was Robert Ziegler who I think has worked a little with Greenwood on this.

The selection of other music we heard was eclectic to say the least. It's probably a fair reflection of the kind of music that the BBC Concert Orchestra plays regularly. So we heard some 40s and 50s pieces with their soaring strings from films of that period. But we jumped around quite a lot. So we heard Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, a piece from Angelo Badalamenti's Blue Velvet, an extract from the score to Limelight, apparently composed by Charlie Chaplin himself, and a piece featuring extracts from Frank Waxman's score to Rebecca. There were also pieces by Robert Farnon and Angela Morley.

Before Doghouse, Mohr-Pietsch interviewed Greenwood and Ziegler about the genesis of the piece, and its meaning. Then we heard the 20 minute or so piece which I felt was somewhat different to the other pieces we'd heard. Trying to describe it here would be difficult, but if you're familiar with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which would become part of the awesome soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, will give you an idea. This is more challenging fare. Indeed it seems that this piece will inform the soundtrack to a forthcoming Japanese film, Norwegian Wood, based on the novel by Murakami.

Anyway, in a couple of weeks, you'll be able to hear as it's broadcast on Afternoon on 3 on Friday 19 March at 2pm.

Amy MacDonald played a set in London's Hard Rock Café for Absolute Radio earlier this evening. The set, promoting a new album, was great and should be going out on-air next Monday.

In the meantime, even though I wasn't right at the front, I'm pretty happy with some of the photos I took. As well as the above shot, there's more here.

Transatlantic Sessions is one of those TV programmes which you may have seen if you spend any time watching BBC Four, BBC Alba, or (I guess) BBC Scotland.

Jerry Douglas hosts a variety of musicians from Scotland, Ireland, the US and elsewhere as they record - well, sessions - which are then broadcast in a very lush manner. Anyone and everyone seems to get involved.

As Celtic Connections has just taken place in Glasgow, a Transatlantic Sessions "band" was put together and last night in the Royal Festival Hall was the last night of their short tour. I got a late ticket when they put the Choir seats on sale. As is obvious from the picture above (and below), that meant I was sitting behind the band. Fortunately, the sound was fine with the RFH thoughtfully placing some speakers pointing backwards.

The set-up was fun in that rarely were all 17 singers and musicians playing simultaneously, so there were a couple of sofas just below where I was sitting for everyone not playing in a particular song to "hang out."

So who else was there? Well lots of people.

Cara Dillon; fresh from winning the Best Album award at the BBC Folk Awards.
Dan Tyminski; the "voice" of George Clooney in O Brother Where Art Thou, and who is part of Alison Krauss and Union Station (when it's not on "hiatus").
Sara Watkins; part of Nickel Creek who I once saw play live at work, and now performing solo.
Eddi Reader; once of Fairground Attraction fame.

And plenty more.

Lots of original work and more than a few covers. I fear that I'll be looking out a few CDs in the coming weeks.

Today marks the day that The Beatles complete catalogue is re-issed on CD (and quite possibly digitally - but we'll find out later).

The original CDs were - seemingly - fairly rushed affairs and during the intervening years, technology has marched on, and many less famous classic albums have had the remastering process applied.

For some it's a simple affair with just a bit of tidying up at the outer edges, but I know full-well that the master recordings were pulled out for this release, and a start-from-fresh policy was adopted.

The albums will largely be available on the high-street for about £10.99 (and a pound less on Amazon et al) which also seems remarkably reasonable for individual titles. I've long moaned about the fact that Beatles albums were way over-priced. While just about any other major artist got the "Nice Price" treatment, The Beatles remained more expensive than just about any other back catalogue titles out there.

They remained that expensive because they could get away with it. Clearly there's still not another musical act that can claim to be as big.

As a consequence, until very recently, I'd never bought a Beatles album. I do own a copy of Sgt. Pepper, bought around the 40th anniversary a year or so ago. It was also around this time that the albums dropped to around the ten pound level on the high street. But by then we all knew the remasters were coming.

I do have some Beatles on vinyl though, courtesy of my parents collection (including, I think, the mono version of Sgt. Pepper).

So will I be rushing out to buy my copies of the re-issues today?

Er, no.

Why not? Because "troubled" EMI still seems to be trying too hard to gouge fans with its pricing.

A few years ago, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds got the remastering treatment too. Since albums from the sixties and seventies tended to be quite short, coming in at around half an hour or so, it was quite possible, on the remastered disc, to fit both stereo and mono versions of Pet Sounds. I'm happy with that.

And that's not a solitary exception. There are other classic albums that exist in both formats on the same disc.

I suspect that most people will just want the stereo editions of the albums and will settle for that boxset - albeit at a price which almost negates any savings from buying the albums seperately (of course, there are extras only to be found in the box). But the mono versions come in their own seperate boxset purely designed to hit collectors and the purist. It's the same as George Lucas and his various versions of the original Star Wars trilogy. I refuse to be suckered.

Some fans are a bit miffed that SACD versions of the albums haven't been made available - or DVD Audio or Blu-Ray. "Love" was released in such a format a couple of years ago, and high-end classical music is regularly released in SACD format. It'll play fine in a regular CD player, but if you have the appropriate hi-fi gear, you can benefit from surround sound versions. With Love that was fine, but I accept it's questionable whether or not surround sound should be applied to albums that were only ever designed to mastered in - at best - stereo.

Then there's the attendant hype. We've had a Beatles day on Radio 2, and another on BBC2. My own employer has been playing albums in full in the evenings (we do this regularly anyway though), and there's the video game. Finally, for some reason it'll be amazing news if Beatles tracks are available via iTunes. That announcement either will or won't come later today. Quite why it's so important isn't clear. If you want the albums - go and buy them. They're in the shops after all!

But I won't be buying today, thanks very much. I appreciate the lots of work has gone into these CDs - but they're still too pricey as a set for me. I could just pick up some of the individual titles, but then perhaps post Christmas the boxset will be down to a more palatable price?

We'll see.

Next year, the Jazz at the Lincoln Center Orchestra is starting something of a residency at the Barbican and other venues in East London. It'll happen for at least a couple of years in the run-up to the Olympics.

All I can say is that on 1 October, when tickets go on sale, you should rush out and get some because this is always a visit that's well worth seeing. Even if you're not the world's biggest jazz aficionado - and clearly I'm not - the passion, skill and above all, the music is unmissable.

I've seen Marsalis play at least twice before at the Barbican and once more at a Prom. There's always a theme to these concerts and this time around we heard lots of movements from a specially commissioned piece for Spain. As such, he had a guest in Chano Dominguez, the Spanish pianist. In one piece he and JLCO regular Dan Nimmer switched multiple times on piano duties - at one point "duelling".

It wouldn't be Marsalis without some Ellington, and we got a glorious solo from Joe Temperly playing a piece who's name I didn't catch (Rose?) "The Single Petal of a Rose" (thanks to the FT) on a glorious bass clarinet.

Another Brit in the orchestra is Elliot Mason and Marsalis insisted that his parents who were in the audience stand up and take a bow.

El Piraña came on for a couple of pieces at the end, playing percussion (basically a box) adding some more flamenco to the New Orleans jazz proceedings.

The evening ended in a standing ovation. I'll be getting my tickets for next year...

I've seen some great concerts recently which were all very different, but all worth mentioning here.

15 May saw Icelandic "Music Through Unconventional Means" which featured the Southbank's artist in residence, Shlomo, who's a beatboxer, performing with one of my favourite groups, Amiina, and another Icelandic performer, Valgeir Sigurdsson.

The first half of the concert allowed each of the groups to perform a couple of songs of their own, on their own. As I say, it was Amiina who I was really looking forward to seeing, and they had a fabulous array of instruments. As for Shlomo? Well I'd not seen beatboxing before and he gave us a gentle, and fascinating introduction to it. It's amazing what you can do with the human voice.

The second half was where it got really creative, with various combinations of artists working together, on one anothers' songs, and also on a couple of completely new pieces. I really enjoyed it.

The following Sunday was another unique experience with the (BBC) Radiophonic Workshop performing live in concert. OK - that's a bit of a strange thing to say about a group that was built large of individuals and based almost completely in various studios.

But this was the coming together of several members who worked there over the years, backed by a team of talented musicians. An excellent evening of electronic music.

There aren't many times where you hear excerpts of music you remember as the original John Craven's Newsround theme, alongside those of Words and Pictures, and of course Doctor Who. We had many other less familiar pieces of music too - unfamiliar unless you've got hold of the excellent recent releases and re-releases of Radiophonic music.

Over the course of the evening we saw short videos with music of some of the other forces of the Workshop including John Baker (check out the recent Trunk Records releases) and, of course, Delia Derbyshire.

As well as the videos, there were some excellent graphics and lighting to enliven what would otherwise have been middle-aged men playing synthesisers.

Earlier, I was fortunate to get into a fun Q&A with the performers who were able to give us a bit more background and understanding.

And I must admit that I really enjoyed the support - Andrea Parker remixing music from Daphne Oram; enough that I went out and got a recent CD of hers afterwards.

The following Wednesday it was off to revisit Ane Brun who was back in town and back in the Union Chapel where I saw her a couple of months ago. She was back, and this time had better support (although the chapel wasn't as full as it had been previously).

She played some of the same songs, but also a few different ones. And she was again joined by her "Diamonds" - who are all singers in their own rights. In particular we heard Rebekka and Jennie Abrahamson do a few support songs each.

But she's a terrific performer, and worth watching next time she's in town.

The Peatbog Faeries are a band that I really came across when I was up in Skye last year. I'd seen posters for all over the place for a concert I wouldn't be able to make, and was vaguely aware that I'd seen coverage of them in things like the Celtic Connections TV programmes that occassionally grace our screens down south.

A chat with the proprietor of a record shop in Portree led me to buy a couple of CDs and they were great (Incidentally - isn't it great that in some places there are still record shops where you can talk to people and have music recommended to you?).

Last night in Dingwalls was my first experience of them live and it was great fun. Although the venue wasn't perhaps as full as it might have been, but everyone there seemed to be up for a good time. There were ten of them on stage, and the music was great fun. It's been a while since I've danced reels and swings with total strangers. I'd guess that their Hogmanay show in Inverness will be quite something.

Anyhow, they're on tour right now, and they've got a new live album. I'll definitely be seeing them again next time they're down here.

And the support band, 6 Day Riot, was pretty good too!

(More photos on Flickr)

The other day I was talking about secondary ticketing and my despising of the general dishonesty of it all.

Well now Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has explained the situation from a band's side of things. He doesn't like secondary ticketers, or "re-sellers" as they're known. Like me, he considers them touts, or scalpers in US-speak.

It sounds like NIN are doing their level best to avoid it, but the forces of exclusive agreements and venues means that they're limited in what they can do. In their instance, they get 10% of tickets for a fan pre-sale with per-customer limits and printed names on tickets which will need to match ID at the venue. Fans will use their own entrance for this check.

Live Nation and Ticketmaster are merging and he foresees an auction system taking place or market-based system a la airlines.

He says upfront that the demand for some gigs outstrips supply and therefore in a market system, ticket face values are under-priced. There are always fans who'll pay top dollar to get the best seats.

But of course the artist might not actually want the very wealthy getting all the best seats. Bruce Springsteen doesn't and raised merry hell recently when Ticketmaster sent fans through to their secondary ticketing outlet in the US Ticket Now. Madonna hilariously complained in her film In Bed With Madonna about the dull fans at the front. Then she does a deal with a secondary outlet for her next tour (or Live Nation) does meaning that only the very wealthiest of fans will be at the front. Of course, she's 50+ these days, so probably wouldn't get quite as many screaming fans up the front. But she can't moan if they don't want to get up and dance. They've spent a lot of money - and it's like sitting in a box at the theatre.

Over at Techcrunch, Michael Arrington disagrees. And of course in a purely capitalist system - he's right. If there's a market, then so be it if the best tickets command the very highest prices.

But if bands want to pursue that route, then some of their fans might voice their displeasure.

U2 tickets go on sale this Friday for their latest UK tour. They've promised a set number of "cheaper" £30 tickets for each gig. But their top price tickets are some in the high £160s! Really. And I quite expect those tickets to immediately get sold for even higher prices when they reach the Seatwaves and Viagogos of this world. Will U2 themselves profit? I don't know. At the moment I've only seen Live Nation and Ticketmaster as promoted sites. It's a fascinating subject, and one I still have strong feelings about.

For some reason - two weeks after I went to see the gig, I haven't mentioned that I saw Ane Brun at the always wonderful Union Chapel.

It was absolutely superb - it's really hard to explain how wonderful the sound was. Brun has a recent album out, possibly re-released recently with a couple of extra cover tracks.

Anyway, I can only recommend that you get hold of a copy of Changing Seasons.

And check out the session she did for Geoff at Absolute Radio.

What a foul expression "secondary ticketing" is. It's the terminology used to refer to those sites that let the "fans" resell their tickets.

Sites such as Seatwave and Viagogo allow you to buy and sell tickets safely and securely. They've grown out from the eBay ticket selling business. But are they really for the "fans"?

Seatwave calls itself the "fan to fan ticket exchange" while Viagogo offers "real tickets for real fans."

But this is just formalised touting. Undoubtedly you have more recourse to buying duds and fakes than perhaps you would on eBay, but the sites would have you think that they're doing the fans a service.

They're not. They're letting everyone become a tout.

Case in point: Michael Jackson.

Jacko is about to embark on what we are told will be his final UK (or at least O2) tour, and more dates are being announced by the minute. At time of writing, there are 28 dates available.

Tickets are selling briskly even during the "presale" period open to people who've pre-registered their interest or are O2 customers. The general sale doesn't even begin until Friday via Ticketmaster.

Tickets have only been on presale for a day or two, yet a cursory glance at Seatwave reveals hundreds of tickets already on sale. Goodness - haven't a lot of fans been buying tickets and then realising they've inadvertently bought more than they need, or perhaps their purchase clashes with a holiday?

Of course they haven't. The "fan to fan" ticket exchange is allowing "fans" to sell on their tickets for several hundred pounds - well above the top price of £75 that's being charged.

Viagogo, if anything, is worse. That's because it's the official secondary ticketing outlet. The official site has a link to Ticketmaster and Viagogo for each date. Ticketmaster is there for "pre-sale tickets" while Viagogo is the outlet for the "fan to fan ticket exchange."

What this really means is that the promoters/Jackson is getting some of the backend of that secondary sales.

It's really annoyed promoters/artists that they're not getting a piece of that backend, and suddenly secondary ticketing outlets are allowing it.

I'd like to know whether Viagogo, as was the case for the upcoming Madonna tour, is actually selling a batch of tickets that were never made available for public sale at all.

If an artist wants to essentially auction tickets to the highest bidder, then that's fine, but be honest about it. Say something like "all the best tickets will be sold to the highest bidder."

But of course an artist who says that is a brave man or woman.

Another option is the premium package with hotels, top seats, pre and post drinks, and perhaps even "meet and greets". But at that's all up front. If one of my favourite groups does that I might think: wow what a great opportunity to meet my favourite artist - something I'd never otherwise get the opportunity to do. Or I might think: cash in...

Of course "live" is where the action is these days. And given the decline in recorded music sales, maximising that revenue is fine. But be honest about it.

Secondary ticketing really is no better to me than the guy outside the venue. I might have slightly more of a guarantee that the ticket is genuine, and I'll happily concede that internet rip-offs are a massive problem.

A recent Word Magazine podcast addressed this to an extent and mentioned that the FT's Undercover Economist Tim Harford had addressed this problem recently and had summised that from an economic point of view, artists simply weren't charging the market prices. If they were, then many tickets for a concert series like this would be in the multiple hundreds of pounds.

I guess that the airline ticketing model is an interesting one with elastic pricing adjusted according to demand. Of course, there's not a great market in me selling my 1p Ryanair flight on to someone else the day before the flight who might otherwise have to pay £100. Airlines tend to charge if you want to change a name, and they probably wouldn't be happy with me putting my ticket on eBay.

But if an artist is honest, then perhaps these foul sites wouldn't exist.

[UPDATE]

I see that the Michael Jackson site now titles the two ticket purchasing options as "Ticket Option 1" and "Ticket Option 2".

I'd still be very curious to learn the details of this deal - especially as there are now upwards of 50 concerts being sold.

Wherever music collection agencies and internet sites exist, there are problems.

The latest disagreement is the very public falling out between Google, owners of YouTube and PRS the UK collection agency. And when that story reaches the Ten O'Clock News, you know that it's a significant one.

When thousands of music videos start to disappear from YouTube, you know they have a serious disagreement.

My natural inclination is to think it's the music companies being stupid and to side with YouTube, but nothing's ever quite that simple.

It's clear from what PRS is saying that Google has decided unilaterally to pull the music videos:

PRS for Music is outraged on behalf of consumers and songwriters that Google has chosen to close down access to music videos on YouTube in the UK...

This action has been taken without any consultation with PRS for Music and in the middle of negotiations between the two parties. PRS for Music has not requested Google to do this and urges them to reconsider their decision as a matter of urgency.

I can't find a Google press release - only what they've said in news stories. [UPDATE] The YouTube statement is here.

Our previous licence from PRS for Music has expired, and we've been unable so far to come to an agreement to renew it on terms that are economically sustainable for us. There are two obstacles in these negotiations: prohibitive licensing fees and lack of transparency. We value the creativity of musicians and songwriters and have worked hard with rights-holders to generate significant online revenue for them and to respect copyright. But PRS is now asking us to pay many, many times more for our licence than before. The costs are simply prohibitive for us - under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube -- that's like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it.

Now perhaps Google believes that those negotiations were going nowhere which is why they've pulled the videos. Google is big and powerful enough to be able to do that and the record companies are the ones who are most affected by the fallout.

It's not in the interests of record companies to have their music unavailable at YouTube. It's the go-to place for finding a song or video that you suddenly have an urge to see. Think of artists with albums coming out in the coming weeks. If I was a record company I'd have the video of any singles or songs from that album up there and would be watching the stats very closely to see how the buzz was. How many plays is the song getting? And so on...

I'd have thought Michael Jackson's people would be closely watching the video play stats for his music right now as well to see how well his O2 concerts are likely to go down.

For the record industry, YouTube is important, in the same way that radio's important. Of course the collection agencies want to maximise their revenues from these outlets, particularly in light of an overall declining market, but playing Russian Roulette with Google is a dangerous game. These negotiations are big, and they've seemingly gone on for months.

Like iTunes, YouTube is an important arena where record companies are essentially held over a barrel - they are nearly completely reliant on others. And basically YouTube still costs Google lots of cash rather than being a cash cow.

Could the record companies set up their own platform for their videos? The must-visit destination for music videos? They could. It's not too late. Ironically, they might get stung my the Competition Commission if they did and locked out others (as Project Kangaroo recently discovered). But as sites like Hulu in the US has discovered, if you have the right mix, people will come. Include all the features that YouTube has like allowing embedding, including adverts (ironically, Google is the biggest player here), and links to allow you to actually buy the music or videos alongside (something YouTube's only recently really added in). You might be able to get a replacement service into the wild.

Fundamentally, YouTube is still costing Google rather than generating significant cash, and as such they don't want to pay very much for their music videos. PRS is trying to maximise revenues for its members as CD revenues fall faster than digital revenues make up for it.

Catch 22.

Seeing how it pans out will be interesting.

[UPDATE]

A nice piece by Mark Mulligan, better worded, but arguing similar points here. But he also addresses the issue that Google wants to know exactly which artists PRS represents.

As Mulligan notes, this whole arena is getting very fragmentary, and not every musician is represented by PRS in every arena.

Indeed there are some very interesting developments at a European level that may mean that going to a different collection agency altogether is an option.

Of course if Google is to pay for every play of every song on their system, then it's only fair that PRS lets them know precisely which ones it should be earning cash from and which it shouldn't.

[UPDATE 2] Amended further to include a link to the YouTube statement on the disagreement as well as quotation from that statement.

In the last seven days I seem to have seen a lot of music, although I did pay the price just a little.

Last Sunday I went to The Junction in Cambridge to watch Bellowhead. Just to be clear, I don't live in Cambridge, so it was a bit of a trip to see them. But The Junction's just near the station, and depending on when they finished, I knew I'd be able to get back to London in time.

Foolishly, as it turns out, I had a pizza while I was there. Or perhaps it was the salad. Anyway, it had implications.

If you've never seen Bellowhead, then you really need to. Yes, they're a folk band, but there are eleven of them (so buy their albums: think how much they must have to split the proceeds!) and they play a very upbeat version of folk. Sometimes the songs they sing can be a bit bawdy. The previous night they'd played at the Royal Festival Hall, but it had been sold out being Valentines' Day, and we were told that some of their songs that night had been quite rude.

This was more family friendly fare, which was just as well as people do bring their kids along to Bellowhead (again - the previous day in London, they'd done a free kids concert in the Festival Hall earlier in the day).

Jon Boden is the charismatic lead singer, but everyone else just seems to love appearing on-stage, and they bounce around with excitement and play their incredible array of instruments with complete joy.

According to their Wikipedia entry, the band themselves describe their music thus:

"Merging a joyous, uplifting cacophony of sound with a slightly sinister, distorted collision of music hall, Lotte Lenya, Robert Wyatt and pure theatre."

Curiously, midway through the concert, a girl collapsed near me for the second time in a week. I know what you're thinking. It's not that. The previous Monday, at a speaker at a presentation had passed out and collapsed against the wall behind her. This time, it was a woman behind me who basically fell into me. I think it was a small fit, and she had her mum (I think) to hand to help her up. She stayed on for the rest of the fantastic gig.

As I say, there were ramifications of that pizza meal, and let's just say that I had a very unpleasant trip home, and didn't sleep a great that night or much the next day. And I wasn't in a rush to eat anything.

The second concert was with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank. This concert was called Music and Chance, and was a very strange affair indeed. The highlight was a new composition receiving its premiere featuring precisely one minute of music from each of twelve composers. These people had randomly placed in two groups of six with each composing their minute with only the very end of the previous piece available to them. So effectively we had two six minute pieces.

The composers varied from the Pet Shop Boys (receiving their Brit the following evening) and Anne Dudley, to Will Gregory (of Goldfrapp) and Andy Sheppard. I think it's fair to say that you could hear where the breaks between composers were.

Charles Hazelwood, who talked us through procedings, also gave us a couple of variations of Mozart's Music Dice Game, with one version determined by audience members rolling dice (essentially the dice roll determines which of a 176 one-bar phrases, the orchestra plays).

Also on the programme was the remarkable "In C" for which Hazelwood left the podium and the orchestra played by itself. Although the duration is indeterminate due to the rules of the piece, I got the feeling that some kind of agreement had been reached in advance. It works astonishingly well however.

The whole concert was recorded for Radio 3, although I can't yet tell exactly when it's going out.

Finally, I was very lucky and got a last-minute ticket to see Gustavo Dudamel conduct the Philharmonia for Mozart's Piano Concerto 17 (with Emmanuel Ax) and then Mahler's Symphony No. 5. This second piece, in particular is immense and lasts some 70 minutes. But Dudamel is an incredible conducting force and throws himself into it. Of course he knows the piece backwards and has recorded it.

At the end of it, he got a rapturous standing ovation, and the applause lasted several minutes. He's back in the country later in the year with his beloved Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, but sadly this is well and truly sold out already.

Anyway, glorious stuff, and a concert that will live long in my memory.

Have I mentioned before that I hate the Brits? Well - yes I have.

Having studiously avoided them for several years now (despite working for a music radio station), I decided to watch this year simply because the Pet Shop Boys are getting the award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.

But this is dire.

I suppose at least they're not recording to a show a day after the event - as far as I can gather, it's only on a relatively short delay. But in no particular order, here are the things I hate about the Brits based on this evening's show:

#1 The screaming Brits school kids
#2 Winners seemingly knowing that they'll win (Katy Perry came off her sickbed because she was told she should), and betting closed in one category earlier today
#3 Tables of indifferent record company execs and assorted hangers on (£7500 a table folks) waiting for the after-parties
#4 Strange pauses in procedings (does nobody rehearse this stuff?)
#5 Constant screaming
#6 Fearne Cotton
#7 Way more presenters than need be
#8 The public voting winners
#9 The record industry divvying up the winners
#10 Unnecessary costume changes
#11 Unfunny presenter scripts
#12 Lawyers getting to vote winners (Yes - really. The voiceover women said so)
#13 Big name in music, Jamie Oliver
#14 The screaming
#15 Unfunny pre-recorded winners' clips (e.g. Paul Weller)
#16 Fearne Cotton's interviewing technique seemingly carried out in an empty aircraft hanger. Can you hear the echo - echo - echo?
#17 ...and from mobiles will be considerably more... (What type of phones do you think people most likely to vote for this award will have?)
#18 God - the screaming never stops...
#19 Going behind the scenes to interview the presenter before he or she has gone on to present.
#20 Americans thinking England = UK (but still being far more professional than anybody else)
#21 No on-screen captions. How am I suppose to know who the idiots in the Logan's Run jumpsuits on the Close Encounters spaceship are supposed to be? Yes... I guessed.
#22 Laboured video gags (again... I quite liked the fact that Iron Maiden are able to win this award, but I bet some producer made them do that at the end)
#23 The idea that Radiohead, Girls Aloud, Take That, Coldplay and Elbow could all compete for the same award ("It's reassuring to know that quality music does get recognised" says voiceover lady. What does that say about the Brits?)
#24 Ashley Cole looking thoroughly bored - actually, I quite liked that.
#25 People standing very much indifferently and chatting while Kings of Leon play - almost certainly not looking at the stage.
#26 Unsure what's more offensive, the "Hoff" being sleazy or the fact that Fearne Cotton's the object of his affections (kudos for knowing/being primed that Elbow have Wembley gigs though)
#27 Hilllllllaaaaarrrrious Craig David gags. They're just brilliant!
#28 The "audio muted" soundtrack
#29 Hilllllllaaaaarrrrious gags from music specialist Gok Wan.
#30 Taking no responsibility for the "commercial radio" part of the British Single award.
#31 Wondering when Tom Jones stopped dying?
#32 Girls Aloud, Gok Wan, Alan Carr and Fearne Cotton all on the screen at the same time...
#33 Did I mention the screaming?
#34 The idea that this is available to buy.
#35 Brandon Flowers was 13 when Discography came out?!?
#36 The many faces of Louis Walsh.
#37 Duffy Diet Coke ads.

In the end, the PSB were pretty good, although perhaps not as awesome as they might have been.

I think it may be another five years until I next watch this, although following it on Twitter's good fun.

The new issue of Private Eye's Ad Nauseum column highlights the recent BBC 6 Music TV ad which you may have seen, featuring Vampire Weekend on the soundtrack.

(Also available here)

It points out, as the person who uploaded the above version of the ad, that ad agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R were probably, um, inspired by a guy called Blu who created a wonderful film called Mutu:

Anyway, that's not really the radio ad I wanted to talk about.

No.

It's the new Nicky Campbell Five Live ad I wanted to bring up. Here it is, in case you've been unlucky and not yet seen it (the aspect ratio's wrong sadly):

It's dreadful. He's in a studio packed with people (with plenty of diversity) who represent "the nation" and are going to talk about today's "big story". They all put on headphones and instead of talking to one or more of them, or a discussion getting underway, we get "Tom on line 1". Huh?

This is all to promote the strange new Five Live breakfast line-up where Shelagh Fogarty starts at 6am on her own before Nicky Campbell joins her at 7am. Then at 9am, Shelagh leaves and Nicky gets an hour on the phones before at 10am, Victoria Derbyshire takes over on the phones - her show effectively bumped back an hour. That means no more midday news, which is a shame.

Now Campbell's good at phone-ins, and I'm sure that creating a generic ad about a phone-in is difficult, since the very nature of thing means that it has to be about a subject. But this is poor fare indeed. Creatively poor.

Of course I'm not suggesting the creatives responsible trawl the net for ideas however...

--

In other radio news, if you've not already caught the Elbow concert on the red button, do so before it disappear, or watch it here (I know it's embeddable, but it ends on Saturday, whereas this blog doesn't).

And if like me, you enjoy 2ManyDJs aka Soulwax, you've got to listen to last night's Colin Murray show where they sat in. The first hour features 400 intros all mixed together.

And I should also point you to Absolute Radio's videos of Chris Martin - did I mention he came in last week? There'll be four songs in total to see, with a song going up each day this week. At time of writing, there are three to watch already.

(Needs to be seen large)

Lots of live streaming (now over obviously) of Chris Martin from Coldplay at work.

Strictly speaking, I shouldn't have been taking photos, but I was standing behind non-performing band members, and couldn't really resist. Most of the other photos have him gurning or are otherwise unlikely to be cleared by his PR, but they're on Flickr nonetheless.

Anyway, listen out for an interview with Christian on air from Monday, when you'll also be able to watch the whole 30 minute set. It'll also be available to view online.

A great film explaining why extending sound copyright is not in performers' interests but just record companies'. And, of course, our worst interests.

More at soundcopyright.eu.

Last Friday was the last in Clive James' current run of A Point of View (Harold Evans takes over this Friday). You have about 24 hours to download the podcast, otherwise you'll just have to read his words.

James got on to the habit of Hollywood actors promoting products that once they'd never have been seen promoting - having probably signed agreements to ensure that the ads were only played in Japan.

Matthew McConaughey is doing commercials for a certain fragrance. I'm sure the extra money he is making is going to a good cause, but there are two questions that I ask automatically whenever I see those commercials. The first question is: Who wants to smell like Matthew McConaughey? And the second question is, doesn't he looks silly?

...

If I could be assured that the certain fragrance doesn't make Nicole Kidman smell different, but instead smells exactly like Nicole Kidman, I would buy a bottle and drink it. But otherwise I'm convinced of nothing except that she looks exactly as if she's hustling for a buck she doesn't need. Even if she does, is this the way to get it? Doesn't she look silly?

Recently two other adverts have started being screened on UK television that makes you question the sanity of those involved, and wonder exactly how big the cheque must have been.

First there's the Aviva ads rebranding Norwich Union to a meaningless international name. Norwich Union was founded in 1797. If the smart marketing folk think that employing Bruce Willis, Alice Cooper, Elle Macpherson and Ringo Starr to try to persuade us that if they hadn't changed their names, they wouldn't have been successful is laughable - especially in Starr's case. [And yes, I'm well aware that I'm employed by a company that's just changed its name - but I don't believe this is the same thing at all].

That, however, is nothing to the truly appalling Swiftcover advert featuring Iggy Pop. You can see it here - I refuse to embed it.

Do you really need the money that much Iggy?

Is anyone fooled into thinking that Iggy cares about British car insurance?

I don't find some of the fragrance advertisements quite as upsetting as Clive James - they're always ridiculous because it's impossible to advertise a smell that costs thirty quid or more a bottle. But car insurance? Online car insurance? Is this what punk rock was all about? It's much worse than John Lydon's butter ad.

I believe that Iggy is due to be touring again soon. There's good money in that, and I've never seen an Iggy show* where he hasn't put his heart and soul into it. He performs for the money. All the more reason why he shouldn't be making ads like this.

*OK - I've only seen Iggy live once - at last year's Isle of Wight Festival. But I've seen him on TV at things like Glastonbury, and he always puts on a show and works incredibly hard.

In just four days, we could begin to see the first of Cliff Richard's singles re-released without Richard himself either profiting or having any say over what's released.

That could happen, although as I write, I can't see any forthcoming releases at Amazon. Indeed he's recently released a celebratory 50 years anthology, and gave away an album with the Mail on Sunday recently covering much the same.

His first two singles came out in 1958 and were Move It and High Class Baby.

Because copyright on current performers extends over 50 years, those songs drop out of copyright from Jan 1 2009.

Richard's problem is that he performed, but did not write most of his hits. Move It, Wikipedia tells me, was written by Ian Samwell (Aaron Schroeder wrote the B-Side - Schoolboy Crush). Samwell died in 2003, but his estate continues to profit from the song he wrote, and will do so until 2073 under current UK copyright legislation.

But Richards isn't happy, and he's not alone. In 2012 early Beatles songs will also go out of copyright, and thousands of other songs are going out of copyright every year.

There's a massive push amongst the UK music industry to get this period increased from 50 years to 95 years.

The reason is simple. These songs currently earn money, and with recorded sales declining, the industry is trying to recoup every penny it possibly can from wherever it can.

Is this a problem? Doesn't Cliff et al deserve a few quid for their work? Well in fact, Cliff's profited quite nicely. The major problem the industry has is that all the people who stand up for them seem to be well-known multi-millionaires. I can look at my own work in 50 years time and know that it won't be earning me any cash. But then I know that because I went in knowing it. If I perform a song today and it's in some way successful (I know this is a stretch, but stay with me), then I know that I have but 50 years to recoup some cash. A struggle I know.

Andy Burnham recently stood up in front of the music industry and gave a speech which suggested that the UK government was backing down from the conclusions of its own report.

Gowers, the author of the report, has a fantastic riposte in the FT:

Copyright is an economic instrument, not a moral one, and if you consider the economic arguments - as I did two years ago at the request of Gordon Brown - you will find that they do not stack up. All the respectable research shows that copyright extension has high costs to the public and negligible benefits for the creative community.

Consumers find themselves paying more for old works or unable to access "orphan works" where copyright ownership is unclear. Small businesses that play recorded music such as hairdressing salons and local radio stations face a hidden extra "tax" in the form of higher music-licence fees. Do they really need this at this time?

Gowers goes on to point out that no musician has ever decided not to record a song because it'll be out of copyright in 50 years.

The orphan works argument is also important. Most recorded music is not available today. It was largely disposable at the time, and even if it wasn't, unless it was recorded by a big enough star, it has long gone out of print. It's worth nobody's time putting it back in print if there are unnecessary copyright payments making the project unworkable.

And if you can't even trace the copyright owners, then you can expect the works to remain out of print until that copyright period is up completely. Currently that's 50 years from then, but it could reach 70 or even 95 if we mimic the States where Walt Disney has had such a sway.

As ever, it's the Open Rights Group that looks out for this kind of thing, because the music industry sings from one voice.

As it points out: the record industry will roll out some needy musicians - and there undoubtedly are many. But they won't be the real beneficiaries of increasing the term: many of those performance rights are owned by the large labels. I don't doubt that they're suffering. Look at EMI after all. But that's not reason to tax the public.

[Regular readers may know that I've written a lot on this subject before. Here, here and here for example. These views, are of course my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]

Two a couple of great concerts in the Southbank Centre over the weekend.

On Saturday it was John McCusker's Under One Sky. McCusker has put together a fascinating group of performers of Scottish and English origin who together make some wonderful music.

So on stage, alongside McCusker we had Julie Fowlis (who I saw a few weeks ago), John Tams (who'd brought a fan club), Roddy Woomble of Idlewild, and even Graham Coxon of the now reforming Blur (tickets onsale this week!).

Emma Reid, a half Swedish violinist was exceptional, as was Jim Causley. Indeed all the performers were, and although I did pick up the forthcoming Under One Sky CD I evidently have much more to look into.

On Monday it was a slight change of pace as I saw the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Sir Simon Rattle perform perform the first of two nights at the Royal Festival Hall playing Schumann's symphonies.

It was a terrific concert and it's remarkable that you can get tickets for as little as £9.50. I still find it wonderful to go to a concert and see absolutely no sign of any speakers or microphones. By the way, during the interval I just fancied a glass of water so braced myself to fight to the bar to get a mineral water. But no! The RFH actually lays out dozens of plastic glasses of tap water for anyone who wants one. What a wonderful idea.

Anyway, this all makes me realise that I must visit the Southbank Centre a little more frequently (although I must also visit the much closer King's Place soon too).

So the long awaited Amazon MP3 store is finally here - with just days to go until the end of the year deadline. They've got quite a lot of music on it with a claimed 3.5m tracks on there at the moment (so they've been busy).

Tracks are recorded as 256 kbps MP3 files - usually variable bit-rate. That's not bad, although Play.com uses 320 kbps. And eMusic uses a disappointing 192 kbps (again VBR).

Apple's default AAC is at 128 kbps, so a like with like comparison isn't direct - contrary to what you might glean from the BBC News report.

There's plenty of variable pricing which is sensible, but one thing that Amazon, like iTunes is bad about, is allowing you to re-download music you've later bought. Since they know who you are and what your buying history is, quite why I can't download music again after a hard disk failure or similar is beyond me. Piracy can't be the answer, because once I've got the MP3, I can do anything I like with it anyway. Obviously there may be watermarks within the audio files - I don't know.

That's one area where eMusic has the upper hand. I can download music I've already bought again and again. Anyway, nothing's taken my fancy just yet, and being an old fogey, I in any case prefer the physical comfort of a CD to a large extent (That said, if there was something I wanted in their £3 offer, I'd be downloading it right now).

As America votes, there were a couple of fascinating films on TV recently which had well-timed screenings.

On Friday there was a cracking film on BBC Four which isn't available to watch on the iPlayer, so I can only recommend picking up the DVD instead. CSNY Deja Vu followed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on tour across the US in 2006. This documentary which appeared to have pretty full access and was made by an ABC journalist, showed that many people thought that when a band in its sixties tours so many years after it had originally been behind the protest movement, it might have mellowed. Those people were wrong as became clear when they begin a song with the lyrics "Let's impeach the president..." I hold not particular candle for their music, but their beliefs are heartfelt, even if some of the disagreeing crowd had the perfectly valid opinion that if they were paying $200 for a ticket, they shouldn't be preached to. But CSNY always preached, so more fool them.

And speaking of DVDs, if you missed Recount on More4 a month or so ago, and the Channel 4 screening on Saturday night, then you'll have to wait until January to buy the DVD of that excellent film (or import the US edition). I trust that this evening's procedings will be completed somewhat more speedily. If the polls are anything to go by, that's the case.

A heavy cold means that going out to an election party is out the question, so I shall be taking in supplies this evening and settling back in the sofa with a remote switching between the BBC, Sky, CNN, even Fox, and possibly CNBC if they're carrying NBC programming through the night. Sadly there's no way to watch the Daily Show/Colbert Report show until tomorrow when the result will be known.

A great little gig at the wonderful Union Chapel in Islington with Julie Fowlis singing and playing some superb music in Gaelic. It was real toe-tapping stuff.

And the support from Emily Smith was excellent too. I picked up her most recent album at the back of the hall on the way out. More photos here.

It's come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I've got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that's not really the best way to listen.

On top of that, I actually have a quite decent stereo system at home, and when I do listen to CDs via that, the quality is astonishing.

So yesterday I went out and bought an Airport Express. OK - my interest had been piqued by a conversation with Geoff a couple of weeks ago. But I now realised that this relatively inexpensive device is exactly what I needed.

Setting it up was OK, although installation on Windows wasn't quite as simple and painless as Apple tried to claim it was. Indeed, on my Vista setup, I'd have been completely lost were it not for the fact that I've used WiFi for a few years now. Connecting to the Airport Express also meant losing my wireless router connection for a while until I could tie the two together into a single WiFi network.

Even that was a problem because the password I was using for my WEP-protected router wasn't 13 characters precisely. I took the opportunity to upgrade from WEP in the protection stakes, and this also meant some fiddling on XP machines with a patch that mysteriously hadn't been included on either of my machines (including my very recently flashed Asus Eee that now runs XP booting in under 30 seconds).

I got everything back on network with the exception of my PSP which refuses to work. No great loss as I rarely use it online these days.

As for the Airport Express? Well it works very well indeed. I think that Apple might include at least a cable in the box, but I'd bought one knowing that they hadn't.

And once installed, all the computers with iTunes on my network saw it, and gave me the option of streaming music to it rather than the tinny computer speakers.

Now I need to properly work out a single place for my iTunes library - preferably on a NAS drive. And finally I can start to comprehensively rip all my CDs in the same format. I have some as mp3s (and with an ongoing eMusic subscription, I'm likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future). Others are in Windows Media format, while anything ripped more recently is in AAC - at 256k. That's a particularly important detail, as I don't want my stereo finding the encoding quality wanting.

Any recommendations of NAS devices or enclosures with good power management (I don't want the drives continually spinning), would be more than welcome.

A friend of mine pointed me towards this story based on some research that suggests that your musical tastes are linked to your personality.

I think she took exception to the idea that "heavy metal fans are gentle."

Obviously, making broad genearlisations like that is nonsense, but I wanted to learn a little more about this survey. It could prove very interesting with commercial aspects for radio stations surely?

A bit of Googling revealed this BBC story on the research, conducted by Prof. Adrian North of Heriot-Watt University. Prof. North is a highly published academic, who I believe has worked with Capital Radio in the past. And it would be terribly unfair to ridicule research that I've not seen the full findings for.

But then the BBC story states that the research is still ongoing (so I suppose that means no published findings, I certainly haven't turned any up), and says that they're still looking for more participants. Helpfully, the BBC provides a link to the research survey - peopleinmusic.com.

Well I had to have a look at this survey. I should note that it does randomise the order of the questions, and I didn't actually complete the questionnaire, but I reloaded it a few times to see a large selection of the questions (it's not as short as the BBC report claims), and I do have a few questions about some of the things it asked me.

It wanted to know the ages of my parents (or how old they were when they died if they were no longer alive) and the age of my best friend. I can't quite work out what that could be used for in the nature of a music research survey. While I don't doubt that my parents might have had an influence on my musical tastes, knowing my current age and the age that my parents died wouldn't be especially helpful. E.g. My dad might have died aged 30 yet I might be 35 today.

The questionnaire asked me if I was bi-, hetero- or homosexual. How is that musically relevant? Will that define whether or not I like Erasure?

Another question asks me to what extent I agree or disagree with the following:
a. Music is very important in my life
b. Music can arouse feelings of thrills and excitement in me.
c. It's really important that I am able to share thrilling, intense and stimulating experiences with my partner.
d. I often get bored with my partner.

Huh? What have the last two got to do with anything?

More questions ask me about whether or not I'm in a romatic relationship, who ended my last relationship and why it ended (If she cheated on me, does that make me more likely to enjoy country music?). How happy am I in my current relationship, and how long I've been in that relationship.

Now I'm not a psychologist, and I've never studied the subject, but it feels to me that this questionnaire is trying to look at more than just my personality traits in relation to the music I like. There are plenty of questions about music that I've not ntoed here, but I've got to wonder what the ultimate aim of this research is. I don't think the press story that's out there is the whole thing.

Self-selected samples - i.e. you've made the decision to go to this site and fill out an online survey - aren't great. And without seeing details of the findings, I can't really be certain whether Prof. North's results really are "significant" as he claims in the BBC piece.

UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards "connected" radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model.

Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28 partner stations (including Heart and Galaxy networks), and allowed you to buy and download the music you heard for a price of £1.25.

Allowing your listeners to buy the songs that they've just heard is a perfectly sensible thing to be doing. So why has the service failed?

Well the takeup was low, and they had technical difficulties that they found hard to overcome. I know one person who simply couldn't get the service to work. I did have it running on my previous Windows Mobile device, but never actually used the service.

The fact that the music was encrypted with DRM, meaning that I had a limited number of devices to playback the music was the main reason, but the £1.25 price point is unattractive when iTunes is selling the same songs for 79p. That's a 58% premium! I believe that un-encrypted downloads are the only longterm solution that's going to be accepted by the public. We're already seeing that with iTunes beginning to unlock some of its inventory. Play.com is already up and running selling mp3s in the UK, with EMI the first of the big four record companies working with them. Amazon has announced it'll be selling downloads later this year, and it'll undoubtedly have done deals with all the majors, and Napster in the US has gone down the mp3 route for its sold tracks (subscriptions obviously work differently).

As a consumer I want to be able to listen to my music on my iPod, my mobile, my PSP, my Xbox, my PC and even my SatNav if I want!

But price is important as well. The music industry has undoubtedly taken a hit in recent years with albums seemingly as cheap now as they were when I was growing up. I read reports that Coldplay's new album, supposedly the saviour of EMI this year, is going to be sold for just £7 in Asda (and no doubt other supermarkets) tomorrow when it's released. But record companies lost control of the market when they left it to Apple to launch the iTunes store and didn't offer the service their consumers were crying out for themselves.

Linking your music sales offering with a radio station still makes sense. I'm concerned about developing hardware around a specific sales offering though. Requiring me to buy a new device in order that I can purchase your product is a brave move to make.

That said, wi-fi radios have yet to reach a significant level in the UK, and if they have DAB chips in them too, and are offered at a reasonable price point, then there's certainly a possibility. I believe that wi-fi is still a bit of a black art for many people. How many subscribers who have a BT Home Hub realise that they also have a wi-fi base station I wonder?

Anyway, I'll look forward to seeing the devices when they're released later in the year. But your product has to be priced in line with the rest of the industry, and when Amazon opens its mp3 store, we're all going to hear about it.

The FX channel has rather smartly just started showing the very excellent Colbert Report. It'd be great if they showed it at 9.00pm just after More 4 has shown its sister The Daily Show. But anything's better than nothing. This week, both shows are off, but we get repeats, which are welcome since in this instance I can't have seen whichever edition of The Colbert Report they play.

Towards the end, Colbert has an interview with Canadian songstress Feist, who ends the show with a song.

Suddenly I remember that she's due to be playing a concert in London very soon, and I seem to remember that tickets were still available at Stargreen (an old ticket agency in Argyle Street that I walk past daily). I hop over to Feist's site and note that the concert's at the Royal Albert Hall. I head straight over to that site, where I find that tickets are available - in the Grand Tier (essentially the boxes).

Ah, but there's a problem. Tomorrow night is the Champions' League Final night with Chelsea meeting Man Utd in Moscow. Surely I'm going to watch that?

Well the problem is that I'm still hoping for some kind of UEFA ruling that makes the fixture null and void and awards the cup to Barcelona. Yup - I'm a sore loser.

So I book tickets.

After a decent warm up from New Zealand's Lawrence Arabia, Feist comes on and appears initially in silhouette.

She spartan set includes a pair of what I can only describe as puppeteers who hand animate backgrounds to many of the songs.

Feist plays about 90 minutes in total, and it's absolutely wonderful. She's obviously enjoying herself in the palatial surroundings, although at times I feel that perhaps the pretty full audience could show their appreciation a little more - the Royal Albert Hall doesn't always feel as full as it is.

But the songs are great and they keep coming, with the audience singing along to 1-2-3-4.

By the end, I'm reminded of the last time I was in this venue to see another Canadian band, the Cowboy Junkies. A great evening.

There are more photos here.

In some respects, this is a continuation of my last entry about Qtrax. While the final position of Qtrax has yet to be established, it's interesting to look at another high profile example that got plenty of coverage last year - Nokia's Comes With Music package.

As you may or may not recall, Nokia announced that a new range of Nokia phones would come with the ability to listen to free music from the Universal catalogue. Well, according to a piece from Bloomberg reported by Engadget, all is not quite what it might have first seemed.

Telecoms operators have something called ARPU which they're continually driving to maximise. It stands for Average Revenue Per User, and it refers to all those bolt-on services that you buy aside from airtime and texts. These days there's obviously data, any number of subscription text and video "content" and so on. Music downloads have been a recent addition, although issues based around getting your music from one device to another begin to rear their head and have probably stymied sales somewhat. But music remains popular, and advance access to concert tickets is another key area with all the major operators doing things in the area.

But when manufacturers like Nokia (or Apple) introduce their own services, they can sometimes undercut the telecoms operators, and an impasse can be reached.

So this report is interesting for two reasons. First, it explains that the "free" music is not really free, and that Universal is getting a cut of the handset cost and potentially part of the monthly contract in a similar way to Apple taking a proportion of its users' contracts. That cost might have to be built into the "music contract" that a user will have to sign. Secondly, they realise that without the assistance of the operators like Orange and Vodafone, they can't really get the scheme off the ground.

It still seems to me that it's unnecessarily confusing for an Orange subscriber with a Nokia "Comes With Music" phone has two different mechanisms for getting music - almost certainly incompatible with one another. But then PC users have a multiplicity of mechanisms for buying digital music from heavily DRMd iTunes music to mp3s from Emusic.

The market will have its say in the long term, but I would be very wary of anybody claiming that they're offering free music. We're at an experimental stage where new payment mechanisms need to be tried on for size. Jumping straight to free probably isn't sustainable in the long term.

So what's the deal with Qtrax?

On Saturday, Channel 4 News carried a report highlighting the launch of a new music service. Qtrax, they reported, had signed deals with the big four record companies and would be launching their free music service on Sunday.

Details were a little sketchy, but it was clear that the service would be ad-funded and users would have to register so that ads were targeted on a demographic basis. The service would be peer-to-peer, minimising the load on Qtrax's servers.

The music would work on a number of portable devices, which would also serve the ads (quite how was not clear), and in a couple of months' time there would be a version which worked on iPods.

Consumer listening trends would also be reported back to record companies.

The end of the Channel 4 News piece highlighted the fact Apple's iTunes would have the most to fear (and although it didn't mention it, Amazon announced at the weekend that it's mp3 download service would be rolled out internationally in 2008).

I eagerly went to the site on Sunday, only to read that the "Beta Download" would be available at "midnight EST."

Well I wasn't going to wait until 5am Monday morning, but another look today sees the same announcement still up.

Of course last minute technical hiccups are common enough. But this doesn't smell right.

A story from Australia reports denials from Warners about a deal being in place with Qtrax, and more denials from EMI and Universal. So what's going on?

Qtrax president Allan Klepfisz told AP that Warner was expected to agree to terms "shortly". He claimed that all other parties had agreed to the terms but some deals were yet to be formally signed.

Huh? So they don't have deals currently in place? How were they going to launch at midnight today or any other day?

I'm not the only suspicious person either.

Maybe Qtrax will launch in a couple of days as advertised. But selling DRM-free downloads, or perhaps introducing subscription models might be the first moves to make for a beleaguered industry.

More on the music industry will be forthcoming. But today the IFPI which represents the recording industry worldwide has published it's digital music report. The report runs to 28 pages including front and back covers, a contents page, three full pages of pictures and drawings, and a list of members. But we're all busy people, so there's a summary which runs to 9 pages.

That's less a summary, and more a slight abridgment...

"Pandora's ex-customers in the UK will be wondering why the service they want can't be catered for by the recording industry. And they are not alone - for what are the millions of illicit peer-to-peer file-sharers, but a huge potential market? Internet users are showing the industry how they want their music in the digital age."

From the New Statesman

This week EMI makes between 1500 and 2000 employees redundant.

Is there a link? Discuss.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, then you'll already know that Pandora is shutting down in the UK. The full email sent to Pandora users is on James' site.

As the email explains, the service has been shut down because they were unable to come to an agreement with the music rights organisations in the UK. Essentially, they want to charge on a "per listener, per song" basis.

Unable to reach an agreement in the UK, they're going to block the service to UK users from next week.

It's a principled decision that seems fair and reasonable. But the people who aren't fair and reasonable are the music collection agencies with whom they haven't been able to deal with.

Commercial UK radio stations have to pay for the music they play on the radio; part of the money goes to the performers, and another part goes to the copyright owners/song writers. That seems a reasonable compromise. They way that they collect this cash is to simply take a fixed percentage of all the revenue that the stations earn - for larger stations it's around 10%. That leaves enough cash over, hopefully for the station to pay its costs including staff, equipment, transmitters and so on, and still leave a profit.

If the station is commercially successful, then the artists and songwriters get more money. Stations have to send lists of the tracks they play, so the cash does go to the relevant artists. It's a win:win situation.

But the flat rate fee doesn't make sense. If it's set too high, as they currently are, then the business is unsustainable. This is what Pandora has found - the advertiser revenue they're generating is not enough to cover the costs. This is the same problem that faces all streamed radio in the US where they're also expected to pay on a per track per listener basis.

Radio services that are "simulcast" in the UK, like Virgin Radio or Heart FM, escape these costs because their internet broadcasts are seen as simply a different broadcast band. Your service might be on FM, AM, Sky, Freeview, DAB or the internet. It doesn't really matter because the more listeners you have, the more money you're able to earn, and the more money artists and song writers get.

It seems to me that like the record industry, which is slowly - painfully slowly really - dragging itself kicking and screaming into the 21st century, the music rights bodies are simply behind the times.

I don't want to give record companies too much credit because they simply don't deserve it. But more of them are finally seeing that selling un-DRMd music is a good thing. And they're realising that if they don't try new things, their CD sales are only going to continue falling without any replacement revenue at all.

Strangling new models for the music industry at birth is surely a mad idea. Here's a burgeoning company that wants to pay for the music it plays but finds itself frozen out by the industry. It's providing a service that we know people want and enjoy. But it won't budge.

So what happens now?

Well what if it were to set-up somewhere legislatively "difficult" - perhaps Russia where it took so long to shut down those mp3 sites. What are you going to do to stop them then?

Interestingly, while Pandora faces closedown in its home territory of the US, the Viacom Last.fm continues to broadcast. Working on a similar basis, they've followed a different route and signed deals with most of the four major record labels. As far as I'm aware, they've not done a deal with the largest of them all - Universal.

Yet is it really as simple as that? An album licenced to EMI in the UK might be on a different label in the US. So how does a global deal work? And then there are limitless independent labels, some of them having bigname bands on their labels. Radiohead's recent physical album release has come on the XL label for example. Last.fm has done deals with a couple of them, but they're the tip of the iceberg.

And even if you do a deal with the label, is that enough? I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but do you still need agreement of the performers, copyright owners or song writers as well?

It seems to me that under the relative safety of a massive media organisation like Viacom, Last.fm can play a little faster and looser than Pandora is able to. Like YouTube, which let's face it, has built its success on the back of other people's content (must stop using that word), Last.fm is in a position where it's waiting for people to come to it to do deals.

Who says the Wild West isn't dead?

A good song, with a very good and very "radio" video...

Via Why That's Delightful

I missed one other programme that I should have mentioned the other day - this Saturday's Archive Hours is called God, Pirates and Ovaltineys.

"Sean Street investigates the history of the cultural battle between the BBC and commercial radio, which predates the pirate music stations of the 1960s by several decades."

That's got to be worth a listen!

Oh, and it might not be radio, but don't forget that this Sunday sees BBC Four repeat the Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela Prom. Don't miss it!

I'm really not sure what to make of the news that US album sales fell by 9.5% in 2007, and down 15% on 2006. Digital sales increased by a whopping 45% but only 10% of them are albums. Basically, as we know, most people only buy the tracks they want and not the whole album. This is the problem that record companies need to address as some artists now begin to only release singles.

We all know that once upon a time, single sales were all important and money-making devices. Then they became loss-leaders for albums (as marketing and video costs increased). Finally we're now at the point where albums are just devices to sell concert tickets and merchandise.

But what explains the malaise? Well obviously a generation is now being brought on "tracks" rather than "albums." But I'd also suspect that in the US they may have some other issues.

The top three albums of last year were Noel by someone called Josh Groban who I'd not even heard of. It's a Christmas album. Second is the soundtrack to the Disney TV movie High School Musical, while third is the comeback album from The Eagles which was available exclusively in Walmart in the US.

Now compare that with the UK's best-selling albums. At the top is troubled yet talented singer Amy Winehouse. Back to Black has sold 1.65m copies to date (including a "deluxe" version) compared with Noel's 3.7m copies. That's actually not that bad considering that the UK's population is around 20% of that of the US.

Second in the UK was Leona Lewis, last year's X-Factor winner, who sold a massive 1.27m albums in five weeks (and there were a few more shopping days until Christmas when these figures were compiled, with Lewis a likely stocking-filler album). Compare this with High School Musical's 2.9m. Both are arguably TV spin-offs, although the musical value of the UK title is probably a bit stronger than the US one. 13 year-olds may argue that point.

A slight word of warning - I may well be comparing physical US CD album sales with UK figures that include full album downloads as well as CDs. But I think the comparison is still worth making.

The BPI hasn't reported overall 2007 album sales as far as I'm aware, so it'll be interesting to learn what the overall decline (if it is a decline) is compared to the US. Interestingly downloads have shown a 50% increase in the UK compared to 45% in the US, but 95% of album sales remain on CDs (which explains why Radiohead still went ahead and released a physical edition of their new album last week).

I think the problem in the US is perhaps more to do with the quality of music, the lack of decent radio stations (who are ridiculously stymied from broadcasting online), and overall malaise in quality not especially helped by an endless procession of TV talent shows. I dont' really think filesharing is the big problem. I had a cassette to cassette recorder in the eighties, and CD burning has been around for ages. So copying your friends album has never been a problem. It's more likely to be simply spending cash on other non-musical purchases - especially DVDs and video games.

A recent entry on Boing Boing pointed to an article in Rolling Stone magazine which highlighted the fact that producers mix tracks so that they sound good when they're ripped to an mp3 player, at the same time, removing the subtleties that a wider dynamic range allows.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comments "...it seems to me that as a society, we're happy to sacrifice fidelity for ease of use, flexibility and low-cost (see, for example, the trend from landlines to cordless phones to mobile phones to Skype). Designing for that, as opposed to lamenting it -- is a damned good and realistic thing to do."

But has he read the full article? If he has, then he'll see that engineers and producers aren't happy with this trend. What we're getting are tracks with dynamic range compression to make them sound loud, thus removing some of the subtleties of the original sounds.

When you rip a CD to mp3 or similar lossy compression format, you're losing some of that range. We're often told that this compression simply loses audio beyond our hearing range, but it's really not as simple as that - an mp3 does not sound as good as a CD track when you play it through some decent speakers.

If all you're going to do is listen to your track through your iPod listening via the terrible ear buds that came with it, then you probably don't care. But give the crappy compressed version of the track to people who buy it from iTunes if they're happy with that. I still buy the majority of my music on CD because I want to hear the full range. I've got a rather nice stereo system with big floor standing speakers, and I can very much hear the difference.

Most FM radio stations also use lots of compression to make them sound "louder" and clearer than other stations on the dial. The music suffers.

You really can't just design for the lowest common denominator, otherwise we might as well design music to be optimised for those kids who listen to it from the speakers of their Nokia mobile phones at the back of the bus.

It really is strange that at a time when in the A/V world, we're all being persuaded to upgrade to HD TVs and high end 7.1 surround speaker systems to watch our Blu-Ray movies on, the CD world is going the other way.

But it's not just CDs - there are plenty of other areas where quality is losing out.

In the digital broadcast arena, poor quality seems to be accepted. Look at TV channels on Freeview and compare, say, BBC1 with ITV4. The latter, even with recently made programming looks terrible in comparison because it has a much lower bit-rate. ITV4 is on a multiplex that uses a more efficient compression technology, but it's still significantly worse. What that means is that channels look more "blocky" - something that's especially apparent as we all get larger and larger TVs (you can see a range of bitrates here).

A recent Deloitte & Touche report into the efficient use of spectrum by the BBC even recommended that the BBC should reduce its bitrate to squeeze more channels on. Viewers don't care they claimed. The BBC has promised to look into it.

In the run up to a full digital TV switchover in 2012, we're now looking at the resulting over-the-air pictures being worse than the previous analogue pictures. Yes, plenty of households had ghosting on their sets due to misaligned aerials, or coat-hangers stuffed into the back of their portable units, but that's not a reason to accept lower standards.

Satellite and digital cable are better but have their own issues. There's not a bandwidth shortage (at least for satellite), and those channels that are obviously lower in quality are so because they output in that format, or they're not prepared to spend enough on decent bandwidth on those platforms.

I am surprised that so few channels are broadcasting in widescreen - yes I'm looking at you UKTV and Virgin Media. Just about every TV sold these days is widescreen, yet even when a good proportion of their programming is now originated in 16:9, they persist in cropping it. There really is no excuse in 2008.

I'd love to say that my industry, radio, is better. But it's not is it? DAB can sound fine, but unless you invest in up to date codecs (ahem, Digital One), or don't overcompress, then it really doesn't beat a good analogue signal. Ask a Radio 3 listener or a DAB listener to the mono Radio 7.

The industry would argue that listeners don't care. They'll point to the fact that most DAB sets sold are "kitchen radios" which natively come with a single speaker. So there's no problem if they broadcast in 128k stereo (nearly every station), or even mono. Last Christmas, GCap launched theJazz and it's been pretty successful, in audience terms at least. Yet it's broadcast in mono. Now I'm no jazz aficionado, but surely this was a mistake. Jazz fans that I've met tend to be very particular about their listening environments, and high end kit is part of that. And maybe theJazz isn't really aimed at those hardcore fans (in the same way that Classic FM isn't really aimed at the die hards who prefer Radio 3), but it's telling that they even answer the mono question in their FAQs (and there is some space on Digital One these days...). Stereo was first broadcast in the UK in 1925 yet over 80 years later, we're not seeing greater dynamic range and more channels (5 or 7), but fewer.

If you look at the newspaper industry, they're continuing to upgrade presses to allow full colour on all their pages, and trying to ensure that ink doesn't rub off on your fingers. The technical quality is improving. Your local cinema probably sounds better than ever, and many screens are slowly becoming digital, meaning that we're seeing fewer scratchy old prints, instead getting pristine copies as we tend to see on recent well-mastered DVD releases.

But in so much of the broadcast arena, we're seeing declining quality. I'd argue that it was only recently that TV technology has improved to match a decent tube from ten or fifteen years ago, not displaying motion blur when showing sport, and handling dark pictures with lots of greys and blacks without "jaggies" appearing everywhere.

Quality really does matter. There are still many more stereo CD players in the world than mp3 players. At a time when record companies are facing a bleaker future than ever before, they might want to consider maintaining a quality product.

[UPDATE] Well what do you know? theJazz has just become stereo! Only 128kbps stereo - but that's still a vast improvement! Well done GCap/Digital One for finally getting that sorted.

And while we're talking about DAB - it's a shame today to hear that Oneword is effectively being closed down as Channel 4 pulls out of it. Oneword has always been a troubled station since there was never any real investment. Ironically they did have some decent programming, but it was just packaged badly. There'd be an unabridged adaptation of, say, Oliver Twist, that would run to forty episodes. Nobody is going to follow a series that long apart from one or two very real die-hards. Radio 4 rarely run a daily serial over more than a couple of weeks, and their hour long Classic Dramas tend to be between 1 and 4 weeks with very occasional "epics" that might run 13 weeks. But getting a producer to edit down the readings to more manageable lumps from the original unabridged audiobook versions was obviously expensive. And in any case, they filled time, and filling 24 hours a day with non-music programming is not a cheap thing to do.

There were some good shows like "Between The Lines," which felt almost unique in that it was book programme not presented by Mariella (Open Book on Radio 4, The Book Show on Sky Arts) Frostrop. But sadly it was lost amid the miasma of long form serials.

Of course this is also the problem that Channel 4 Radio is going to have. Widely touted as an alternative to Radio 4, it seems to me that it's bound to be closer to the non sports parts of Five Live. Not for nothing have they hired Five Live's Bob Shannon. They're unlikely to have more than a few serial book readings if they're sensible. Instead, the current affairs phone in is likely to prevail - less adversarial than Talksport perhaps.

I find this astonishing.

Essentially what artists want is a cut of any resale money made from selling on concert tickets. The idea is that when tickets are resold, usually via websites these days, a proportion of the resale value would be passed on to a new body - The Resale Rights Society.

I find this simply staggering.

But there is a problem. Everyone knows that the live music scene is burgeoning, and with it comes a plethora of quickly sold out concerts. Sometimes, if it's a big artist and a small venue, tickets will sell out in minutes, leaving many fans frustrated.

Along comes eBay, and concert specialists like Seatwave who allow fans to trade tickets... at a mark up. This in turn leads to plenty of ticket buying speculators. No longer is the only way of getting tickets to that sold out concert a question simply of handing over some cash to a dodgy looking bloke outside the venue itself. Instead there are a host of "home traders" who mark up the price and sell the tickets on.

At the moment Spice Girls and Led Zeppelin tickets are hot property.

There have been plenty of attempts to stop this; tickets are sold with no right to pass them on, and at festivals like Glastonbury, they attempt to stop resale by printing photos on the tickets.

The thing is, no matter how strict the rules are, rarely does anyone really check that you have the card you bought the ticket with - they're just hustling you through the doors and into the venue.

Yet now we have this. Instead of trying to find a solution to fans losing out through this massive resale trade, the artists want a cut of the profits.

How about finding a route for stopping resale, yet letting people unable to make concerts be allowed to either trade at face value or return their tickets to the venue for a refund?

Another option is electronic ticketing, and releasing the tickets very close to the concert itself to minimise the chance that they can be "re-sold".

But charging fans twice is not the answer.

I've just been watching Verity Sharp interview the members of Sigur Rós for The Culture Show, who have a new concert film - Heima - coming out next month which looks wonderful. And seemingly there's a Culture Show special specifically about the band coming up in November.

The interview was somewhat better than one they gave NPR in the States recently.

I'm just gutted that the film screening for the BBC Electric Proms and live acoustic set were scheduled for Wednesday which is RAJAR results day, and hence I can't make it.

You can't move for Phil Collins at the moment. Geneis has just embarked on a new tour of North America for the first time in something like fifteen years. There's a new book out about the band. But mostly, there's that Cadbury's ad:

Over in the States, there's a new ABC sitcom called Carpoolers which is being trailed with this clever take on the same song:

The best use of the song is still surely the wonderful footage of Crockett driving around in his Ferrari in the pilot of Miami Vice:

Incidentally, Popbitch informs me that In The Air Tonight is likely to make the top forty this weekend. That's iTunes for you.

Guess where I was last night? I had my camera confiscated at one point, and was very pleased that I slipped the memory card out of it and into the palm of the person next to me, as I was directed to some lockers to hand it in. It was an unnecessary subterfuge since they didn't try to delete any pictures or take the memory card. They just wanted me to stop taking pictures and were pretty nice about it really. I just claimed to be completely unaware of the rules - I hadn't even seen the ticket until that evening (true).

Today I read that the small purple person (Google indexes this site pretty well so I shan't make it easy for them) has contracted lawyers to remove lots of illegal fare. I assume that many of those YouTube videos will be the thousands of camera phone videos that everyone else in the audience was taking without incurring the wrath of security.

Wandering through Virgin Megastore yesterday, I came across two unlikely compilation albums - unlikely for very different reasons.

First there was Cained.

It's a compilation of Michael Caine's favourite chillout tracks. Yes - that Michael Caine.

According to Caine's "blog" he truly did pick these tunes, with the idea coming when he had dinner at Elton John's house and he showed himself to be very knowledgable about chillout music. Who knew?

And then, for a very different reason there's The Saturday Sessions. This features tracks recorded live by artists who've appeared on Dermot O'Leary's show. Now this album has a relatively eclectic collection of songs by some excellent artists, and I've no doubt that Dermot is a lovely guy who'd be great company down the pub. But seriously - look at the album cover:

Stop giggling at the back.

Come on. Leaning against a wall? With a guitar! He's not playing himself on these tracks is he? I guess that at least if you downloaded this album via iTunes, you could elect to dump the album artwork.

I've just been listening to an amazing concert that I'm really annoyed I didn't go to. I'm talking about the appearance of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela under its 26 year old conductor Gustavo Dudamel.

Now before you go scooting on believing that I'm getting all high falootin' talking about classical music, you really do need to listen to this concert.

As I say, I missed it, not managing to read about it until the following Sunday, thus missing out on the BBC's Listen Again facility.

But fortunately on Wednesday the Prom was repeated on Afternoon on 3. So until next Wednesday afternoon you can hear it here. Fast forward about 1 hour 35 minutes to get to the start of the Prom.

And if the prospect of the Shostakovich fills you with dread, then skip another hour to 2 hours 35 minutes when a wonderful performance West Side Story's symphonic dances is performed by this massive orchestra of 200 12 to 26 year olds.

And then stay with it for some wonderful South American music and three encores.

Just read what others are saying here. More than one person is demanding a CD/DVD release of this excellent concert!

The concert was also on BBC Four, which of course I missed too. But I'm certain that there'll be some repeat performances over the coming weeks and months. The first chance to see the performance again is likely to be next Thursday's "Youth Orchestras of the World" on BBC1 at 10.35pm. I'll be tuning in.

Why does Venezuela have such wonderful young musicians? It's all down to a system that lets any child in the country learn a classical instrument. Hundreds of thousands have participated and leading to a musical renaissance. There's a programme all about it that you can download here.

There was much excitement recently, when it was announced that a revamped Music Week would include a chart from Last.fm. This is the site, we're told, that really discovered the Arctic Monkeys and so on.

Now I must admit that I've never really persevered with Last.fm to the extent of using it properly. It might well introduce me to all sorts of music that I've not previously heard, but I'm always suspicious of just hearing the will of the masses. In other words, the most popular albums will always ride to the top because everybody has them.

Anyhow, it was with interest that I turned to this week's Music Week to see what interesting new songs are being highlighted by Last.fm.

Well the top ten is dominated by Kate Nash who has four songs in it, including the number one - Foundations, which is also her current single. The album only came out last week, so it's not surprising that everybody's listening.

The number two is Misery Business by Paramore (misspelt in the paper incidentally) which is a single released back in June that didn't trouble the charts too much reaching the dizzy heights of number 31. For a band like Paramore, this is probably helping their album, Riot, which currently sits at number 47.

Elsewhere we find Starlight by Muse at number 5. A great song undoubtedly, although it came out in September last year, so not exactly cutting edge. Just behind that we find Kanye West's Stronger, which is also the current number one. Then there's another Muse track, Supermassive Black Hole, a single from June last year.

Then there's Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T's [sic] which is still high in the charts at number 6, although the album it comes from, Every Second Counts, was originally released last year. However, the album is currently unavailable, with an imminent re-release next week.

Finally there's Golden Skan by Klaxons which was released in, er, January this year.

What I'm trying to say here, is that this chart isn't much use for predicting the next big thing, aside from giving Kate Nash's record company some food for thought when they think about what to release from her album as a follow up to Foundations. And a few other record companies might be a bit miffed that some songs weren't as big hits as they might have been - but that's always been the case.

To be fair, there are two additional charts that Last.fm is reported to be supplying: a global version (this one is UK only), and a "hype list" showing artists that have risen most in the last month, and as the Guardian column linked to above suggests, it'll be this chart that'll be the most useful. But it remains to be seen how different it'll be from the radio airplay charts already published which obviously include pre-release tracks, as well the overall pre-release top 20, which is currently led by James Blunt (1973), The Twang (Two Lovers) and the very fine Scouting For Girls (She's So Lovely). Although with Razorlight's America at 17 and Lily Allen's Smile at 19, I'm not quite sure what "Pre-Release" actually really means.

Do you follow the charts?

No, me neither. But I couldn't help noticing that Elvis is having something of a resurgence.

Currently there are three singles in the Top 40:

Blue Suede Shoes is a "new" entry at no. 13.
My Baby Left Me is a "new" entry at no. 19.
Suspicious Minds is at no. 26 having slipped from last week's no. 2.

What's going on?

Well a couple of things. First of all, Elvis's label, RCA, is releasing 18 Elvis singles over the coming 18 weeks to build an "Elvis the King" collection. Avid collectors dash out to buy these limited edition re-issues which can be stored in a box. The collection "commemorates" the 30th anniversary of Elvis's death.

But hang on. Didn't something like this happen a couple of years ago? Why, yes it did. On that occasion it was "celebrating" the 30th anniversary of Elvis's birth.

They seem to be a different 18 singles this time around, but there is obviously plenty of bonus material bulking it out. Suspicious Minds and Blue Suede Shoes are the most recent releases.

But what about My Baby Left Me? That's not part of either singles collection. Instead it's the first major Elvis release now his material is out of copyright in the UK. As Music Week reports on its front page this week, it has been reissued by Memphis Recording Service and sold exclusively through HMV. In this instance, the recordings have not been sourced from early vinyl, but from masters and safety masters that the record company has got its hands on.

As ever, it should be pointed out that the songwriters of My Baby Left Me, do get paid. It's just the performers (and producers) that don't.

It should be noted that aside from these singles, there are also a considerable amount of other Elvis material proliferating at the moment with a partwork having just launched, and collections of Elvis's films readily available. And if that collection of Elvis Number Ones from a couple of years ago is not enough, you could pick up Elvis The King instead (which does have a further 21 tracks including some biggies like Blue Suede Shoes and Always On My Mind which the previous collection didn't).

But you might want to wait for "Elvis Presley: The New York RCA Studio One Complete Series" coming before Christmas. It's another unofficial release taking advantage of the UK's copyright laws. I rather suspect that Elvis completists - those who're putting these re-issued singles so high in the charts - will be getting this CD too.

The coverage of the Government's rejection of extending performance copyright in Music Week (the industry trade magazine - all behind a paywall) is surprisingly muted. There's just a piece on page 6 indicating that the fight must now be taken to Europe, and an editorial that somehow saw this singular decision as a failure to show that "the superficial years of Blair spin were over."

I may be wrong, but I somehow suspect that Gordon Brown has better things to worry about than this. And instead, the new minister, James Purnell, has simply read the Gowers Report and made his decision off the back of that. The music industry would have preferred that the Government listened to the DCMS Select Committee. The problem is that they rarely get to the bottom of issues in quite as much detail. While they can have decent question and answer sessions, my watching of them tends to lead me to believe that they don't tend to be as informed as someone independent like Gowers, who had time to fully explore the issues.

There is one hilarious piece in the editorial which I think the author, Music Week editor, might have re-appraised before sending to the print:

"The signal from the Labour Government is that it is happy to take all the Brits tickets and boozy nights out on the Thames, but when it comes to delivering on a point of great importance to pretty much everyone in the business - and how often can we say that? - Gordon Brown and co will turn their back."

Far be it from me to tell an industry how to respond if it's disappointed with a Government decision, but I'd humbly suggest that they don't just throw all their toys out of the pram. I wonder which ministers will want to come to the Brits next year?

By the way, there was a great documentary about The Beatles losing their own publishing rights to their songs in a Radio 2 documentary, Only A Northern Song. You've got until Tuesday evening to Listen Again (A shame that there's no radio on the iPlayer to allow downloading and replay without necessarily having internet access).

The government has come out and rejected calls to extend copyright on music performances from 50 years as it currently stands. As I've said on a number of occasions, this is suddenly a hot potato because Elvis and Beatles tracks are suddenly falling out of copyright in this country, and a cash cow is finally coming to an end. At the same time, record companies have managed to screw up their own business models by not adapting to the needs of their customers. So if some traditional revenue streams have dried up, they think they can make it up by increasing copyright periods, just because the Americans managed to do the same thing!

I might begin to have some sympathy if some of the labels - step forward Apple - hadn't been taking the mickey for all these years. I'd say that it was only since Sgt Pepper's 40th that I've seen a reasonably priced Beatles album. Great works they may be, but there's no excuse for still charging a premium price so far down the road.

I'd also be surprised if many session musicians are losing vast amounts of cash. They tended to be given a one off fee. Nope - it's the name artists who are losing out. I don't know the jazz market too well, but I do know that most stuff that's not by famous artists just sits in a vault (like others have said, I'm pretty sure that you can't just go out and rip a freshly remastered CD and issue that yourself). And at least now, some of that stuff will start to become available again, and some of those songwriters will start to earn money from it once more.

What seems to have happened is that the Government has read the Gowers Report.

It's important to remember that copyright doesn't exist to provide a performer or their beneficiaries with a guaranteed income for many years to come. It was originally put in place to give artists an incentive to create new works - without that protection, anyone could record and sing your song, or republish your book.

There's a great quote in Gowers' report from Thomas Babington Macauley made in the House of Commons in 1841:

It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

The same report also notes that actually very few performers will actually benefit from an extension of the 50 years performance copyright:

Furthermore, it is not clear that extending term from 50 years to 70 or 95 years would remedy the unequal treatment of performers and producers from composers, who benefit from life plus 70 years protection.

This is because it is not clear that extension of term would benefit musicians and performers very much in practice. The CIPIL report that the Review commissioned states that: most people seem to assume that any extended term would go to record companies rather than performers: either because the record company already owns the copyright or because the performer will, as a standard term of a recording agreement, have purported to assign any extended term that might be created to the copyright holder.

The Gowers Report goes on to explain why any arguments about record companies not being able to invest in talent are specious - nobody banks on a fifty+ year return when most albums don't sell beyond the first ten years.

Furthermore, Gowers notes, of all the US sound recordings published between 1890 and 1964, an average of 14% has been reissued by the copyright owner and 22% by other parties.

These statistics suggest that the costs of renewing copyright or reissuing copyrighted material are greater than the potential private return, but that these works may have enduring social and cultural value.

The lack of commercial availability impacts upon consumers and users, but it is also worth noting the impact this has for all creators and musicians. Chapter 2 noted the increasing prevalance of licensing and the complexity of rights clearance. If works are protected for a longer period of time, follow-on creators in the future would have to negotiate licences to use the work during that extended period. This has two potential implications: first, the estates and heirs of performers would potentially be able to block usage rights, which may affect future creativity and innovation; and second, this would make tracing rights holders more difficult. Thus extending term may have negative implications for all creators.

Overall, this is good news for music lovers.

But I do look forward to reading next Monday's Music Week. They're going to hate it!

Off to the Barbican to see Wynton Marsalis and his Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra perform pieces under the heading Full Steam Ahead.

I saw him perform here a few years back and once again it's a sold out crowd with just a couple more performances happening in the UK as part of the JLCO summer European tour.

As ever, the set-up is very simple, clarinets/saxophones are in the front, trombones in the middle row, and trumpets, including Marsalis most of the time, are at the rear. To the left of them are a piano, double bass and drums.

Marsalis is nothing if not an educator, and he introduces each piece with a little bit of background history. The Barbican has supplied a free programme, but one suspects that the exact set-list is relatively changeable, indeed Marsalis' own site suggests that we'll get 'selections' from the Full Steam Ahead repertoire. As a result, I try also sorts of mnemonic devices to memorise the pieces we hear.

For the first half of the concert, it's pieces either written by, or usually performed by, Duke Ellington. And so we get Across the Tracks, part of the Deep South Suite, Daybreak Express, Take The 'A' Train, and The Old Circus Train Turnaround.

After an interval, it's on to their own compositions and we get Due South, Expressbrown Local from All Rise, and Jump from Jump Start and Jazz, a pair of ballets. Then we finish with the final three tracks from 1999's Big Train: Sleeper Car, Station Call and Caboose.

For an encore we get a 1925 piece which I think is called "I'm Alabama Bound" and finally end with a great trumpet solo.

All round, a simply wonderful concert with virtuoso performances from his immense band. Wonderful stuff.

This Friday sees the start of the new Proms season, and I really must try to make time to get along to a few again. I actually quite fancy Saturday's Music from Great British Films concert that ties in with BBC Two's Summer of British Film, although being a Saturday will mean getting there early, and you can't beat a bit of Sibelius.

There's a guide to promming in The Guardian, and I must admit, you do get some odd folk down there.

I visted the O2 last night (previously the Dome) for a "secret" Snow Patrol gig that was an invitation only affair for many of the people who worked on the site, or had something to do with it. My involvement is minimal to non-existent - I supplied the odd piece of data to a friend who works there.

The last time I got off the tube at North Greenwich was in 2000 when the Dome was originally open. I was vaguely curious about the delights it held in store at the time, but my real reason was that somewhere within, there was a machine that scanned your body and allowed you to create a digital avatar. You could then use this in various PC games. As it happens, I didn't really use mine as the resulting avatar really brought home how out of shape I was.

Anyway, last night I made my first return visit, and the Jubilee line delivers you straight to the neon lit venue. Once inside the dome, they x-ray your bags (or at least should), and then you can wander around the various shops and bars. There's an 11 screen Vue cinema, and a VIP bar which was quite smart.

I was whisked upstairs into one of the very plush suites which have a bar and eating area at the back, and seats in the arena at the front. All in all a very civilised way to watch a concert (Of course, this does now prevent me from writing a rant that I'd had building up inside me, about all the VIPs at that great "egalitarian" festival Glastonbury. Still, you do have to read Charlie Brooker on Glastonbury in Monday's Guardian). I preferred to sit on bar stools overlooking the seats in front of me into the main arena.

The arena is very adaptable with sports events including basketball, ice hockey and, er, Ultimate Fighting Championship events coming up. I also understand that for smaller events they can put in a fake ceiling to make the arena feel more intimate and cut-off the top tier of seats.

What about the concert? Well, I saw Snow Patrol on the Isle of Wight a couple of weeks ago, and they're very much a band that everybody likes a bit, but nobody loves. They're quite probably the biggest selling contemporary band in the UK, but they're just not a band you can get excited about. The invited audience at this gig certainly didn't get too excited. The band played gamely on, and had success with a couple of their really big numbers.

What I will say is that the acoustics are excellent. AEG, the American company who built it, are stadium experts and considering that it's a similar size to Earls Court or Wembley Arena, it sounds vastly better.

Finally, a really nice thing. There's a bit of wall somewhere near the main entrance which has the names of 11,000 or so people who worked on the project. And my name's up there! Names are sorted in alphabetical order, and although this terrible photo doesn't do it justice, I'm on the topline. I love it - even though I feel a bit of a fraud (See also my Lord of Rings DVD appearance).

And so to Hyde Park Calling - a festival that happens at the same time as Glastonbury, and so has an "old rocker" feel to it.

Due to a bit of a cock-up on my part, one of the newer singers I wanted to see, Terra Naomi, who'd I heard on the cover CD of this month's Word magazine, was singing the last lines of the last verse of her last song as I entered her tent. Not a great start then.

The set-up is one big stage and two smallish tents. I was actually quite worried about how small the tents were, because I was planning on seeing the Buena Vista Social Club in one of them later. I made a mental note to make sure that I arrived nice and early to see them.

On the main stage, I watched The Feeling perform essentially the same set as they'd performed at the Isle of Wight Festival a couple of weeks ago. That didn't bother me too much because I'd enjoyed it before, and they've got a few quite decent songs, and I got to hear their cover of Video Killed the Radio Star again. What a great song!

The one worry I had was that the heavens were going to open at any time. Most people were glancing in a worried manner skywards every so often.

Next up was Crowded House, who were pretty good. I say that, but I only stayed for a couple of songs before heading off to the second stage in one of the tents. I wanted to make sure I could get in for the Buena Vista guys.

I needn't have worried as there was plenty of space when I got there and watched Jason Mraz finish up. He was pretty good from what I saw of him, but his fanbase and that of the next band didn't seem to overlap and they all left. That afforded me the chance to get right down to the front and stand on the railings at the dead centre of the stage. You really couldn't get a closer and better view.

And that's where I stayed for the entire show. The Buena Vista Social Club band was formed for the film of the same name by Wim Wenders back in 1999. Since then, a few of the big stars who came together for that film and the subsequent album and concert performances have died. But Cuba's an incredibly musical place, and those band members have been replaced. As the Wikipedia entry quotes, the band is "something of an anomaly in music business terms, due to their changing line-up and the fact that they've never really had one defining front person ... It's hard to know what to expect from what is more of a brand than a band."

So today's version is not at all the same as the band we've seen in the film, although several "original" members are still there performing.

Nonetheless, they still play some quality music and a packed tent (made even more packed by the heavens suddenly opening and a much promised dumping of rain finally arriving) is soon dancing and clapping along to the great melodies.

I had a whale of a time.

Afterwards, I wandered out to watch a little of Peter Gabriel before I left to go home. I didn't hang around long, as one after another unfamiliar song was played. Then Gabriel announced that he'd held a vote on his website where fans had picked some of the lesser played songs for him to perform tonight. Suddenly, even though this was a "festival" where greatest hits sets go down fine, we were to become a fan club only event. I left.

More photos over at Flickr.

So I'm popping in to HMV after work to look for an album, and can't help but notice all the special editions of albums that are on sale. It's pretty typical these days for albums to be packaged in at least two different manners. It might be that one set comes with an additional DVD, although you need to be careful, since at the start of an album's life, there aren't typically all that many promo videos to give away. Or the album, might come in a larger pack with artwork, a booklet or some other wonder.

But sometimes it's just stupid. Take the new Paul McCartney album. You can buy it in its normal packaging. Which is fine. And as we all now know, it's available from branches of Starbucks as well as from download sites (although sadly for Sir Paul, the Starbucks sales don't count towards the charts). But there's a "deluxe packaging" set that comes with a second CD. That CD has some sort of "making of" piece of audio with Sir Paul talking us through the tracks. An interesting, and quite possibly worthwhile extra. It's the other "extra" that you get with this CD that made my jaw drop in HMV. The CD - which was released just a couple of weeks ago, don't forget - also comes with "3 Bonus Tracks, Previously Unreleased."

Wha?

You mean these are three tracks that didn't make the album - released on the same day - yet made the "deluxe packaging" set. How can anyone describe them as "Previously Unreleased?"

OK - so they might be McCartney back catalogue songs, but seriously...

However, the award for showing the most affront must surely go to the recent Bruce Springsteen releases. His last studio album was the excellent We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions which actually came as a dualdisc. That is to say, it was packaged with a DVD (indeed I saw some packaging that came with a DVD and CD on the same disc.

But don't buy that version, released in April last year. To tie in with his tour in the autumn of last year, the album was re-released as the Land Edition (same price at Amazon), which comes with three additional songs and an extra four videos on the DVD, an extended documentary, and extended booklet. That's annoying for a completist isn't it?

But wait, if you saw the tour, perhaps you'd like to relive it with the Live in Dublin version of the album just released. Although be careful. You may instead want to pick up the version that comes with a DVD.

There's no word yet on whether or not this album will be re-released in a few months with a couple more tracks. Watch this space!

On a related note, as I wandered into HMV I noticed that their security barriers carried their regular adverts for a CD or DVD release. This week, it was Hot Fuzz which was released last week. Except I couldn't help but notice that the first 5 in £15.95 was cutout and stuck ontop of something else. It couldn't have been the 3 in £13.95 that they were charging last week could it? Why... yes it could.

To the Hammersmith Apollo to see a great Pet Shop Boys concert with all your favourites in a non-stop show. Great stuff, and more photos to be found here in my Flickr stream.

There's nothing like having something really built up, only for you to be let down at the last moment. I feel a bit of a heel for saying this, but that's a reasonably accurate reflection of me earlier this evening.

I was at the evening do for the Radio Academy's Production '07 conference. After a day of discussing issues relevant to the radio industry (I really hate the fact that what we do is an "industry", but there you are), some awards are handed out and some musicians "play" for us.

I didn't attend the conference proper - mainly because it's not entirely relevant to what I do for a living. In any case, I was too busy summarising the Future of Radio. But Mediaguardian had a helpful blog of events.

The awards include best pluggers (national and regional - they're the people who try to get radio stations to actually play their clients' music) as well as industry achievement awards. The John Peel award, for example, went to Mark Story of Emap. He's been in radio for donkeys' years, and was the first programme director I experienced at Virgin Radio.

We also had music from Sophie Ellis Bextor (impossibly thin, great voice, and woefully fake music-playing by her band), Gareth Gates (you can tell this is a class affair can't you? I've got to hand it to him though, he can sing), one of the Sugababes who's gone solo (not Mutya - buy Siobhán Donaghy), and Simon Webbe (ex-member of boyband Blue, but - and I amaze myself for saying this - a really good singer with a charismatic stage presence).

But the key award of the evening, which was hosted ably by Richard Bacon, was the Lifetime Achievement Award. It slowly became clear that it was going to go to Sir Paul McCartney!

I was standing near the front of the stage in the small and intimate confines of the Café de Paris, and was beginning to get annoyed with myself that my camera's batteries were flat, and in any case, it was in my bag in the cloakroom. This was going to be great. Sir Paul in our presence!

The eulogy was long and great. The wonderful music he's made over the decades. The crowd was hushed - which is always hard at these things when there's a free bar.

You know where I'm going with this don't you?

A friend from work pushed forward with his camera in hand - he wanted a picture... (copyright free with his Creative Commons Flickr licence).

And then came the letdown.

Sir Paul wasn't here tonight. He'd missed all our talented musical guests, and sent a message instead.

What a letdown! What a disappointment!

I'd actually been annoyed that The Geoff Show was off air this week and Geoff wasn't going to be able to see this (there was the small matter that Geoff should have been on-air around the time of the award presentation, but that's a mere detail).

It didn't matter - Sir Paul had been unable to make it. He'd sent a note which the presenter read out, but the disappointment in the room was palpable.

[I should, I suppose note, that I did very literally nearly run into him once. It was when he'd come in to be interviewed by Pete & Geoff. I came out of the lift, pretty much unaware that a rock superstar was in the building, and noticed a man who seemed somehow familiar, coming out of the studio and ready to get into the lift. It actually took me a few seconds to clock who I'd just seen. I think all I did was smile - it's a safe fall-back for just about any situation, after all. But it was a small brush with fame, nonetheless!]

A couple of really interesting stories to come out of America recently regarding the state of the music industry.

First up was the report that in the US, CD sales dropped by 20% in the last year. That's an awful lot. In real money, it's a decline from 112 million CDs to 89 millions.

A couple of things to note about this headline - being widely touted. First of all it's for the first couple of months or so of this year compared to last that are being measured. That's important because obviously if big-selling albums appeared in February 2006 but not this February, then the comparison's not really valid. I'd prefer to see stats that compare rolling 12 month periods.

What is clear from the Nielsen information is that more "Music Purchase Decisions" are being made in America than before, with 288 million individual digital tracks being purchased this year compared with 242 million at the same time last year.

What it means is that people are buying more frequently, but they're buying tracks and not albums. This is a theme picked up upon in a piece in the New York Times.

Now this is the situation in the US, and while it might be indicative of what is, or will be happening in the UK, I think it's fair to assume that we won't be far behind.

The UK market is struggling, and I think the music industry itself must take some of the blame. In the high street, top forty fare has undoubtedly dropped in price over the past year, with price points as low as £6.73 for new albums in Tesco, and the same albums being sold for under ten pounds in HMV and Virgin Megastores.

I don't have the figures to back this assertion up (I'm not giving the BPI fifty quid for a year old handbook to find out), but undoubtedly a much greater proportion of music is sold through supermarkets, and they're obviously being supplied on very good terms to be able to offer such deep discounting.

It's only fair, then, that the high street retailers fight back against both them and the online world where consumers can either buy digitally or from retailers like Amazon, Play or CD Wow.

So that cuts margins on the big-sellers.

But then the problem is that anything outside the most popular albums retail at more standard £14.99 and upwards which suddenly makes them appear expensive.

But the big change is that people are buying tracks and not albums.

Of course, I always think it's a mistake to consider music sales in isolation. The chances are that the money you're spending on music could equally be spent on a DVD, a computer game, a book or a few drinks in the pub. They're all "leisure activities" and we only have a finite amount of time and money to spend on them. Growth in one tends to mean a decline in another.

It's worth noting that my local HMV has handed over more space to DVDs at the cost of CD shelf space. And in the Oxford Street flagship branch, DVDs squeezed computer games from the first floor down to the ground floor - again costing pop/rock music shelf space.

Personally, I still prefer an album to a single, but then I'm in a shrinking minority in preferring most of my music to be at least purchased on some kind of physical medium, even if I'm likely to listen to it on an mp3 player.

I missed the Cowboy Junkies when they visited in January, so I had to catch this very acoustic set at the Union Chapel in Islington earlier this evening.

The Union Chapel itself is an octagonal auditorium dominated by a massive pulpit and is still used as a church. As the event was unreserved seating, and I didn't get there all that early, I was upstairs in a pew on the balcony.

As I mentioned, the set was acoustic with just Margo and Michael Timmins, accompanied by Jeff Bird. They played a full set spanning everything from The Trinity Session through some of my favourites from the likes of The Caution Horses, and played some tracks from their forthcoming new album At the End of Paths Taken.

All in all a very enjoyable evening.

So the "exciting" news today is that The Police, who recently reformed for the Grammys, are touring the UK this autumn. I have no real desire to either see them or not see them, but I am very interested in their ticket prices.

First of all, I understand that tickets at Twickenham will cost £107 each. I can't confirm that price at the moment, since Ticketmaster doesn't have London ticket details up yet on their website. (See update below).

They do have Manchester ticket details up where the range is from £40-£85. Cheaper, but not exactly standardly priced. As a comparison, seating at Muse at Wembley Stadium is between £37.50 and £42.50. Not quite the same as The Police admittedly, but a big stadium concert nonetheless.

Anyway, back to Messrs Sting, Copeland and Summer. Tickets to their concerts go on sale on Friday, but members of the The Police Tour Fan Club can buy their tickets tomorrow. What do you mean you're not a member? Very helpfully, Ticketmaster lets you pay for your membership to the club at the same time as you buy your tickets for a further £53.

What do you get for your cash, apart from the opportunity to empty your bank account even earlier, and ensure a good five month's interest for the tour's promoters? Well, assuming it's the same as the US version of the club you get the following:

• Priority ticketing before the general public
  
• Access to Message Boards including the Members-only sections (Oooh)
  
• Exclusive Police photos and videos (They mean online don't they?)
  
• Members-only discount to Police Online store (More opportunities to hand over cash)
  
• Membership Premium: Commemorative Lithograph with band replica signatures* (*Lithographs with band's actual signatures will be randomly given out to new members) (This seems to be the only physical benefits of membership - no magazines, no fan club shows, etc)
  

No wonder touring is more profitable than releasing actual records.

It's only right that I should point out that "a portion of the proceeds from this tour will be donated to WaterAid." We don't know what proportion this is, which is a shame because we could make it more cash by completing a Gift Aid form to enable the charity to claim back our tax. Maybe you get that option when you book your tickets through Ticketmaster? Maybe not...

[UPDATE] Looking at Ticketmaster for the Twickenham gig, tickets range in price from £45-£90. Although the £45 tickets are in either the upper tier or the back of the middle tier. Anything half decent is between £70 and £90. Add a £9 service charge and a £2.75 postage charge and you're there. Well not quite £107, but very close for the best price tickets.

It must be awfully difficult being an up and coming band. Sure, making the records and touring must be hard work, but maintaining your online presence is truly daunting.

Since taking an advantage of an offer on the Virgin Radio site for a free track from the band Ghosts, I've ended up on their mailing list.

No problem - I did choose to go on it.

But at the end of the email they've just sent out plugging the download release of a new set of tracks and remixes, they list their online presences.

There's the official website: www.ghostsmusic.com

Then there's the Myspace page: www.myspace.com/ghostsuk

And the Bebo page: http://ghostsuk.bebo.com

And the Youtube page: www.youtube.com/user/ghostsband

And finally the page that says we haven't left the underground/alternative scene: http://www.ukundercurrent.com/

There's also the pages where you can collect your tracks paid for by SMS: http://ghosts.tunetribe.com and http://ghosts-sun.tunetribe.com

And I expect there's an unofficial fansite with forum and a Yahoo/Google mailing list somewhere too.

Phew. Never mind the tour manager, it's a full-time webmaster that you need these days.

Wrote this last week, but I forgot to put it live, so better late than never. And there's yet more original research in this!

I hate the Brits.

I hate hate hate hate hate hate them.

I really don't like them at all.

Now this is completely irrational, and I can't exactly explain why. I suppose it's something to do with morbid fascination with awards shows, allied to the "you're all incompetents who have no idea about anything" attitude I take to most things.

I'm right you're wrong.

I think the Brits are the epitome of this in that they're nearly all elected by some jury of record company bigwigs. And is there truly is nobody more worth hating than record company execs (serial killers, despotic dictators and other evil people obviously excepted). They're overseeing the implosion of their own industry, and they're powerless to do anything about it. I wouldn't mind if you didn't have that feeling that they stitch it all up between themselves.

Then there's one award elected by the public. And that's the problem. The public are hopeless too.

Sure, there are some good bands that won awards. But you always feel that it's the big four sharing the bounty.

To be fair, a quick analysis of this year's winners actually reveals the following:

British Male Solo Artist James Morrison - Universal
British Female Solo Artist Amy Winehouse - Island (Universal)
British Group Arctic Monkeys - Domino (Independent)
MasterCard British Album Arctic Monkeys - Domino (Independent)
British Single Take That "Patience" - Polydor (Universal)
British Breakthrough Act Fratellis - Island (Universal)
British Live Act Muse - Warner
International Male Solo Artist Justin Timberlake - SonyBMG
International Female Solo Artist Nelly Furtado - Polydor (Universal)
International Group The Killers - Mercury (Universal)
International Album Killers "Sam's Town" - Mercury (Universal)
International Breakthrough Act Orson - Mercury (Universal)
Outstanding Contribution to Music Oasis - Big Brother (Indie - by SonyBMG internationally)

Giving the following summary:

Universal 8
SonyBMG 1
Warner 1
EMI 0
Independent 3

EMI score 0 on the day that they announce a profit warning. Oh dear. If Lily Allen had won any of her expected awards, at least they'd have had something.

But let's take a step back and consider the nominations too. Spending considerable time with Amazon's Brit awards list I can now reveal the following:

Record Company (Total Nominations, % Nominations)
Universal - 22, 33%
SonyBMG - 14, 21%
EMI - 11, 16%
Independent - 11, 16%
Warner - 9, 13%
Total - 67

Compare this with the 2005 world music market share (not British note, and I guess 2006 figures aren't yet available):

Universal - 32%
SonyBMG - 26%
Warner - 15%
EMI - 10%
Independent - 18%

Goodness - those are close numbers. There might even be a correlation there...

Of course, you could argue that market shares are bound to be broadly in keeping with awards, since Universal obviously has the most artists, they're bound to win the most awards. Strange that this doesn't happen in the film world, where the share of Oscars can be enormously at odds with what actually made money at the box office.

It's all very gratifying to learn that the football on BBC1 that night attracted more viewers than the Brits.

No, not the band. But the current obsession with bands whose names begin "The ----."

It can't just be me, but there seem to be evermore of them - particularly in the indie/rock genre that my employer plays.

It's certainly true that there have always been bands with names that start "The". Most obviously bands like, The Beatles, The Beach Boys or The Who. Going back, it was perhaps more common to have the name of a star artist and their backing band. So we had Cliff Richard and the Shadows, and Freddy and the Dreamers.

Perhaps nothing really ever changes, but it does strike me that there are more bands beginning with "The" than ever before.

There's nothing like a bit of original research, and far too few blogs have charts or graphs on them. Here is the previously unpublished results of my 'study'. Since I have access to an electronic log of the nearly all the tracks played by Virgin Radio from 2003 onwards, I've examined whether the artist name of every track that the station's played and counted those that began "The". If the track was played more than once, then it's counted more than once. In other words, popularity of tracks counts. I then took that as a proportion of all the tracks played, to give me a "% The" score.

And here's the chart:

A couple of things to say about this chart. First, I'll freely admit that Virgin Radio plays only a subset of all best-selling bands. You won't find too much pop, dance or R'n'B on the station. Secondly, there was obviously a brief surge of popularity back at the end of 2003 and start of 2004 with bands like The Darkness and The Thrills, but not to the same extent as currently. And finally, the number of plays a band gets is obviously down to how the station is programmed. But no Programme Director has ever gone out of their way to play tracks unpopular with the audience. Indeed regular research is undertaken to ensure that the audience does enjoy the music Virgin Radio plays. Oh and obviously Q1 07 is examing the songs played to date.

But I think that there's a clear indication that bands like The Killers, The Feeling and The Fratellis are where "it's at." "The" Klaxons have got it so wrong...

Steve Jobs has posted a long piece on the future of DRM in music. It seems that he can see the writing on the wall, and he ends the piece effectively arguing for the abolition of DRM ("It wasn't out idea guv! The record companies insisted on it.").

There's a certain amount of self-interest here. Apple has become something of a monopoly with its locked system of players and the iTunes music store, and it's in Europe where the rumblings about the possible illegality of this situation are causing some concern, with Norway most recently saying that the current state of affairs is illegal.

So Apple is turning it back on the major record companies, with Jobs helpfully pointing out that 2.5 out of 4 of them are European owned. Apple would drop DRM, he say, in a "heartbeat."

Of course the current state of affairs is unsustainable. More people are realising that their mobile phones are effective music players but that their current collections need to be either re-ripped, bought again, or they have to go through a laborious burn-to-cd-and-then-rip process. Profits from the iTunes music store are never going to be enough to sustain Apple - their future remains hardware. So get ahead of the curve now.

Of course there is some disingenuousness about Jobs position. I have an eMusic subscription that offers me a fixed monthly ration of unprotected mp3s to download. So it would seem to me that Apple could already sell any track that currently appears on eMusic (all from independents - not the majors) DRM free already. Yet as far as I'm aware, the latest Barenaked Ladies album has DRM attached if I buy it from iTunes but not if I buy it from eMusic (By the way, I do have issues with eMusic as well. Their one credit = one track approach doesn't work too well if an artist has filled their album with 20+ songs compared to a classical album that might only be 4 tracks).

So Apple needs to put their money where their mouth is and remove DRM from tracks that don't need to have it. Then they can put a little logo on those that do still have DRM attached that could become the

[Update] Steve Page of the same Barenaked Ladies that I used as a random example above blogs about this very story. As a band who sell USB keys with unencrypted mp3s to fans, he's more than happy for iTunes to ditch DRM on his band's stuff as soon as they like. The physical new album, incidentally, Barenaked Ladies Are Men, only came out this week in the N America, and arrives in UK stores next week. I've had it since last year I think! (Oooh. Just seen that they're playing Hammersmith at the end of March. Must sort out tickets!)

Baggy Trousers was one of the first pop songs that really made an impact on me back in 1980 or so. I learnt all the words from Smash Hits (or maybe Number One). But I don't think I've seen Madness live before... until last night. Wembley Arena was a heaving throng (far fewer seats than at Springsteen a few weeks ago), with lots of moshing up front.

I managed to smuggle my camera in - well actually it was spotted in my bag and I was told to deposit it with reception. I seemed to get lost on the way. I also inadvertantly brought in a hip flask (dropped into the lining of my coat at the last moment), and the worst thing you can take to a gig - the single thing that all concert venues ban. Yes - a bottle of water brazenly sitting there on display on the side of my bag. I think the security guard was more worried about the camera.

Anyway, more samizdat photos on Flickr.

I wrote at length about the Gower Review the other day, and in particular the section related to music copyright extension. Towards the end I noted that an advert had been published in the FT listing the names of 3,500 - 4,000 people who were in favour of the extension.

If you don't read Boing Boing, or get overwhelmed by the volume and skip bits, you may have missed that some of signatories of the petition are actually dead. More at ORG.

This week has finally seen the publication of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property conducted on behalf of the Treasury, and the departments of Trade and Industry, and Cutlure, Sport and Media.

All the press reports have been about the need to protect intellectual property rights more rigorously from pirating and counterfeiting. There are also notes that consumers should be able to legally copy their CDs to their MP3 player (What? You didn't know that as it stands, it's illegal to copy your CDs to your iPod in the UK? Lawbreaker!), and buried away at the bottom of the press release is the following:

"[the review is] recommending that the European Commission does not change the status quo and retains the 50 year term of copyright protection for sound recordings and related performers' rights."

This isn't what the BPI wanted to hear of course. Indeed, here's their response in which they vow to fight on to increase copyright to 95 years.

The Gower Review does a rather good job at knocking down the main arguments made by the record companies and other parties, for extending the period to 95 years. Allow to me to quote at length. It's very readable, honestly:

Extension achieves parity with other countries (e.g. the USA where sound recordings are protected for 95 years)

It is important to note that the term of protection is only one factor determining the royalties that artists and recording companies receive. The breadth of protection is also important. In the EU, the term of protection for sound recordings and performers' rights is harmonised at 50 years. During this period, rights holders receive royalties for almost all public performances of their work. In the USA, the term of protection is 95 years, but under the Bars and Grills Exception around 70 per cent of eating and drinking establishments, and 45 per cent of shops, do not have to pay royalties to performers. In the USA, performers only receive royalty payments when their music is played on digital radio, while in the UK all radio performances carry royalties. If the system in the USA was the same as that in the EU, estimates suggest that European rights holders would receive royalties of $25.5 million per annum for the broadcasting of their recordings in the USA. It is therefore possible that the total royalties received in the EU is no less than, and may even be more than, those received in the USA.

The argument has also been put forward that the longer length of term in the USA encourages artists from the UK to sign to US recording companies, thereby remitting profits to the USA. However, the Review has seen no evidence of UK bands choosing to sign to US labels based on copyright term. If musicians are indeed signing to labels in the USA, there may well be other reasons for doing so, such as the size of the market. In fact, there is anecdotal evidence that bands from the USA are signing to UK labels to develop in a vibrant music scene. For example, the Scissor Sisters are signed to Polydor UK, and their first album sold 2.6 million copies in the UK, and only 130,000 in the USA. Orson, another American band, achieved a number one single with "No Tomorrow" and is signed to Mercury Records in the UK.

Performers and composers should have equal protection (Composers get copyright protection for life plus 70 years, whereas performers and producers only get 50 years)

Performers argue that the incentives to perform are no less than those required to write lyrics or compose a score, and that the performance itself is a work of art. The distinctive voice and aesthetic of the performer adds value to the composition and is vital to making a song a commercial success.

This is because it is not clear that extension of term would benefit musicians and performers very much in practice. The CIPIL report that the Review commissioned states that: "most people seem to assume that any extended term would go to record companies rather than performers: either because the record company already owns the copyright orbecause the performer will, as a standard term of a recording agreement, have purported to assign any extended term that might be created to the copyright holder". The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) submitted a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) to the Review. Using the maximum revenues predicted in the PWC report, CIPIL estimated that the net present value (NPV) of a prospective change in term would be 1 per cent or lower for performers. The report noted that distribution of income would be highly skewed, with most income going to the relatively small number of highly successful artists whose work is still comercially available after 50 years.

Extension will increase the supply of new music (Extending the copyright term would encourage more investment in new music due to the increased period available to recoup the outlay)

Investment decisions are typically based on the expectations of future returns. Therefore, in order for the incentive argument to hold, it must be shown that prospective extension of copyright term for sound recordings would increase the incentives for record companies to invest in new acts.

Evidence suggests that most sound recordings sell in the ten years after release, and only a very small percentage continue to generate income, both from sales and royalty payments, for the entire duration of copyright. Before becoming a signatory to the Berne Convention the USA operated a system where copyright had to be applied for and renewed. Between 1923 and 1942, there were approximately 3,350,000 copyright registrations. Approximately 13 per cent of these were renewed. If current law had applied between 1923 and 1942, 3.35 million works would have been blocked to protect 77,000 commercially viable works. In a system where all works receive protection for the maximum term, the vast majority of works remain in copyright despite not being economically viable for the rights holder. Without registration, it is difficult to get accurate estimates of the percentage of works protected in the UK by copyright that are commercially available. Box 4.3 [above] shows that the vast majority of income for sound recordings and books are generated within the first few years of issue. Therefore, extension would only raise revenue for a small minority of sound recordings, keeping the vast majority locked up.

More music would be available to consumers

Extension would impact on all recordings. It would keep works in copyright even when they are not generating any income for rights owners. One study found that parties without legal rights have made more historic US recordings available than have rights holders. Furthermore, rights holders reissue recent works while largely ignoring earlier music. Of the sound recordings published between 1890 and 1964, an average of 14 per cent had been reissued by the copyright owner, and 22 per cent by other parties. These statistics suggest that the costs of renewing copyright or reissuing copyrighted material are greater than the potential private return, but that these works may have enduring social and cultural value.

The lack of commercial availability impacts upon consumers and users, but it is also worth noting the impact this has for all creators and musicians. Chapter 2 noted the increasing prevalance of licensing and the complexity of rights clearance. If works are protected for a longer period of time, follow-on creators in the future would have to negotiate licences to use the work during that extended period. This has two potential implications: first, the estates and heirs of performers would potentially be able to block usage rights, which may affect future creativity and innovation; and second, this would make tracing rights holders more difficult. Thus extending term may have negative implications for all creators.

The UK's trade balance would improve

The argument that the balance of trade would improve makes two assumptions; first, that increasing term is necessary to receive longer terms in other countries; and second, that because the UK is a net exporter of music, more money will flow in from foreign markets. The CIPIL report argues that this is not the case.

In conclusion, the Review finds the arguments in favour of term extension unconvincing. The evidence suggests that extending the term of protection for sound recordings or performers' rights prospectively would not increase the incentives to invest, would not increase the number of works created or made available, and would negatively impact upon consumers and industry. Furthermore, by increasing the period of protection, future creators would have to wait an additional length of time to build upon past works to create new products and those wishing to revive protected but forgotten material would be unable to do so for a longer period of time. The CIPIL report indicates that the overall impact of term extension on welfare would be a net loss in present value terms of 7.8 per cent of current revenue, approximately £155 million.

So there we have it. Let's hope that despite the blustering of the BPI - which includes a full page ad in yesterday's Financial Times reading "fair play for musicians" and signed by such luminaries as Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Cliff Richard, U2, Yoko Ono, Barry Gibb, Petula Clark and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa - that EU continues with the status quo.

Today's FT has a letter from Jill Johnson, Director of Policy of the National Consumer Council, arguing that, if anything, the period should be reduced. And in a leader in today's Guardian also expresses disappointment that reducing the period wasn't an option that was examined. It uses the pharmaceutical industry's model as an example, where protection is limited to 20 years before others can replicate the drug. The pharmaceutical industry still invests billions in research and development. Read the comments below that Guardian leader too.

Some of the best news recently has got to be that the UK is not going to extend the copyright on music beyond the current 50 years to a proposed 95 years. The rather random seeming 95 years is because that's what it is in America.

As I've mentioned before, record companies are seemingly unable to make enough cash from their copyrights over a 50 year period. That's why the poor businesses neeeded help doubling it.

Well that seems to be have been knocked on the head (although I'll wait until the official verdict is in). Of course, whilst the first Beatles tracks come out of copyright in the UK in 2013, the songs' composers (or rights holder - so in this instance, Michael Jackson/Sony) still get paid, and will carry on getting money until they've been dead for 70 years (not sure what the means for Lennon/McCartney catalogue when they or their estates don't own it). So it's not as though song writers will be destitute.

Mind you, I don't know how many of his songs, Cliff Richard (one of the campaigners for the increase to 95 years) actually wrote. One way or another, I wouldn't have thought he was very poor. So quite why he feels that I shouldn't be able to do some interesting new things with his early songs, I don't know.

To Wembley Arena (never a fun phrase to type, but it was pretty painless this evening) to see Bruce Springsteen. Now I've got to admit that I'm not a "Bruce" fan. In his heyday he was selling out Wembley Stadium, but we're now in the somewhat smaller Arena - not that the stadium's available of course, since it's a year behind schedule for completion.

But this tour is not about old-skool stadium rock. It's about Springsteen's Seeger Sessions band who are alongside him on his fabulous recent CD. The sound is very much bluegrass/folk/country, and Springsteen is accompanied by sixteen other musicians and singers on stage for the whole concert.

All in all we got 22 songs (according to the set list on the official site) over about two and a half hours.

Springsteen told us on a couple of occasions that he was pleased that "some semblance of sanity" had returned to the States, and performed a brand new song - Long Walk Home - which was very much pointed towards the current state of affairs with American troops.

The band was just wonderful, being completely acoustic, and the whole thing had the feel of a really good night in some slightly larger than normal pub.

I had a great time, like probably everyone else in the arena, and Springsteen and gang really put on a great show with perhaps the highlight being Pay Me My Money Down.

As I returned to Wembley Park station, I was amused to see a woman attempting to sell what I can only describe as headscarves in the colours of the stars and stripes. Even if that might have been Springsteen of old, can you imagine anyone wearing such a garment now?

Seemingly, the BPI is calling for record companies to be given tax breaks! This seems to be the latest hare-brained scheme for British record companies to make more money for themselves. It seems that when they're looking for new artists, it's not because they might hit big and earn loads of profits, but they're actually carrying out "research".

On that basis, any business investing in new products deserves tax breaks. And that'd be, er, just about every business out there.

So how is SprialFrog going to make money exactly? According to a piece in today's FT (read it quick before it costs you), Universal Music is backing the service which will offer free downloads based on users experiencing ads. Unless we're going to have to watch a whole series of ads, I can't see how the books will be balanced.

I assume the resulting music will be DRM'd which means they must be Windows Media files (shhh). The service doesn't start until December so no doubt all will be revealed then.

A busy afternoon of not winning any Arqiva Radio Awards and then heading on to a party at the Hard Rock Café where a few bands were playing.

I got to see Bonnie Tyler and the Fun Loivin' Criminals. Somewhere around I have a copy of Holding Out For Hero on 7" - I remember it being used for that short lived 80s series Cover Up about crime fighting models (It's probably remembered as the programme that lost its star halfway through the series when he shot himself accidentally with a gun loaded with blanks).

Anyway, on a more cheery note, here are one or two of the photos that I took from right at the front of the stage. More on Flickr.

Two years after MyCokeMusic launched, and it closes down.

I can't say I'm really surprised since the OD2 service they had working for them was relatively poor if you wanted music from outside the mainstream. But it just goes to show that even the might of Coca Cola doesn't guarantee online music sales success. And let's face it, all the competitors to iTunes combined are essentially competing for the 17% of the marketplace that has an mp3 that isn't an iPod.

Seen on the tube this evening: a kid in his generic Orson/Feeder type t-shirt with a Download Festival wristband. That is to say, he hasn't removed his plastic wristband from a concert that was over a week ago. Oh dear...

Incidentally, I discover that it only takes 10,000 single sales to make the Top 10 at the moment. So a back of bus ticket calculation suggests that you could buy your way into the top 10 by spending £20k. I'm not suggesting that anyone does this sort of thing since the BPI don't like it and it's all electronic these days so you'd need to ensure that singles were sold relatively evenly around the country, but it's interesting nonetheless. And it seems that around 27% of your sales might be digital. Very interesting.

I recently bought a copy of the new album recorded by Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler, really out of shear curiorisity. Of course I'm familiar with Knopfler, Brothers in Arms having been one of the first albums I ever bought (and curiously one of the few albums I've ever owned in three formats - vinyl, cassette and CD).

But Emmylou Harris I knew less about. In fact I think I learnt significantly more than I ever knew about her following a BBC Four documentary a couple of months ago.

I loved the album, and when tickets came up for this, I was quite excited. I haven't been to Wembley for ages - so it was quite fascinating to see how Wembley Arena has been significantly refurbished. It's still a shed, but around the edges, at least, it's much improved. Out the front, as touts struggled to offload tickets to a concert which wasn't a complete sellout, there's one of those computer controlled fountain displays with dancing lights. And towering above everything is the new stadium, way behind schedule, and its fantastic arch. It actually looks quite close to finished up close - as good as Ashburton Grove looks, but there is obviously a way to go.

Inside the crowd was very well behaved - well apart from the fools behind me who made me wonder why they'd bothered getting their tickets and coming at all. Knopfler and Harris launched into some of the stronger songs from their album before each performing a few songs particular to them. As I say, I'm not really familiar with Emmylou's back catalogue, but I think we all recognised Romeo and Juliet.

It's a great band they've got, full of superb musicians, and I loved every minute of it. There were a couple of encores and the night ended with a wonderful duet of them singing the Dire Straits song, Why Worry (You can find a version on Youtube.)

I know just about every magazine or newspaper has already given the new Pet Shop Boys album, Fundamentalism, 4 or 5 stars (out of five), but it really is that good.

I am a bit of a long time Pet Shop Boys fan and this album really is the best since Behaviour with some great tunes and some serious politics. Integral, for example, closes the album and is all about a subject I hold closely - ID Cards:

If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear
If you've something to hide you shouldn't even be here
You've had your chance now we've got the mandate
If you've changed your mind I'm afraid it's too late
We're concerned you're a threat
You're not integral to the project.

Of course this album marks the return of Trevor Horn, who worked on Left To My Own Devices. I still remember putting my Introspective cassette, newly purchased from Our Price in Bath, into my cassette player, only to hear some kind of orchestration. I seriously considered that there might have been some kind of mix-up in the duplication factory. Left To My Own Devices remains one of my favourite ever PSB songs.

As a consequence, I'm really looking forward to hearing their recently recorded concert with the BBC Concert Orchestra this Saturday on Radio 2. This opens with a fully orchestrated, full length version of Left To My Own Devices. It also features Rufus Wainwright, Frances Barber and Robbie Williams. Should be quite a listen. Then there's Wednesday's C4 documentary, Saturday's appearance on The Culture Show, and today's interview with Simon Mayo.

Anyway, rush out and get hold of Fundamentalism!

A quite hilarious "Crib Sheet" from last week's Music Week about Radio One making unsigned artists available on a special podcast.

It's all behind a pay-wall, so here are a few choice extracts with my thoughts:

Isn't that illegal? Hardly the kind of behaviour I would expect of the nation's favourite.
Well not if - as Radio One is doing - they are from unsigned artists.

I realise that this isn't actually a genuine question and answer, but surely the record company bigwigs are aware that if they don't own or publish the music, they can't get any cash from it.

...

I don't know about all this podcasting stuff though, I can't get my head around it.
[Answer follows, not explaining anything about what podcasting actually is]

I really hope that the write of this piece was letting his or her imagination run away with themselves. Again, if the constituency of readers of Music Week doesn't know what podcasting is, then they seriously need to think about whether they've made the correct career decision.

...

Unsigned is all well and good but I can't help thinking I'd like something a bit more, you know, familiar. Can't they get any artists with a deal?
Ask George [Ergatoudis, Radio 1 Head of Music]. "At the moment we can't use copyrighted or licensed music," Ergatoudis answers helpfully. "We would like to do that as soon as possible. We are talking to record companies and all licence holders to be able to do podcasts with licensed music."

So, no, Radio 1 can't put that music on their podcasts because you, the record company big-wig reader of Music Week won't let him.

But didn't MCPR-PRS come up with a licece for exactly this sort of thing?
Indeed they did - the Joint Onlince Licence to be precise - which allows podcasters to use the society's 10m musical works until the end of 2006. But - and it's a big but - willing podcasters still need the permission of either record labels or Aim [the Association of Independent Music].

Yup, if you pay 1.5p per track to the PRS, you too can have your podcast feature copyright music. That's 1.5p per track per download. And you've also got the small matter of going to the record companies for each and every track, and negotiating a deal with them. How much will that be? who knows, but from a 79p iTunes track, the lion's share goes to the record companies, not Apple. And who's to say that a record company is going to let you distribute your DRM-free mp3 podcast irrespective of how much you pay for the music. Even if you do negotiate a price, how are you going to ever make your podcast pay for itself?

That's not to say that musician don't deserve to be fairly recompensed for their work in podcasts or wherever else. But as it stands, it's not a workable solution.

Incidentally the MCPS-PRS scheme requires the first and last 10 seconds of each track to be obscured by speech or a "station ident". Wouldn't want people getting the full track for free would we? And this is a great solution for tracks with a proper ending.

For some reason, the podcast must be at least fifteen minutes in length. The reason for this is unclear. Is it because anything less and I might keep replaying the podcast to hear a specific track. Let's hope I don't have a copy of Audacity then.

You can read the full rules and regulations here. Has anyone used the licence yet?

I was going to get on my new bike today (more anon), but the weather forecast was poor, so I settled down to a lot of BBC Four's recent Folk Britannia season that I'd saved on my PVR.

First up were a couple of concerts from Celtic Connections in Glasgow. They're all available to view on the website. Plenty of new artists like Les Yeux Noirs, Crooked Still and Eivør to discover.

Then to the Folk Britannia series proper starting from the fifties revival and Ewan MacCall (father of Kirsty who pops up in episode 3), through the sixties with lots of Martin Carthy (father of Eliza) and through to the current revival. Great stuff, and now I have a massive "to get" CD list.

I've just been watching, again, the BBC documentary that recorded the creation of the 1984 Leonard Bernstein conducted "operatic" version of West Side Story. It was on BBC Four a few weeks ago, and I'd not watched it since it was first shown in 1985.

It's a fantastically interesting document of the wonderful musical's first full recording, since soundtrack albums until that point, had been cut to fit on a single LP. I remember listening to dad's LP of the musical many times on our "music centre". After the documentary was shown, mum went out and bought this new version on cassette. I made cassette to cassette copies for myself. Since the book was reproduced in full in the accompanying booklet, I was able to sing along to my heart's content!

But the music aside (and I do have some issues with the over operatic renditions in a couple of places), the most remarkable thing about Humphrey Burton's film is the candid record of Bernstein working with his scratch orchestra and his tough love approach to getting what he wanted. In particular, Jose Carreras doesn't get an easy ride.

I don't own this version on CD, so I feel a trip to a music shop coming on soon. It's just a shame that the DVD of this documentary that's available from Deutsche Gramaphone isn't quite as good as it might be, being a NTSC transfer rather than PAL.

So Smash Hits is no more. What a shame. Where will be without Smash Hits editorial alumni like Neil Tennant, Mark Frith and, er, Kate Thornton. Ah, those happy days I spent memorising the lyrics to Baggy Trousers and Shuddupa Your Face from its hallowed pages. The free badges on the cover.

But it does make me wonder what kids who are into pop music are reading now. Is it really all online? Or is it different kinds of magazines?

I was in a local grocery store the other day and the middle aged woman in front of me was buying some food with her son, who was, I'd guess, around ten. Then he went over and picked up a copy of Nuts which she duly bought. This particular issue featured a topless photo of 'Chantelle' on the cover with a tiny text-box covering her nipples. Now call me an old prude if you like, but is this what kids are encouraged to read by their parents? At the very least, they ought to be sneaking out and buying this stuff without their mum seeing they've got it. Perhaps I should be pleased that the child's obviously reading something. I'm scared to think that his family spend their evenings sat around the telly watching the latest free striptease DVD covermounted on Loaded or Maxim too.

I just thought I'd post here, the comments I left over at On An Overgrown Path in relation to free mp3 downloads of classical music:

My question is this? What proportion of the UK population (and I'll limit this to the UK for simplicity's sake), currently purchase classical music CDs? Unfortunately, the BPI, who'd probably have this information, password protect their statistics section of their website.

But it does seem as though in 2004, Classical "albums" made up 2.6% of all sales in 2004 (among CDs), a fall from 4.0% in 2000.

One way or another, we can be certain that a significant proportion of the population do not buy classical music at all. It's not so much availability of the music that drives this figure, as interest in the music as a whole. There are plenty of very cheap CDs out there to sate interests, and the music's freely available on two national FM radio stations, to greater or lesser extents. Nonetheless, for various reasons, CD sales in this category are falling.

The reasons, I'm sure, are many and various, probably starting with the marginalisation of music in education. The BBC's "experiment" showed that there was significant demand. It's something for nothing certainly. Does giving away something devalue the product? To a certain extent, yes. But it's quid pro quo. Some of those 1.3m people who downloaded those files, probably went out and bought another Beethoven CD because they liked what they heard. That's why Gramaphone give away an excerpts CD every month. Sales come off the back of it. Sure, an excerpt or single track is a different thing to a full piece, but if it costs nothing and generates interest in the music, how can it really be bad.

Classical music is seen as thoroughly inaccessible to many people. A completely closed shop. What version of a piece should I buy? Specialist shops and departments in the larger London stores can seem scary places. Opening up the music like this is a toes in the water way of doing things.

If giving away some music gets a few more people interested and listening to the music, can it be a bad thing?

The caviar analogy is false I believe. Aside from the fact that there probably aren't enough sturgeon left in the Caspian to meet this demand (there's an international ban on you know!), there's obviously an inherent cost in giving people produce compared to media that can be distributed either cheaply or freely (Actually, I bet if I stood out in the street in front of Fortnum and Mason handing out tasters of caviar, I probably would drum up a few customers). But if you truly believe that there's not a larger market out there for music than the shrinking one that is currently buying music, then giving away the music is not going to make much difference. Unless there was someone who held off buying a Beethoven boxed set because they could download a series of mp3s, then you can at least feel good about culturally improving the lives of the masses!

The other link, discussing the commoditisation of music as a result of the increased availability of mp3s is quite interesting. It's possibly true, but then the same argument could probably be made, to an extent, for CDs and every other recording medium. Is the answer to remove them all and force us to attend concerts? According to research from BRMB (TGI, 2005), only 24% of the UK adult population attended any kind of musical concert (pop/rock/classical/jazz etc) in the last year.

If I'm just downloading hours of pirated material through p2p systems, then no, I'm probably not investing much emotional committment to the music. But if I'm buying it via iTunes, what's the difference to purchasing the CD via Amazon?

As a whole, we are buying more music these days, so perhaps, overall music is more of a commodity these days. But the medium is irrelvant. More physical CDs are being sold too. It's more a question of fitting listening to music into our lives. It's how we listen to the music.

The Britten quotation is interesting, but I think he was on dangerous ground if he required me to travel, possibly hundreds of miles, if I wanted to experience his mass. Far be it from me to disagree with him, but aside from the obvious financial issues that mitigate against this, mightn't I actually appreciate the music even more, if I've had the chance to listen to it on CD before I attend? Aren't the liner notes the same as the programme? If you haven't experienced the music live then you haven't truly experienced it. But second best is better than not at all, surely?

Record companies may have scared off the BBC from doing more classical downloads following their Beethoven symphonies last year, but the idea seems to have taken hold in Scandinavia where both Swedish and Danish state radio services are offering free Mozart downloads to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth.

Swedish Radio is offering a series of historical recordings via a podcast link - first up is a 1943 recording of Don Juan. Meanwhile Danish Radio is offering a series of nine symphonies recorded by the Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Symphony No. 41, Jupiter, is available now, and there's an XML podcast link on the download page for that too.

Thanks to James for the Swedish link, and thanks to An Overgrown Path for the Danish link (a site, who's author doesn't believe in giving away free classical music).

The next time record companies are bemoaning the fact that piracy is killing the industry, blah, blah, blah... just think about this: "record firms are vying to get 'Celebrity Big Brother' housemate Chantelle to record the song that she pretended had been a hit when she had to fool other contestants into thinking she was a 'real' celebrity."

If they actually spent a bit of time doing some A&R, then people might have something half decent to buy instead of this kind of crap.

Some of these places just drive me mad. Earlier this year I got loads of free credit from Mycokemusic, the music download site. As a rule, I hate downloads. You're effectively leasing rather than owning the music and with DRM it's just a total pain.

However I accrued a bit of virtual money and got a couple of downloads - why not? Today I pick up last weekend's Observer Music Magazine and fancy listening to Rapture Riders, the mix of Blondie's Rapture and The Doors' Riders on the Storm. A good way to use my credit surely?

Nope.

The site does list the single, and the four tracks on it. I can even listen to a thirty second clip of each track on the CD single. But I can neither stream nor download the full track! So why's it even there? A complete waste of time.

No doubt it's very downloadable from iTunes, but I've not got an iPod so would lose fidelity by burning it onto CD and then re-ripping it, and in any case I've got credit with another site. This isn't even an obscure title (Mycokemusic's pretty terrible about anything that's not in the top 40 - basically you can forget it. Consequently, I haven't exactly been burning through my credit.).

And the music industry wants to know whay it's doing wrong? It can't even get a major player like Coke's site fully working. I don't know who's problem this really is, but I don't care. All I know is that I can't download the music I want. I know of another way to get it, but the artists and performers don't get paid if I go down that route.

Useless.

Madonna wasn't the only artist playing a "secret" gig last night. Alanis Morrisette was playing the intimate confines of the Kings College London Student Union in a one-off gig to promote the recently released "Best Of" (or rather "Collection").

All good fun with all your favourites, although the annoying idiot near me who kept shouting out "Ironic" every time she didn't play it, really did begin to annoy me after a while.

But I didn't let that get me down for what was an ebullient concert. I got the idea that the audience was 50:50 die-hard fans and liggers like myself. That probably doesn't make the greatest concert audience ever, but it was still a good crowd all told. I'm probably just getting more ratty in my old age.

As an aside, it's somewhat disconcerting when you see mobile phone pictures coming out better than your own digital camera photos. I can console myself that was looks good on a phone screen is usually at the extreme end of a digital zoom. I'd never lower myself to use such pointless technology.

Must dust off some of my Alanis collection, although having had a proper listen to Gillian Welch last night I think my tastes in music are 'a changin'. I must admit that I got mildly interested when I read in the paper that it's the Country Music Awards tonight live on Radio 2 (oh there's some terrible music in that genre undoubtedly, but there's also some good stuff.

Someone in a Newsnight editing booth has obviously been to see Michael Nyman recently because Susan Watts' piece on nanotechnology this evening was packed full of Gatacca music. Fantastic.

This article (free subs. reqd.) about the BBC's Beethoven downloads really annoys me. Not the article itself, but the words and thoughts of John Whittingdale of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.

It seems that the record companies are still annoyed that the BBC actually gave away some music free. These were recordings of live concerts recorded at licence payers' expense for Radio 3 by members of an orchestra that's also paid for by the licence fee. And the composer's been dead some 178 years, so there aren't any royalites due to any Beethoven copyright holder. Although rumour has it that the record companies might quite like extend copyright until 200 years after a composer's death. I mean, how else are they going to be able to turn a profit from The Beatles' back catalogue. The fact remains that I paid for this music, so why shouldn't I be allowed to have a copy?

The usual nonsense about it taking a commercial CD upwards of five years to reach 1.4m sales (the cumulative number of downloads) was spouted. Of course, if anyone did any research into the people who downloaded they'd inevitably find that the downloads reached a far wider audience than the classical CD market does. Initiatives like this actually grow the audience for classical music. I suspect that a goodly number of those who downloaded that music had never bought a classical music CD in their life.

I completely understand that the classical CD market isn't as buoyant as it once was, and that labels are having a tough time. But there are other issues at stake here. And protectionism isn't the answer.

I'd have more sympathy with the classical music labels if one of them could publish some verfiable data to show that their commercially available Beethoven catalogue suffered some kind of marked drop-off following Radio 3's Beethoven week. I mean, it surely isn't possible that more people than normal bought Beethoven CDs in the weeks following that initiative is it? It seems terribly unlikely that someone heard something and thought "I'd like to hear more Beethoven now", isn't it?

In a strange way, this actually seems to hark back to the old days of The Third Programme, when "needle time" was limited, and BBC Radio was forced to broadcast lots of live music to keep an industry alive. Now it's the other way round. The BBC helps support several orchestras that wouldn't otherwise exist. And these orchestras make recordings for a variety of record labels incidentally.

Who at the BBC told who at the record companies what they were doing and when, I don't know. But then the BBC shouldn't need to get record companies' permission to do anything; they already act as the biggest shop window for the recording industry there is.

Salon have a free download of a track from the latest Cowboy Junkies album available. You will have to watch an ad if you're not a subscriber.

Uncut magazine also has a track from the same new album cover-mounted this month. But not having the CD with me, I can't tell you whether it's the same track.

The album's well worth a listen.

Since I downloaded this on Friday, it's barely been off my mp3 player if you see what I mean? (Via Boing Boing)

While watching part 2 of the Dylan documentary, there was a brief sequence showing the position of Like A Rolling Stone in the charts. I'm pretty sure that the top four entries of that chart read:

1. Help - The Beatles
2. Like A Rolling Stone - The Beatles
3. Unchained Melody - (Unsure exactly who)
4. California Girls - The Beach Boys

OK - so records did tend to hang around for quite a while in those days, but that's a hell of a top 4 tracks. Number 5 downwards might have been classics too, but I wasn't quick enough to read them.

This year was V Festival's 10th anniversary, and I think that one way or another I've been to the last nine of them, starting with V97 and Blur (featuring Phil Daniels doing his Parklife stuff).

This year was inevitably our biggest ever effort with some fabulous music in the Virgin Radio tent making it harder than ever to get out and watch the bands perform live around the site.

The undoubted star band of the entire weekend were the Kaiser Chiefs. They performed on Saturday in the Virgin Radio tent and were simply awesome. (Check out our site in the coming days, or the station on-air to hear some of their set).

Having completely won over the crowd in the Virgin Radio tent, they went on to do the same on Channel 4 Stage later in the afternoon, and I was priviliged to be there.

This was the first year that I'd camped at V Festival. Actually it was the first time I'd camped at any festival at all. I've always fancied Glastonbury, for example, but the scare stories about mud and stuff are enough to put the fear of god into me. This time around, we had some quite poor weather in the sense that it was both muddy on Friday when we setting up, and Monday when we were shipping out. But overall, I had a really good time.

On Saturday, it was undoubtedly the Kaiser Chiefs as I've said. I even picked up the album on the way home this evening. Later on in the evening, Oasis were headlining, but to be honest I couldn't have really cared less. In "VIP" terms (and that phraseology should be treated with caution), Saturday was far more popular than Sunday with the likes Mickey Rourke and Abby Titmuss as guests.

I can't tell you how disappointed I was to see Big Brother "stars" (I think that should be "contestants") in the area, but far be it from me to complain. Tabloid coverage is tabloid coverage.

Of course, when I was instructed to rush and get a camera to take pictures of Abby Titmuss in our jacuzzi, I didn't muck around, but then neither did the security guard that I happened to mention it to.

Sunday was a much more refined affair. There was the hilarity of discovering that two of my colleagues had got into their tent the previous night and only "discovered" the porch of their tent before going to bed for the night... They only found "the other room" when they woke up the following morning.

Best celeb spot in the Virgin Radio area was not a member of the cast of Eastenders, Hollyoaks, Emmerdale or Holby City, but "England" cricketer Kevin Pietersen - KP to his mates (I'm not one obviously). He hung out for ages and was much better value for money than either Charlotte Church or Billie Piper (no Whovians in attendance seemingly).

It was painful getting back into work today, but I picked up the new Goldfrapp album and the aforementioned Kaiser Chiefs record on the way home. Alison Goldfrapp also performed superbly as did the Scissor Sisters, although I do question whether or not one album with a handful of singles really constitutes enough songs to headline a festival the size of V.

One final thing - the security at V really wasn't what it might have been, and I was able to get into places I really shouldn't have been able to. But I should keep quiet about that sort of thing...

So what's the final verdict on the weekend? A great concert, certainly. Some great performances (and some pretty terrible ones).

Hundreds of thousands of people giving their support to a great cause that has truly got the country behind it.

But, but, but. Still the doubts linger. Full credit to Pink Floyd (and The Who and Keane) for donating revenue to charity, from their increased album sales that result from their performances. But of course they can easily afford it - probably true of every artist playing on Saturday. Thanks to HMV for those stats about how well the Floyd did, and had badly Pete Docherty did.

And it's worth reading Private Eye's "Eye TV" column from today's issue (not online) for a view that's not a million miles from my own. And much as I think Jonathan Ross is a great presenter, I don't think anyone could argue that it was a poor show from that point of view at the weekend.

Finally, this is worth a read, for ammunition next time someone tells you that x billion are watching your telecast.

I was very lucky last night to get a chance to go and see Brian Wilson play a concert in the rather lovely surroundings of Hampton Court.

What a fantastic night. The weather was obviously excellent, and it was a shame that we didn't bring a picnic like just about everyone else.

The concert itself began at 9pm and was basically back to back Beach Boys hits. I can't begin to tell you how much fun I had singing along to just about every song for two hours.

The audience was, erm, slightly different to your usual crowd, and the Waitrose sponsorship of the event meant that it was all very different to what you're used to. It reminded me of picnics in the park in Bath at the end of the Bath Festival. And the clientele there meant that the train journey was especially empty on the way back.

All in all a wonderful concert and I'll being humming Beach Boys hits for some time to come.

No ticket for me, but then it'll be better on the TV anyway.

Andy Kershaw, writing in today's Independent, is very angry. When Bob Geldof first announced the line-up for the Live 8 concerts, African artists were notable by their absence. And this whole thing is about Africa after all.

But a week or so down the road it turns out that we do get some African performances. At the Eden Project in Cornwall. Kershaw sees this as almost a form of apartheid, where the popular Western artists get to play Hyde Park while African's are shunted down to the West Country.

And I agree. It's ludicrous to think that people who've shown up to see Coldplay and U2, will get fed up or turn off if Youssou N'Dour or Salif Keita play. They're international superstars after all.

My nephew is now two, and a while back my brother surprised me by playing a CD from They Might Be Giants that he'd heard on Jonathan Ross's radio show which is for pre-school kids. Now St Etienne and Belle & Sebastian are getting in on the scene.

The underground is festooned with posters for the Royal Opera House's Rigoletto. But the photo of Paolo Gavanelli in the poster, makes him look like an evil John Peel. You can see the picture currently on the ROH home page here.

It seems that The Beatles haven't made enough cash and that the British government want to give them the rest of my adult life to keep earning. That way, EMI will invest more money in new bands.

Alternatively, their shareholders will get richer, and the record companies will get let off the massive screw-ups they've made of late when it comes to the digital age.

Oh, and lots more music will be lost forever.

Not that I'm in any way recommending it, but if you enter the Coca-Cola win a music download (or ringtone) on promotional cans, you currently pretty certain to win. I'm edging towards a full free album's worth of tracks.

So it's all change with both the Radio 1 chart show and Top of the Pops.

The chart show (remember, that's the CHART show), is going make the chart countdown just a "minor part of a wider chart show". Umm, right, yeah. Why exactly do people tune into a chart show? To find out where singles are placed in the chart, and to discover what's number one. You also know that you're going to hear all the said records, even the ones that mightn't ordinarily get playlisted by Radio 1 (few though those might be). Someone also seems to have sold in to JK & Joel that getting just the one show a week rather than their previous two is somehow a good thing.

In the meantime, Top of the Pops is getting sidelined over to BBC 2. And it's being moved to Sundays. It's unclear at the moment where exactly it'll sit, but the official press release talks of it being in an extended foramt. I imagine that it'll follow on sometime after the chart has been announced on Radio 1 at 7.00pm. But then they'll have to do that week's charts which means that the whole recording process and live studio audience will have to change considering that they'd then have to either have live links or make the whole show live - surely unllikely. Obviously there'll be strong cross-promotional opportunities.

Those illegal downloads really are killing music. Here's the proof... Oh...

Today, round two of the music industry's shameful battle to retain copyright in recordings over 50 years old took effect.

From 1 January next year, Elvis' earliest recordings come out of copyright in the UK, meaning that others can release them and profit from them with impunity. It sounds bad. But we're talking about artists who have been profiting for FIFTY YEARS with these tracks. Elvis, like many of the performers who are now coming out of copyright, is dead. And his estate doesn't need the money.

It's worth pointing out that the songwriter and composer continues to receive payment.

Now it's Cliff Richard's turn to have a moan. He uses the emotive idea that his songs could feature in pornographic films - not something I see happening too quickly. Well Cliff, too bad! You've earned cash off your first record for nearly fifty years now. When should it stop? And whilst there might be some performers who don't have as a healthy a catalogue of hits behind them over the ages, these are the same performers who aren't earning now.

If you've only had one hit record, it doesn't mean that you deserve to live off it for the rest of your life. Why should it? I really hope that the EU aren't swayed by the self-interested record companies who are currently occupied in the process of suing some of their biggest customers. The quicker the whole industry dies on its arse the better as far as I'm concerned. If they can't cope with the competition, when they've got the masters (they haven't lost their precious masters have they?), then they're even poorer businesses than I thought they were.

And so it came to pass. The BPI, is announcing today (free reg. reqd.) that it's sueing "uploaders" of music. Now I still don't really understand what they mean by "uploaders". Do they mean "encoders" or "rippers" of the music? Because everyone who leaves a song in a shared directory surely becomes a lender as well as a borrower.

I'm sure that at some point, when sales start dipping enormously, and someone smart realises that there are far more attractions out there than just music to use up our leisure time and money, they might realise how big a mistake this move is.

And I look forward to the wave of, er, outrage, that will come from the likes of the Daily Mail when some middle class 12 year old in this country is prosecuted for thousands of pounds.

Indie labels who use filesharing to get artists out there who have no radio airplay (that would be most artists then); people who like to try before they buy; people who want to be able to listen to the music they've bought on their portable device without worry about stupid copy protection on the "CD".

Record companies are pretty backward about all of this as I've previously said. I really don't have any sympathy at all for the major record companies.

The Cowboy Junkies are touring again, and were on NPR the other day.

It seems to have taken me the better part of a week to get over it, but it does take a lot out of me! Spent much of the weekend in the suprisingly dry, and indeed sunny, Hylands Park near Chelmsford, video and photographing my colleagues.

Live performances in the tent saw highlight performances by Keane and the guy from Snow Patrol. While the Scissor Sisters gave a pretty amazing performance on the NME stage.

Typically, despite taking some hundred or more photos and 6 hours plus of video, I have none with me right at the moment. But maybe I'll upload a video when I've put it all together...

I just need to let of some steam....

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH

Thanks. Sorry about that. For reasons that I can't really go into, but mainly down to the fact that I volunteered to write a database, I seem to have been lumbered with overall responsibility for our company's guest tickets to the V Festival in Chelmsford this year. Yes - it's coming up this weekend, and despite a modest lineup, it's proving more popular than ever.

But can I just say that my heart goes out to anyone who ever gets put in charge of ticketing a major event. It's quite impossible to keep your sanity and do it. Juggling tickets is a full time job, and suddenly I begin to realise why Ticketmaster and their ilk charge you 2.50 to buy tickets through them. I'd hate to organise tickets on a professional basis.

The one good thing to come of it is that we have a barcode reader. Normally at these sorts of things it's a paper list and if "your name's not on the list, you're not coming in". But this year I got the company to invest in a barcode reader. I downloaded a barcode font, and printed a code number on every ticket. Then, when the scanner reads the number (which it does as a USB keyboard incidentally) it enters it into an Access database we've built and finds the invitee. How cool is that?

Slight problems include the fact that it doesn't like direct sunlight to work, and that we haven't finished the database. But I don't need to worry about that until the weekend.

But there are also wild rumours floating around that there's going to be a severe weather warning in the south east on Sunday. Frankly, I don't believe any weather forecasts this far away from Saturday and Sunday, but it's true that Hurrican Charley ripped apart Florida, and of course Cornwall and, tonight, Scotland have seen serious rain affected issues.

But I'll worry about that at the weekend...

Another night, another Prom. I always enjoy the visits of Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (last seen 18 months ago at the Barbican), so I'd been looking forward to this Prom for a while. I showed up quite early, but not early enough it seemed. Instead of joining the Arena queue, I was directed to the Gallery queue.

Even as I type this, I'm not sure I understand why since the first queue didn't look that long. Unless it's the fact that you're allowed to stay on if you attend the first Prom. Anyway, at least I was afforded plenty of reading time, and ample opportunity to people-watch my fellow queuers (broadly speaking - young, fairly well-off, and eager).

The performance was great - the Orchestra is lined up in three rows, with Marsalis himself in the middle of the back row with a couple of other trumpeters. Different pieces see different musicians getting a spotlight performance, and indeed different band members get to lead some of the pieces. Needless to say, I've got the performance digitally recorded on my PC to relive at a later date (it was also on BBC4 so I taped that too).

The only trouble with late night Proms is that they finish at midnight, which means a hasty trip down Exhibition Road to make sure that you don't miss the last northbound tube train from South Kensington. I love late night London transport!

I must be getting addicted. It's a few years since I last went to a Prom and now I've been twice in two days. Even on the day of rush hour tube chaos. OK, so I took the bus and listened to the conductor's story of woe - Routemasters are being phased out this year, and his route, the number 9 is due to finish on 3rd September if not sooner, at which point he loses his job. On another recent occassion I saw a number 73 that, instead of a destination showing, simply stated that it was the last week of its life. Obviously I feel sorry about the job losses, but I just love Routemasters - you can jump on and off them at traffic lights and it seems much more efficient having someone else check tickets once the bus is underway. Yes, I know you can't get wheelchairs on them but I'm going to miss them. I'm sure a modern redesigned Routemaster could have both a tilting floor and an open back. Instead we're going to get these horrible bendy-busses that'll take up more "real estate" in Central London and increase congestion. Still, it seems I could buy a Routemaster for as little as £2000 if I had somewhere to park it, and then go on a summer holiday with it!

However, I digress. The Prom tonight was the world premiere of piece by Chinese composer Zhou Long, a Liszt Piano Concerto and An Alpine Symphony by Strauss. For the first time ever, I went up into the gods - well the Gallery as it's called at the Royal Albert Hall. Prommers can be an odd lot, and even on a half empty day like today, you had to get there early if you wanted a good position by the rails. It seems many of the regulars up there bring full picnics, and quite often lie down for the entire duration of the concert.

On the way back, using buses because there were still tube "issues" I had what I must call a Douglas Adams moment. I'm of course referring to the story that first appeared in So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish (and latterly, again in The Salmon of Doubt) about the packet of biscuits. I shan't retell it here, and if you haven't read it yourself, then chastise yourself immediately and head for your nearest bookshop at your earliest convenience. Anyway, I'm sitting on the middle of the backseat of the bus and a women gets on, munching on an apple, which does make me a little irate. It could have been something smellier, but as a rule, I dislike people eating on public transport. At her feet is a Sainsburys carrier bag that obviously contains more fruit. I return to my book, but suddenly hear the obvious sound of some fruit-shaped object rolling around the floor. I look down and see another apple near the woman's feet. I look at her, and then the apple. She's still munching away on her first apple, but the one on the floor is bouncing around with much noise, so she can't fail to be aware of it. I'd lean down and pick it up, but it's a piece of fruit so she wouldn't want me handling it, and it's right by her foot two seats along from me. I return to my book. Next thing I know, it's slowly rolling past me, and is now bouncing down the middle of the bus's centre aisle. I could have stopped it, but if she was showing no interest, why should I? Oh well. Too late now. It'll be a bit bruised, and it's been all over the floor of a bus! Who'd want it? The woman should have just picked it up when it first fell out of the bag. It's her own fault. Obviously, I now have to keep track on the apple's whereabouts, much in the same way you do an empty bottle if it's rolling between the seats on a bus. It's somewhere near the centre doors of the bus (this isn't a Routemaster you'll gather). Then the woman, who's finished her first apple, puts the core back into the Sainsburys bag which she then begins to inspect closely. She was obviously going for the second apple, which has now vanished (it looks, from where I'm sitting, that the bag now only contains a banana). She looks around her feet, and around mine for the apple. Then back in her bag. I feel as though I should say, something. But what? Am I supposed to admit to watching her apple roll past my feet and down the centre aisle of the bus? That's tantamount to saying that I just "couldn't be bothered". But I thought she knew it was rolling around all over the place, and simply couldn't care less herself. Now I know that this isn't the case, it's too late; I'm culpable. I decide to play dumb and continue reading. But now we're at the bus terminus - well Kings Cross station, which is much the same thing. I walk to the centre doors to get off. And there, right by the doors, staring up at me, is the apple. It's only a Golden Delicious, but still... Now the woman's getting up to come to the doors. She's going to see me standing by the apple and know that I did nothing to stop it. The doors open. I make a dash for it, never once looking back.

OK. Not exactly up to Douglas Adams standard. There's no payoff to the embarrassment. But it's quite close, I'm sure you'll agree.

I paid my first visit to the Proms for a while today, seeing the BBC National Orchestra of Wales playing various pieces including Elgar's Enigma Variations.

I'd entirely forgotten that the opening variation, C.A.E. (which is actually a portrait of the composer's wife) was lifted lock stock into the soundtrack of the first Matrix film.

Naturally, we "prommed" for the princely sum of four pounds. Is there a better bargain to be had in London? There are a few more this season that I really would quite like seeing including appearances by Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo Ma, as well as pieces by Tan Dun.

I spent several hours yesterday, in Finsbury Park getting very wet. I enjoyed myself, nonetheless. The Fleadh is one of those festivals that's quite small, and I suppose gets smothered, coming on the weekend between the Isle of Wight Festival and Glastonbury. Still, not a bad line-up.

I'd not seen Billy Bragg live before, but he was pretty good, and as trenchent as ever. The Delays were OK, as were The Counting Crows. Quite a few people were really there to see The Charlatans who weren't bad, although I did sneak away to catch a bit of Kathryn Williams while they were on. But most people were really there to see Bob Dylan. I wanted to see some of his set, I suppose just to be able to say that I'd seen him. He was pretty good, and I enjoyed it much more than some of the music that had come before. For some reason Ronnie Wood joined his band on stage. I suspect that in reality the legend is bigger than the performances, but then the man is 63 years old. It might be heresy to say it, but there was a certain "sameness" to the songs that we heard, but I did recognise Highway 61 Revisited. Maybe I need to get hold of a few Dylan albums.

Observer Music Monthly published their list of the hundred greatest British Albums of all time yesterday. The list was compiled by critics, industry figures and pop stars.

The Stone Roses came out top, although I'd argue that this was really down to the age of the average rock/pop journalist and/or pop stars. The list of contributors is here. It's worth noting that no album from before 1965 is on the list - and Blur's Alex James wrote an interesting piece in the magazine about what was missing and possible reasons.

I suppose the big thing is to see how many of these "essential" albums you actually have. Well, I've been through the list and can proudly confirm that I have only seven of them. In order they are:

The Hounds of Love - Kate Bush (22)
OK Computer - Radiohead (24)
Lexicon of Love - ABC (42)
Parklife - Blur (76)
Dusty in Memphis (77)
Behaviour - Pet Shop Boys (94)
Sweet Dreams - Eurythmics (100)

So let's look at the exceptions. Noting in the top 20? Well there's plenty of Rolling Stones, who I've no real time for, and lots of Beatles, who I have plenty of time for, but who charge a fortune for their CDs. I'm not paying premium prices for this work, so I therefore have none of their albums. I don't own any Bowie, Zeppelin or Oasis. No Who, Jam or John Lennon. No Joy Division, Clash or Van Morrison. If I did, I'd have more.

Still I'm glad that there's not more recent stuff. If these albums truly are classics, then they can't become that within a year or two of their releases.

I'd love to see this exercise again in ten years' time to see how tastes have changed.

Well, more like, I've lost my faith in Faithless. I really like the current single, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the new album was out on Monday. BUT... it's got "Copy Control" on it, so it's not a real CD. I won't be able to easily copy it across to my minidisc. The disc will have deliberate errors, and the best it'll have on it is a 128k WMA file or something.

I refuse to buy these CDs - that's a sale lost guys.

UPDATE: Looks like the same is true of the Beastie Boys new album. Record company execs know this - you're LOSING album sales with this policy.

My Canadian music week continued earlier this evening with the brilliant Barenaked Ladies. They are quite simply one of the most fun groups around. And don't think they're not talented either; from drummer to bass to keyboards/accordian, they're exceptional musicians.

The one track that just about everyone knows is the radio friendly "One Week", but guess what? They have loads more really fun stuff like that. And they put on a show. Not in the U2/Michael Jackson mode with vast set pieces. The stage at the Hammersmith Apollo was basically just the band and their instruments. But the guys are just brimming with excitement. If anyone in that audience was the slightest bit down when they got there, it'd have taken them about 30 seconds to brighten up as soon Steven Page or Ed Robertson started performing mocking guitar "thrusts". There's plenty of banter and general mucking about. Basically, they take the piss.

A huge North American contingent were out - most audibly for me in the guise of a woman behind me who was quite fanatically happy, and couldn't help screaming the entire evening whilst jumping up and down. She also regularly hit the back of my head, but I forgave her because she was so enthusiastic (about the band, not hitting the back of my head).

I couldn't help but notice that the Barenaked fanbase is quite possibly the shortest known to man. Is it something in the genetic make-up that makes people of a certain "less lanky" height love the music? I don't know about that, but I do know I was a full head taller than anyone else even vaguely in front of me, and that there were initially issues with a woman behind me about our party, and in particular me, blocking her view. After I'd explained that me standing 20 feet off to one side would make me come across as being a little unsociable towards by companions, a reordering of who stood where became a compromise. So great was the size difference, that I began to suspect that the floor of the Hammersmith Apollo was akin to that of a swimming pool, with a sudden drop as you get towards the deep end. Look, I'm only 6'2" and I do sympathise with short people who stand at concerts. I do whatever I can to avoid causing problems. When I go to the cinema, I always try to sit in front of an empty seat so that anyone who comes along afterwards and sits behind me should have been fully aware that they were going to sit behind a tall person. And even then, if I can "sense" that they're suffering from a restricted view, I slouch down into my seat, even though I feel sure that I'm only storing up future back problems. I try, I really do.

Anyway, the latest album, Everything to Everyone, is just out in the UK and I heartily recommend it (Likewise, I've now heard the new Cowboy Junkies album, One Soul Now, and it's essential that everyone gets the early release that includes the bonus EP).

The support act were really good too. A band I'd never heard of before (not difficult) called The Honeymoon. Their lead singer, Thorunn, is Icelandic, and has a great voice, and a stage persona that seems to be ever so slightly modelled on Marilyn Monroe. I shall hunt out their recently released debut EP, Passive Aggressive, in a spare lunchtime.

What a great week for music!

On the way home, I think I may have spotted the only person in the universe to complete the NME Crossword.

Subscribe.

The Cowboy Junkies have a new album out at the end of next month, and are on a brief tour in the UK and Europe before heading back off to North America for a larger tour. I'm a massive Junkies fan, and one thing I was always sure of. A band like that would never show up at Virgin Radio.

How wrong was I? I was idly looking to book a room the other week when I noticed that they were booked to come into the station for Captain America.

So guess where I was at 11am this morning. Not at my desk that's for sure.

Siblings Margo and Michael Timmins were in. Michael playing guitar, and Margot simply singing. I just sat there quietly and watched, not even getting one or more of my many Junkies CDs out for signing. They performed two songs in the Virgin zoo, The Slide and My Wild Child, both of them off their forthcoming album One Soul Now (looking forward to tracking down a pre-release copy).

I'm not sure when the session is going out, but, well, when you work for a radio station... They're not just visiting us; yesterday they were recording for Stuart Maconie (I'm not too sure whether this is for Radio 2 or 6 Music). I suspect that they'll be going to other places too - watch this page of the website.

Sometimes my job's great!

Ash came in to do a Virgin Superstars session on Wednesday, which I sat in on. These things take the form of an interview in front of a live audience, interspersed with songs, a couple of old ones (Girl From Mars and Burn Baby Burn) and a couple of new ones. All acoustic and all very intimate - they seem like a very relaxed bunch of guys. I look forward to the new album.

Then the next day, it was the one I was looking forward to. I'm on the BBC Concert Orchestra mailing list and they were recording a live concert with Diana Krall for broadcast in May. This was one hot ticket, and I was quite excited getting along to the Mermaid Theatre down in Blackfriars with a hall full of Radio 2 listeners. How did I get my tickets? Email competition.

Krall was on Parkinson at the weekend and I bought her new album on Monday (9.77 at Safeway). This was a concert full of jazz standards, accompanied by a set of gifted musicians. Krall herself plays the piano, nearly as much as she sings, and she's surrounded with a Double Bass, Drums and Guitar. Together they were accompanied on many tracks by the massed ranks of the BBC CO.

I loved every minute of it. She's the sort of singer who leaves you with a spring in your step as you depart.

Listen out on Radio 2 for the concert at 7.30 on 7 May!

Soggy Bottom Boys Remixed - via Boing Boing. Music to pass the time of day by until you get your copy of O Mickey, Where Art Thou (heard the bluegrass version of Supercalifragilisticexpialdocious last night on Radio 2, but I want to hear The Bare Necessities - even though I hate Disney for reasons not worth going into just now).

As a follow up to my previous entry, I couldn't help but notice that the Norah Jones CDs available in Fopp are different to the one I bought. They don't mention Copy Control anywhere on the cover.

I did read somewhere on the web when I was fuming before, that EMI only use Copy Control in certain territories, and at the moment, they don't use it in Britain. Quite how I ended up buying a European version I'm not sure, although the price I paid was a tenner, it's widely available at around that price or less elsewhere.

And in any case, why should anyone have to put up with that copy control nonsense wherever they live? Indeed it makes a mockery of the whole thing that the CD is available unadulterated in some places and in a pseudo capacity elsewhere. So I get a UK version, rip it, and share it. Just as well this internet thingy is not some kind of international network. Since then people from abroad might be able to share my files.

The bottom line is buyer beware. Look carefully at the pacakaging, and look for the Compact Disc logo. Quite how one does that with CDs bought from Amazon, I'm not too sure.

Can I just say here and now that I think EMI are idiots. Complete buffoons. I foolishly made the mistake of buying the new Norah Jones album on Friday - but despite being a fine collection of music, I really can't recommend that anyone else should buy it.

EMI have been using their Copy Control mechanism on CDs for sometime now, and I've been avoiding buying any of their CDs that employ it. But I missed the large notice on the rear, and front spine on Friday.

The problems started when I tried to play it on my PC. I know, I know. But I still wanted to have a listen at my computer. I also wanted to copy it onto my minidisc player. The "CD" (it's not a CD) launches its own player which uses a pre-encoded soundfile at a massive 128k to play on the PC.

My Sony "Sonic Stage" software refused to read the CD - preventing me copying directly to minidisc. "Simple Burner" - another MD copying program - did it, but as once I listened to the resulting tracks I realised they clicked and popped throughout. Result - unlistenable.

The various bits of ripping software that I have scattered around, like dbPoweramp and CDex all read a ripped the CD, but they also read all the deliberate errors.

After much faffing around, I finally used a program called Easy CD-EA Extractor as suggested here and finally I had WAV files that were listenable.

Why on earth should I have to go to all this trouble to listen to some music that I've bought? This doesn't stop piracy. It positively encourages it. I like to think of myself as pretty clued on these things, but if even I have to jump through so many hoops to get audio off a CD I've bought and onto a portable listening device, then I feel for the average consumer. Save the hassle and download the album seems to be the message they're giving out.

Norah Jones is going to sell CDs by the bucket load. I look around my place of work and see all the people who've bought iPods, and despair at the thought of them trying to get their music onto their portable machines.

So that's the last EMI CD I buy until they ditch this stupid mechanism. And the more record companies that employ this protection, the fewer CDs I will buy.

The really stupid thing is that any CD can be pirated one way or another. I can record from the digital out of a CD player to whatever medium. And once it's out there, it's out there.

Supposedly, EMI are in trouble at the moment. Copy Control is not going alleviate this.

Off to the Annie Liebovitz exhibition at The Hospital for American Music exhibition. Lots of roots American singers having had photos done by Vanity Fair's no. 1 photographer.

I've moved onto Ennio Morricone at the moment - since I finally worked out that the theme music to the hit and miss Nighty Night is from the soundtrack to My Name Is Nobody.

Morricone is one of my favourite composers, with the soundtrack album to The Mission being one of my favourite pieces of music of all time. (For the record I was recently asked in a work survey what my three favourite albums of all time. Just to be difficult, and because it's kind of true, I named, The Mission, The Trinity Sessions by The Cowboy Junkies, and Fine Young Cannibals' The Raw and the Cooked. The last one of those will have certainly changed by next week).

Morricone will be 76 in November, and I guess that his output feels like it's slowed down of late. But a look at IMDB reveals plenty of Italian and other international work still coming through.

The trouble is, it's difficult to determine works for which his music is being reused (Kill Bill), where he may have only created the theme music (has he really scored 50 hours of Japanese mini-series Musashi? I doubt it), or full film scores (I have yet to catch Ripley's Game). I suspect that I need to spend more time surfing the net to find out this stuff.

Maybe I should get out to Japan to do a Lost in Translation tour, and take in Morricone's June concerts. That's a wonderful idea - if slightly beyond the bounds of reality just now.

Today, I seem to have been travelling around with a background of Francoise Hardy. What brought this on?

Well I was watching the disappointingly poor Sea of Souls on telly last night, and frankly, by the end I was channel surfing. You really know that a supposedly thrilling drama hasn't grabbed you if you're seeing what else is on. I stumbled across a documentary that BBC 4 were screening as part of a Bernardo Bertolucci season they're airing in "celebration" of his new film, The Dreamers.

I only caught a little of the programme (taped the late night repeat), but they showed a scene in which one of the characters has to put Tous Les Garcons et Les Filles by Francoise Hardy on the jukebox. I just love that song. I spent a large part of the evening turning my CD collection upside down looking for a compilation that I bought on a whim a couple of years ago, as I visited one of those parts of HMV that others dare not.

Why should I do that? Well she must be one of the few musical influences I inherited from my parents. I was brought up in the seventies and eighties, and theoretically, my parents should have had a record collection to kill for. Well they didn't. It wasn't that they didn't like music, but their album collection was quite limited. I think that by the time my brother and I had reached our teens, we'd easily doubled their entire lifetime collections. It might be the fragile nature of vinyl, and the fact that my parents had travelled to the US and back so probably didn't absorb clutter like I do now, but I was generally disappointed with the music available. Of course there were some Beatles albums, a fair sprinkling of Simon & Garfunkel, and even some Monkies. But the rest was made up of musicals (my dad), and some popular European singers from the late sixties and early seventies like Nana Mouskouri and Hardy.

It's incredibly easy listening music, and while I can get reasonably excited by some of the new music coming through at work, you can always return to this sort of stuff to relieve stress, particularly when Blair and Bush are just about admitting that there was bugger all reason for going to war. [Calm deep breath]

It's just a shame that my French is not up to much, and I don't really understand the lyrics. Still, I rarely listen to the lyrics of English language songs so that's not the biggest issue in the world. I do sometimes think that I'm the only person in the world utterly oblivious to the written meaning of songs. I guess it's a voice against a melody that makes me like them. A discussion for another day.

Today I went to see my first ever ballet. The Nutcracker by Matthew Bourne is something of a different ballet, I'm told, with a non-conformist setting and method of producing the show.

The charming people at ING Direct provided the tickets via one of their free offers, and who was I to refuse them.

I didn't quite realise how much of the music I already knew, albeit through my knowledge of Fantasia.

It's a tremendously entertaining and exhiliarating show, from which you come out having had a wonderful time. I loved every minute of it, and should go to the ballet more often.

I've just been listening to a show on BBC London that I've never heard before presented by Sean Rowley (I think). He played a remix of a Belle & Sebastian song that's soon to be released as a single. It's an amazing remix with some very African influences. I can't quite remember the details of exactly who or what's on the track but it's wonderful and so uplifting.

The single is called I'm A Cuckoo and is due for release on Feb 16.

Apropros of nothing, there's a thoroughly disturbing video airing on the EMAP music channels just now. It's a German band called the Boogie Pimps and their crass Euro remake of "Somebody to Love". However, it's the video that you really have to wonder about. It features seven very small babies skydiving from a plane in formation (aka the red devils), landing on a lip-syncing model who's wearing lingerie, while the camera lusts over her breasts. Then she gets a baby bottle out and starts drinking milk from the teat, before the miniture babies all land on her breast. I really don't think that this description does the video justice. Just what the hell is going on?

There are always one or two of these very strange videos for songs that as far as I know get no air-play from any major radio stations in the country whatsoever (prove me wrong when they get to number one). Still, we're in the dog days of January when just about anyone can get to number one.

I've only just learnt that composer Michael Kamen has died at the age of 55. Only a couple of weeks ago, I was transferring my cassette of his soundtrack (with Eric Clapton) for Edge of Darkness from cassette to my PC for burning to CD. He had loads of film credits and recently he did the wonderful music for Band of Brothers.

Here are some obituaries from The Telegraph, the BBC and The Guardian.

Yes it's bad. But for 70p I got a load of Elvis songs - and one of them is Suspicious Minds - so I had no choice really.

Or just "V Festival" as it should be known.

The weather held out, and the Virgin Radio hospitality tent looked better than ever. We didn't have the problems we'd had before with food, which was handled expertly and efficiently. Coldplay and the Chili Peppers headlined, and I did make out of the Virgin area on more than one occassion over the weekend.

But I really think that some kind of investigation should be held into water sales. They always stop you bringing water into the site, and then charge one pound fifty for 500ml of water, again in bottles. They may let you in with small bottles but despite the hot weather, you can't bring large ones in (unless you're camping).

And what a rip-off beer is and three quid a pint. I'm glad that I don't have to buy it at those prices.

Oh, and can someone tell me what a "mandatory donation" is? I should have made one with my ticket, but there was me thinking that it was up to me whether I donated or not.

All those things aside, it was all well organised, and went really well, so I shouldn't complain too much.

One way or another, I've done quite well out of the BBC today. As well as waking me up earlier today, they also supplied me with free tickets to see the BBC Concert Orchestra playing film music by Michael Nyman at the Royal Festival Hall this evening.

Nyman himself was conducting, with a full range of music from Gattaca, The Claim, The Draughtman's Contract, Prospero's Books, and of course The Piano featuring Nyman himself.

The music's wonderful, and it was slightly unusual to hear full orchestral arrangements of it. When I was living in Bath, I heard Michael Nyman give a concert there once with his band as part of the Bath Festival. I think that I probably enjoyed this even more. The music in particular from Gattaca is sensational, and everyone loves The Piano, even if I find it hard to rewatch the film these days.

Radio 3 is broadcasting the concert next Monday, and I'll certainly be recording it for posterity.

For the first time ever, we came bottom of Eurovision with nil points. No relegation for us however, since we bankroll the whole thing.

I've just returned to a program that I first got interested in a couple of years ago - Music Collector. The idea is that it keeps a database of all my CD music (and indeed any other music that I have). The really clever part is that it can batch scan CD TOCs and then query them with a CDDB database to fill out all the album and track details.

Of course this is still quite a big job. So far I've scanned over 300 discs, but I have probably twice as many to go (I seem to have accumulated quite a lot of music over the years).

But doing this is very therapeutic, since there is so much music that I never listen to. There is also the fact that I find I have music that I'd forgotten buying. Indeed there are a handful of duplicate albums in total.

The one thing I'd like to do with the data when it's complete is to host it on this site somehow and allow it to be searched using PHP and MySQL. I've hunted their forum, and although others are interested in doing it, no-one seems to have done so yet. I have to battle with the exports that the program allows, and it seems I'm going to have to learn some of the finer points of XML, as well as PHP and MySQL. Could be quite uphill.

In the meantime, let's continue scanning.

A very long day has just about ended. Starting with a five o'clock taxi for RAJAR (down basically - thanks for asking).

Later on, the weather took a turn for the worse, and by the time it came to the highlight of my day, a Barbican concert given by the aforementioned and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the snow was really coming down.

It's a strange relationship that Britain has with snow. We live in a climate where it's not unusual, yet the slightest downfall and everything grinds to a halt. It was crowded getting on the tube, and by the time I got to Kings Cross, they decided to close the station altogether. The Barbican is two stops from Kings Cross, so I thought about a bus, but it was snowing, and buses were packed with long queues.

Half an hour later, freezing cold, I arrived at the Barbican Concert Hall.

The concert was wonderful, featuring the music of Benny Goodman. I enjoyed every toe-tapping minute of it. My cheap ticket (the lowest price available) also seemed to secure me a front row wing seat which wasn't at all bad.

I'll spare the details of the trip home, which needless to say, was equally as fraught. At least it's not quite midnight yet...

I've just been listening to my Wavefinder's recording of last Friday's Remix, and it's fantastic. Loads of great tracks that at some point I'll pull apart and make into audio of. Maybe tomorrow at work!!!

Well the jury's still out. Is the video on the Christina Aguilera CD single any different to the one that's on constant rotation on all the music channels on TV. We don't think so.