Recently in Music Category

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 st