Christopher Mackay's Blog

Banner day for EMI: “OK Go Ditches Label Over YouTube Embedding Rights“

(Via @johnsgunn.)

PinkFloyd.co.uk has won a court ruling against EMI in their suit preventing EMI from selling individual tracks online.

Should they choose to enforce the ruling (they might simply have wanted to prevent EMI from stepping outside of their agreement, thereby establishing precedent, or they might be using the ruling as a bargaining position come renegotiation time), I can’t see how this doesn’t amount to Pink Floyd cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

A few things come to mind:

1. While it’s true that the Gilmour/Mason/Wright version of Pink Floyd did perform Dark Side as a set during the latter half of Division Bell tour in 1995, as did Roger Waters on his 2007 tour, they’ve both regularly played songs from many of their ‘concept albums’ individually, too. This implies that the suit was ether about money or control, or both.
2. If it’s about money, I wish them luck. Die-hard fans will, of course, buy the full albums either way, if they haven’t already bought multiple copies over the years (my Dark Side of the Moon collection is ridiculous), but casual fans will want to buy Money, Comfortably Numb and Wish You Were Here. Which group do you suppose represents the larger market?
3. This sounds like an attempt to control how people listen to their music. A) Why bother? B) Get over yourselves. I like Pink Floyd and Roger Waters’ music more than most, but I certainly don’t listen to it the way it was released. Who has that kind of time? (It must be said, though, that Wish You Were Here is the greatest rock album ever made, regardless of what fans of Exile on Main Street might say)

But why is this futile? Because people don’t want it.

Adam Engst, of TidBITS (@tidbits), wrote a thoughtful opinion piece called The Rise and Fall of Bundle-based Business in which he states:

All this unbundling happened due to customer demand and because new technology, largely the Internet, made it possible. After all, who hasn’t felt slightly cheated after buying an album and discovering that some of its songs are far less appealing than others, or realizing that none of the articles in a magazine were compelling enough to read? This shouldn’t be surprising: enabling each member of a family to order a completely different meal in a restaurant has long been seen as “better” than a home-cooked meal where everyone is forced to share the same dishes, whether or not they are equally well liked. Unbundling promotes choice, and, within reason, people like choice.

Are David Gilmour and Nick Mason (Pink Floyd’s surviving members) within their rights to demand that their contract with EMI be upheld? Absolutely. Do they (together with former member Roger Waters) have the right to exert control over how their creative work is disseminated? Of course they do.

And will their fans, both die-hard and casual, continue to ignore all this when it suits them? To quote everyone’s favourite quitter, “you betcha!”

“Failure is an option, but fear is not.” A great talk by James Cameron at TED, February, 2010; touches on his early love of science fiction, his love of diving, working with Stan Winston at Digital Domain, and his work on The Abyss, Titanic and Avatar.

By way of Vanity Fair magazine:

Hitchens dissects the best-known commandments (there are, of course, far more than the top-10 that they teach in Sunday school) and proposes 10 new ones (begins at 6:16):

1. Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or their colour.
2. Do not ever even think about using people as private property or as owned or as slaves.
3. Despise those who use violence — or the threat of it — in a sexual relationship.
4. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child.
5. Do not condemn people for their in-born nature. (Why would god create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them?)
6. Be aware that you, too, are an animal and dependent on the web of nature; try to think and act accordingly.
7. Don’t imagine that you can escape judgement if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife.
8. Turn off that fucking cell phone (you can have no idea how unimportant your call is to us).
9. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions and terrible sexual repressions.
10. Be willing to renounce any god or any faith if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above.

The folks at PictureCode have released a 64-bit version of their outstanding Noise Ninja plug-in for Aperture 3. They didn’t waste any time getting this into users’ hands.

Even better, when I hadn’t seen any mention of a forth-coming upgrade on PictureCode’s web site after Aperture 3 let me know it would have to run Noise Ninja under 32-bit mode, I emailed them to ask about their plans.

Not only did Bill Smith, their senior programmer, get right back to me, letting me know a release was imminent — he attached a beta version of the plug-in.

How cool is that?

Awesome animated ad for Google Chrome:

(Via Official Google Mac Blog.)