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!”

This one’s for the personal knowledge base:

Boston Acoustics Horizon I-Duo Volume limit problem: Mine came with “hospitality mode” enabled, and volume would not go past 19. To fix: turn on unit, turn volume all the way down to 00, push and hold volume button for 10 seconds until beep then release, then turn volume all the way up to 50 (max) and push and release volume button.

From an Amazon.com customer review.

Pink Floyd keyboard player and founder member Richard Wright has died aged 65 from cancer

(Via BBC NEWS.)

‘Digital Manners Policies’ is a marketing term. Let’s call this what it really is: Selective Device Jamming. It’s not polite, it’s dangerous. It won’t make anyone more secure — or more polite”

Best argument for open-source software; now what about open-source hardware?

WALL•E (2008) review:

The idea that a company in the business of mainstream entertainment would make something as creative, substantial and cautionary as WALL-E has to raise your hopes for humanity.

—John Anderson, Washington Post

That’s a lot to pin on a movie. Can’t wait to see it. Hopefully Thomas Newman’s score is up to his usual standards.

(Via metacritic.com.)