Hard News by Russell Brown

Some numbers:
Glastonbury: 135,000 attend in a country of 60mln => 0.2%
Lollapalooza: 160,000 in 300mln => 0.05%
BDO: 40,000 in 4mln => 1%

Which means they need a big chunk of the potential market to turn up, leading to a situation where it's always going to be hard to make money and unlike say Glastonbury, which attracts a good percentage of reasonably on to it music fans, BDO has to rely on attracting a large munter contingent to make up the numbers.

Which means for non-munters without a VIP pass, it's going to be a very average experience and one that many have given a miss to after one or two years.

Huge fan of Dimitri. He's also recently posted a remix of The Boss by Diana Ross on his Soundcloud page, and it's brilliant. Problem is I then get all conflicted because my favourite version of that song is the Masters At Work remix of The Braxtons, which is an all-time house classic...

Anyway, Dimitri’s got a new compilation album out which looks very tasty. It opens with my absolute favourite remix of his:

Memories…
Why just today, while enjoying a souvlaki at casbah, I was delighted to stumble into Debbi Gibbs’ lakehouse, and great to see she’s looking good, just the same in fact, and comfortable, good on her…
bet her son loves the Aquada
;- )

… duck out and buy the latest copy of Home magazine
(June July) and have a look, there are some other
really nice places in there, too
Keep Print Alive

Which means they need a big chunk of the potential market to turn up, leading to a situation where it's always going to be hard to make money and unlike say Glastonbury, which attracts a good percentage of reasonably on to it music fans, BDO has to rely on attracting a large munter contingent to make up the numbers.

Um, OK... It's also a lot easier to make money if you're charging Glastonbury prices - £210 ($407) this year. (I also have a sneaking suspicion the BBC isn't getting any of this access for free.) I suspect you don't have to be a "munter" to end up doing a pretty stringent cost/benefit analysis on spending that kind of cash on any music festival in New Zealand.

PNC's new album (The Codes) out today. It's a lotta EDM apparently.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/music/news/article.cfm?c_id=264&objectid=11281618

One of the songs on it: Hundred Cups
https://soundcloud.com/nzonairmusic/14-hundred-cups-m4a

Vodafone sucks big time!
Did I mention just how crap Vodafone is?

After several hours and days to various help desks – 3 days later they still can’t reinstate SoHo after cancelling it for no good reason when we upgraded to a Hard Drive recorder that they supplied – everything has been their fault all we want to do is give them money to watch what we had been happily watching prior to ‘upgrading’ and they say they can’t flick a switch any faster than 3 working days (this 3 day thing was only mentioned on the 2nd day of trying to get them to fix their mistakes)- pricks!

What kind of undynamic clunky systems are they running in there
Not good enough!

Does anyone out there know any names of anyone high up in the Vodafone hierarchy, better yet their phone numbers or email addresses – I am about to take the battle of the pissed off consumer to their battlements…

…and every website I can think of that will allow disparaging comments about Vodafone’s lack of consumer service and empathy – and I have all this free time to do it now – until they reinstate the channel!
They were the ones who addicted me to Penny Dreadful – who knew what further horrors they had in store in their ‘lack-of-service’ department!

Corporate arrogance is so unappealing!

(Edit: oh yes, tip to the so called 'help desk’ people and supervisor (John and May) who both said on different days that they’d expedite, then escalate, the solution and that they’d phone me back to let me know – well I’m still waiting for those calls too – bastards!)

Bugger Vodafone!

</rant – for now)

Bugger Vodafone!

So, is that your learnings going forward? (I have been learning TVNZ speak ;)

Maybe the people in charge of Vodafone are the same ones in charge of Glastonbury? Vodafone, brought to you by Glastonbury. New slogan: No, you can't change, you're stuck with whatever crap we give you..

And just in case Vodafone or Glastonbury doubted it, communication is a Good Thing.

Artefact of the same thing, I suspect - lack of population. People going to Glastonbury have to like music enough to make the effort and fork out four hundred dollars.

There are people in NZ like that, but probably no more than two or three thousand.

Maybe NZIS should have a migration category for music lovers of taste and distinction.

BDO may need a bigger % of the population than Glasto but that hardly seems a relevant point when you consider all the other festivals in an English summer. The Hyde Park concerts are like a string of Big Day Outs, V festival is huge, Reading and Leeds festivals is a giant cheese fest. There are soooo many beyond that. Niche festivals for every genre (Green Man a folkish fest hosts 20k people and runs for 7 days!) countless dance music fests. And then you have a number of UK music nuts who travel to Primavera etc in Europe.

The culture of going to several music festivals a year is much stronger there. I'm sure ticket sales to big festivals as a percentage of the population would far out weigh that of NZ.

Personally I would love to see Smith and co put on some sort of fest at Western Springs this summer but 6 months out and without the tie in with oz booking power that seems unlikely. 2014 BDO was great though. Very enjoyable, even without Blur.

Vodafone sucks big time!
Did I mention just how crap Vodafone is?

Did I tell you the story of how Sofie and I were imprisoned by Sky TV?
True, tried to return equipment that they wanted to charge $25 for collecting after we cancelled. Took said equipment back to their shop in Mt Wellington, which apparently closes at 12 on Saturdays so we took it round the corner to their offices, bloke at desk refused to take it and said if I left it he would put it in the skip and we would be charged for not returning it.
So, I put it, with a covering letter, in the inbox. When we got to the main gate it was shut tight, I called on the intercom to get it opened and was told we were not allowed out until we picked up THEIR equipment and took it away.
Luckily a Sky employee wanted to get in so he used his entry pass and as the gate opened we made our break for freedom, yeeee haaaa!!!
Best of luck Ian, I fear you are dealing with the same people.

Oh yeah, Big Day Out. Went there once on acid, it was weird.

Which means they need a big chunk of the potential market to turn up, leading to a situation where it’s always going to be hard to make money and unlike say Glastonbury, which attracts a good percentage of reasonably on to it music fans, BDO has to rely on attracting a large munter contingent to make up the numbers.

I’ve wound up going to all the Big Days Out, and this is not my experience at all. Apart perhaps from the first couple of years, the crowd at the Big Day Out is very largely fun and good-humoured.

What made some sort of VIP/crew/sponsor/bFM-type refuge attractive was really the harshness of the Mt Smart environment. There really weren’t many places to chill there, if any. The Western Springs site, otoh, has nice, grassy slopes and even trees to sit under. The problem there was bars and toilets, but that’s fixable.

this is not my experience at all

Yeah, the munter BDO was the Metallica-headlining one, but that wasn't its general vibe every year. (Also, that was the BDO at which I spotted a woman with the arm tattoo of the heads of *all* the members of INXS, so it was clearly a bit of a winner.)

The culture of going to several music festivals a year is much stronger there. I'm sure ticket sales to big festivals as a percentage of the population would far out weigh that of NZ.

How many decent sized music festivals are there in NZ each year? I literally have no idea how many go to the likes of Raggamuffin, Rhythm and Vines, Tankapalooza, Home Grown, Parachute (before it bit the dust) ..... etc ....

The last great soul man goes...
...across 110th street one last time. RIP Bobby Womack

The Telegraph's top ten

Maybe the people in charge of Vodafone are the same ones in charge of Glastonbury?

Well, if the BBC coverage is anything to go by, they seem to be going over reasonably well with the crowd.

I always thought that going to Glasto purely or mainly for the bands on the main stages was kinda missing the point - most of the interesting stuff happened over in the corners or on the quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, etc. etc. stages. Mind you, I never paid for a ticket so couldn't really complain about the headliners not being to my taste....

all the other festivals in an English summer. The Hyde Park concerts are like a string of Big Day Outs, V festival is huge, Reading and Leeds festivals is a giant cheese fest. There are soooo many beyond that. Niche festivals for every genre (Green Man a folkish fest hosts 20k people and runs for 7 days!)

The Guardian puts out a UK festival supplement in around April/May every year that lists most but probably not all of them. It's generally around 40-50 A5 pages.

Last week a Doprah video, this week a Doprah video

Just off the scanner: Doprah at the Arch Hill 15th anniversary bash last month.

First World problem solved!
I was phoned back by vodafone today (Sunday), by one of the people who promised to, who had just come back to work after time off, and who followed up and let me know the connection was now live.
Good on him,
so they are on a 24 hr 7 day business cycle.
But it still needn't to have taken effectively 4 days to tick a check box somewhere
the person I talked to could give company money away
- credits and waiver of charge - actual income,
but couldn't initiate a flow of already streaming content,
this in the age of dynamically updating systems
and instant gratification
- weird approach!

They should all be made to watch Brazil
(no, not the soccer!)

seeing as how all them Led Zepp albums have been re-issued and stuff, this is how they should really be played…