Posts by Simon Grigg
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Cameron, for the CD, simply, on physical you are paying a fee for warehousing and the sales team that brings it to your shop..about $5 last time I looked, plus the mark up for the retailer..about 30% of the cost.
And, yes, paying for the license you've already purchased again. But then, you're doing the same thing when you buy a CD copy of something you already own on vinyl. Selling you something you already own has been a very lucrative cornerstone of the recorded sound industry for a long time and one of the key reasons the CD was such a profitable container throughout the eighties and nineties.
-
No idea, but iTunes' profits suggest I'm at least part of a very large group of people,
And the ugly elephant in the room, widely ignored, is that unit sales of music are actually up in the digital era, not down as we are repeatedly told. Album sales, and hence dollar value have dropped dramatically. There is overwhelming evidence that people, if they want a song, tend to buy it. For most people it's a pain in the arse to have to fire up Limewire and hunt for a song that you can easily nab for one click on for iTunes. The quantities of one track digital track purchases for the likes of Lady Gaga & Black Eyed Peas are massive, far larger than they were in the pre-net days of singles. People buy tracks, not albums.
Have we not worked out that generalisations are the enemy here?
Yep the generalisations and half truths seem to have mutated into the unquestioned truth upon which arguments and law are made, at least as far as music is concerned.
-
Gordons, Rhumba Bar, mid 1980. Only 4 of us there as it was pre-Future Shock EP. Two of us consisted of a skinhead and a drunk skinny guy who the skinhead wanted to beat up and was chasing around the venue for half the set until the bouncer removed them both, leaving just me and my girlfriend.
Surreal and blisteringly loud. Good tho...
-
I've reported these nine tracks to iTunes, so hopefully this'll get sorted.
Good luck Robyn. My experience with Apple on iTunes is that they simply don't care and are rather unresponsive to any issues you may or may not have with the store.
It may pay to speak to the aggregator..maybe Amplifier/ DRMNZ. They are a thoroughly decent bunch and very helpful.
-
Fighting their customers. Suing their customers, in the case of the music industry. Refusing to release product that consumers want in the absence of supposedly-perfect protection against duplication in the case of the movie industry. They force people into downloading because they fail to deliver what is being sought.
And yes, without wanting to even search for it, if the best forgotten copyright thread established one thing it was that the demise of the record industry (as in the big record companies) could not be attributed to just one factor: piracy. There are a multitude of reason why sales plummeted in the 2000s (and indeed quite some data that argues that they haven't plummeted in the way IFPI and RIAA would have one believe, rather the customer has ceased to acquire in a way that provides quite the cash flow that recording giants were used to in years earlier), with piracy being just one part of the equation.
2009 has been something of a vintage year for new music, and almost none of it has been released by majors. Indeed, read through the lists of the best music of the 2000s appearing here there and everywhere and the one thing that sticks out is how little of it comes from the big labels...the ones who control the bodies screaming piracy.
I bet the kids are excited this week..Bon Jovi are number one in the US.....
-
and Terry Hogan
without whom NZ's rock'nroll imagery would, to this day, look very different.
-
Having said that, the late '80s were still fairly bleak for NZ music.
I reckon I could scribble out a fairly long list of why they weren't. But RIANZ, commercial radio and most of the media provide a fairly good reason as to why most folks in NZ simply had little idea of what was being produced by the likes of Angus McNaughton, Shayne Carter, Trevor Reekie, Mark Tierney, DLT, Phil Fuemana, Grant Fell, Chris Mathews, Jon Cooper, Daniel Barnes and many, many more (and that's mostly just Auckland)
-
Dammit Joe, I'm outing you
whoa, I though everyone knew that. Iconic, innit.
Gotta say my favourite Knox film footage was something I found in a box that he somehow left with me circa '79, I guessing when TL went to Australia. Looking through I found an uber-grainy, Super 8 reel of he, Doug Hood and a couple of others taking a road trip to Auckland in 1974 to see Elton John at Western Springs in, I think, a Combi. It was shitty quality but was very funny in a flare wearing pre-Goodbye Pork Pie way. I've long since returned it but I'd kill to watch it again.
Toy Love upstairs in the Cook packed to the gills was the very best place to see/feel/hear them - I wish they could record that.
There are various live at The Cook tapes floating around the net..I've got a bunch of songs from one in my iTunes.
But I'd also argue that while The Enemy were very much a Dunedin act, TL were as much an Auckland band, as they were a product of a year or so in that notorious band house in Williamson Ave, and an absorption into the Auckland scene (hell, Phil Judd almost joined them at one stage..now that would have been a bizarre mix) which included countless Saturday afternoons at the Windsor Castle, both as The Enemy and Toy Love, where they were very much playing to a very extended family, at least until late 1979.
-
James, I like how you slid past being called on the fact that the regime in control of Burma are actually right-wing, and much of the opposition to them - both parliamentary and outside parliament, is left-wing.
James is always very selective in his outrage, and often finds the urge to pull in George Friedman, whose also very selective wisdom and tailored semi-truths can be very handy when one wants to tighten one's blinkers a little.
I suggest you read Edward Teller's biography by Peter Goodchild.
Indeed, or any reasonable history of the end of the cold war.
-
Uh, not when you're getting paid to go there on a regular basis. The bfm studio is a half kilometre walk from the Civic carpark under Aotea Square which is seldom full at any time.
Rather depends if you're carrying a large box of 12" vinyl as I was for some 16 years of bFM shows and racked up countless parking tickets in the process. I know Mike has been known to do the same in past years. I have some sympathy.