Posts by Simon Grigg
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
this downloading mp3s is the saviour of it all is mythical bollocks. .
Umm...I'm the last person to state such a thing Rob.......I agree 100% but in the face of all that live revenues globally are soaring, as is the amount of music, whether its paid for or not, being consumed. It's the failure to monetarize that in traditional terms which is the issue.
But there are people out there who are succeeding and Mp3 stores are not the answer or close to it, although they are a stepping stone to a small part of it.
-
Columbia signing Rick Rubin to turn around the company
You can't blame Rick for taking the big cheque (or check in US-speak) but truly this reeks of last act in the play desperation.
The guy is s record producer whose circus act since the mid nineties primarily consists of rescuing or saving the careers of acts deemed over by the "industry"....with Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Johnny Cash being the most notable examples (Neil Diamond less so, but there wasn't a lot left to rescue I understand). That doesn't translate to corporate rescue services but I guess they've tried everything else.
But those articles miss the fundamental point, which is that the music industry, and indeed the grass roots record industry is actually in surprisingly good health, its just the way it was done, and all that implies, that isn't.
-
scarily close to saying dire straits and you'll just upset mr grigg by mentioning the band of his nightmares
As I once said elsewhere, if The National Party were a band, they'd be Dire Straits....
But I understand the record shop conundrum. I used to, at the height of the punk thingy in 78 /79, manage a small record store branch in Parnell and I truly tried to be the good employee and play The Cars and Dire Straits instore but I usually, less and less, couldn't bring myself to do so. Sometimes you had to just let your needs and instincts get the better of you and just bang on The Ramones or The Buzzcocks and be done with it..
Now of course they have employment contracts to prevent such individualistic venting
-
I also noted that Apple lopped $200 US off the price of the iPhone, (which generated much wailing and gnashing of fanboy early adopters teeth) making it now $399 US for 8GB, they also culled the 4GB one.
But the buzz in the industry (music) has more to do with the Nokia store due this year, than the iPhone, or indeed the iPod, which, in this part of the world at least, seems to be largely slipping out of view under the wave of music enabled phones from Sony E and Nokia. It's easy to forget that Nokia sells as many phones every three days as Apple has iPhones in it's whole time on the market, and that total is growing both in number and sophistication. I can get a Wi-Fi enabled phone here with a reasonable memory for NZ$100 or less.
Getting on the Starbucks playlist that hooks up with the WiFi iTunes and the iPhone/iPod will be quite important in the US.
Back to Nokia who've been doing just this in Asian phone shops (and it's hard to overstate just how many there are of those in Asia) for quite some time.
Then you toss the 3.5G revolution here into the mix...I can buy a 9GB pre-pay 3.5G unlimited time card here for $95 now....
Already struggling musicians are posting songs to MySpace et al and feeling validated because 378 people have downloaded it and that's really important, man.
In a way it is....we kinda used to find music, at least in NZ, these ways a lot of the time, and the mainstream broadcast media, as RB points out, simply doesn't have the legs any more...it (globally) no longer sells music, for a variety of reasons but mostly because the early adopters don't listen to it and start the ball rolling, whereas the expanding buzz from the likes of a MySpace site, or blog talk, live shows, or (in the good old days) a Rip It Up story, has that potential.
Witness the LEDs and the buzz around them...more buzz right now in the fanworld, which is where it really matters, than any NZ act being played on any commercial station...and then look at Scribe, whose having trouble getting much buzz at all on his new stuff because he lost those people who might have bought the 378 copies off a MySpace page. It's actually really all about those 378 copies.
-
But perhaps as the Australian goverment hasn't yet managed to suffer a terrorism attack on Australian soil, it is settling for second best and trying to at least look like a viable terrorist target.
I don't know if they would go as far as to wish an attack as such, but Howard certainly gives the impression of wanting to be seen as a proper target in his lust to be regarded as one of the major players.
-
The irony is that when Bush came here, to the land Howard once described as a front in the war on terror, there was little sense of a lockdown. Sure there were the armoured cars, a retinue at the airport, and the roads were closed as he passed, but the most obvious effect on the island was the very short term crackdown on pirate DVDs and software.
Compare and contrast the APEC security procedures in Sydney with what happened in Auckland in 1999.
And a couple of years later I was able to very briefly chat, as did many others, to Clinton outside my record shop in High Street.
Can you imagine the current incumbent being able to do so anywhere in the world in 2010.......
-
Ahhh...getting rid of a dictator...I don't think that was one of the espoused rationales until a little later.
Remind me, when does Mugabe get the ADF visit, or for that matter Myanmar, which is a little closer to home for John, but clearly not on his radar
The there was his stance on Suharto ...the man he once called a ’caring and sensitive’ leader.
John must be staggering under the weight of all that hypocrisy, no?
-
they did also have a fairly substantial interest in wheat exports to the country too though
ah, but I thought Honest John didn't know anything about that ...
As Neil infers, he's a man of quite some principle
-
Maybe some people actually agreed with Bush......you don't really have a mind of your own.
having watched Australia, without a word of explanation, reversing travel warnings 180 degrees last year when the US issued a contradictory one a couple of days after Australia's, and watched Bush and Howard's Texas meetings, and the body language therein, with some interest I would hazard I perhaps approach their relationship with a little more cynicism than you, it would seem Neil, and recent polling in Australia would tend to suggest overwhelmingly so do many of Mr Howard's countrymen.
And what exactly was the strategic value for Australia being in Iraq? Self defense? The only possible rationale was to ingratiate themselves with the US, which was exactly the same reason NZ sent a token force however briefly. It's hardly rocket science Neil.
-
A possible Democratic President won't be around till Jan 2009. We have an election before then. Might not be Labour having to do decide on whether to u-turn
More to the point, a Rudd led Australian government seems less inclined, as seems likely, to keep Overwatch Battle Group (West) there after mid 2008, doing pretty much nothing at quite some expense.
They're unlikely to be quite as subservient and submissive to Washington as Howard has deemed necessary in recent years.