You are not logged in. (Cheesy Facebook Ads
Facebook adverts have never been great (with the possible exception of the Gene Hunt T-shirt), but this is just terrible.
Update: As usual, there’s an XKCD comic for everything: http://xkcd.com/279/
Quote of the Week
It’s like a trojan horse has wheeled into Downing Street, and the hatch is stuck
Rory Bremner on the general consensus that nobody knows the cabinet
Mega-Rant: Pandora to cut off UK listeners
BBC NEWS | Technology | Pandora to cut off UK listeners
Once again, congratulations must go to the British music industry for successfully screwing-over (sorry, there’s no politer phrase) the consumers.
In the e-mail sent to all those reaching Pandora via a UK net address, Mr Westergren said efforts to negotiate an “economically workable license fee” had proved “impossible”.
The rates demanded per track by UK licensing authorities were too high to support, he wrote.
Wow. That’s a new one. The music industry (by which, like everyone else, I mean everyone except the artists who get paid very little) trying to squeeze so much money out of people that they give up and nobody can listen.
Get your act together. You’re selling to people something which they enjoy and provokes emotions, not office equipment. They want music, the artists want to give them music. Let them without thinking about your wallet for once.
[As a side note, Rob is a great supporter of last.fm, whose free radio let him discover Interpol and Death Cab for Cutie, both of which he has subsequently bought albums of.]
Quote of the Week
And it’s only Wednesday too…
Never mind the lack of vision, just get a grip. Deliver a basic level of competence.
George Osborne on the recent 25 million missing child benefits details
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Man hurt using gun to change tyre
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Man hurt using gun to change tyre
A US man has injured himself in both legs after attempting to loosen a stiff wheel-nut by blasting it with his gun.
Remember kids: don’t shoot your car.
Bremner on Blair
Just seen on Parkinson, Rory Bremner’s assessment of Tony Blair’s new job:
Now he’s Middle East envoy, which is a bit like asking a mosquito to cure malaria
Fair point.
House of 1000 Muppets
Just came across a trailer on YouTube someone has made for a combination of House of 1000 Corpses and the Muppets, which included a shot of outside a church with the sign:
Lost? Have you tried Rev Harry Krishna
Only the Muppets…
AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
Warning: Rambling tech post ahead.
AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”
NBC misses the point completely here.
To illustrate:
An iPod is the complete opposite of a printer. My printer for example, an Epson Photo R220, was bought for roughly £40. If you want to buy a complete set of ink cartridges for it, that will set you back around £30. The printer came with a set of cartridges, so that puts the value of my printer at roughly £10. Possibly the stupidest pricing model ever conceived, but one that makes Epson a fortune.
The iPod on the other hand, is quite an expensive bit of kit (iPod Classic Black 80Gb - £152 from Amazon), but the songs are incredibly cheap at 79p each.
You get the impression, even if it is just an illusion, that once you have an Apple product such as an iPod, Apple do actually care about you as a consumer. They want you to be able to say “I just heard this really cool song, I can go and buy it now for less than a quid”. NBC are clearly in it for the short term money.
Apple don’t rely on the necessity that something like a printer imposes. I need ink for my printer to work. I don’t need iTunes music to run my iPod (although it’s always a big plus).
Television episodes are the same, if not worse. You can watch an episode of Scrubs on television and think it was awesome (and you’d probably be right), and then go and pay to download a different episode which was terrible. You don’t want to risk wasting money on a bad episode. Whilst you might get potentially hooked on a series, it’s pretty unlikely your work depends on it.
NBC appear to be working on the basis that users will just pay for episodes which they’ve missed and jacking the cost up won’t affect the number of sales.
Yes it will, and more to the point, people won’t trust Apple and NBC. Apple have other products to sell, which is why they want to gain the trust of their customers with pricing that reflects what they’re selling. It’s partly because of trust that people like me will get an iPod and then consider getting a MacBook.
The Hives - The Black and White Album
As promised, a slightly fuller review of the Black and White Album by the Hives.
The album opens with the new single, Tick Tick Boom, an odd name for a mad song, but very much true to the Hives’ style. And damn it’s good.
This then leads into the equally manic Try It Again (followed by You’ve Got It All… Wrong), which contains the brilliant line I quoted earlier and will quote again here for completeness:
They say the definition of madness is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
Despite the very recognisable Hives-esque sound of the album, the Black and White Album certainly isn’t “doing the same thing and expecting a different result”. Some have called it experimental, and arguably some tracks are.
Puppet on a String is a prime example, and is perhaps where the album falters slightly. Nevertheless, it picks-up instantly with Bigger Hole to Fill and the almost childish Fall is Just Something That Grown-ups Invented (I say almost childish in much the same way that the Aquabats are - silly, mad, and perhaps even juvenile, but great fun).
All-in-all, a superb return from the Hives. Hyper as always, but that’s one of the things that makes the Hives great. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste, but once you just sit back and enjoy the lunacy it is an incredibly catchy album.
The Hives - The Black and White Album (Quote)
Just got the new Hives album, which is quite good generally but has a few bad tracks on it. I’ll do a fuller article later, but I just thought the pause where Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist stops singing and just says this was awesome:
They say the definition of madness is when you do the same thing and expect a different result.
I should probably take notice of that warning.