Quotulatiousness

May 16, 2011

Ear worms

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a musical track bothering me: I knew it very well, but didn’t know what it was called or where I’d encountered it. An unexpected earworm from the past. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I finally managed to track it down — it’s the theme music to a British TV show that I don’t remember watching (yet I know the theme music very well):

It’s a very distinctive late-60s to early 70s sound. I have no idea why I know it so well: perhaps my dad used to watch the show and I just heard the music in the background. Actually, that’s the only thing I could come up with to explain why I’d know the theme music, yet not remember ever having watched the TV show.

I thought I’d exorcise the earworm demon and buy a copy from iTunes. But no, they’ve got several covers of the music by various artists (including an interesting version by the Band of the 1st Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment — currently classified as “Rock” by iTunes), but not the original. HMVDirect has a similar selection (covers, but no original performance). “Curses, foiled again!”

I found out more about the TV show from Wikipedia, the Unofficial Sweeney website, and a true labour of love, a page devoted to sleuthing up all the many musical tracks used in the original series named for the only album of music released: the Shut it! The Music of “The Sweeney” site.

This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South’s unforgettable, rousing actioner, “ready-made” music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist “Production Music” houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton. The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre’s most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.

In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.

But unless I happen across a physical copy of the CD, I’m stuck with my persistent earworm. Here’s the closing credits, in hopes it’ll help banish it from my mind temporarily:

May 6, 2011

The “orphan works” gap in US copyright law

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

Nicole Ciandella writes about so-called “orphan works” under current US copyright law:

Jazz enthusiasts rejoiced when the National Jazz Museum in Harlem purchased the famous Savory Collection last year, but unless Congress fixes a gaping hole in U.S. copyright laws, few people will actually hear the prized recordings.

William Savory was an audio engineer who developed his own method of recording live audio performances in the late 1930s. Up until World War II, most live performances were recorded on 78 rpm records that could capture only about three minutes of music. But Savory used 12- and 16-inch aluminum discs, which enabled him to create and store high quality recordings of longer performances. His collection includes a six-minute version of Coleman Hawkins performing “Body and Soul” in the spring of 1940 and a recording of Billie Holliday singing a rubato-tempo version of “Strange Fruit” in a nightclub only a month after her original version was released.

While he was alive, Savory kept his recordings mostly to himself. He died in 2004. His son, who inherited the recordings, finally agreed last year to sell the whole Savory Collection to the National Jazz Museum.

Museum spokespeople say the museum is eager to share the songs with the public online, but because of the recordings’ murky copyright status, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. The performances Savory recorded are now considered “orphan works” — in other words, their copyright owners are unknown and cannot be tracked down. The museum can’t obtain permission to disseminate the recordings; and if the museum were to go ahead without permission, it would risk being hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit, meaning potentially hefty civil penalties.

April 20, 2011

What will Smartphones kill off next?

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

When you look at their track record, Smartphones are technological hit-men, taking down category after category of stand-alone electronic devices:

Cisco’s recent announcement that it was closing its Flip mini-camcorder business got us thinking. It’s pretty clear that today’s smartphones, with their excellent HD video cameras, are partly to blame for the Flip’s demise. But how many other consumer products and services — digital or analog — are being killed off by the big, bad smartphone?

We’ve assembled a list of likely victims here. If you know of other smartphone-induced casualties, please tell us in the Comments section — or contact your local law enforcement authorities. Let’s start with the most obvious victims…

The only two items on their list I disagree with are stand-alone GPS units and paper maps. Paper maps because the portable GPS units are excellent for what I think of as tactical directions — take this turn, drive this distance, etc., but are not as useful for strategic purposes. Paper maps aren’t dead yet.

And the reason I don’t think GPS units are quite dead isn’t technological, but financial: I can’t afford to use my iPhone for GPS because of the insanely high data costs when I’m roaming, especially if I’m in the United States.

April 13, 2011

“Using the principle of ‘demonstrated preference,’ this music video ranks as the most popular in human history”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

Jon sent me this article by Jeffrey Tucker which re-interprets Rebecca Black’s “Friday” as a libertarian allegory:

Far more significant is the underlying celebration of liberation that the day Friday represents. The kids featured in the video are of junior-high age, a time when adulthood is beginning to dawn and, with it, the realization of the captive state that the public school represents.

From the time that children are first institutionalized in these tax-funded cement structures, they are told the rules. Show up, obey the rules, accept the grades you are given, and never even think of escaping until you hear the bell. If you do escape, even peacefully of your own choice, you will be declared “truant,” which is the intentional and unauthorized absence from compulsory school.

This prison-like environment runs from Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to late afternoon, for at least ten years of every child’s life. It’s been called the “twelve-year sentence” for good reason. At some point, every kid in public school gains consciousness of the strange reality. You can acquiesce as the civic order demands, or you can protest and be declared a bum and a loser by society.

“Friday” beautifully illustrates the sheer banality of a life spent in this prison-like system, and the prospect of liberation that the weekend means. Partying, in this case, is just another word for freedom from state authority.

The largest segment of the video then deals with what this window of liberty, the weekend, means in the life of someone otherwise ensnared in a thicket of statism. Keep in mind here that the celebration of Friday in this context means more than it would for a worker in a factory, for example: for the worker is free to come and go, to apply for a job or quit, to negotiate terms of a contract, or whatever. All of this is denied to the kid in public school.

April 4, 2011

Totally underground band loses millions to illegal downloads…or do they?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

An interesting article looks at a claim by an obscure band that their debut CD had been pirated over 100,000 times:

Late last week, TorrentFreak was contacted by a guy called Wayne Borean who alerted to us to a somewhat heated debate he’d been participating in on the ‘Balanced Copyright For Canada’ Facebook page.

“There’s a Rock Band called One Soul Thrust. They have a debut album, which I like (bought it off iTunes). However the first I heard of the band was when there were complaints that the band had gone Platinum — because of illegal Torrent downloads!” Borean explained.

Indeed, according to a press release from the band’s manager, Cameron Tilbury, the situation is very serious.

“The Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA) states that, to achieve Platinum status, an album must achieve sales of 100,000 copies/downloads of an album. Sales…that’s the key. A random polling of several torrent site’s downloads — ILLEGAL downloads — has shown that 1ST, the debut cd by ONE SOUL THRUST has been downloaded over 100,000 times,” he wrote.

That’s really terrible, isn’t it? An obscure band, hoping to make it big by selling their CD have an illegal audience more than 300 times their number of Facebook fans? How did all these illegal downloaders even find out about the band? Well, perhaps they didn’t:

At this point, since we couldn’t find any torrents on any site (Borean tried everywhere too), we have to admit we were beginning to wonder if this 100K download claim was some kind of publicity stunt. Furthermore, since Wayne Borean and Tilbury were starting to publicly tear each other apart (and getting pretty personal at times) it seemed sensible to get to the bottom of this, particularly since the band’s manager claimed that the all-powerful CRIA is supporting the band’s stance.

[. . .]

As many readers will now be aware, there is a huge problem. These results are completely fake and are generated from user input to draw traffic to site advertisers. You can type anything in the search boxes on some of these torrent sites (these apparently came from LimeTorrents) and anyone can appear to be pirated into oblivion [. . .]

We wrote back to Tilbury and explained our findings. We also asked him to comment on how he feels now that he realizes that people aren’t downloading the band’s music at all. He hasn’t responded to that question which is a real shame, because personally I think this is the most important part of the whole story.

I’m absolutely confident that there was no attempt to mislead with the band’s ‘piracy problem’ press release and that the band and their manager sincerely believed that 100K people had downloaded their album without paying for it. However, it would be intriguing to know what happened, when emotions of supposedly being ripped off by 100,000 pirates were replaced by other, perhaps more confused feelings.

Update, 5 April: Apparently you have two choices in a situation like this. 1) Own up to being mistaken and apologize for making a stink about a non-issue. 2) Double-down on stupid:

A day after One Soul Thrust’s manager had the entire Internet explain to him that his band’s music wasn’t being downloaded 100,000 times on BitTorrent sites, he’s still in deep denial. Today’s post is all about how the pirates attacked him “[b]ecause a debut album by an independent Canadian band is listed on torrent sites around the world and we had the audacity to point that out.” Um, no it’s not. It’s not listed on any torrent sites. As far as anyone can tell, not one human being on this planet has torrented this band’s CD. Dude, you made a mistake, you freaked out, you looked a little naive. Now you’re looking like an ass. Quit while you’re ahead, maybe?

Creative comments to that last post include 1) someone, somewhere actually upload the album to a torrent site, just so the band doesn’t look quite as pathetic, and 2) replace each track with varying length versions of a certain Rick Astley tune.

March 31, 2011

Men At Work lose copyright appeal

Filed under: Australia, Law, Media, Pacific — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:03

As reported last year, Australian band Men At Work launched an appeal against a judgement requiring them to pay 5% of the royalties on their song “Down Under”. The appeal was dismissed:

Australia’s Federal Court upheld the decision which stated part of the song’s melody came from the tune Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree.

Record label EMI argued the writers did not plagiarise because the inclusion of two bars from the tune was a tribute.

The music company has also been ordered to pay costs.

The latest decision clears the way for Larrikin Music, the copyright owners for Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, to claim millions of dollars in unpaid royalties from Down Under writers Colin Hay and Ron Strykert.

The original judgement was clearly insane: it assessed the damages at up to 60% of the profits earned by the band on that song (for two bars of a three-minute song). The revised judgement was much more proportional: 5%.

March 29, 2011

Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” announcement

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

Tired of moving your music from machine to machine? Feel constricted in your choices? Amazon.com thinks they’ve got an offering you won’t turn down:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive (www.amazon.com/clouddrive), Amazon Cloud Player for Web (www.amazon.com/cloudplayer) and Amazon Cloud Player for Android (www.amazon.com/cloudplayerandroid). Together, these services enable customers to securely store music in the cloudand play it on any Android phone, Android tablet, Mac or PC, wherever they are. Customers can easily upload their music library to Amazon Cloud Drive and can save any new Amazon MP3 purchases directly to their Amazon Cloud Drive for free.

“We’re excited to take this leap forward in the digital experience,” said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon. “The launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of thumb drives and cables to move and manage music.”

“Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” Carr said. “Now, whether at work, home, or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it in the cloud and play it anywhere.”

Don’t get too excited, fellow Canadians: this is the .com company, not the .ca flavour. Since amazon.ca still can’t sell you MP3 tracks, I doubt that the Amazon Cloud will be available north of the border any time soon.

March 24, 2011

Deconstructing “Friday”

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

Jon sent me this link, saying “you owe it to yourself to read up on Rebecca Black and her self-published (in the worst sense of what that used to mean) music video, Friday. You need to see the video and absorb the meme to really enjoy this epic piece of work:”

She offers the camera a hostage’s smile, forced, false. Her smoky eyes suggest chaos witnessed: tear gas, rock missiles and gasoline flames. They paint her as a refugee of a teen culture whose capacity for real subversion was bludgeoned away somewhere between the atrocities of Kent State and those of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the start of a creeping zombification that would see youthful dissent packaged and sold alongside Pez and Doritos.

“Look and listen deeply,” she challenges. An onanistic recursion, at once Siren and Cassandra, she heralds a new chapter in the Homeric tradition. With a slight grin, she calls out to us: “I sing of the death of the individual, the dire plight of free will and the awful barricades daily built inside the minds of all who endure what lately passes for American life. And here I shall tell you of what I have done in order to feel alive again.”

***

Ms. Black first appears as her own computer-generated outline: wobbly, marginal, a dislocated erasure. The days of the week flip by accompanied by dull obligations — “essay due” — and tired clichés — “Just another manic Monday…” Her non-being threatens to be consumed by this virtual litany of nothing at all until, at long last — Friday.

[. . .]

Yet here the discerning viewer notes that something is wrong. Because it is a simple matter of fact that in this car all the good seats have already been taken. For Rebecca Black (her name here would seem to evoke Rosa Parks, a mirroring that will only gain in significance) there is no actual choice, only the illusion of choice.

The viewer knows that she’ll take the only seat that’s offered to her, a position so very undesirable as to be known by a derisive — the “Bitch” seat.

She might well have been better off on the school bus, among the have-nots. But Rebecca Black’s world is so advanced in the craft of evisceration that this was never a consideration. John Hughes died while out jogging, these are the progeny of his great materialist teen-villain, James Spader, a name that would come to be synonymous with desperate sex and high-speed collision. And as she gets in the car Ms. Black’s joy is as patently empty as her liberation.

“Partying, Partying,” she sings, in hollow mantra.

“Yeah!” an unseen mass replies, a Pavlovian affirmation.

February 17, 2011

I believe this is my first-ever reference to “Justin Bieber”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

And it’s prompted by Jimmie Bise, Jr, who also observes (most accurately) that “We bloggers are a mercenary lot who’ll find reason to write about almost anything if it’ll bring us that sweet, sweet blog traffic.”

The bad news is that Rolling Stone actually thinks anyone, anywhere, truly cares what Justin Bieber thinks about political parties, socialized medicine, or anything else beyond singing the word “baby” several times in a row.

Look, I get that we like to get inside the heads of entertainers we admire, but there really does have to be a limit. Rolling Stone, once upon a time, was a magazine that published real journalism from writers like Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke, and Lester Bangs. It was probably the go-to publication for details of the Patty Hearst abduction and its interview with Charles Manson in 1970 is one of the most chilling looks into a mind stuffed full of madness I’ve ever read. Now, thanks to the decline started by ardent progressive Jann Wenner, we just get a fluff interview with a 16 year-old kid on issues in which he has almost no knowledge or experience and wretched hacks like Matt Taibbi.

If nothing else, the Justin Bieber interview shows us what we lost. I’m actually sorry for it.

While a lot of what Hunter S. Thompson produced was vivid and entertaining, it probably skirted well clear of formal “journalism” even in the golden glow of nostalgia. But other than that little quibble, and that Jann Wenner was a co-founder of Rolling Stone . . . which means the decline he’s lamenting was actually baked in to the original recipie . . .

The Pirates of Oz

Filed under: Australia, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:15

According to a recent study, piracy in Australia has become the biggest industry: one third of all Australians are accused of piracy in the last twelve months.

The study, released by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft, claims that piracy sucks $A1.37bn out of the Australian economy.

Direct effects claimed by AFACT amounted to $A575m, the study claims — including $A225m attributed to “secondary piracy”, in which an individual either “views or borrows” pirated material (presumably whether or not the viewer knows the full legal status of what they’re watching).

[. . .]

The economic multiplier effects, for those willing to get past the press release, include reduced spending on recreation, clothing, housing and household goods. So, freetards, hang your heads in shame: not only were more than 6,000 jobs lost due to piracy, but the victims of your crime are now homeless, naked, hungry and bored.

February 16, 2011

“A heart filled with music will not have room for God’s words”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

Islam is apparently not a religion to appeal to the musically inclined, because, as former guitarist Bilal Philips warns, only certain forms of music are acceptable to God:

Bilal Philips was once a guitar god. Now he is trying to convince Muslims that God doesn’t want them listening to guitars.

A Saudi-trained Canadian, Mr. Philips is among a small group of lecturers who preach against most forms of music — a controversial prohibition that surfaced in Manitoba recently, where a dozen Muslim families want to pull their children from music class.

“A heart filled with music will not have room for God’s words,” he writes in his book Contemporary Issues, which also defends child marriages, wife beating, polygamy and killing apostates while calling homosexuality “evil and dangerous.”

While Mr. Philips argues that Islam does not prohibit all music, he says it only allows adult male singers and “folk songs with acceptable content sung by males or females under the age of puberty accompanied by a hand drum.”

“Wind and stringed instruments have been banned because of their captivating power,” he continues. “Their notes and chords evoke strong emotional attachments. For many, music becomes a source of solace and hope instead of God. When they are down, music brings them up temporarily, like a drug. The Koran, the words of God filled with guidance, should play that role.”

Of course, music is bad because of the behaviour of musicians, too:

“What you see instead is that some of the most corrupt elements of society are found among the musicians. The drugs, the deviations and homosexuality, these type of things and all the corruption that’s there, people committing suicide,” he says. “The reality is that it in fact does carry an evil, dark side which produces that type of corruption amongst themselves and, in the end, ends up corrupting elements of the society.”

Wow. I didn’t realize the Toronto Symphony was such a hotbed of decadence and perversion!

February 10, 2011

Re-interpreting the theme to “The good, the bad, and the ugly”

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:48

H/T to Nick Packwood and Paul Jané.

February 2, 2011

Thousands are sailing flying

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:31

Patricia Treble reports on the new wave of Irish emigration:

With their economy in a tailspin and bad financial news piling up, the Irish people are voting with their feet—they’re leaving the Emerald Isle at the rate of 1,000 a week. Last Thursday, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) published a grim forecast: net outward migration will reach 100,000 in the two years ending in April 2012.

Packing up and leaving in dire times is nothing new for Ireland. In the 1800s, millions fled the island’s famines and disease for the chance of a better life in countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia. Even recently, there have been waves of emigration. The last time the emigration numbers were as high as they are now was in 1989, when 44,000 fled the economically depressed nation. Soon after, Ireland cut taxes, attracted massive foreign investment and transformed itself into a Celtic Tiger. Property prices soared along with personal wealth.

It’s always a good time for some Pogues music:

January 19, 2011

Dire Straits not suffering due to CBSC ban

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

Dire Straits may need to send a nice gift basket to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council after they banned the song Money for nothing:

Britney Spears’ return with “Hold It Against Me” say 37,000 downloads, which is the best-ever first week performance ever since SoundScan started tracking digital sales six years ago. Avril Lavigne also did all right with 16,000 downloads of “What the Hell.”

But here’s my favourite stat: what with all the hoopla of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council ruling on the unworthiness of Dire Straits “Money for Nothing,” digital downloads of that track went from 167 last week to about 2,700 this week. That number represents a full 10% of all downloads of that song since tracking began in February 2005. Meanwhile, Brothers in Arms, the album from whence the song came, saw its digital sales spike 406%. It’s now the fifth-best selling catalogue album in the nation.

H/T to Paul “Inkless” Wells for the link.

January 18, 2011

A new Kate Bush release this year?

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:10

The Guardian is reporting that we may see some new music from the incomparable Kate Bush sometime in 2011:

After more than five years since her last album, Kate Bush will “likely” release new music in 2011. Following a rumour last week that the singer is finishing the follow-up to 2005’s Aerial, her spokesperson confirmed a release — but not necessarily an album — is expected later this year.

Thirteen exclamation points opened the post by London blog Wotyougot, declaring that Bush “will be releasing a new album in 2011” through label EMI. Although bloggers declined to reveal who told them this, they said this week that it came from “phone conversation(s) [with] reliable source(s)”. Wotyougot apparently see themselves as the Wikileaks of pop.

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