Savage Popcorn

Check out the Black Tartan Clan.

It appears that Nine Inch Nails were satisfied enough with the response to their free download of Ghosts to repeat the experiment for tgeir next album, The Slip.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

The physical CD will be along later but for now, sign up and chek it out.

Fat Ed’s Furry Fucking Guide to Metal. You have been warned.

Found at Jono Bacon

… as this rather amusing machinima video from Spiffworld (via) all too accurately reveals.

… in style (via)

Kermit the frog takes on Once In A Lifetime (via)

Last week several Swedish MPs - from the Moderate Party - have called for (via) the decriminalisation of online file sharing. The article is worth reading but the crux of their argument is this:

Decriminalizing all non-commercial file sharing and forcing the market to adapt is not just the best solution. It’s the only solution, unless we want an ever more extensive control of what citizens do on the Internet. Politicians who play for the antipiracy team should be aware that they have allied themselves with a special interest that is never satisfied and that will always demand that we take additional steps toward the ultimate control state. Today they want to transform the Internet Service Providers into an online police force, and the Antipiracy Bureau wants the authority for themselves to extract the identities of file sharers. Then they can drag the 15-year-old girl who downloaded a Britney Spears song to civil court and sue her.

I’m not about to start condoning media piracy and I do think that artists should be compensated for their work. But it also strikes me that the media industry - the distributors, the promoters and the rest - are less concerned with protecting artist revenues and more interested in shielding themselves from the changing realities of their chosen market.

Read The Register’s reaction to the music industry’s special pleading over ticket sales.

So, ticket touts are in the news again with an all-party committee of MPs calling for profits from resold tickets to be shared with artists and organisers.

This does strike me as a remarkably impractical approach, not least because of the inevitable difficulties that will gather around identifying resold tickets, determining whether they were touted or just passed on to a friend by someone no longer able to go to a concert, and then collecting revenue from someone with whom you have no commercial relationship. I’m also instictively skeptical of centralised or legislative attempts to determine how a market should operate - especially, as in this case, the promoters are so far out of step with their customers.

As has been noted elsewhere, the music industry often takes a rather bizarre delight in how quickly tickets gfor major concerts sell out. But really, if you manage to sell a full set of tickets in under two hours, that’s about as clear an indication you can have that your ticket price is two low. It’s not surprising then that touts will move in, snap up the underpriced tickets, and sell them on at a price closer to the one people are willing to pay.

And if the promoters really wanted to be nice to their fans, they could use the adiditional revenue to bring down the prices of food, beer, tshirts and everything else that gets marked up at these events.