Category: Music Page 4 of 6
I should imagine that, by now, you’ve heard Stephen Fry’s podcast on the subject of piracy, copyright, DRM and the like. If not, it’s worth a listen, as it makes some good points and raises some interesting issues which are worthy of discussion.
I point you towards it, not because I’m going to discuss any of the issues within it, but rather because I was thinking that there’s one area of copyright infringement and piracy which rather tends to be overlooked in these discussions, and probably because it has next to no commercial impact; that is, items which are not commercially available. I’m mainly thinking here of things such as radio and TV shows, but it also applies to albums and films to a slightly smaller degree. I can’t claim to have the most wild and esoteric tastes, but I find that certain things I’d cheerfully pay to own are no longer available, due to never being released on CD or DVD or whatever. Examples would be Victor Lewis-Smith’s Radio 1 shows or the first self-titled album by Animal Logic (for some reason, Animal Logic II is available as a download, though its predecessor isn’t).
So, if I want to own these things, and be able to play them whenever I want, the only real route is to see if I can find them online, and then download them there – which invariably means getting them for free and the original creators getting no money. Which, in the case of items such as the above, I’d actually be happy to pay – and as commercial releases are often of higher quality and contain extras which are missing from copies thrown onto the ‘net, I’d certainly welcome the chance to do that (not to mention the conscience aspect of things).
Now, I’m painfully aware that the vast majority of music and film which you can download from t’web is commercially available – new films and CDs are often there to download within hours of release (if not before) – but I have to say that I feel slightly less bad about downloading material which isn’t available in a commercial form; yes, I know it’s copyright infringement in the most literal sense, but much of the argument about this topic seems to focus on the fact that doing so is taking money away from the appropriate parties, which in the case of non-commercial downloads of non-commercially available material, doesn’t apply. To give an example, before there was a full release of On The Hour, a BBC radio series which was both influential and spectacularly funny, many comedy websites and discussion boards would provide links to places where you could download the series. Now that it’s available to buy through the usual routes in its full form, those sites have removed those links, which seems only right and proper.
So, I think this is a bit of an overlooked area, and as one who’s always keen to replace cassettes and VHS tapes wherever possible (let’s face it, mp3s and DVDs just take up less space), I may simply be trying to justify questionable behaviour on my part as a means of enabling my obsessive-compulsive collecting tendencies to be satisfied. But I like to think there’s something worthy of discussion here.
Incidentally, thinking about the non-availability of items which are owned or produced by the BBC led me to wonder if there isn’t a commercial opportunity for a hybrid of iTunes and the BBC iPlayer whereby one can pay a sliding scale fee to access items which have been broadcast but are no longer on iPlayer; for example, 50p to download an mp3 of a radio show which is over a month old (and which isn’t going to be released commercially), £1 for a TV show or documentary, with the prices increasing depending on DRM issues and whether you can download them to keep or just to stream or whatever, and upwards to the point where downloading the stuff just becomes less attractive than buying the DVD.
I appreciate that the BBC has to balance its public service and commercial thinking, but given that they sell millions of DVDs each year, I would have thought there was some way to ensure that people could get to listen to the Afternoon Play they thought sounded interesting, or see the episode of Mastermind in which someone they knew was a contestant, even if they took place outside the ‘iPlayer timespan’, for a fee which is small enough to be appealing to a punter but useful enough to justify the service.
Just a thought…
Pictured, the comic character Plastic Man, who you may recognise from the cartoons which used to be shown on TV.
However, despite the fact that the glasses look kind of similar, am I alone in thinking that ‘Plastic Man’ may not have been the original name for this fancy dress costume?
The hair doesn’t match at all, and the overall look and pose makes me think it may actually have been intended to be someone else who recently died, and who was alleged to have had a fair amount of involvement with plastic in a more medical sense…
So I’m on the brink of setting pen to paper with The Body Orchard, a novel I’ve been threatening to write since … well, probably around the time that Britain joined the Common Market, or perhaps even longer ago .
Anyway, as it’s a rather complex thriller (essentially a ‘locked room mystery’ on a highly-secure military base), I’ve spent a goodly amount of time planning it all out – the relationships between the characters, the events, the forensic and investigative stuff – to the extent that I now know about 75% of what happens in it. Whilst I appreciate that going into it with every detail nailed down would probably be wisest, I’ve found that being immersed in the story often means that new possibilities become clear – I guess this is what people mean by ‘characters doing things I didn’t expect them to do’.
So I know the structure of the book, the main events and the general tone of it, but I’m finding myself pausing before I actually start the physical writing of it, because of uncertainty about one thing: the point of view from which I’m going to write.
As it’s a murder mystery, I’d like to write in the first person, so that the reader has the same information – and the same chances of solving it – as the detectives; the alternative, of course, is to write it in standard third-person omniscient narrator fashion, which would frankly be easier as it allows me to do cutaways to a knife being sharpened in a dark room (not actually a scene which appears in the story) or similar, to add some sense of foreboding and the like. However, I’m very much up for the challenge of writing a whole novel in first-person mode (something I’ve never done before), and the only real obstacle to me doing so is one very simple thing…
My main character is female.
Now, this was obviously a deliberate choice on my part, so it’s not something I can whinge about – and indeed I wouldn’t, as I’m really looking forward to writing about this character – but there was something that I heard (no, make that I was told) repeatedly when doing English at school, and then talking to people who were studying English Literature at college level, which is that male writers can’t write female characters. Not that they’re not very good at it, or that they tend to stereotype or whatever, but that they simply can’t do it.
Yes, I’d argue that this is a nonsense generalisation – and as much a heap of festering horse manure as the suggestion that female writers can’t write male characters (something I never heard with the same degree of frequency) – but unfortunately it slightly colours my thinking about writing (or approaching writing) an intelligent, capable female character in a way that’s actually more irritating than anything else.
I’m aware there’s a danger of making her into some kind of Lara Croft-meets-VI Warshawski character, or going too far in a contrary direction and making her into a cross between Bridget Jones and a member of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, but in all honesty my approach to writing women has always been the same as writing men, as quite frankly I don’t think I have any more insight into the behaviour of other men than I have into women. Granted, I have more details about the functioning (or otherwise) of the equipment, but that’s about it.
Hmm, I think I’ve actually talked myself into writing the book from her point of view, which is good, as I think it serves the story best; and if I can write from the viewpoint of Heather Watson in a way that doesn’t drag the reader out of the story to any extent (either because of an inaccurate representation of how women [or, indeed, people in general] think and behave, or due to writing which is shoddy in some other regard), then I’ll consider I’ve done what I set out to do.
Y’know, I often remember that this blog isn’t just here for the things-that-look-a-bit-like-other-things in life, it’s also here for other stuff, like stuff about writing – and, of course, me venting about the nonsense I used to hear back in college about writing (much of which, I have come to realise, bears about as much relation to creation as trying to re-create the delights of a fine meal by eating a recipe book).
So, as dull as this post may have been for you, for me it’s been very useful, as it’s helped me decide on something which was holding me back from starting on The Body Orchard. If I hadn’t tried to express this uncertainty, I suspect that the book wouldn’t be started for a while yet – though hopefully not, as the post title above alludes to, when I’m sixty-four -waiting that long would probably not be an ideal way to go about becoming a paperback writer, as much as Mary Wesley’s life and work suggests it can be done.
For reasons far too obscure to mention, I was trading silly e-mails with m’colleague when Feargal Sharkey was mentioned, specifically his hit A Good Heart. Feargal, as you may know, is now a spokesperson for the UK record industry, often quoted in debates about piracy and the like.
Of course he’s not the only person from an entertainment background to have taken an interesting career turn – bestselling science writer Michael White used to be a member of the 80s group Thompson Twins (leaving before their success), and if you’ve ever wondered where Bob ‘Spit The Dog’ Carolgees is now… well, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect him to be “just off the B5152 from Frodsham to Delamere”.
Life, I feel, often takes us strange places, to do things we could never have guessed at. Not that I’d ever have it any other way, of course.
When did it become cool for popular music artistes to be named like my grandmother and her friends?
I only hope they don’t smell of Parma Violets and carry their handbags everywhere.
For pretty much as long as I can remember, the cost of CDs by the Beatles has been pretty stable – generally hovering around £15 per album (in shops, that is). It’s probably because they’re classics and perennial bestsellers, and it’s a good solid source of income for everyone involved. It’s also the reason I don’t have as many Beatles albums as I’d like.
Anyway, I was driven to think about this when I saw that one can now get the entire Monty Python TV series* for less than £16. Back when I was a teenage boy learning Python sketches off by heart instead of getting out in the sunshine or snogging girls, the VHS boxed sets of Python would set you back something in the region of £40 a series – so you’d probably be lucky to get the lot for less than £100 (though I know Mr Lomax got a decent deal on a set of all of them). And then they released the series on DVD recently, at about £15 a throw, which is way less than the VHS cost for a much better quality of image and sound. And then the deal linked above makes it possible to get all 45 episodes for £16. Presumably they’ll come out on Blu-Ray soon, and cost about £2.53, though for an extra tenner Eric Idle will come round and do your washing-up.
The same happened with Friends – the VHS tapes had 4 episodes per tape, and were about £10 each, so you’d be looking at something like £60 per series, or £600 for the whole run of the show. And now you can buy a boxed set of the DVDs for about £50. And it’s similar for The West Wing.
So, I’m rather bewildered; Python, Friends and The West Wing – which (I think it’s fair to say) are all still held in high esteem and rated as ‘classics’ of their genres – seem to have tumbled in cost over the years, and yet Beatles CDs – equally well-respected – don’t seem to have shifted much in price. And if it’s a question of the media involved (I can see how DVDs involve fewer working parts than a videotape), how can it be cheaper to produce a DVD than a CD? Less information, I would have thought. And why is it that boxed sets of The Wire are more like the Beatles CDs in cost? That doesn’t seem consistent.
Oh, my head hurts. Any of you good people have any idea why pricing seems to vary so much? I’m not being sarcastic or facetious here (for a change), I’d really like to know why it’s so unpredictable. If you can enlighten me, please use the Comment function to explain – words of one syllable are often best. Thanks.
*No, I’m not going to refer to it as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, because the acne-riddled teenage pedant in me is aware of the name change for Series 4. Oh yes.
… unfortunately, like
Paula Radcliffe and many a late-night reveller in a CCTV zone, it’s having your image captured whilst ‘going toilet’.
I’m John Soanes, and this has been your Sunday morning dose of sophistication. Coming up next, a CD of Parzifal which makes it look slightly as if the titular character has his winkie on show. Four years studying Law , and this is how I spend my time? Believe me, I too shake my head in despair.
As you know, I’m a huge fan of specious use of language or ill-considered turns of phrase, and so it’s a delight to come across another.
The British Music Experience is an exhibition about the history of (no surprise here) British music, and it’s located in the building formerly known as the Millennium Dome, in London.
I haven’t been, so I don’t know what it’s like, but the publicity for it (posters around London, and their website) contains the following quote:
“A comprehensive, conceptually flamboyant Wikipedia history of British pop music” – Observer Music Monthly
Well, either that’s what the use of the word ‘Wikipedia’ signifies, or maybe someone at the Observer needs to stop and think before dropping zeitgeisty words into sentences to make sure they actually mean something.
After all, that Twitter kind of attempt at unfounded hipness Crunk from a writer just looks Audioboo embarrassing.