[Hudlug] Elvis Costello! I spit on the floor!

[Chris Lindley]

On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 13:02, Les Burns wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 11:17, Chris Wood wrote:
> > On Tuesday 24 September 2002 10:51 am, you wrote:
> > > Poor Elvis, bit old out and out of touch. Well its like they say
> > > "accidents will happen". I'm sure he didn't personally condone the DRM
> > > aspect of the cd, but almost certainly, the ST did. I'll never buy it
> > > again. Its the lowest of the low to back door such "upgrades". It begs
> > > the question as to why anyone would use a M$ product- There are
> > > literally no advantages in using the windows platform, their media
> > > players suck and Office XP is overpriced krudd.
> > >
> > 
> > I'm sure both ST, EC and his record company were all perfectly aware of how 
> > the promotion was working.
> > If you were a famous recording artist, how chuffed would you be if your 
> > record sales were dropping because the general public were trading all your 
> > music as mp3s? This is your livelihood remember! Careers tend to be short, 
> > so you need to make as much money as you can whilst you are still famous.
> > 
> > I think most artists and record companies know that digital formats via the 
> > Internet are the future. 
> > But they can't simply give that sort of material away, as there would then 
> > be no record companies, and hence no beautifully recorded music, as it would 
> > cost too much money to do more than record music in home studios.
> 
> There's two points here:
> 1. They can't give it away, absolutely not and shouldn't have to.
> Capitalism, used responsibly, is a force for good. However, its been
> demonstrated a million times that the 5 (yes only 5) record companies
> charge over the odds for their product- irresponsible capitalism (v v
> bad). Further to that, the monopoly (oligopoly) created by the big 5
> forces new and genuinely original talent to the wall. Through the
> Digital Millennium Copyright Act and DRM they are shutting down your
> rights to choose and your last chance to deny them their stranglehold on
> the market. My experience of the music industry is that its a corrupt
> business filled with people standing on each others heads, trying to
> grab the next crumb. The precedence for this behavior was laid down by
> the people that run it.

Talking about the corrupt record industry there's a interesting
interview with Janis Ian (afraid never heard any of her music, but I
think my wife has a few old Lp's!) on Slashdot.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/23/133228

Cheers
Chris
> 
-- 
  Chris Lindley                                  
  chris.lindley@scotgate.org          chrishl@bmb.leeds.ac.uk
  ICQ#157144010	    AIM#fergycool    jabber#fergy    IRC#Ferg
  Climb up it, kayak down it + make sure it runs on GNU/Linux