Legal downloads swamped by piracy - BBC News

10 years ago the recording industry was losing money because of people duplicating CDs and 20 years ago it was because of us all taping vinyl. The bottom line is that the music industry has been in decline since the 70's as more avenues open for everyone's disposable income.

The IFPI can whine all it likes, people will only buy the goods that they can afford to spend on and music is still a relatively expensive disposable income choice - most blockbuster films can be bought when released on DVD for only a pound or two more than a chart album and they seem to get discounted sooner too. The situation also complicated by newspapers and magazines "giving away" "free" albums. That says sends out the message that music is valueless - if it's free on the Daily News why shouldn't it be free on the internet?

Even us artists are starting to realise that we can be better off going it alone than trading our output to the media giants so that they can make a vast profit and pass us scraps. The days of multimillion pound deals ensuring vast profits is gone (look at Robbie Williams recent failures) so why bother? If you can record your songs at home for the price of a computer and the software that often comes free with it then ANY money you make selling them on iTunes or your own website is more profit than you might realise from any record deal.

Apple to announce resolution to iTunes charges? - Silicon.com

Apple is expected to announce steps to resolve European Commission
charges that its iTunes stores broke EU rules by setting prices country
by country in Europe.

http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39169599,00.htm

Talking Photo Software

This is so cool. Thanks to the coders at PQDVD you can now make any photo talk or sing. Better than that if you blog about it before Xmas they'll give you a copy of the software free! Click on the applet below to get to their site.

Why the future may not be Steam-powered

Well OK you've probably guessed I'm not talking about coal-fired robots, though Boilerplate is fun :)

No I'm talking about that dratted games software overlord that combines all the worst bits of DRM, download manager and favorites browser for your games. Playing a game used to be as easy as inserting the CD and double clicking an icon. Not any more. Now I have to launch steam - that in itself seems to take more resources than Bioshock - then double click a link in the window.

But today I've done something punishable by the gods of gaming because instead of launching the game Steam is going to verify all my game data. Why??? And why does it take sooooo long? Have they not heard of one way hashes?

I don't play many games, I simply don't have the time. I like stupid, pointless first person shooter madness, because it's quick and a little challenging and I don't have to think about it too much. I love my Wii and I love my PS2, but frankly if the future of gaming on the PC is Steam I just don't have the time.

I won another router!

For the second year running I won a router at the annual Cisco Academy Forum Day. Yippee! This year it's a 3640 with a voice card so if I figure out how it works and can get the other bits I need I can show my students VoIP.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

And the winner is...

I guess it has to be egg as I used the new card information in a delayed amazon order yesterday and the CD turned up this morning. So congratulations to egg for being the first company to come through in an emergency.



In joint second place are LoydsTSB debit and credit cards. Both arrived this morning ready to go.



The losers? Two MBNA cards (I've had just had one of the pins) and, disappointingly, my Halifax Amazon card (no card, no pin).



Since the MBNA cards were taken out for balance transfers I think they're finally going to go - MBNA seem to move payment dates randomly (I wouldn't want to accuse them of doing it deliberately to cash in on late fees, but that's how it felt at the time) and obviously aren't in a hurry to get cards out to me. Sorry Dogs Trust, I'll make it up at Xmas, in the meantime get another card provider!



As for my Amazon Card... well the Amazon vouchers are a nice bonus, but that payment date is slowly slipping backwards towards my payday. If it gets to be the wrong side of it, it's off to where the cut-up cards go.

Where's my wallet?

You know that sinking feeling? The one you get when you realise you've selected the wrong file just after you hit delete? Or when you choose shutdown instead of restart on a remote server? Or when you realise that you can't find your wallet and the last time you know you had it was several days before?



Yep. Gone. Disappeared. Vanished. Probably not stolen, though perhaps dropped on the way home. Best guess however? Put in the dustbin by my 15 month old son. The day before the bins were collected.



Still it gives me the opportunity to see which of the banks/credit card companies respond in the most timely fashion to my crisis. I currently have no money and no way to get any money. All my cards were cancelled on Tuesday afternoon after the loss was noticed and the house ransacked.



In the lead so far are egg.com (whose card arrived this morning, but can't actually be used as they have not enabled a balance on it yet) followed (a way behind) by MBNA (they of the magical shifting payment dates and excessive late fees) who have sent a pin.



Nothing at all from my bank yet (LLoyds) who were the first to be phoned.



If egg enable my card by tomorrow am I guess they win the race and my eternal gratitude (I can then put petrol in the car and buy some food). Luckily it's not that bad - my better half has some cash and all her cards, but that means taking her everywhere to buy things for me. Not that I mind being a kept man, but it's somewhat inconvenient.



I'm also seriously considering cancelling all those cards that don't arrive in the top three. And yes that includes my current account! Get your skates on people.

Media gurus see user content as top threat - silicon.com

"User-generated content is one of the media and entertainment industry's
biggest threats according to a survey - a signal that some established
businesses are struggling to cope with some of the web 2.0 trends."



Well at least they've realised that DRM isn't the panacea they hoped it would be. I suspect that they will still make money, however. How? By controlling media advertising. Actually the more forward thinking execs are probably laughing all the way to the bank. After all, with Web2.0 they don't have to finance artists or pay for the costly manufacturing and distribution. They don't even have to step out of the office and go to a gig. They can just surf myspace and youtube and all the other self promotion sites, find the most downloaded material and sign the act up. Then just move the content to iTunes, apply the bare minimum of marketing budgets and hoover up the profit.



Anyone who hoped that Web2.0 would make the mainstream more accessible to individual artists is probably going to be largely disappointed. The artists that do make it to the mainstream will probably find they have shorter shelf lives and make less money, though the higher artist turnover will perhaps spread a little more evenly what little cash does make its way
out of the music industry (and we all know by now how industry treats
the actual workers) into the artists' pockets. What Web2.0 does do is allow the rest of us to create and share ideas and ultimately it's ideas that can change the world. The fifteen minutes of fame Warhol promised could help things along, but in the future that might be all anyone gets.

Powered by ScribeFire.

New colours, new look, new content.

Zakala's has had another facelift and is now fully using Joomla! The initial redirector still needs to be updated, but the site itself is now firmly Web2.0.



Nice.

Zakala's Pics

Finally sorted out the whole zOOm Media Gallery plugin for Joomla! and I'm getting my head around how to apply different styles and content to the system.

So we now have pictures (mostly of the lovely Love Commandos) and news feeds and lots of other goodies :)

Now I just have the job of migrating all the old content across to Joomla!