This is a long article, but very well written.

Finally a rational expose on the poor state of play for musicians right now in the digiverse...

Meet the New Boss - Worse than the Old Boss


(Fixed Link)



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Edited by Chaconne (28/05/12 12:53 AM)

broken link here.

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I'm All Ears.

Chaconne has fixed the link.

Hugh

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Technical Editor, Sound On Sound

Islamophobia aside (did he really need to call them "freehadists"? I'll stick to calling them "freetards", thanks), that is a good article.
I didn't read every last sentence, but speed-reading it, it seems pretty on the mark...
It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know, though.
But yes, he's correct that the public take a very different point of view, and it's all the Google et al's financial advantage.

But I can only bewail the fact that, if audio fingerprinting was used to remunerate artists for digital usage (paid for out of ISP connection fees), the problem would not be a problem any more. Grrrrr.

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote Chaconne:

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This is a long article, but very well written.
Meet the New Boss - Worse than the Old Boss

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It isn't actually. A surprising number of grammatical and stylistic errors from a man with the stated qualifications and experience.

Quote Exalted Wombat:

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It isn't actually. A surprising number of grammatical and stylistic errors from a man with the stated qualifications and experience.

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Well, the good thing about digital publishing is that you can email him corrections and he can fix it

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote Exalted Wombat:

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A surprising number of grammatical and stylistic errors from a man with the stated qualifications and experience.

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Is that a proper sentence?

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There are 10 types of people in this world - 9 who understand binary; the rest are like me.

Yes.

Should it not be preceded with "There were"?

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There are 10 types of people in this world - 9 who understand binary; the rest are like me.

"There was..."

The subject of the sentence is 'number' (a singular vowel), so it should be "There was...", despite there being numerous errors.

Cheers!

Chris

I've just realised how appropriate the title of this thread is...

Quote Korff:

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"There was..."

The subject of the sentence is 'number' (a singular vowel), so it should be "There was...", despite there being numerous errors.

Cheers!

Chris

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No, because it's a plural entity, so in Britain we say "There were a number of ..."
In America they egregiously would say "There was a number", as they can't even spell colour, and think that they need to prove who is wearing a trouser.

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Lovely day for a barbecue, less so for an argument about grammar...

In fairness, I don't think either of us are wrong. In fact, in the magazine we do as you have described. I personally think plural nouns should be treated in the singular, but our house style is to treat them in the plural.

Below is part of an email I sent to someone in the States about this (they were arguing the "number is" case, but I've heard both arguments from both sides of the pond):

The following is from HW Fowler's Modern English Usage:

"The Government, the Times, the Party, & the like, are nouns of multitude, which can be treated as units & therefore referred to by the words it, its, & followed by singular verbs, or as bodies of people to which they, them, their, & plural verbs, are appropriate."

There will always be contexts in which using either plural or singular verbs for nouns of multitude will appear jarring ("Allen & Heath is launching a new mixer," "Joe Meek are releasing an optical compressor," and so on), but that would be the case whichever choice we made.

Oh come on.

What you have to do is realise that English is just a b@stardised slapdash mongrel language, where people get to build sentences out of kludges of bits.
This leads to these scenarios where you have {an expression referring to a multitude} but one of the consistutent bits is a single noun.
You wouldn't get it in a proper language like German, where the concatenate things up to form proper compound nouns instead of these daft bundles of bits we have.

For the "a number" bit, and instead put an imaginary bracket round the entire phrase, and use the appropriate pronouns and auxilliaries for the entire phrases conceptual singularilty/plurality as appropriate.

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote feline1:

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a proper language like German

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Why don't you call the language police and inform them that there's in improper language being used by millions of people around the world? If you can find their phone number, of course...

FWIW English isn't my first language, but I rather like it. In fact I think the very fact that it's such a mongrel tongue is largely responsible for British humour being as good as it is, so it's got its plus points, IMO.

Cheers!

Chris

Quote feline1:

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...who is wearing a trouser.

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...or a pant.

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There are 10 types of people in this world - 9 who understand binary; the rest are like me.

Quote Korff:

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Why don't you call the language police

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I *am* the language police, and YOU'RE NICK, sonny!

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~~~ A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen as you are tossed with! www.feline1.co.uk ~~~

Quote feline1:

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a proper language like German

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I guess a 'proper' language must be too 'pure' to function as an international language then!

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Strictly project and just for fun

I have just read this thread and yes, I am crying!

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My head hurts!

Quote feline1:

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Oh come on.

What you have to do is realise that English is just a [Email]b@stardised[/Email] slapdash mongrel language, where people get to build sentences out of kludges of bits.
This leads to these scenarios where you have {an expression referring to a multitude} but one of the consistutent bits is a single noun.

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Yes but English has become the technological language of the world,by putting everything together, and has brought the ancient Greek way of science back to life (forever). Oh ye! They have even given the world football.

allow me to fan the flames!
Football? Don't you mean, ahem, soccer! big lol

Quote ManFromGlass:

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Don't you mean, ahem, soccer!

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Do you mean Footy? - or should that be footie?

Edited by Airfix (29/05/12 04:19 PM)

Quote ManFromGlass:

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allow me to fan the flames!
Football? Don't you mean, ahem, soccer! big lol

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To be really pedantic and to give it its proper name, I think he meant 'Association Football'!

Seriously though, I still haven't finished reading the OPs link. Its long. Its fascinating. I agree with lots of it. Haven't shed a tear yet, because its all what I would expect to hear. But I am discovering facts I never knew. I'm not going to comment on it until I've read it through carefully and had a chance to digest it. Because its a very well informed, seriously written blog and what it discusses affects us all.

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Strictly project and just for fun

"the music business never transformed into the vibrant marketplace where small stakeholders could compete with multinational conglomerates on an even playing field."

I what other business does a small stakeholder ever get to compete with a Global? It NEVER happens, ever. Why should we ever have thought the internet would change any of that for musicians?
The means of production may change, the means of marketing remain the same.

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You have a point, but the means of marketing have changed as well. You can make and edit videos cheaply, and distribute them as easily as you can the music. You can target blogs, etc. Of course you cant get the 'hard press' easily as majors can, or traditional Radio and T.V etc, but these should be of less importance now, and in fact they are for a lot of niche scenes that exist sucessfully without any mainstream media coverage whatsoever - save perhaps specialist magazines.

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Exatly. Punk with knobs on. Small labels, fanzines, niche interest. I was writing for a fanzine and fan club in the early 80s and building support for artists that are being fed by the fans we were writing for to this day.

Whowever said that punk wasn't catachlysimic for the industy was an idiot. They viirtually invented the small label / big label distribution deal.

imo that's where the labels should be at now, instead of trying to do 360 deals, be waterstones and start selling bloody records made by production companies.

Fountain pen sales are through the roof, records are soon to follow.