Two interesting articles (The Barriers of Music Consumption &  The Broken System) about the change in music consumption from physical/album based to digital/single. The articles make some good points about the change in how people collate and collect music, from a wall of physical LPs to an iPod of tracks, and the changes that has brought to the development of musical taste.

Their main thesis is that for those that have been raised in the digital music era the old/existing music industry is broken, not the other way around. The digital consumers don’t know any other way of listening to and discovering music, so there’s no chance of the recording industry ‘fixing' things and going back to the way it used to be.

Something Sir Mick articulated well in a recent BBC interview:

“But I have a take on that - people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone! 

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone. 

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.” (via Daring Fireball)

If the recording industry wants to stay relevant, they need to adapt to the digital consumption era rather than trying to reintroduce and enforce the analogue years. Unfortunately for Big Music I think it’s too late - the indies, artists, and web music services have supplanted them in usefulness.

Crazily detailed infographic about the BP oil spill catastrophe. Too much info for one graphic?

Must see, if you’re a football fan. Or even if you’re not! Spot on with nationalistic reactions, player personalities (Ronaldo’s ego, Rooney’s agro), and classic interludes from Kobe Bryant & The Simpsons. Can’t wait for June.

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (who’s filmography includes Amores Perros, Babel, 21 Grams etc).

Something interesting brewing from Neal Stephenson (and Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo et al) - some kind of serialised story to be delivered via iPhone/Android/Kindle. Seems that to be part of the delivery team you must be bald and have an evil goatee (not sure how Galland will manage that).

Stephenson dominated cyberpunk for a while, wrote the brilliant Cryptonomicon, and a great Wired tale about laying globe-spanning fibre. His more recent books (The Baroque Cycle & Anathem) have been in dire need of editing and focus, but he remains an interesting writer & thinker.

Balanced coverage from Daring Fireball. Other than, you know, destroying Microsoft.

Wolfshead lays the boot into the MMO industry, and Blizzard in particular:

As long as is there are copious amounts of reward with almost no risk, as long as content remains static and non-dynamic, as long as players have no sense of ownership in their world, as long as players have no need of other players, as long as player freedoms keep getting curtailed, as long as extracting money from subscribers is the end all and be all of game design - you will have the disease that is World of Warcraft…

…When I survey today’s MMO scene I wonder what God must have felt like when He looked at the mess that humanity had gotten itself into. It’s no wonder He decided to create a flood that would reboot humanity and start fresh.

Makes me feel guilty for still enjoying it!

Browncoats: Redemption, a fan made Firefly feature.

Great site that allows you to play tracks from Girl Talk’s all-sample Feed the Animals and see the samples being used as they come up. Now we just need someone to do the same for Paul’s Boutique.

The lead singer of Sigur Rós brings us a beautiful album of crisp Icelandic ethereal elfin epic orchestral pixie pop. Sample at Pitchfork.

I was at a market the other day and one of the stallholders looked at me funny and said “You know, you look a lot like Pat Metheny.” Speaking of which, Pat Metheny on Kenny G:

But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible.

Zing!