Serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is embroiled in a legal fight against the recording business – and not for the first time. His MP3Tunes locker service has raised the ire of EMI in a case that continues this week. But isn’t it weird, he asks, how the Big Four divvy up the litigation against music start-ups between them so neatly?
Interviews
An interview with Feargal Sharkey
Feargal Sharkey needs little introduction. A chart-topper in his own right, and as the lead singer of one of the greatest pop groups of all time, The Undertones, he subsequently crossed into regulatory and policy work – constantly agitating for musicians, songwriters and performers. At the start of the month he joined British Music Rights, … Read more
An interview with Martin Mills
It’s the conventional wisdom amongst some Reg readers that “the evil record labels” are dying, and deservedly so. But such a simplified view of the world overlooks the contribution of the independent sector – which operates very differently to the Big Four. Independents have a different business model, and have embraced digital networks as an … Read more
An interview with John Kennedy
In an interview from the music business annual Midem, we speak to John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the IPFI, the international trade group representing record labels. Here he talks about the new ISP strategy, and the future of the big label. [Full interview at The Register here]
Psion: The story of the Last Computer
This long (40-page) history of Britain’s last computer company, Psion, was written over four days. It’s the longest piece The Register has ever run, we made it available as a PDF (for a small fee). Included are full transcripts of interviews with David Potter, Martin Riddiford, Mark Gretton, David Tupman and Nick Healey. (Charles Davies … Read more
Tim Berners-Lee says some really stupid things, then goes mad
In which the Greatest Living Briton says some very silly things, and then loses his temper
So there we were. In a room devoted to Engineering, the man voted the Greatest Living Briton had exploded in front of me.
Sir Tim Berners Lee, co-inventor of the World Wide Web, was at Southampton University to deliver an inaugural lecture for School of Electronics and Computer Science, and promote his latest initiative.
An interview with Keith Harris
Keith Harris was general manager of Motown, has managed Stevie Wonder for 30 years, is currently director of performer affairs at collecting society the PPL and chairman of the MusicTank network at the University of Westminster.
Were you disappointed there wasn’t more public support for extending copyright on sound recordings? When the issue was raised, it was all about Cliff Richard, and no one wants Sir Cliff to get richer…
In my opinion the record industry has absolutely made a rod for its own back. We’ve not really endeared ourselves to the public over the years.
And journalists have found it easy pickings in terms of creating a story about the big bad record company out to get as much money as possible. And you know, a lot of that is because of the way the industry has operated.
The more you get artists who are dissatisfied – and in many cases they’re entitled to be, given the way deals have worked out financially – the more that reinforces that view. But it’s lazy journalism a lot of the time because if you just knock the record company and support the artist, you’re always going to win.
Where the industry’s at fault is that we haven’t really taken any steps to explain the issues.
Are Google’s glory days behind it? – Colly Myers
Colly’s prognosis was sound. In December 2008, Google announced its intention to make “social search” a significant factor in its search results – the end of the hegemony of the algorithm.
“It’s a well known aspect of man and machine systems. Complex systems with no control fall over. Every example of it you can think of falls apart. With databases, data that isn’t pruned becomes overgrown. Entropy sets in when complexity gets out of control.
“A lot of the search engines’ index is junk, and although they have a lot of clever people, they can’t prune it manually. And they have a lot of powerful technology too, but they just can’t stop it.
“We’re looking at the prospect of the end of the growth of search.”
Answers service AQA is two years old this summer, and finds itself in the happy position of not only being profitable, but something of a social phenomenon in its home country.
A book based on the service, The End Of The Question Mark is due to be published in October, drawing the questions Britons ask, and the answers AQA gives them. Not bad for a company that still has only nine full time employees.
What AQA allows you to do is text in a question and receive an answer for a quid. This might strike US readers as expensive: it’s nearly two dollars (or four days of the San Francisco Chronicle) for a few lines of text at today’s exchange rate. But Britons love texting, and arguing, and AQA’s combination of canny marketing and the quirky charm of AQA’s answers have proved to be a hit.
But where AQA particularly interests us is how its success poses a challenge to a lot of the Californian-inspired orthodoxy about search engines, and Silicon Valley’s latest hype of fetishising “amateur” content.
These are strange times indeed when an AOL web executive must defend his decision to pay former volunteers real money for their labours. Actually pay them – so they can help feed their families? The horror of it!
Founder Colly Myers had plenty to say on this, in typically no-nonsense style, when we caught up with him recently.
Chris Anderson makes me a bet
“Or the arrival of the Web browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.” Chris Anderson, Wired I was really calling the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, to check up on which weird and interesting drugs he was taking when he wrote the sentence you see above you. [* answer … Read more