Three Stories

Three stories caught my attention in today’s news.

Album giveaway could ignite music revolution – UK indie band, Crimea, have self-financed their new album and plan to deliver it for free via the internet.

“By giving away the album in its entirety on May 13, the band hope to widen their fanbase and ultimately make more money from touring, merchandising and licensing deals than they would from sales of the album. Despite selling a respectable 35,000 copies of their debut album, Tragedy Rocks, and making the top 40 with the single Lottery Winners On Acid, the band were last year dropped by their record label, Warner Music. Like its major-label rivals, it is struggling with the structural changes to the record industry and, say critics, is increasingly unable to invest in long-term artist development.”

You might remember Derek Webb made his album, Mockingbird available for free (and in the process won me over as a fan!). It seems clear that this is part of a growing trend, which is not just about music piracy, but about artists setting more realistic and achievable goals for their music. Note that in Crimea’s case, sales in excess of 35k for the debut album was not enough to secure an ongoing major label career. You can bet that despite those sales, they also probably didn’t make much money from that deal and would have sacrificed a lot of freedom. Now they can tour to pay their way, not tour to payback their advance!

MPs issue EC university warning – Interesting story for anyone following higher education and the real issue is hidden towards the end of the story,

“But the Institute of Physics warned the report failed to address one of its main concerns, that some of the UK’s degree courses might be considered second rate by the rest of Europe. Master’s degrees in the UK take one year to complete compared with two years in much of the rest of Europe.”

In case you didn’t know, you can score a UK masters, in arts and humanities subjects, from a number of leading institutions in one calendar year, with as little as two hours per week of contact teaching time. It’s a very profitable model, especially given the rising fee structure and overseas student charges. It would be interesting to do the math and see how many UK masters break the ¬£100 a contact hour mark for foreign students.

Gott in Himmel! – Confession time; I was a devout reader of Commando comics (or is that graphic novels now?) in my younger years (around age 10). For some reason that is lost to me now, I was fascinated with aircraft, especially WWII bombers and used to relish these stories of bravery and teamwork. It’s interesting that they are now viewed, somewhat, as non-pc. My memory is that they were pretty evenhanded and if they had any fault, it was more to do with glorifying war and a kind of warrior-caste view of manhood. But, compared to what passes for entertainment in a lot of films and tv today, they seem almost harmless and old-fashioned.