Blogging will be light from me until early September. In meantime here's a few links that caught my eye recently:

• It turns out that YouTube's Terms & Conditions state that it can license any content uploaded to its servers as it sees fit. CNET have the details. Any independent bands uploading, for example, DIY videos of their music to Youtube should sit up and take note. A similar broo-ha hit the interweb last year for MySpace but a campaign - spearheaded by Billy Bragg - got them to dilute down their terms. Will YouTube, like MySpace before them, soon do the decent thing?
• 

Yesterday the Consumer Association of Ireland published the letter they sent to MCD after receiving complaints from hundreds of ticket holders for the Barbara Streisand gig in Celbridge. The letter seeks a refund in addition to compensation for the complainants that contacted them.

Will MCD cough up? Many doubt it and that what awaits us, once they send in their reply to the CAI, is another round of phone-ins to Joe Duffy featuring some of the punters in question, the CEO of the CAI and a PR person from MCD going on the defensive with a list of banal talking points. And then it'll all quieten down, until the next concert controversy.

The Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) today published a letter it sent to MCD, motivated by 95 complaints representing 343 ticket holders to the Barbara Streisand concert in Celbridge.

No matter what you think of Madame Streisand's music (or, for that matter, of people prepared to cough up a fortune to sit in a field and listen to it) the letter presents a long list of complaints from a large number of punters.

The letter seeks not only a refund but also compensatation for the complainants for "their lack of enjoyment of the concert" (although I do note that the ...

Twenty-five years ago, on August 17 1982, the first ever CDs rolled off an assembly line in Hannover Germany. And the music that was on those first CDs? Some future-focused music of the day? Maybe New Order's 'Temptation'? Or Simple Minds 'Glittering Prize'? Or even the Stranglers 'Golden Brown'? No, the first music on the first CD was Richard Strauss' Alpine Symphony.

The first CD player hit the shelves a few months later on 1 October 1982. A Sony player, it was initially available only in - where else but - Japan. And the first CD t ...

NME are reporting that the new Radiohead album (which was remastered last month) won't be out until 2008. I can only speculate, but there may well be some fascinating stuff going on behind this decision to postpone the release.

With Radiohead out of a contract, their non-aversion to corporate bashing (despite being signed for years to a multinational) and the music industry up in arms over what the future holds, I suspect that they are planning some innovative means of getting the album out there. I certainly don't expect them to do a Prince and stick a free copy of the album on the cover of the Daily Mail, nor just release it via iTunes or eMusic or Amazon's ...

The days of record company lawyers sending intimidatingletters to music fans suspected of illegally downloading and/or uploading copyrighted music may be coming to an end. At least in the EU.

If it happens it will be as a consequence of some action in that plush auditorium there to the right. No it's not Whelan's after its ongoing refurbishment, it' ...

When recently blogging about what might possibly be the best ever pricing model for selling MP3s I mentioned how EMI were the only major record label to allow MP3s of their artists' music to be sold without copy protection. Now however they are being joined by Universal. Well, sort of. Let me explain.

Over the weekend Universal records said they would start selling MP3s free from the shackles of Digital Rights Management. A welcome move, but as always the devil is in the detail. For example:

&l ...

When it comes to downloading legal music from the internet two of the biggest names in town - iTunes and eMusic - have built up their business on back of two different pricing regimes. iTunes charge consumers by the download - 99 cents for each DRM-protected track (or EUR 1.29 for a track that is DRM free, but of EMI artists only). On the other hand eMusic have a subscription model where every month you can pay from EUR 12.99 (for 20 downloads, no DRM protection) up to Euro 20.99 (for 75 downloads).

iTunes and eMusic however can expect some potentially considerable competition when

Note: After a huge interlude (during which whatever spare time I had was focused on sorting out stuff for the CLUAS site) I'm now getting back into blogging, I suspect it'll be in starts and studders for a while though, but hang in there...

The internet is, er, killing the music industry. Obviously.

Thankfully we have Elton John who, single-handedly, has come up with the best idea yet to save the music industry from inevitable death delievred by the hand of devious digital demons:  we must (wait for it) shut the internet down!

Damn, if only I had thought of that earlier. Yes, in yesterday's Sun Elton John we ...

Warning: 
This blog entry starts out with a flimsy but deceptive rock music angle to lure a reader in. This is a trick. Because - before you know it - it descends full-on into all sorts of political stuff.

Whether the widely derided Rock the Vote initiative had any impact in terms of getting greater numbers of younger voters to vote is something we will probably never know. I for one have my doubts that they did succeed on this front. But in an earlier posting on Rock The Vote I lamented how the initiative did not have any chance (or apparent willingness) to address what are two other key barriers to getting a greater proportion of 18-30 year olds voting, namely:

UNKL, a bunch of American creative types who (to quote themselves) "develop products that tie directly to their ever growing line of urban vinyl characters" have a whole range of 2" minature dolls they flog for about US$8.

They have just announced that they will be launching a “six pack” set of Wilco dolls at some Comic shin-dig called Comic-Con, taking in San Diego in July. We're talking a limited edition of 1000 of the 6 packs, which can be ordered for 50 bucks on

The Irish Rock the Vote initiative has been getting a bit of a hammeringfrommanyquarters. And the criticisms – the banality / pointlessness of the videos, the refusal to advance even a single issue of importance to their target audience, the obsessive neutrality of everything they do, etc – are (no pun intended) rock solid.

Now it transpires that, as Rev Jules pointed out yesterday in his blog ...