A reminder that China can be an unsophisticated place when it comes to freedom of speech, Internet users here as of yesterday can't log on to Youtube. The popular website joins others like Wikipedia on the lengthening list of sites which have fallen foul of the Great Firewall. The crack-down is perhaps because all this week the leadership of the country's one and only political party, the Communist Party, is meeting for its 17th Congress. Embarassing videos alluding to the Party's dodgy record on corruption and human rights would not be acceptable  during the grand pow-wow, held about once a decade to divvy up leadership posts.  The army of censors who patrol Chinese cyberspace may also have been ordered into action as a form of revenge towards the USA for awarding the Dalai Lama the Congressional Medal earlier this week. Such blunt logic would not be beyond Beijing's cadres, who have reacted as if kicked in the nuts by Washington's grand reception for the exiled Tibetan leader. Whatever, the people most angered by the neanderthal approach to free speech as the young Chinese who use Youtube to learn English and watch to western and Chinese music videos. Those who benefit are the folks who came up with toudou, a Chinese copy of youtube. It hasn't been blocked. 

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Live from central Paris, in the news for today's traditionally French transport strike. In fact, your blogger is lucky enough to live on a line that had a skeleton service this morning - at 7a.m. we hopped on a full (but not crowded) train and arrived at Gare Saint Lazare to be greeted by a swarm of journalists hoping we would look suitably disgruntled (and is anyone except your breakfast show DJ ever on chirpy form at seven in the morning?). No such luck - most commuters generally accepted the inconvenience and understood the train drivers' position.

Central Paris this morning looked like Beijing - the streets were full of cyclists. Some had succeeded in the wild-eyed search for public bikes; others had blown the dust off their old boneshakers and were wobbling precariously across the road, their first time up on a bike since the days of Bernard Hinault. And the taxi drivers are delirious...

Fortunately, the weather today is fantastic - a crisp, sunny day that really shows Paris at its most beautiful. A lot of people walked to work for the first time this morning - and many people we met have told us that they'll continue their new habit. After all, walking for thirty minutes through Paris is no hardship at all. Your blogger might stroll home this evening, stopping in some nice café in Square des Batignolles along the way. Again, no hardship in that.

Today's strike doesn't enjoy mass support; few other unions have joined the transport workers .Strangely, the staff of both the Opera and the Comedie Française (Paris's most prestigious theatre) have stopped work in solidarity.

No such strike contagion at Dublin's premier French entertainment, French Friday at Thomas House. However, we understand that tomorrow night's edition will be the last at its current location and for the near future.

We've only heard rave reviews from our Dublin friends who've been along, so we've no doubt that French Friday will return very soon. If you're heading there tomorrow night, bonne soirée.

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We saw Quebec indie-rockers Malajube at La Maroquinerie in Paris last night. Despite a sluggish start (with - our bad luck - a relatively listless version of 'Montréal -40°C', our favourite song of theirs) they soon picked up steam. Literally - the place was roasting and clouds of mist were rising from the overheating crowd.

No one suffered more from the heat than lead singer Julien Mineau. For some reason he had decided to wear a platinum-white moptop wig that hung sheepdog-stylee down to his upper lip, completely covering his eyes and nose.

He was obviously hot under there - two songs in and already the poor guy was leaking buckets of sweat (and probably nostalgic for the minus forty degrees of home). Perspiration was pouring off him, running down the front of his guitar and spraying the front row teenage girls whenever he made a sharp movement. We hadn't seen such hot sweatiness since that time in Pigalle when we [Snip! - CLUAS Legal Department]

Despite Mineau's socially embarrassing discharges, his band played a storming set made up mostly of cracking tunes from their 2006 album 'Trompe L'Oeil'. We dug the music, but even your blogger (with his fluent French) had problems comprehending the band's Quebec accents - and they didn't help matters by deliberately exaggerating or putting on fake French accents. The Quebec accent is a source of ridicule in France - only today someone explained to us why punters last night were playfully heckling Malajube with shouts of 'Skiddooo!'

La Maroquinerie (the name signifies the building's former life as a leather goods factory; the 'maroc' comes from Morocco, traditional land of leather production) is a smashing little venue - the gig space is a cavernous cellar, and up on ground level there's a nice, spacious bar and restaurant. Already this year we've been there to see excellent shows by Peter Bjorn and John, The Decemberists and Simple Kid (who gave a masterclass in winning around an audience). It's in the 20th arrondissement, a bohemian district of Paris that's full of fine little bars, restaurants and concert venues (our beloved Flèche d'Or is there too).

As for Malajube, they now have a healthy following in France. As well as playing Paris, they also visited Rouen, the city where Joan of Arc also suffered badly from the heat. Warding off the flames, here's Malajube treating local website Domino TV to an acoustic version of 'Montréal -40°C'. That's 'mon-ray-AL MWAN kar-ONT' to you:

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Variety reported on 16/10/2007 that Apple in the United States was cutting the price of songs it sold via i-tunes that did not have copy protection software (DRM) from $1.29 to $0.99 per song. Although Apple said this was not in response to Amazon's entry into the market in September 2007 with an offering where songs without DRM sell for $0.89 to $0.99 it does appear to the casual observer that the consumer is regaining some of their traditional fair use rights in relation to copyright material as a result of Amazon's entry and this is more significant than the just announced price drop which puts songs without DRM at the same price as those with DRM.

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Suffering from how-Radiohead-have-utterly-changed-the-music-industry fatigue yet? Yeah, me too. Despite this I have one final blog entry relating to the release of 'In Rainbows'. It'll be the last one from me, I swear.

I wrapped up my 'Radiohead in smooth download shocker' blog entry last week hoping that techie details of how Radiohead delivered the album would be released so that other acts in a similar position could at least go about a similar venture in an informed way. The details I was hoping for? They are at last out.

This weekend some fascinating (well, fascinating to a saddo wanna-be geek like me) information emerged about the infrastructure used to deliver 'In Rainbows' last week. If you downloaded it on its release date you probably saw the MP3s, despite my fears of a meltdown, coming at you really, really fast. To be honest I was baffled at how they managed to do it, but there was no denying they had pulled it off in style. Now we know how.

Cutting to the chase Radiohead - as I hoped - brought in some proper guns to help deliver the album. They tapped the services of PacketExchange, a UK-based company who basically have a global infrastructure in place that allowed Radiohead to (wait for it - we are concentrating aren't we?) bypass the public internet.

It took me a while to wrap my head around this but basically it means that when you clicked on the link to download 'In Rainbows' your request was sent over the internet to Radiohead's server but (still concentrating?) the ZIP file containing the MP3s was not sent back to you via the internet. If it had been sent via the internet the ZIP file would, in order to get to you, have been routed through any number of 'routers' on the public internet that direct traffic to its final destination. In the developed world these routers (imagine them as traffic lights at a junction) are usually quite robust and nifty but they can get 'clogged' with extreme surge events (such as 10s of thousands of fans suddenly trying to simultaneously download a 48 MB ZIP file from a single server). To overcome this potential meltdown-of-part-of-the-public-internet scenario Radiohead did a very smart thing: they bypassed the whole damn internet. As you do, like.

In real terms the full 'journey' of the ZIP file from Radiohead to fans took place on an extremely fast, private global network owned / managed by these PacketExchange guys (see it as a dedicated highway with traffic going in only one direction and with no junctions). Only at the last possible moment (i.e. when the 48MB file was within relative spitting distance of your internet connection) did the ZIP file leave the private network and hop on the internet to complete the last virtual mile of its journey to your PC. Yes, yes, I have simplified it all a bit but, in essence this is what happened. A simple idea, but very, very smart.

It is only now clear to me that what happened last week - very fast, problem free, digital delivery of a brand new album by a major artist to 100s of thousands of fans on a single day without any record company support - was not a once off. There is now no doubt that any established act in a similar contract-free position as Radiohead (stand up Trent Reznor and, er, Oasis) now have no excuses to digitally distribute their future recordings - and to do so competently - with all this knowledge on the table.

May they just tip their hats to Radiohead in recognition of their mother-of-all proof-of-concepts for music downloading. They have turned into reality something that probably started out as nothing more than an idea scribbled on the back of a beer mat.

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A judicial hearing in Toulouse has granted conditional early release to Bertrand Cantat, singer with French rockers Noir Désir.

Cantat (43) has served three and a half years of an 8-year sentence for killing his girlfriend, actress Marie Trintignant, during a violent argument in a hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania in 2003.

The court agreed with lawyers for the singer that Cantat had been a model detainee and had 'made efforts at social readaptation'.

However, the judgement stipulated that Cantat is not allowed to make any public comment on the case or his offence.

This essentially precludes the singer from performing or recording any songs that refer to the death of Trintignant or to his culpability in the matter.

Noir Désir's record company, Universal France, have previously stated that the band's contract remains in force and that new material is awaited.

Cantat will leave the prison in Muret, near Toulouse, tomorrow (16 October). A media frenzy awaits him, as does renewed controversy and public debate about a perceived lack of adequate protection for women who are victims of domestic violence. France has also been rocked by recent cases involving repeat offences by convicts on early or temporary release, though the court in Toulouse today was satisfied that Cantat would not re-offend.

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So all of France is in a state of gloom after being knocked out of 'their' Rugby World Cup by the old enemy.

And if that wasn't depressing enough, there'll be a transport strike this Thursday. President Sarkozy wants train drivers to give up their extra pension benefits so that they'll have the same retirement age and wrinkly-money as the rest of the public service.

To Sarko's surprise, the train drivers would prefer to keep their benefits - and so the rail unions are all out on Thursday. There's a legal obligation on the unions to provide a minimum transport service on strike days, but it remains to be seen if this will be honoured. There's also the possibility that the strike could continue for days or even weeks, as happened in the winter of 1995.

Anyway, the strike reminds us of a French song you sometimes hear on the radio in Ireland and elsewhere - a jazzy little ditty that goes "Je ne veux pas travailler..." You know the one we mean?

Of course you do. The song is called 'Sympathique'  (which means 'nice') and it's from the 1997 debut album of the same name by a 12-piece jazz-lounge-pop band called Pink Martini (left). Strangely, despite the heady Gallic flavour of the song, the band aren't French - they're from Portland on the west coast of the USA, home to The Dandy Warhols, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and many other alt-rock bands.

Also, even though it sounds like an authentic artefact from the days of Edith Piaf and Josephine Baker, the tune was written by the band's core duo, singer China Forbes and pianist Thomas Lauderdale. But they didn't write the lyrics, which come from a piece of whimsical verse by the celebrated early 20th century French poet and man-about-town Guillaume Apollinaire. (Among his other feats: he coined the word 'surrealism', was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa, received a serious head wound in the trenches of World War I, died of Spanish flu two days before the Armistice and was buried in Pere Lachaise.)

The song came to prominence when it was featured in a TV ad for the Citroen Picasso (very useful in times of transport strikes), and it seemed to spread in popularity by word-of-mouth and occasional radio play. Your future blogger, before The Great Leap Frenchwards, recalls hearing it a few times on Ray D'Arcy's show on Today FM around 2001-02.

However, you might be surprised to learn who claims to have been the first to play the song in Ireland - none other than football commentator George Hamilton (right, on television). Now, we hasten to add that George wasn't spinning discs during Irish international games - he hosts a fine little music show called 'The Hamilton Scores' on Lyric FM on Saturday mornings. George also writes an interesting classical music column for the Irish Independent every Saturday.

[On a related football commentator/music DJ point, did you know that the Irish Top 30 chart show on RTE radio in the 1960s was originally presented by Jimmy Magee?]

For such a sweet little song, 'Sympathique' is actually quite subversive (the French rail unions would no doubt approve). The chorus goes: "Je ne veux pas travailler / Je ne veux pas dejeuner / Je veux seulement oublier / Et puis je fume" - in other words (i.e. English ones), "I don't want to work / I don't want to have lunch / I just want to forget / And so I smoke". In both French and English, 'smoke' here is clearly understood as being of the Cheech-and-Chong kind.

Pink Martini have just released their third album, 'Hey Eugene', which continues the band's cabaret sound and tradition of terrible titles and album covers (their second record was called 'Hang On Little Tomato').

Anyway, out of solidarity with our fellow-workers, here's Pink Martini and 'Sympathique'. The video is anything but sympa, by the way:

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"It's just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now. I thought it was an interesting thing to ask people to do and compare it to whatever else in their lives they value or don't value."

Those are the words of one Jonny Greenwood, whose band, you may have heard, released a record yesterday.  They were in answer to the following question:  'Why give people the option to pay whatever they want?'  Posed by the New York based Gothamist blog.  It's rare for Key Notes to swear out loud in work but, upon reading Greenwood's comments, an expletive or two may have slipped out.

You see Key Notes, working as he does in the marketing industry, (and yes, thanks, he does know he's the spawn of Satan) was less than impressed with all this talk of Radiohead changing the face of the music industry and, alongside Promenade and other blogs, was very sceptical about In Rainbows and its 'revolutionary' method of distribution.   While yesterday was D (for download I assume?) Day for most of the interweb and blogosphere, Key Notes bored the soon to be Mrs. Key Notes to death lamenting the demise of CDs, of tapes, of vinyl and of Commodore 64's. 

'Cheap publicity stunts will be the death of music!' was one of the phrases uttered but, having read Greenwood's interview this morning, Key Notes is prepared, possibly for the first time ever, that it may have been wrong.  The thought of placing a value on what music is worth had just occoured before.  Key Notes, like most people, usually just buys its albums in the €15 to €25 price range, grumbles for a bit about 'rip-off' and forgets about it.  But to place a value of a piece of music, something that you may well have been waiting months or years for, well that's something totally different. 

Key Notes wonders then, of the thousands of people who paid very little or even no money for In Rainbows yesterday, how many of them consider the record as worthless or indeed, upon listening, how many regretted not paying more?  Of course, the answer is probably going to lie in the amount of people who order, or, more tellingly, don't order the Disc Box.  

However, Key Notes would be interested to know how much you paid for In Rainbows, and how much you think it is worth?  Answers on a postcard or you could just comment below.

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