Matt Cutts (a Google employee whose blog I dip into for nerdy hints on how Google's search engine works) last week posted, as a diversion from his usual geeky stuff, a blog entry about a fledgling business idea he had that touches directly on music and how it is consumed today.

His idea (which BTW he has no intention to follow up on) was for a company to provide a service of making someone's illegal MP3s legal. Something along the lines of allowing the company to scan your music collection for illegal file-shared MP3s and to convert them to legal MP3s (with high quality bitrates and maybe cover art, lyrics, etc). (Obviously there are privacy & trust concerns with letting a company scan your computer in such a way. But for the sake of exploration let's assume that a company offering such a hypothetical service is a) considered trustworthy by its targeted consumers and b) addresses privacy concerns.)

Now with the CLUAS faithful being a law-abiding lot, you're not going to have such illegal MP3s scattered across your digital devices. But if you did, would you be prepared to pay to make them legal? If so what's the most you'd be prepared to pay per MP3? In his blog post Cutts floats scenarios where the cost to the consumer could be kept low (and potentially even free) by, for example:

• anonymizing the data and licensing the anonymised data to various businesses;
• Making ancillary revenues by getting people to sign up with other music services (Pandora, Last.fm, or Rhapsody, etc);
• Not even making money on it. Using such as service as a way to build brand recognition or positive karma.

An idea like this that was knocked up quickly is going to be full of holes, some of which could be plugged, others which perhaps can't. Leaving that aside for the moment, the truth is there is a pretty big potential market out there. I don't know if anyone has ever estimated the number of illegal MP3s that have been downloaded from the interweb, but we have to be talking multiple billions, and I hazard a guess that more people than you'd imagine would be keen to clear their conscience by "legalising" their illegal downloads.

So would you pony up to make illegal MP3s legal? And if so how much? Or maybe you couldn't care less. Answers on a postcard. Or, failing that, in the comments section below.

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Chapeau to our Icelandic friend Ulfar for tipping us off about this ages ago (and reminding us this weekend): French music site La Blogotheque has a brilliant feature called Take Away Shows (in French, Concerts à Emporter) where indie bands visiting Paris are filmed playing an impromptu live set in unusual locations.

A typical Take Away Show usually (but not always) features the act performing on the streets of Paris before a handful of bemused onlookers. It's a great opportunity to see acoustic or stripped-down versions of great tunes by your favourite indie acts.

Since starting in May 2006 the series has featured the likes of Arcade Fire (live in a freight elevator: how scarce were tickets for THAT?), Andrew Bird, The Divine Comedy, Tapes N' Tapes, The Shins, The National (in Perpignan in southern France), Beirut and any hip alternative act you care to mention.

La Blogotheque's posts and articles are only in French - but the Take Away Shows come in French or English with a short text describing how each performance came to be staged.

The Take Away Shows are unmissable: take some time to browse through the archive. To whet your appetite, here's the aforementioned show by Arcade Fire (backstage before their Paris Olympia show last April) performing 'Neon Bible' and 'Wake Up',  where everybody ends up in a freight elevator:

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As per Jim Carroll over at the journal of record: Justice, latest off the never-ending production line of brilliant French dance/electronica duos, are playing at the Phoenix Park on 1 December as part of the Live at the Marquee series of gigs-in-a-tent. 

As Jim points out, the venue is especially appropriate given the title and cover of their album. Perhaps Phoenix can play there too.

This Dublin show will be the pair's third Irish appearance of the year, following their set at Oxegen last July and (as fazwaldo reminded us below) before that the Trinity Ball in April.

The rest of the line-up has yet to be announced, but it'll probably be other dance-type stuff. Or maybe not.

Tickets go on sale this Saturday, 22 September - they should probably sell very well regardless of the hammering the French will probably give us in the rugby the night before.

BTW, December is a chilly time to be in a tent, no? Not to worry - you can keep warm by breaking wind inside your sleeping bags, like the scouts taught you.

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Congratulations to Key Notes readers Ciara Lee, Lena Sy and Graham Smyth who correctly answered (or googled!!) that the Future King of Spain is none other than Crown Prince Felipe of Asturias (or Felipe Juan Pablo Alfonso de Todos los Santos de Borbón y de Grecia to his mates!)

Their prize, a pair of tickets to the launch of the Future Kings of Spain new album Nervousystem, will be distributed this afternoon.

Entry levels were very impressive (apologies to those who missed out) and so Key Notes hopes to run more competitions of this type in the near future.

In the mean time, for the winners and losers, here is a live video of Syndicate for your viewing pleasure:  

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The New York Times annonced this week that they were going to stop charging for access to parts of their website (they had been charging $49.95 a year for online access to the work of its columnists and its archives). Despite persuading 227,000 readers to pony up the money (and netting about a tidy little 10 million dollars a year) they have done the sums and realised that, if they open up their website to everyone and run ads on each page, they can actually make even more money.

Indeed, subscription-based models for accessing web content are slowly - but surely - dying. All thanks in the main to the rise of the new targeted advertising models for the web, available to any website - big or small - through services such as Google's Adsense program (which CLUAS uses).

Close to home there are a number of websites that, perplexingly for me, continue to charge for access to their content. For Irish music fans Hotpress.com is the notable example: they continue to insist on a payment of 20 Euros to read their articles online. I'll sidestep any temptation to discuss the value proposition of that offer (or the objectivity of their published reviews for that matter, others have already done so), but surely the time has arrived for Hot Press to smell the online-ad coffee and allow access to their content to anyone on the interweb who wants to access it, and give them that access free of charge?

They have a huge volume of content in their 30 years of archives, content which could attract many, many more eyeballs than they do today. Such attention from a larger readership could then be 'monetised' via targeted online ads. Ultimately they could, as the NY Times eventually discovered, earn more money than charging for access to content. Yes, I know Hot Press like to dangle the carrot of 'free access to our web archives' for those who subscribe to the printed version of the magazine and, thus, drive some revenue via offline channels. But, how much of a 'deal closer' is such a carrot? I have my doubts.

According to Alexa.com’s imperfect (but good enough for the purposes of this article) website traffic measuring service, Hotpress.com has over the last year been receiving more or less the same level of traffic as CLUAS.com (see graph). The truth is, with their 30 year old archive they should be blowing us out of the water. So, come on Hot Press, open up your website and give CLUAS a bit of real local competition. We need it.

And while I’m at it, there is that other Irish website charging for access to 99% its content, The Irish Times. Their web publication division iTronics made a loss of 180,000 euros in 2006. Time too that their bean counters also slapped out a calculator and did the right thing.

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To celebrate the launch of their long awaited second album, Nervousystem, the Future Kings of Spain have teamed up with Key Notes to provide CLUAS readers the chance to win a pair of tickets to their album launch night on 28 September in The Village, Dublin.

Key Notes has 3 pairs of tickets to give away to the first 3 people who correctly answer the following question.

What is the full name of the Future King of Spain (heir apparent - to give him his proper title)?

Answers on a postcard to keynotes@cluas.com

Rules:
Please note that this competition closes at midnight tonight and the judges (in this case Key Notes) decision is final.

The winners will be notified by email and announced tomorrow. 

Members of the Spanish Royal Family are automatically disqualified from entering this competition.

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Your blogger's life is revolving around the rugby this week, so much so that we almost forgot about the return of the Champions League. The vast hordes of Irish who were in Bordeaux for the first two games (and let us never talk of them again) are arriving in the capital, as are those supporters flying in just for the two Paris games. By coincidence, the cold weather has arrived too.

So, France v. Ireland in the Rugby World Cup -  your blogger is pessimistic to the point of depression. Being away from home makes a person depend all the more on their national team, and these days both the Irish football and rugby sides are making a show of themselves (only the Kerry team are lifting your blogger's spirits). And our record in Paris is terrible.

Even so, the French media and fans are being very sympathetic to the Irish team - if only because they need us to beat Argentina so that they can avoid their nightmare scenario of a quarter-final against the All-Blacks in Cardiff. 'At least you won both games', French fans say, without them having to experience the wierd horror of last-minute try-line defending against the mighty Georgia.

The Rugby World Cup really isn't capturing the general imagination in France. Down south is the game's heartland; places like Toulon and Toulouse and Biarritz where people talk rugby all day anyway.

In Paris and elsewhere, however, it's met by a typically Gallic shrug. There are desperate efforts by both TV and organisers to create a cult of Chabal, the long haired and bearded French forward. Apart from him, most French people only know their rugby players from the nude calendar that Stade Français bring out every year.

But should France get closer to the final, that will change. The 1998 football World Cup in France began with similar apathy, but as Zizou and friends edged towards the final the French public's strong sense of patriotism went wild.

From a Frenchman-on-the-street perspective, the Rugby World Cup only starts with the semi-final, the real business end of the tournament.  Anything less will be a disaster - which is why the French team will make no mistakes against Ireland on Friday night.

This month's French Friday club night at Thomas House happens to coincide with the match (it being the third Friday of the month) - so you can watch the rugby on the big-screen before the music starts. Entry is free, the match kicks off at 8:00pm - and the victory dance will start soon after. Groan.

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It's played host to all of Beijing's usual supspects and bigger names, like International Noise Conspiracy. After making way for yet another Beijing Mall, Yugong Yishan has reopened in an old Latin-colonial looking building in the old part of the city (or what's left of that). Rui Fu, a posh club making no money - too far from the big business district bucks perhaps - is giving up the lease and Yugong Yishan will next week open the doors on whats likely to be a more dive-bar kind of place. We wish them luck.

UPLOADTEMPLATE

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The good people of Radio France Internationale (RFI - pronounced 'air eff eee') were kind enough to invite your blogger along to a recording of their live music show 'La Bande Passante' at the Flèche d'Or last night.

Invitation was accepted gladly. In truth, we almost snapped their hand off at the elbow; top of the bill was the brilliant Emily Loizeau. Sure enough, she put on a great show. The programme will be broadcast on Saturday 22 September and available to hear on the RFI website soon after.

All of which reminds us that we listened to RFI in Dublin while learning French and planning The Great Leap Forward (i.e. the move to Paris). How come? Well, all thanks to an eclectic local Dublin radio station.

NEAR FM is a community station on 90FM which serves the north and central city area (the name stands for North East Access Radio). It has a diverse range of music and information shows - and every morning at 8:00 it carries the international news in French from RFI.

Many's the morning that your bleary-eyed blogger-to-be would fall out of the leaba and tune in for half an hour of French over breakfast. Even if the word-for-word comprehension wasn't great to begin with, the ear got attuned to French accents and very soon the understanding increased greatly; we definitely recommend it as a language learning technique.

At the more manageable hour of 5pm on Saturday there's another French language programme on NEAR FM. 'Quartiers Francophone' is a news and information programme presented by Robert Cuthbert.

Even if you've no intention of learning French, NEAR FM has a fantastic range of eclectic music shows. Pick of the bunch for Irish alternative music fans is The NEAR FM Sessions on Thursday evenings from 7 to 8, featuring live studio sets from local acts.

Check out NEAR FM by podcast on their website, or tune in to 90.3 FM if you're in the northside or central Dublin.

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Remember our recent post on 'Double Je', the brilliant single by Christophe Willem, winner of French TV talent search 'Nouvelle Star' in 2006? Well, these days the 2007 winner has been topping the charts in France.

Julien Doré (right) is his name. His image is that of the sort of meticulously-styled faux-rebel you see in hair gel commercials. His choice of first post-victory single, always an accurate indication of career prospects, is a strange one - a cover of a smash hit debut single by a previous TV talent show winner. What's more, it's an ironic acoustic-rock version of what was a slick pop song sung by a girl.

Naturally, it's awful - ironic cover versions always reek of pretentious snobbishness, but Doré deliberately mangles the melody and rhythm for maximum effect. That's us pop fans taught a lesson, so.

But we're not here to talk about this eejit. Instead, let's look at the song, one which definitely deserves our attention.

The original version of the track in question is a rare instance of a French-language hit that may be familiar to Irish radio listeners - 'Moi Lolita' by Alizée. A brilliant piece of slinky and sophisticated disco-pop, it received a lot of Irish airplay in 2000 (in particular, Today FM seemed to have playlisted it). Something of a dancefloor hit, the single actually reached number 9 in the British charts - the most recent single en français to crack the UK Top 10.

As the title suggests, the song's lyrics are fairly risqué - especially when sung by a squeaky-clean 16-year-old girl. Sometimes the whole thing gets a little too seedy: stuff like "Quand je rêve au loup / c'est Lola qui saigne" ("When I dream of the wolf / it's Lola who bleeds") is just too dodgy even for seasoned Frenchpop listeners. But none of this matters if you haven't a word of French - it's a fantastic track.

After her TV show win in 1999 Alizée was immediately snapped up by Mylène Farmer, a Quebec-born singer and French superstar who specialises in just this sort of disco-perv-pop. Farmer, moving on in years, and her partner Laurent Boutonnat were looking for a young and clean-cut singer to continue their line of saucy-but-bland singles (Remind us to tell you about Farmer in detail sometime). In Alizée they found their girl, and 'Moi Lolita' was written for her. As well as going top ten in the UK, the single was a number one across the continent and in Japan.

After two albums and several record-company difficulties, Alizée split from Farmer and took time out from music to get married and start a family. However, Doré's cover of her most famous hit has renewed interest in her - and her new album 'Psychédélices' will be released in November.

The video for 'Moi Lolita' is terrible. It's a mini-movie where the singer plays a rural girl going to her first disco. This type of pretentious big-budget short film is a trademark of Farmer, who's notorious for appearing naked in her music videos. (Bet you're interested now, aren't you?)

So, here's a television appearance by Alizée, performing one of the best French pop singles of the last decade. Your blogger has been known to (100% unironically) play and sing this on guitar at parties:

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