best bumper sticker ever
Seen on the back of (I think) a Ford Focus today in Oxford:
This isn’t just dirt, this is m&s dirt
Seen on the back of (I think) a Ford Focus today in Oxford:
This isn’t just dirt, this is m&s dirt
So yet again, a music trade body says that almost everybody on the internet is constantly stealing music. According to their figures, 110 million individual tracks and over 10 million albums were downloaded in the UK last year but 95% of downloaded files are still done so illegally. I can’t be bothered to argue, but my faviourite sentence from their ‘key statistics’ report is this gem:
Online piracy is hitting local repertoire. The number of new albums released in France fell by eight per cent in the first half of 2008
Seriously, are we to believe that online piracy is single handedly killing the French music industry? Oh and is it too much to ask for the body which represents 1400 music companies to check their work. This just doesn’t make sense:
In the UK, Jupiter valued the lost to online piracy at £180 million annually
Ignoring the side issue of the big 4 music companies trying to break apple’s dominance of the digital music market (which I don’t believe they understand is more to do with the ipods themselves and the itunes based ecosystem rather than just because of price/availability) by withholding this for so long (and possibly getting their way re: pricing), lets focus on the positives. As Steve Jobs wrote in Feb 2007:
Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players.
And we may have got little other from this week’s macworld, but finally, here we go! Oh and a big thank you to (the troubled) EMI for being desperate brave enough to start the process.
As a software developer that’s not (yet) suffered something this bad and embarrassing and from the point of an iPod user, I can’t quite stop laughing at the idea that all 30GB Zunes will take the day off on December 31st of a leap year.
I also love the solution, wait 24 hours. Happy new year all.