Definitely track of the week here at winjer towers.

A marvellous idea implemented very simply, Soundamus is extremely satisfying.  Give if your last.fm username (are anyone elses I guess) and it provides an RSS feed of new and upcoming releases from your favourite artists.

Since I’m an avid user of Google Reader anyway, RSS is how I consume most of my Internet, so this fits brilliantly.  My only problem is that I don’t scrobble so much any more.  I listen to music in the car, from which I cannot scrobble.  I listen to some music on the stereo at home, on CD (although I’m sick of CDs and may give up on them soon).  We have a jukebox in the office though, that scrobbles to it’s own account, so I can watch this — but some of the stuff played on there is horrendous.  New releases of Andy’s pixie music I do not want.

I fear there’s no good solution to this one - what I’d love is some way of tracking what I play in the car on my iRiver, so I can scrobble that when I sync.  A quick google makes me think Rockbox might be able to do this, so could be time to give it another shot.  Watch this space.

Last.FM have announced that they will be providing a huge amount of their catalogue available for free, streamed from their site, with artists paid from advertising and possibly some sort of subscription model.

This is part of a worldwide trend anticipated by many of us for a very long time. Several mobile phone networks are in the process of releasing “music plus” packages, where you get pretty much any music you like, for free, at any time. Again, artists are paid from the phone subscription package.

Obviously streamed music can be copied. Over at Rogue Amoeba, who produce Audio Hijack Pro, they’re an interesting post on this, wondering if this is going to be a problem for the free-streamed model Last.FM have developed.

I don’t think it matters. You won’t bother keeping a copy for yourself for much longer in any case. Why have copies of all those CDs, or MP3s, when it’s all available from the Internet, all the time, at zero cost and effort? The only reason to keep a copy yourself was an artifact of the primitive method of packaging and distribution - not because there being millions of individual copies of a piece of music is inherently useful.

So, in ten year’s time, I reckon the kids won’t have a single copy of mainstream music themselves. Their record collection will consist of a set of bookmarks only - and the whole “music business” as it currently stands will just be a brief “blip” in the history of music, from it’s origins in live-only performance to it’s future as a ubiquitous cultural service in the cloud.

I have intended to blog about these things for ages, but am always too busy at work.  Since the kids thoughtfully got me up early this morning, I can blog.

First up, War Stories by UNKLE:  utterly unexpected (by me at least), you’d never guess this was the James Lavelle who played Tribal Gathering.  Some fantastically well produced and diverse rock, with guest vocals from Ian Astbury and the outstanding Gavin Clark.

Next, The Religion by Tim Willocks: a rollicking yarn based around the Muslim siege of Malta, defended by the Knights of St John.  Written with a good eye for detail and a pretty brutal assessment of the qualities of the opposing sides, and some excellent characters.

Then, Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge: near-future science fiction with Vinge’s remarkable perceptiveness about both people and technology, with a really original take on the current politics of technology.  Worth reading to get a glimpse of a real possible future, something that seems to be getting harder and harder.

Finally, Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible: truly one of the best recipe books of all time.  We destroyed our first copy by spilling stuff on it while cooking, so got another copy immediately.  Try the divine Coriander Chicken and the toothsome Vietnamese Pork.  I swear everything you make out of this book will become a regular dish.

From the wonderful, wonderful, ParentHacks (well really The Lovely Mrs Davis) comes The Top 20 Kids Albums for Parents Who Can’t Stand Kids Music.  It had never even occurred to me that something like this might exist, let alone that They Might Be Giants had made a kids album.  They’ve even got kids psychedelia from the marvellously named Sippy Cups.

Book of Dogma, The latest from The Black Dog. A collection of out of print EPs going back quite a way. Classic Black Dog, really good stuff.

Back to Mine, compiled by Royksopp. Obscure 70s noodling.

I haven’t bought any albums in a while, and I feel the need for new CDs. I don’t know what to get though. So, dear readers, please suggest some. Albums on CD preferably, although downloads could be ok too. What’s your favorite stuff right now? Answers on a blog comment please!

I promise to blog about anything I get that you recommend

The scene: a gaol, somewhere in the mid-west. With apologies to Jim Dodge.

> I’m standing in a cell, when the cell block door opens and the Sergeant, fat, red and sweating enters dragging a screaming Microsoft user. He hauls him to the end of the line of cells and throws him into it. The Microsoft user’s name is Joe. The Sergeant’s name is Bill.

> Joe screams “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” I hear the Sergeant kick him in the stomach. The Sergeant walks out, locking the cell behind him. He leaves the cell block.

> Silence. The other prisoners are quiet too, listening. We can hear Joe sobbing.

> Ten minutes later, Joe takes a huge breath and we hear him scream again “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”. This repeats once every ten minutes or so. “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”.

> After a few hours of this, the cell block door opens. The Sergeant walks in, tapping his blackjack on his thigh. He walks to Joe’s cell, and opens the door. We hear the sudden thud of the blackjack striking Joe’s head, and he hits the floor with a thump.

> “Too much noise. I’ll give you something to block up that mouth of yours, kid” says the Sergeant.

> “On your knees”.

> There’s another thump as he strikes Joe again.

> “That’s right, good. Now you know what to do.”

> We hear a moan and a gag from Joe. Everyone else in the block is silent, as we hear the panting of the Sergeant. Then, with a crescendo, it stops. Joe gags and pukes.

> “You better remember that, kid.”

> The sergeant slowly leaves the block, looking even more florid than before. We hear Joe gag and puke.

That’s what it’s like to be a Linux user right now, seeing all the rest of you being abused by your software vendors.

I see Microsoft, Apple and other users of big corporate manufacturers being slowly imprisoned by their own software. As more and more [DRM](ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRM) is added to the things we own, the less freedom we have from it.

This post isn’t about the dangers of DRM, or indeed why it’s so harmful. That much is obvious. This is a gaze into the crystal ball to see where this might go.

Microsoft are attempting perhaps the largest land grab in the history of entertainment and communication. What has happened so far with record sales is *nothing* compared to the prize of Internet Television (IPTV). That big box in the corner of your room is not long for this world in it’s current form. Microsoft want everyone to have a Microsoft television, running Microsoft Windows, and taking content mediated and managed by Microsoft.

To become both the monopoly supplier of IPTV and the [monopsony](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony) buyer of content from the TV and film companies, Microsoft need to conduct a major land grab right *now* to get their platform and their standards accepted. Selling it to their users is difficult, since there is no benefit to them. Selling it to the film and tv companies is easier, since right now it costs them little and has some significant temptations to them.

This answers the conundrum I posed [the other week](http://adju.st/2006/12/vista_drm.html) — why are Microsoft building such horrendous DRM into Vista? If they can get the content suppliers on side now, they have a real possibility of tying up the platform. But I don’t think they’ll succeed, and in the process they may ruin their business. And the reason they’ll fail is because of Linux.

Vista is going to be a nightmare when it rolls out, but right now Microsoft couldn’t give two hoots. It’s going to be slow unstable crap, because of all this DRM, but right now as far as they are concerned their users have *no choices*.

It would seem in fact as if Microsoft have this all sewn up. If they can provide a viable platform for IPTV that limits users right sufficiently that content producers can maximise their profits, what could stop them? After all, if you want your content, where else are you going to go?

RIght now, the answer would be the various P2P networks. They are cheap and easy, and you can get pretty much anything. These aren’t going to work for Vista users though, oh no. Anything with DRM will be unplayable on Vista, even if you can download it from these sites. So, you have to suck your content from the Microsoft pipe, or nothing.

Apple would be viable competition, but they are going down exactly the same road. They are basically happy with their computer market share, and Microsoft are willing to cede this to them. If Apple lost much more market share, in fact, Microsoft would probably once again fund them, just to make sure they weren’t legally a monopoly. Some weak competition is very valuable to them. I’d be willing to bet that Apple buy into the same DRM strategy as Microsoft, especially if Microsoft find it in their hearts to fund the development.

So, all you Windows users, if you want to play a movie without paying a fee for every view, or a fee for time shifting, or without the 5 minute rant about copyright theft at the beginning, what do you do? You run Linux, that’s what you do. You will shortly have no choice and this, I suspect, is going to be the greatest encouragement to the growth of Linux ever.

I can see some corporates buying this argument too. Vista is going to be buggy as hell, and I reckon it’ll take much longer to become stable than 2000 or XP needed. When corporate networks start failing, this might provide the final urge to a lot of companies to move to Linux on the desktop. The product is very nearly there now, and with a tech support team to roll it out, a Linux corporate desktop is a real option now.

The availability of the Linux desktop *on it’s own* is enough to cripple Microsoft’s strategy. If enough people run a Linux desktop, or soon a Linux TV, it defeats Microsoft’s strategy. As Firefox has shown, you don’t need a major market share to be a disruptive influence. Just 20% of people using non Microsoft/Apple software should be enough to stop the monopoly/monopsony strategy.

And where there is competition their lock-in strategy fails. In ten years when you are still running Windows, and you’ve got your Microsoft-powered TV, but your content isn’t priced per minute, or person watching, or whatever, then be thankful for those Linux users who kept the market open.

First in an occasional series of posts about music. Recycle or Die were set up in 1992 by Eye Q, to produce german electronica. They’ve produced a stack of what I consider to be really rather excellent minimalist/ambient electronic music. I can particularly recommend:

Oliver Lieb - Constellation

Baked Beans: Baked Beans

Baked Beans: Bean Me Up Scotty!

The best of the all of them that I have is a virtually unidentifable label mix, Recycle or Die: Electronic Mind Music.

Anyhow, keep an eye out, it’s good stuff.