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Latest blog posts from The Peer

Hound Them Out!
The public seems to be waking up to the reality that the British Army is not a force for good in the world. Not only have several Student Unions banned the army from recruiting there â€" on the very reasonable grounds that these new recruits would soon be off killing people in places where they...
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Published 9 months ago

Give Me Dissonance or Give Me Death
When I was growing up, back in the Eighties, disposability was a glorious thing - something for young bands to aspire to. Pop is disposable, ran the argument, because it is the thrill of being young, of living in the moment. Pop is disposable because, once you've heard that spine-tingling riff a...
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Published 11 months ago

The $5 LP
I just paid for my copy of Saul Williams' excellent album, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust. I was reminded to do this by an editorial by the album's producer and evangelist Trent Reznor, in which he quoted the exact figures for the album's "sales".Like In Rainbows, Niggy...
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Published 11 months ago

The 160GB iPod - My Music World in My Pocket
Woo-hoo! I am so delighted by today's announcement that I don't know where to put myself. I thought Apple had stalled at 80 gigs, and the others seemed to be pulling back from the brink. When I read about the Archos 605 Wi-Fi 160GB player this morning &ndash the first personal media player with...
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Published a year ago

Music and the Meaning of Money
The role of money in our world is bizarre. Even within its own narrow parameters it makes little sense; for example I am still doing pretty much the same kind of work at pretty much the same level of competency as I have been for several years - yet now I find myself earning literally double...
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Published a year ago

The Price Is Wrong
iTunes will be selling its DRM-free content at an even sillier priceWhile I'm all for saving the Earth's precious resources (by which I mean the plastic, metal and Wikipedia-knows-what-else that goes into a CD) and going digital with music distribution, there has to be an economic incentive for...
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Published 2 years ago

We Owe Them Nothing
You might think that by now everyone would have realised that peer-to-peer filesharing trounces media companies' traditional (ie 20th Century) business model. In fact, when else do you even hear the phrase "business model"? For a while there was a valid industry in selling facsimiles of music in...
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Published 2 years ago

Copyright Penalties to be Extended
No change otherwiseI'm snowed under at work, but someone has to say this: Andrew Gowers is a reactionary old goon who should be ignored. He's the bloke who's supposedly going to recommend that the government not extend the period of copyright beyond the current 50 years. Well, pardon me if I...
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Published 2 years ago

Radiodread
Music of Human OriginEven with the existence of the MOBO awards, there are fewer boundaries in popular music here in the UK than there were in the Seventies when I was growing up. Back then you couldn't listen to Disco and Rock; it simply wasn't allowed. One TV music quiz had a category called...
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Published 2 years ago

Another Ten Years
Where But For Playlists Would I? (part two)Since I wrote Part One of my playlist trilogy, I have realised that there are basically two things I want from my player’s firmware that I’m not currently getting: 1) better tools for handmaking playlists, such as the ability to edit tags, set...
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Published 2 years ago

A Saucerful of Bolton
Where But For Playlists Would I? (part one)(Yawn) Of course Microsoft had to get a music service. Dunno about you, but every time I hear about a new music subscription/download service with x million songs I get a mental image of a million-strong army of singers who look and sound exactly like...
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Published 2 years ago

Fin de Tout?
I just read the Introduction to Ian MacDonald's famed Beatles analysis, Revolution In The Head. There seems little point going on to read the track-by-track analyses, not being a Beatles aficionado, but the Intro puts forward a superb theory I haven't encountered before and which, in our...
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Published 2 years ago