No Rock And Roll Fun

IT'S THE ONLY CHART THAT DOESN'T COUNT MOST OF THE STUFF IT'S MEANT TO BE CHARTING: An official download chart is going to start pretty soon - although quite why it's going to take them until Christmas to start it isn't clear. The usefulness of a chart that only counts downloads tracks from 'official' sources - and thus limits itself to just 7,500 artists - is dubious anyway; and because it's tied in with Digital Download Day - the half-hearted attempt to beat the pirates at their own game - the whole thing is probably going to be a cold, depressing gray slab.
The weakness of DDD is inadvertently shown up in the BBC News Online report on the new chart: "The first day, in the UK in October 2002, was deemed to be a success in persuading users to abandon pirate services that are thought to be damaging the music industry.
An estimated 4,500,000 people are thought to be downloading up to a billion pirated tracks over the internet at any one time.
You can only shudder and wonder - if four point five million people downloading a billion tracks is after a "success" - what the figures would have been like if DDD had failed.
Interestingly, Daniel Bedingfield is the 'star' fronting the next "please be legal" day. We've always felt that Daniel Bedingfield is kind of like a star who should have been on Pop Idol, and who is just hanging round hoping people will assume he was. Anyway, Dan's opinion is "Digital is the future of music.
Every record needs to be available legitimately online before things can really take off. A superior choice of tracks is fundamental to a defence against online piracy.
Every record, Daniel? Are you saying that if even Derek Guyler's novelty gnome record is missing from the Internet, there will never be a hope of destroying Bearshare? More seriously, it's not just the range that counts - far more important is the pricing and the format. It's on format that the last Digital Download Day became Unplayable Letdown Day; the mistake looks set to repeat itself again.