No Rock And Roll Fun

IT'S PIRATES. IT'S THE PIRATES: We're a little bit puzzled as to how Universal records can say that it's all the pirates and the downloaders that have lead them to do the laying off of hundreds of staff - the implication being that were it not for the existence of CD burners, they'd not be having to throw people off onto the scrapheap.

Except the whole of Vivendi-Universal has been in trouble for the last few years, hasn't it? There's been a whole soap opera of payments to axed chief Jean-Marie Messier for a start; they've had to flog off large chunks to General Electric, and the whole company has been a nipple tweak away from going tits-up. So, we're expected to believe in a company with problems in every single one of its arms, the record company alone was a model of perfect management and a well-executed, watertight business plan?