The needle returns to the start of the song and we all sing along like before

Exciting news from the New York Times. Vinyl, it's coming back.

Vinyl records almost disappeared after CDs were introduced, but they’re making a comeback — and a surprising number of LP buyers are young listeners.

Ah, sweet old, reliable friend makes a return. Not vinyl, but a story about vinyl coming back.

Last month, for example, it was The Arizona Republic spotting the trend:

Vinyl records are making a comeback across generations

In April, Forbes spotted the sales:

The Beat Goes On: How Vinyl Records Are Making A Comeback

That was just a few days after The Racine Journal Times pointed to all those kids with 12" singles under their arms:

Vinyl records making a comeback with collectors
BUYING MUSIC THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Even Senior Planet is talking about it:

Got Vinyl? Record Albums Are Making a Comeback

But let's be fair to the New York Times. After all, if you pitch something at editorial meetings with the words "have you guys noticed what's going on at the top of the pops?", it's going to be three days before you'll be able to tempt Mark Thompson out the Executive Panic Room. Maybe they're a few weeks behind - ahem - Senior Planet with knowing what's down with the kids, but this 2013 new vinyl trend is just rolling, right?

What's that you're saying, Dubspot?

The Resurgence of Vinyl Continues In 2012 – Record Stores Making a Comeback?

But that was November.

Although The Daily Beacon had a story in August 2012:

Vinyl making local comeback

Hang about, if the mainstream media were reporting this story summer last year, surely some edgy, rule-breaking group was trying to warn us sooner? Fox News, maybe, in June 2012:

Vinyl records mount comeback

Fox. First with news.

Vinyl Records Making Comeback

Okay, so Voice Of America ran a story in September 2011.
And USA Today had a story in February 2011:

As both a music lover and record store owner, Tim Cretsinger is excited about the recent resurgence of vinyl record albums.

"This is my favorite thing to do — hold a batch of records like this," Cretsinger, owner of Groovacious in Cedar City, Utah, says as he hugged a stack of new records close to his chest.

"It reminds me of the old days."

The old days are making a comeback.

And the LA Times did the story in 2009:

In a digital age, vinyl's making a comeback

The Telegraph was heralding the vinyl comeback in 2002:

Forget the compact disc, the MP3 player and the MiniDisc. The vinyl record, once believed to be consigned to the dustbin of music history, is making a comeback.

Yes, that's a vinyl comeback story from so long ago that it mentions MiniDisc in it.

But let's be fair, you can't really expect the New York Times to monitor all the other media in the world having been reporting vinyl comeback stories month in, month out for over ten years.

You might have hoped, though, the paper would have spotted this story:

Music on vinyl making a comeback

That was the New York Times announcing a comeback for vinyl back in 2008.

Ah, if only the Times could have had the prescience of this publication, which reported on vinyl's scramble from the grave in 1994:

A funny thing happened on the way to the burial of the vinyl record. It has been kept alive by a subculture of ardent fans who insist that something precious is lost when music gets all cleaned up on a CD. In addition to preferring what they insist is the "warmer" sound of vinyl, fans speak wistfully of the tactile pleasures of an LP -- studying the cover art, reading the liner notes, even placing the big, meaty platter on a turntable.

You'll be ahead of me: that was the New York Times.

Nearly two decades of running articles about how vinyl is clinging to life. The only thing more resilient than the twelve inch album is the ability of journalists to pretend to be surprised when talking about them.

Adam Yauch: A round-up

As you might imagine, there's a lot of Adam Yauch memories being shared online today. Here's a quick dip into some of them.

Dose.ca points out that he was a Beastie Boys multitasker:

With Adam Yauch's passing, the Beastie Boys have lost not one, but two members. Under the name (lederhosen, and fake-beard) of Nathanial Hornblower, the erstwhile MCA shaped the band's visual legacy from the '80s up to the present day. Yauch directed many of the Beasties' best videos -- though his alter-ego wasn't necessarily relegated to behind the camera. (In 1994, for instance, Hornblower crashed the stage at the MTV VMAs, stealing the mic from R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe -- who wasn't as acquainted with the "Swiss" director as the kids at home.)

Spinner shook Twitter for responses:

"In times of doubt I can think on the dharma and the enlightened ones who graduated samsara" #RIPMCA -- Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend

The Beastie Boys basically invented the concept of the cool white person. #RIPMCA -- Chromeo

Such sad news about Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. A fellow Buddhist and part of hip hop history!! R.I.P! -- Boy George

RIP Adam Yauch. You made my teenage years more fun and your art made it easier for me to do what I do. For a Beastie, you sure were a beaut. -- Kevin Smith, filmmaker

Rolling Stone reprints their 1998 Beasties cover story:

Adam "MCA" YAUCH – the spiritual seeker – what of him? He registers under the name I. Clouseau, as in Inspector Clouseau, for he is a huge Peter Sellers fan. His favorite Sellers movie is The Party. "He plays an Indian actor," Yauch says, "and the movie was banned in India because he is playing this bumbling idiot in the middle of all these white people, and some Indian people were insulted by it. But the irony is that he's really the only intelligent person there – all the other people are morons. So it has a cool theme."

Cool, yes, and you are free to interpret it as you wish: as an anti-racist parable related by a white rapper; as a parable about the Beasties themselves, who started out acting the idiot and worked hard to convince the world that they are, in fact, intelligent people; or, more simply, as the plot of a fairly funny movie from the Sixties.

Wired's Underwired music column salutes Yauch's role in remix culture:

Specifically, he was the thoughtful one when it came to the Beasties’ ethos on sampling, telling Wired in 2004 how the group approached sampling and how he felt about other artists borrowing from Beastie Boys’ cuts.

“It’s totally context. And it depends on how much of our song they’re using and how much of a part it plays in their song,” he said. “We might take a tiny little insignificant sound from a record and then slow it way down and put it deep in the mix with, like, 30 other sounds on top of it. It’s not even a recognizable sample at that point. Which is a lot different than taking a huge, obvious piece from some hit song that everyone knows and saying whatever you want to on top of that loop.”

On NME.com Matthew Horton captures the way the band's early activities might have left them frozen in some parts of the public's mind:

In the consciousness of your mums, dads and Daily Express readers, the Beastie Boys will always be those snotty-nosed frat boys winching a colossal phallus, but through Yauch's vision they changed hip-hop's mindset and as a collective with a ridiculous lack of inhibitions they influenced everyone from A Tribe Called Quest to Eminem, Guru to Gorillaz, Beck to blimmin' Limp Bizkit. Yauch, you were the funkiest of bosses and you'll be missed.

As you might expect, it's the New York Times Artsbeat blog which records the facts:

Mr. Yauch’s mother said he died at 9 a.m. on Friday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan with his parents, his in-laws, his wife, Dechen Wangdu, and his 13-year-old daughter, Tenzin Losel Yauch, at his bedside. He had been admitted to the hospital on April 14 after a three-year battle with cancer of the salivary gland. He was conscious until the end.

“He was a very courageous person,” his mother, Frances Yauch, said. “He fought a long battle with cancer. He was hopeful to the very end.”

Open wide and say 'aha'

Does it seem to you that there's a load more tours being pulled these days because of the singer having throat problems?

You're not wrong, according to the New York Times. Turns out it's not that throats are getting damaged more easily, but that it's a lot easier to spot problems:

Dr. Steven M. Zeitels, the Boston surgeon who operated on Adele to fix bleeding in her larynx, said that over the last 15 years the use of fiber-optic cameras that can scan the vocal cords for minuscule injuries and abnormalities has become common. It is now possible to spot problems like bleeding, nodules and cysts earlier and to take swift action to fix them, he said.

“Is there some epidemic? No,” he said. “The only thing different happening is the singers know better how to take care of themselves, the doctors know better how to take care of them, and what has been happening always is just getting noticed.”

I suspect there's also an element of insurance companies being more bullish on their demands for the problems to be fixed early on, too.

Chelsea shutters

The Chelsea Hotel has closed its doors for what is either a renovation project, an attempt to break the hotel's unions, or some sort of confidence trick.

The New York Times popped down for the last night, and found an enthusiast:

“Where are all the punk kids? Maybe they don’t know,” said Ms. Ramona, an adrenaline-fueled, self-described “forever teenager” (in her early 30s) who had booked a room, hopped in her car and gunned it to New York City as soon as she heard the news. For a decade, Ms. Ramona has journeyed to the hotel several times a year, drawn by two of its famous guests from decades past. “Sid Vicious in caps, and Dee Dee Ramone,” she said. “If I could be anywhere tonight, this is the place to be.”

That might also explain where "the punk kids" are - somewhere other than a place that meant something to their grandparents, at a guess.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Black Swan

Nice, brief New York Times piece on the city's pioneering Black Swan records:

In early 1921, Pace struck out on his own, taking most of the office staff with him to found Pace Phonograph Company — its first office was in his home on West 138th Street — and starting Black Swan Records. It was aimed at recording black performers at a time when many big record companies would not. Pace’s goal was to challenge white stereotypes by recording not just comic and blues songs, but also sacred and operatic music and serious ballads. Du Bois was one of Black Swan’s directors.

New York Times gets riot grrl wrrrng

The New York Times had a few notes:

An article on June 5 about the riot grrrl musical movement and its legacy misidentified the original song containing the lyrics “boy girl revolution.” It was “Her Jazz” by Huggy Bear, not one by Kathleen Hanna, who was in the band Bikini Kill. The article also misidentified the singer who first performed the song “I Wish I Was Him.” It was an Australian musician, Ben Lee, not Ms. Hanna. The article also misstated the ages of the teenage musicians Coco Moore and Aziza Akhmatova. Ms. Moore is 16, not 15; Ms. Akhmatova is 15, not 16

[Kudos to the mighty Regret The Error]

Courtney Love remains Courtney Love

Of course Courtney Love greeted her New York Times interviewer naked and drunk. Of course she did. The only real mystery in the event is why Rolling Stone wrote about it thus:

She may have tried to remake her image in recent years, but Courtney Love's interview with New York Times reporter Eric Wilson lived "right up to my worst reputation," as she put it.

Rolling Stone thinks Love has been trying to remake her image in recent years? Really? With the endless rants about houses bought in Curt's name, and fuck this and screw that, and Ryan Adams stole something and the people she doesn't get on with are all wrong and evil and Activision never got permission to do that thing they did and so she's going to sue them just as soon as her daughter comes back?

It's like saying that Burma has been doing its best to be a model democracy, so it's a bit surprising the election results came out the way they did, surely?

Woot-ton: Something someone said about Ronan

A couple of weeks back, the New York Times printed a letter of complaint from the News Of The World's managing editor Bill Akass. Responding to the Times' story about Andy Coulson and his team phonehacking their way through the great and the good, Akass snorted out this paragraph of disgust:

Sources: In the days prior to publication the Standards Editor Phil Corbett wrote to all staff reminding them of the NYT’s ethical guidelines with regards to anonymous sources. We were surprised therefore to see the finished article was based almost entirely on anonymous sources – a “dozen former reporters”- whose credibility, seniority, motives or qualifications we are therefore prevented from challenging. The article also cites anonymous “detectives” and “prosecutors”.

There was one single named source who claimed direct knowledge of wrongdoing, as opposed to hearsay or supposition. This is pretty thin evidence on which to hang a 6,000 word investigation. I believe that by failing to adhere to their own stringent rules when dealing with the News of the World story, the NYT’s reporters and editors demonstrated clear bias.

So, running stories with only one named source is bad. It's worse than bad, it's unethical.

Hmm. There's a bit in Dan Wootton's column about Natalie Imbruglia standing in for Keith Duffy on a Boyzone tour (a bit like using champagne instead of root beer in an ice cream float) and that is sourced. But then there's a totally separate story about Ronan Keating:

Ronan, who is already battling for his marriage to YVONNE, is also struggling to cope as the anniversary of Steo's death on October 10 looms.

A source said: "The memory of Stephen's death is flooding back to Ronan. They were very close, like brothers, and Ronan has been going through a rocky patch."

And on and on runs the quote. From an unnamed source. "[W]hose credibility, seniority, motives or qualifications we are therefore prevented from challenging."

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Def Leppard

A shower of glorious love to David Hepworth and The Word for pointing the world in the direction of the New York Times wedding section. Always a haven for the unexpected - it should be subtitled "if I'm compromising, at least I'm going to do it as publicly and expensively as possible" - this week, they recorded the nuptials of Def Leppard's Phil Collen and Helen Simmons:

Ms. Simmons, too, felt a spark. “But emotionally, there were a lot of other things going on with us,” she said.

The other things included a wife from whom he was separated, a girlfriend from whom he wasn’t, and Ms. Simmons’s boyfriend.

Two days later, he asked her for seven minutes of her time.

Not 5 or 10? “I knew I needed more than 5 and I figured 10 would be too long,” Mr. Collen said matter-of-factly.

There's a lot of that sort of thing.

Bookmarks - internet stuff: Sissy bounce

The New York Times introduces its readers to sissy bounce (even dusting off the phrase "gender bending" in the process):

And then something remarkable happened. The crowd — just about evenly divided between men and women — instantly segregated itself: the men were propelled as if by a centrifuge toward the room’s perimeters, and the dance floor, a platform raised just a step off the ground, was taken over entirely by women surrounding Freedia. The women did not dance with, or for, one another — they danced for Freedia, and they did so in the most sexualized way imaginable, usually with their backs to her, bent over sharply at the waist, and bouncing their hips up and down as fast as humanly possible, if not slightly faster. Others assumed more of a push-up position, with their hands on the floor, in a signature dance whose name is sometimes helpfully shortened to “p-popping.”

MIA v NYT

I know we're living in an all-interactive, 360-degree feedback world, but still can't shake the sense that for MIA to tweet a New York Times journalist's number and suggest her fans call her to rail against an article smacks more than a little of a bully's tactics.

The article, it's true, doesn't exactly smother MIA in lovey-kiss-kisses:

While Hirschberg's research poses some important questions, particularly with regard to MIA's wealth, her politics, and her relationship with her father, it is the 34-year-old singer who does herself a disservice, admitting to being "tone deaf" and "not very musical". Elsewhere, she shows a childish desire for controversy: "'I kind of want to be an outsider,' [MIA] said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry. 'I don't want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I'm a terrorist.'"

Well, no, it doesn't make you a terrorist. Nor does the tweet-bomb. It does make you look petulant, though, and quite disappointingly thin-skinned for someone who claims to desire to be an outsider. Isn't being knocked by the New York Times meant to be what happens to you if you're beyond the mainsteam?

Bono: It wasn't just comparing file-sharers with child pornographers, you know

I've already covered the highlight of Bono's latest op-ed piece for the New York Times, wherein he suggests that we should make like the Chinese government to protect his income. But, at the suggestion of James M, it's worth exploring his piece further:

IF we have overindulged in anything these past several days, it is neither holiday ham nor American football;

You're Bono. Why would you be having a traditional American Christmas?

it is Top 10 lists.

Have we?

Still, Bono is always happy to add to another unwanted layer to an over-supply:

And so, in the spirit of rock star excess, I offer yet another.

Did Bono mention that he's Bono, out of the band U2, by the way?

Still, surely Bono is going to put a whole new crazy spin on the top ten list, right?

The main difference, if it matters, is that this list looks forward, not backward.

See? You weren't expecting that. A top ten of new things. Why hasn't anyone else thought of that? Eh?

Oh.

Still, to be fair, Bono has come up with a new way of doing things - rather than basing his list on ten members of a single category, he's just done a random list:

So here, then, are 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting, healthy or civil.

They're not things that are going to happen. They're not even things that Bono is suggesting are desirable. Just things that might make things "interesting, healthy or civil". One of which is giving private corporations domain over the internet.

God help us, what are the other nine?

Return of the Automobile as a Sexual Object

No, no, he doesn't mean putting your wee-wee in the exhaust pipe; Bono wants cars to become glorious, alluring objects again. He wants Obama to bring together a style panel to make cars much, much more sexy and delicious.

I've checked, this is the same Bono who is keen for us to protect the planet. Somehow he's going to do this by making us all want to have brand-new personal cars.

An Equal Right to Pollute (and the Polluter-Pays Principle)

Bono does admit that he's only a "mild green" as he praises the idea that pollution should be a thing you can buy and sell permits for. He seems excited by the idea that Western corporations could effectively buy, say, Ethiopia's share of pollution:

By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.)

Yes, capitalism will work. You or I might offer a demurring observation that capitalism has had a good few hundred years and managed to get "your average Ethiopian" in a position where she hasn't got the wherewithal to educate her kids, and how someone who is under-educated is actually going to sell her polluting rights to a family in Boise. That this system would end up with a bunch of middlemen getting rich, and the world still trundling to disaster, and the poor still poor is obvious to anyone who has ever been alive. But it would allow Bono to spew carbon dioxide out next time U2 goes on tour and pretend it doesn't matter, so you can see why it appeals.

A Person (Dr. William Li) and a Word (Angiogenesis)

There's nothing particularly new about the research into angiogensis and links to cancer, but it does fit the 'healthy' remit Bono promised.

Matter Doesn’t Matter

Something about teleportation, crediting it to God. God likes Star Trek, apparently. Because, erm, a scientist is working on teleportation. In a way that he says has nothing to do with Star Trek.

Matter Doesn’t Matter

Hey, why don't we all get together and have an arts event in the Middle East? Then we'll see some peace breaking out, right?

In Ireland, at the height of the “Troubles,” it was said that the only solution for rabid sectarianism was to let 1,000 punk-rock bands bloom: music helped create a free space for dialogue (of a high-volume variety).

That's right. Who can forget the Northern Ireland Peace Process starting when Spiggo from The Quoits lent Brango from Butter Churn Incident a plectrum? Thank god they kept the politicians away, right?

So no politicians allowed. Artists only.

Well, that would at least spare the Middle East Bono turning up. How would you police this? What if you were a sculptor who also held a council seat? Could you visit?

People Power and the Upside-Down Pyramid

Here, Bono gets excited about the power of new technology to allow people to organise:

Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power.

Yes, like the Chinese Government, right? Of whom, Bono had just a few paragraphs earlier, been pointing out were able to use new technology to police dissent.

Taking the Fight to Rotavirus

Yeah, you'd have to give him this one.

Viva la (Nonviolent) Revolución

Isn't this the same as the people power one?

The World Cup Kicks Off the African Decade

Wasn't the last decade the African decade? And if Bono is such an expert on African affairs, shouldn't he understand that suggesting that a football event in South Africa is somehow going to have an effect on, ooh, let's say "your average Ethiopian". But then, a grand gesture aimed at helping multinationals sell things and entertain the rich disguised as a positive good for everyone in Africa - it's pretty much a perfect Bono event, isn't it?

Bono wants protection

Bono is calling for the internet to be much, much more tightly controlled. Because, you know, we need to protect the creatives, you know:

"The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files," the lead singer of the band U2 wrote in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.
[...]
"Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly four percent of gross domestic product," Bono said.

Not that it really matters, but if you measure "most creative economy" by the share of GDP, America isn't the most creative economy. If you take Bono's figure of "just under 4 per cent", that puts it behind, just at random, Brazil - where the figure is over six percent; Uruguay, six per cent; and Mexico and Jamiaca, both well over four per cent. [source: Caricom.org]. Indeed, the global figure for the Creative Industries is seven per cent of GDP. So America is quite a laggard. I don't think it really matters, though, beyond proving that Bono, once again, doesn't really know anything that he's honking on about and the New York Times has given a platform to someone happy to build an argument on made-up fact.

Still, Bono's call for copyright control being imposed on the internet itself is worth a bit of a consideration. What sort of model does he see as being called for?

The singer pointed out that the US effort to stop child pornography and China's effort to suppress online dissent indicate that it is "perfectly possible to track" Internet content.

Right. Let's get this straight. Bono, the champion of the underdog (self-appointed), thinks that the risk of the odd person watching Mall Cop or an episode of House without paying for it should be treated as a crime on a par with raping a child and putting the footage online; he believes that the crime of not slipping a couple of cents to Guy Ritchie if you stream Holmes on your laptop calls for the entertainment industry multinationals to be handed powers to make them like the Chinese Government.

And people still pretend that Bono is on our side.

A screed on Creed

Also from yesterday's New York Times, a lengthy interview with Scott Stapp as Creed get back together for the mo... oh, apparently not for the money:

All of which makes Creed’s reunion — which includes a United States tour that wraps up on Tuesday and a new album, “Full Circle” (Wind-Up), due on Oct. 27 — more than the usual sentimental, cash-generating victory lap. It’s an attempt at rehabilitation.

“I’m asking all those who’ve become disenchanted with the band because of me to allow me to reintroduce myself and, with the other guys, show who we really are,” Mr. Stapp said.

Stapp seems convinced that Creed were a bit more important than bystanders might have considered them:

He admitted that he had grown cocky and defensive back then, but he also pointed out that Creed was an easy target: “We were the biggest band in the United States.”

Thank goodness he got the cockiness out of his system, otherwise he might well be making elaborate claims for his band's greatness that aren't quite borne out by the facts.

But let's not criticise, shall we? Stapp takes it to heart:

The album’s producer, John Kurzweg, who also produced the first three Creed albums, described the sessions as a “mess.” Years of withering criticism had battered Mr. Stapp’s self-confidence.

“If he read a review, I’d be like, ‘Look, you’ve got a fan base. Why worry what these people are saying?’ ” Mr. Kurzweg recalled in a phone interview. “But he took it very seriously, and that had an effect on everything, including his writing.”

There is, surely, a possibility that the criticism stung not because it was unfair, but because it was spot-on? The story the Times runs with - a man struggling to cope with fame and doubt about his talent - is interesting; the one it ignores - a man who knows he's selling snake-oil - is far more fascinating.

And if Stapp has got the gang back together not because of his weak solo career, but because he really wants to try and prove that Creed was something more than a rock act whose popularity was built on a parent-pleasing Christian message, how would that be going now?

According to the concert industry publication Pollstar, Creed has been playing to roughly half-full amphitheaters and grossing nearly 60 percent less money per night than on its 2002 tour

You might conclude - once its fan base no longer has to make purchases while on shopping trips with mum and dad, and can buy records without having to say "it's alright, it's about Jesus" - there's not much left for Creed at all.

Opening Pandora's box

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine went behind the scenes at Pandora, watching at the company sucked all the joy out a new delivery of music:

Over the previous six weeks or so, the Pandora analysts listened to 650 Indian pieces, and the session I observed was a refresher course. Steve Hogan, who oversees Pandora’s analyst squad, had given a half-dozen of its members the same two songs to analyze. The first was “Raga Ahir Bhairav,” recorded by Bismillah Khan in 1955. But the analysts had not been given this cultural information; all they had for the assignment was the music and their ears. Hogan played a snippet and pointed to Kurt Kotheimer, a bass player who often gigs around the Bay Area.

Kotheimer consulted his listening notes: “Flat second, major third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, major sixth, flat seventh.” Everybody nodded: that’s the tone set, which helps identify the particular raga, one of 25 new “genes” added to Pandora’s algorithm to accommodate this variety of non-Western music. Based on the beat, everyone agreed that this raga was set in Teentaal, with a 16-beat rhythmic cycle often heard in North Indian classical music; it’s now in the genome too. But that was the easy part, apparently.

They moved on to vocals, and Alan Lin, a violinist, ticked off the scores he came up with for things like rhythmic intensity and the relative exoticism of the melody scale. “I actually put exotic at 3.5,” he said. This prompted Sameer Gupta — a percussionist and an expert on Indian music who was weighing in by speakerphone from New York — to lead a brief discussion of how to think about melody and exoticism in this context. Seven or eight scores related to melody, and then about the same number for harmony. (“A 5 for drone,” one analyst announced.) More scores related to form. Tempo. The timbre of the reeds. When Gupta gave his score for riskiness on the percussion — a 3.5 — Lin did a sort of fist pump: “Yes!” Evidently he’d scored it the same way, meaning progress toward properly fitting Indian music into the Music Genome Project. Things went on like this for a while. “Even if you have a solo violin with a tabla, you’re still going to have monophony,” Gupta remarked at one juncture. “I just wanted to point that out.” It was hard to believe there was a business riding on this kind of conversation.

Pandora aim to cut out the influence of hipsters and taste makers in order to concentrate on finding music which is structurally similar to songs you like - it's very clever, and academically time-consuming, but seems to miss out on a whole lot of the things that make songs resonate.

This kind of box-ticking and point-scoring might work if you have incredibly limited tastes; if you don't, the weakness of Pandora (and, to a lesser extent, Last FM) is that there's a tendency to make your listening more conservative.

The problem is this: you tell the system you like Madness, so it plays you The Specials because they're a bit alike. You tell them how much you like that, and it chooses the next song. But the problem is that you're always on this branch. Sure, you can start over again and plug in Nanci Griffith, but once again you're going down the arm - and how can the system ever hope to tell how your affection for Madness and Nanci Griffith balances out?

The nice thing about relying on hipster bloggers is that sometimes you'll stumble across things you never knew you were going to like - and most people would say they discovered more music through a John Peel show than they ever would from The Evening Session.

Because even if subconsciously you favour songs with a 3.5 rating for exoticness and 2.7-worth of timpani drums, boiling it down to a matrix of numbers seems depressingly mechanistic. Do we really need a time-saving device to spare us the effort of serendipity?

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet: Yo La Tengo

Yo La Tengo share some of their favourite bands with the New York Times:

MR. KAPLAN You know, it’s funny. Georgia made this list, and it got me thinking about all the people on it. One thing that I was thinking about My Bloody Valentine was that they’re so legendarily difficult; they’re the band that bankrupted Creation Records. But they never took any, as far as I could tell, great pleasure out of — that wasn’t their motivation. They were just listening to the music in their head, trying to make it. It seems like they were doing what made sense to them, and the fact that it didn’t make sense economically or decibelwise, it was almost like: “Oh it doesn’t? I thought it would.”

Beatlesobit: Heinz Edelmann

Heinz Edelmann, the man who created the Pepperland sequence for Yellow Submarine, has died at the age of 75.

The New York Times obituary notes that his work on the Beatles movie obscured his more interesting and definitive work, before filling his obituary with anecdotes about his work on the Beatles movie.

It does reveal that one of the influences on his work for the film was Bob Godfrey, thereby taking us from Henry's Cat to John Lennon in one leap.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Michael Jackson

Amongst the acres of coverage of Jacko, there are some things worth reading - The New York Times dealbook on his dealings with Private Equity companies, for example:

A lot of Mr. Jackson’s monetary dealings have been conducted in private. But several of the pivotal moments have been described in media reports over the years.

Driving many of the deals was Mr. Jackson’s increasingly unmanageable debt load — something that private equity firms can probably relate to these days.

A 2006 article in The New York Times said the principal drains on Mr. Jackson’s finances may have been “monumentally unwise investments that apparently produced equally colossal losses” — and, later, the payments to service his debt.

A financial adviser to Mr. Jackson described how he might have frittered away $50 million on things like amusement-park ideas and “bizarre, global kinds of computerized Marvel comic-book characters bigger than life.”

Virgin closes New York store

There is one store left winding up, in Hollywood, but the closure of the Union Square Virgin Megastore in New York is effectively the end of the retailer in the US:

“It’s clear that the model of the large entertainment specialist working in a large space is not going to work in the future,” said Simon Wright, the chief executive of Virgin Entertainment Group, North America.

Perhaps part of the problem was a mindset that saw "entertainment" as a specialisation in itself, rather than a top level description.

Lily Allen is upset with the New York Times

In fact, she believes that:

The New York Time are cheap skanks

So cheap, there's only a single Time, it seems.

Lily is annoyed that the New York Times syndicated the photos it took of her for a piece in the magazine.

There's a lot of scene-setting in Allen's complaint. An awful lot. Here's a quick canter through what you have to wade past:

So, something has been really bugging me [...] Ambrosia my press agent and friend called me very excited [...] the cover of their Arts section. [...] goes without saying The New York Times is an incredibly prestigious publication [...] would fly in from New York, hang out at my house [...] feel more relaxed and then we’d go out for dinner after [...] she was called Milena and she [...] showed her round [...] an ISSA patterned all in one, louboutins, hoop earrings [...] got out her Dictaphone [...] interview for an hour, hour and a half [...] this restaurant called the Wolsley [...] a bottle of wine I wasn’t really drinking at the time [...] I decided to let my barriers down [...] Wiener Schnitzel [...] Duck [...] shared a pickled cucumber salad thing [...] left Milena with my friend Louis [...] she and Louis seemed to get along [...] my email address and contact details [...] all she need do is ask, and I bid them both farewell [...] a little awkward about her paying for dinner, but she insisted [...] a photographer whose name escapes me came round to the house to take a picture to accompany the NYT piece, [...] piece was so intimate and the biggest part of the interview had been conducted at my house [...] allow photographers into my home [...] special circumstances and after all TNYT is one of the most respected news publications in the world. [...] article came out [...] a really nice piece with a picture of me sat on my sofa, on the cover of the arts section. [...] I saw Milena was in New York [...] Bowery Ballroom and had an after party [...] I thanked her for the article as it was very complimentary ,it’s not often people write nice things about me.

So, with all that detail, you might be wondering what it is that Milena did to her. Did she make up a story that Lily doesn't have a plug and fresh in her bathroom? Did she double-dip the shared pickled cucumber?

Now I want to be clear, this has nothing to do with Milena she is a reporter and that is all. The reason what I’m about to tell you is so hurtful is because I had a really nice time with her and I feel that I will only ever feel badly about that day in London from now on .

Yes, after wading through a small novel about the interview, it turns out that the complaint is actually about the photographs. Still, I guess it's important for Lily to mention a couple of times that the New York Times is a prestigious newspaper which put her on the prestigious front page of its very, very prestigious arts supplement which is known around the world for its prestigiousness.

The problem is that New York Times syndicated the photos and they appeared in OK. Because Lily never signed a contract with the company to say they couldn't.

She seems to think that by selling photographs they had obtained openly and fairly, the New York Times has done something wrong - quoting their response:

I am sorry to say that we have no record or recollection of your client or her representatives ever requesting any restriction on our exploitation of the photographs. Indeed, it is not our general policy to accede to such restrictions, so it is certainly not something we would have agreed to without a written agreement confirming such arrangement.

As the copyright owner of thousands of photographs, a significant part of our business, like most news organizations, is the syndication of photos to third parties. This is very standard in the news business and I'm sorry that it comes as a surprise to your client. Under the circumstances, we are unable to provide you with the assurances you have requested.

I do hope, however, that our correspondence sheds some light on this issue for your client's future arrangements.

Nobody would want their photos to appear in OK unexpectedly, but Allen - or rather, her press agent - appears to not have understood the way things work. She also doesn't seem to have understood the response from the New York Times, either:

Uuuuurrggh , so patronizing, and gross. The world has become a dark place when The New York Times considers OK magazine to be “the news business”. Sorry if that made for tedious reading but, I think the NYT have behaved really badly and I wanted to vent .

The Times doesn't say OK is in the news business - it says that selling on photos is common in the news business. Which is true.

It's unfortunate that OK then used the pictures to imply that Allen had spoken to them - that is wrong (and actions for which OK have apparently apologised to Allen). But selling on of photos is usual (that's how picture libraries function, Lily) and if you don't want it to happen, you make that clear before the shoot. To try and imply some sort of unfairness after the fact is like complaining that someone stole your purse when you left it on the bar while you went to the toilet - however sympathetic an observer might be, you left yourself wide open.

But you know what really hurts Allen?

It’s one thing posing for a picture fro TNYT and wholly another letting OK into your house, and I didn’t even get paid ☹