The Times used to be a serious newspaper

The horrible death of a child in an accident can be difficult. What's the correct way to react? How do treat the parents.

Here's a clue: you don't treat the parents the way The Times has just treated Nick Cave following the death of his son.

The Times runs a second load of baseless, pointless, insinuating shit about Nick Cave. Well done, you fucking creeps pic.twitter.com/o8THd3RDo1

— Alexis Petridis (@alexispetridis) July 17, 2015

Robbie Williams: Now Menswear wade in

After Robbie Williams' attack on second-string indie bands has lead to a major skirmish.

Contactmusic is reporting from the frontline:

Menswear? Star? That's a bit of a stretch, surely?

It's the drummer, Matt Everitt, who has at least had a post-Menswe@r career in radio - he's the only one of the band who has his own Wikipedia page. On this basis, the Times have handed him an op-ed slot to start the fightback:

"I find it amusing that Robbie Williams... can let one comment from Brett Anderson... get his back up... It's quite endearing, but also slightly worrying...

"Menswear weren't manufactured, but I can see why people went on about the whole style over substance thing with us... We actually used to go on stage to Back For Good by Take That, a staggeringly great pop single. In the mid-nineties there wasn't really any rivalry between pop groups and the guitar bands...

"Traditionally your big pop acts allow record labels to invest in guitar bands, because they take longer to develop. Some rock bands take a few albums before they start making money and those tend to be the bands, like U2 and Radiohead, that in the longterm become important and fund everything. It's always been like that."

And that's an important point. It's worth remembering that even when Take That came off the production line, it took them four goes before they managed a hit; some of the bands slated by Williams didn't get given the same space to develop a following before the label pulled the plug.

Peter Gabriel on Pussy Riot

There's been a lot written about Pussy Riot; one of the best pieces came from Peter Gabriel in yesterday's Times. Unfortunately, of course, The Times is locked behind a paywall so, ironically, it's difficult to share Gabriel's words on freedom of speech. I hope he'll not mind if I share his words here:

OK, here we go again — another cause celeb with a bunch of overpaid, underinformed musicians banging on about a part of the world they don’t really understand. A punk group playing rude, subversive music in a cathedral — it has outrage, blasphemy and sacrilege all wrapped up in one fell swoop.

At first glance the campaign to free Pussy Riot looks like another bandwagon for the Save the World gang to jump on. There’s a lot worse stuff to worry about than a Russian punk group when even President Putin, on his visit to the UK this month, called for the courts to be lenient in sentencing them. Although presumably he filed that under “notes to self”.

A number of musicians, myself included, have spoken out against the threat of many years in jail for these three young women. Pussy Riot have become a focal point for the protest movement and the campaign is warming up. By supporting Pussy Riot — and gay rights — Madonna found herself criticised by none other than Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister who, in an extraordinarily personal attack, accused her of being an old whore who should take her cross off or put her pants back on.

When it comes to religion, I do believe that we need to respect each other’s faiths and most musicians supporting Pussy Riot would not have chosen the cathedral as a place of protest. However there are certain fundamentals on which democracy and freedom have been built and one of those is the separation of Church and State. So when an archbishop, the head of your Church, publicly backs a very repressive head of state who so obviously now follows a doctrine very different from the Christian one, something is clearly amiss.

I am told by those who know Pussy Riot that the three girls on trial are all believers and quite serious about their faith. This might put their action in a different context, more similar perhaps to Martin Luther’s hammering protests against the sale of indulgences by the Pope on the door of his church, or Christ causing havoc by throwing over the tables of the moneylenders in the temple.

Going back to the days of Mikhail Gorbachev with all the hope for the reforms of perestroika and glasnost and then Boris Yeltsin leading the country to economic collapse, Russian morale had sunk very, very low. The West made the decision not to offer help or to get seriously involved, and perhaps we are now reaping the result of that decision.

When Vladimir Putin first came to power, he was a genuinely popular hero, bringing back services, prosperity and pride and many were willing to overlook the negatives. But each term of office has exposed more of what is rotten and seen the erosion of more and more human rights. The clampdown continues and so does the fall from grace. Recently we witnessed the previously unimaginable sight of Mr Putin being booed at a judo match.

But on the street, older Russians are saying that they have not seen such use of force — such brutality, bullying and threats of violence — since the bad days of Stalin. Russia is now regularly described as a gangster state: in which protesters are routinely imprisoned and beaten; in which investigative journalists are murdered; in which the tax authorities have been known to sell an individual’s tax returns to gangs so they can be a little more precise in their extortion demands; in which a young lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, hired to investigate corruption, is murdered.

It is a country that has continued to supply arms to the Assad regime while it slaughters its own citizens; where once again there are only two sides to choose from, with two shirts, one saying “Foreign Agent” the other saying “Agent of the State”.

And yet, as in many other parts of the world, there are very brave young people willing to risk their freedom, along with all the accompanying threats to family, for a better, freer and more open Russia.

The Russians are a very smart, able and independent people who will, for sure, determine who governs them and how they do it. We outsiders (and musicians) are now being asked to help them to throw off the heavy blanket of silence, to let a little light into Russia’s darkest corners.

Turning away doesn’t seem like the right thing to do.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Caitlin Moran meets Lady GaGa

She's one of the smartest, most entertaining women in the world. And she went to meet Lady GaGa. Caitlin Moran meets Lady GaGa in today's Times. It's a wonderful, wonderful interview, and you really must read it all. A taste:

Would you play for the Pope, if he asked you?

“Yeah,” Gaga says. There’s a pause. Perhaps she considers her current stage show, and the section where her male dancers grab their gigantic, fake white penises, and bounce them off their palms to Boys Boys Boys.

“Well. I’d do an acoustic show for the Pope,” she amends.

The Times: Teaching Abba about gay icons

Enjoy Pete "R" Paphides column while you don't have to stick a quid in a slot, for today he meets Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. While mainly noteworthy for how the reunion question is answered, the exchange about how gays love Abba is priceless:

[Björn says "]For instance, we never thought in our wildest dreams that we would be gay icons.”

I put it to him that Fältskog might have had something to do with the whole gay icons thing. “But why?” Ulvaeus counters. “She’s a very heterosexual woman. I know.”

That’s not how it works, I tell him. “How does it work, then?” he asks. Well, it all goes back to her not looking happy. You could tell that she was suffering inside, but she carried on in the name of showbiz. Ulvaeus remains unsure: “Hmm. It could be the outfits and the Eurovision.”

And the reunion questions? After thirty years of instant rejection, when Pete raises the idea, he doesn't get hit straight in the face with cold water:

Andersson, by contrast, seems deeper in thought. “Yeah, why not?” he nods. As if working through the logistics, he adds: “I don’t know if the girls sing anything any more. I know Frida [Anni-Frid Lyngstad] was [recently] in the studio.”

If they are hoofing about the stage in white jump suits - waistbands now elasticated - in a year or two, it might well be down to Pete. I'm not sure if he'll be hailed as a hero or treated like the guy who opened Pandora's Box.

Peter Paphides suggests 'difficult for new bands'

Writing in the Times, Pete "Peter" Paphides worries that the exciting new music industry might be good for big bands, but tough for small bands:

Neither does it work for a group such as Butcher Boy, from Glasgow. Their recent album, React or Die, received unanimously adoring reviews, making it into The Times’s list of the decade’s 100 best albums. For all that, Butcher Boy find themselves in a quandary. With day jobs, they can’t tour. And without tour money, they can’t give up their day jobs.

Erm... hasn't that always been the case for small, unsigned bands, since the start of time? I've certainly been on tours where singers have been calling in to their day job "unwell" shortly before heading out to Bath Moles.

I guess in the internet age, there is more risk of being caught out when people Tweet "great gig by Stiggy Pants" when Stiggy has told their boss they're in bed with flu.

6Music back on death row

Just a few days after the BBC Trust said it thought 6Music was a good thing and should be preserved comes a nasty rumour that it's going to be axed anyway.

The Times is widely being credited with uncovering the story that 6Music, along with the Asian Network, Switch, Blast and half of future web activity is to be axed - although the death of 6 was first re-rumoured in last Friday's New Statesman radio column. The Staggers reported that:

. At a meeting in early February, the channel's controller, Bob Shennan, told the gathered staff that they had three weeks to wait before the wet towel was officially removed from its bucket to be wrung. (One imagines his gestures while speaking - fingers unusually honed from writing redundancy cheques.)

The idea is that the BBC will shrink to allow "commercial rivals" room to thrive, although it's not entirely clear which company is planning to create an advertising-supported programme along the lines of Marc Riley's, or the Freakzone. Or the music programmes on the Asian Network, come to that.

It's a bit like having Radio Five axed all over again, but this time with actual listeners to disappoint. (The loss of Five, taking with it virtually all BBC children's radio, proves the fallacy of believing if the BBC stops doing stuff, commercial radio will delight at having a space to work with - advertisers want markets, not gaps in them.)

Obviously, I love 6Music and don't want a station I enjoy to be switched off for no real reason, but there is a wider policy question here, too. There is an interest in shifting radio from analogue signals to digital, but most of the digital commercial stations have struggled precisely because it's very hard to fund interesting new services from the money you make selling commercials around it. If the BBC cuts back its digital-only radio offerings, and the commercial sector can't afford to offer much, why would anyone bother to buy a digital radio? Killing 6Music isn't just killing off a station enjoyed by half a million happy licence payers; it's effectively the end of the DAB dream.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Moustache

The Times' Michael Moran counts down the 25 best moustaches in pop:

23: Bryan Ferry

The blink-and-you-missed-it Ferry pencil moustache from 1976 graced the cover of his third solo album Let’s Stick Together. Although a short-lived project it was quite possibly an influence on Midge Ure’s widely admired 1979 effort.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Cory Doctrow

Cory Doctrow takes to The Times to patiently explain to Peter Mandelson why it won't work:

Fifteen years of draconian copyright regimes show that when you create powerful enforcement tools without any consequence for misuse, they get misused. And half a century’s worth of evidence on digital technology shows that no amount of enforcement will make computers and the internet worse at copying. Hard drives won’t get magically bulkier and more expensive. Networks won’t get less accessible, slower and harder to use. General technological literacy won’t decline. If you want copying to stop, physics is not on your side.

Gordon in the morning: Ice cream man

It's hard to imagine anything more horrific than this:

MIKA whipped up chaos yesterday when he turned up in an ice-cream van to hand out tickets to last night's exclusive Bizarre gig.

I'd announced there would be a ticket giveaway just for Sun readers - and hundreds (and thousands) of you flocked there to grab passes.

But no one expected pop star Mika to be manning the van himself.

Isn't it much more likely - on a warm day at the start of autumn - that the people crowding round the ice cream van were flocking there to grab ice creams? Only for Mika to pop out trying to make you go and see his show instead.

At least he did give out some ice cream:

A crowd quickly gathered as word spread that the colourful singer was handing out cornets and free passes. Last night Mika performed a special set for 700 lucky Bizarre readers at the Bloomsbury Ballroom.

I'm not quite sure how a van handing out tickets with much hoopla managed to only target Bizarre readers. Perhaps you had to do some sort of test, like managing to look interested while someone talked about JLS.

Fans of Gordon's inability to cope with the idea of head-to-head challenges will be delighted to hear there's a textbook example today:

TAKE THAT and their former bandmate ROBBIE WILLIAMS have been getting on famously recently. But that could all change this Christmas - when they go head to head in the album charts.

Head-to-head? Really?

Rob drops his collection Reality Killed The Video Star on November 9, then GARY BARLOW's gang issue live CD The Greatest Day just three weeks later.

Only 21 days apart? That's almost the same day, if you look at it on an astronomical time scale.

The view from someone else's yacht: Mandelson defends new filesharing hunt

Is that the sound of deckshoes I hear approaching? Why, yes, it's Peter Mandelson writing about the new proposals for treating filesharers illegally in today's Times. Even the headline is flawed:

Taking something for nothing is wrong . . .
. . . that’s why we must stop illegal file sharing and give the creative industries a breathing space

Taking something for nothing is wrong? Really? Harvesting blackberries at a roadside is wrong, is it? Helping yourself to apples from a bowl which says "help yourself" is wrong, is it? Having a lovely, lovely evening on a creative industry executive's yacht and not dipping your hand in your pocket is wrong, is it, Mandelson? Taking large payments from Bernie Ecclestone for nothing in return would have been wrong?

It used to the Tories who we worried would try and find a way of charging for the air that we breathe, enraged that it come for free. It looks like it still is; they're just sat on the other benches.

But, my Lord, we're running ahead of ourselves. Do explain your argument:

It was said this week by a former colleague of mine (anonymously, of course) that I do not “get the internet”. While I am still something of a novice when it comes to streaming and downloads, I have been around long enough to know that piracy is wrong.

To be fair to Peter, he's not the only person who gets this so wrong, and thinks that he's taking part in a battle against "pirates" rather than being used to try and artificially inflate the price of audio and video files online. The schoolteacher tone more than demonstrates that, no, he really doesn't get the internet, or basic economics, at all.

It's that lack of understanding of economics - that where supply is unlimited and production costs near to zero, there's no business in charging for that product however much we might wish there was - that is perhaps worrying. It'd be worrying in any grown-up, but in a senior member of a government, it's a bit like discovering that your pilot is suffering from glued-shut eyes.

Of course, Mandelson didn't get where he is today by being so dull, so it's more than possible he's just pretending that what he's proposing is nothing to do with stopping pirates and everything to do with trying to artificially inflate prices. He wouldn't say that in public, though, would he?

That is why my department decided to consider strengthening proposals to tackle illegal file sharing and downloading.

But if - by your own admission - you don't really understand what you're talking about when you say "downloading", how can you hope to regulate wisely and fairly? It's like putting someone who lives in a shack with no electricity in charge of Ofcom - how can you make subtle decisions if you don't have experience of the market you're regulating? It's no wonder you'd fall back on nursery half-witticisms like "pirates are bad" if you're an amateur in the field in which you're dabbling.

And if the file-sharing of which you speak is illegal, then why not use the laws that make it illegal to stop it? You'd not stand up and announce self-satisified proposals to outlaw illegal murdering, as you know it would make you look like a bit of a tit, right?

The thinking behind this is clear and has nothing to do with dinners in Corfu.

This is Mandelson's only reference to his recent jolly with Geffen and Speilberg - as I've observed before, if his department was really considering these proposals before he took their largess, he is guilty of a terrible error of judgement and should be considering his third ignominious resignation.

The Government decided to reopen the issue of suspending internet connections as a sanction of last resort against the most egregious offenders for two simple reasons.

Geffen's most excellent port and Speilberg's delicious cheeseboard?

First, taking something for nothing, without permission, and with no compensation for the person who created and owns it, is wrong.

Well, he's clarified the headline, at least. That "and" is fascinating - not "or". Mandelson is actually suggesting that if someone is happy for you to help themselves to their apples, it's wrong.

It sounds, though, like a fair point. If you can shake the image of that time Faith was in Buffy's body mouthing "you can't do that... it's wrong... I'm gonna kick your ass", you might find yourself nodding and saying "well, that's inarguable."

But equally, charging for something that is in abundance is impossible. It's like dropping a ten pound note on the street - yes, morally, the finder should seek out the lawful owner and return the ten pound note. But nobody does, and - frankly - you wouldn't expect someone who slips the tenner in his pocket to then be banned from walking down the street for three years as a result.

Mandelson doesn't get the internet. He doesn't get the philosophical difference between the song, and the file. It would be wrong, certainly, to force Noel Gallagher to record an album at gun point and not reward him for that. But is sharing an mp3 really the same as that? If it is, would sitting outside a window listening to someone play guitar also stealing if you don't pay them for their time?

This is not a conversation about things, it's a conversation about ideas. It's abstract, and trying to slap on the simple morality of what would happen in a shop doesn't work. The trouble is that if you attempt to discuss this, the copyright industry just barks that you're trying to rationalize wrong-doing, rather than offering an answer to the questions.

Mandelson has a second point, though:

Second, our creative businesses drive much of our economy. They provide not only tax revenues and jobs but also ensure that Britain punches above its weight on the global cultural stage. We are a creative people and we do these things well. These businesses will get no favours from government, but we should create a regulatory environment where they can operate without having to deal with illegal competition.

Britain "punching above its weight on the global cultural stage" means, I think, that we're still the number one supplier of evil villains to Hollywood movies, and The Rolling Stones still jaunt around every so often raising money which, erm, doesn't supply tax revenues as they organise their affairs to avoid that happening as far as they possibly can.

It's funny that they're not getting any favours from government, though, while one part of the government is ripping out a large chunk of the Digital Britain report and rewriting it in terms that could have been dictated by the creative industries. You wonder what a favour would look like.

It is true, though, that creative industries do raise a lot of money and keep people in jobs. The asbestos and tobacco industries also threw a lot of cash into the pot - as did the children-up-chimney industry. Do we calibrate our rules according to how much cash there is to throw around from an industry these days?

And is simply protecting a small number of large, mostly-foreign based corporations really the best way to ensure we have a healthy number of people making things? Isn't it at least as possible that locking most of the inventiveness into exploiting things already made is the best way to spark the imaginations of the next generation?

Mandelson then rambles on for a bit about how it would lovely if ISPs and copyright holders could work together to create ways of fleecing the public - sorry, exploiting the copyright:

It’s that which will effect the sea change that we are looking for.

Well, no, Peter. iTunes has managed to scramble out and turn a profit without the need for anyone to throw people off the internet first; the suggestion that the non-winnable battle against piracy must be won at all costs before there's room for a market is just ridiculous.

To those who have raised their voices about the proposed changes this week, let me say that I hear their concerns. I have read their blogs and can live with the abuse (I’ve had worse).

Of course you have - you're a devious, dishonest politician who does favours for his mates. Of course you've had worse abuse.

I made clear to the content industry that we would consider legislation that includes temporary account suspension only if it was seen as the sanction of last resort.

That doesn't really make it right, does it? "We'll only shoot the prisoners if all else fails" isn't exactly a stance against capital punishment.

It would only follow a well-established series of warnings and clear evidence that they were taking action to defend their own rights. This will not turn your ISP into Big Brother. The process is driven by rights holders reporting activity on public file-sharing websites rather than service providers monitoring individuals’ internet traffic.

Mandelson, you'll notice, is not worried at all about the idea of a private company snooping on people's online activities, just so long as it isn't the ISPs.

I want to know more from digital rights groups and consumers about other steps that should be taken to protect people who may feel that they are at risk of being accused without good cause.

That's big of you. Perhaps you should have spoken to them before issuing a press release? Or does the EFF not have a yacht?

This could perhaps be because of legitimate file sharing, or because of others hijacking their connection. Having a fair, fast and effective appeals process will obviously be essential.

No, Peter. What would be essential would be for there to be a proper, due process - not the rushed job you're supporting with an equally rushed appeals panel. You're talking about cutting people off from their banks, their education, their jobs. You need to be bloody sure you're right before doing that - and right in the eyes of the law, not some chap from EMI.

We are fast approaching the tenth anniversary of the trial in which Napster.com, the site that enabled the first real boom in file sharing, was shut down after legal action by record labels. This legal action was hugely expensive, time-consuming and ultimately did little for consumers. Why? Because it failed to encourage rights holders to develop new business models and did nothing to seek to change consumer behaviour. A decade on, we have another opportunity, and for some in the content industries, perhaps the last.

Pete doesn't get the internet. He doesn't see that Napster did an awful lot for consumers - there wouldn't have been any impulse to take music online, into an environment where it can't be controlled, and the unit cost has shrunk, without Napster. The trial, he's right, was long and expensive. And closing Napster did nothing for consumers. But it wasn't consumers who had the problem with Napster in the first place. It worked well for us.

Mandelson's final flourish, though, sounds like it comes from a different article:

The age of flogging a CD in HMV for £20 is well and truly over. Ask me what I think will finish off piracy as a real threat to our creators and creative businesses and the answer is obvious — it is the market.

Provide customers with a good quality, cheap, safe and efficient experience, and they will ditch illegal downloading. If the threat of temporary account suspension and its implementation in a small number of cases helps to build a market to make this happen, then I believe it is worth our serious consideration.

... well, apart from that last sentence. But you almost want to grab him by the lapels and say "yes, my noble Lord... if you build a better mousetrap, people won't waste their time hanging out by the skirting board with hammers. Even though they could do that for free, they'll gladly pay you a fair price for that ease and simplicity."

What has driven the labels to come to their sometimes grudging agreements with Apple and YouTube and others is the sort of activity that Mandelson is targeting. The inspiration is the disruption and the disruption is the inspiration. Why, then, Mandy, why are you trying to build a system in which the creative industries don't need to be creative, and can use draconian measures to try and protect a market of selling back catalogue at inflated markets through the same old system?

Jacksonomics

Lovely work by The Times, who have produced a sliding calculator thing which allows you to work out exactly how hard Michael Jackson will have to work to clear his debt.

It allows you to adjust ticket price, the amount spent on piles of crap by the average concert-goer, the number of nights paid and so on, to see how much of his cash-hole will be filled. The only thing missing from the equation is the drain on his income that will happen when Jackson discovers those shops in Piccadilly Circus that sell souvenirs.

"I bought my tickets off a man with no nose" "How do they smell?" "

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal revealed how Britney Spears and Neil Diamond appeared to be scalping their own tickets.

Today, sister paper The Times reveals that Michael Jackson has been doing the same thing - or, at least, the promoter of his shows:

The Times understands that outside the official sale of the tickets, AEG Live approached secondary ticketing companies — which allow people to resell tickets to sporting and music events — offering to provide them directly with between 500 and 1,000 tickets for each performance.

It is thought that AEG Live offered the tickets on the understanding that they were sold at about £500 each, with 80 per cent of the revenue returning to AEG Live and the secondary ticketing company taking the remaining 20 per cent.

Last night tickets for seats closest to the stage were on sale on Viagogo for thousands of pounds. Other seats in prime locations seemed to be on sale at surprisingly uniform rates, with many priced at £418 and £659.

AEG Live did not deny its links to Viagogo. The company previously said in a statement: “In an effort to ensure fans are able to purchase premium tickets and exchange tickets directly with other fans, AEG Live has entered into an agreement with Viagogo. The online site allows people to buy and sell live event tickets in a safe and guaranteed way.”

Is it just me, or does that statement totally miss the point - the question would seem to be 'have you deliberately started selling tickets on the secondary market, rather than sell them for face value', to which that is not an answer.

There is an argument that some, or perhaps all, tickets for popular events be sold through an auction; but surely the most important thing is that the process is transparent?

If AEG wants to charge £500 for a £50 ticket, why can't it be honest about it?

Did I just hear that correctly?

The Times is giving away albums every day this week - including The Jesus And Mary Chain. It's meant to be a promotion built around the records that every collection should have - although, surely, if a Times reader has no Mary Chain in their collection it could be because the right-wing press didn't exactly embrace the band during their first flush of fame.

Perhaps answering their own question

The Times website conjoins two stories, with a question that might look upwards for the answer "because you see what happens when they dont..."

For those who are keeping up, Glitter has now been turned away from Hong Kong.

Mike Batt predicts starvation from unchecked bread downloading

Mike Batt: he's given us a lot of dubious value - the Wombling Merry Christmas, Katie Melua, and now, a piece for The Times where he sets out to prove that - oh, yes - illegal downloading is killing music using any argument he can think of:

Why do people illegally download music? Because they can.

I hate to jump all over his opening line, but this isn't actually true, is it? First of all, there are huge numbers of people who have the ability to illegally download who, for whatever reason, choose not to.

And isn't the fact it's "illegal" means that, rather than doing it "because they can", they're doing it "despite they can't"?

Of course, what Batt is doing here is arguing for bans, for blocks, for making it impossible to download, and so it serves his case to claim that if people can, they will. Don't fall for it, though - people can download graphic images of people having sex with large waterfowl, but don't act on the ability.

Batt then reminds people that the BPI has grudgingly accepted a deal with ISPs:

This has been welcomed by most musicians, industry organisations and fair-minded consumers.

Well, let's leave aside the evidence in the Guardian this week that the industry organisation which negotiated the deal hasn't actually welcomed it and instead sent out petulant letters insisting that the agreement wasn't, actually, in any way binding at all, and instead look at that assumption that if you disagree with the deal, you're doing so not because you have valid worries - it's just that you're not fair-minded.

Reasonable people agree that musicians should be paid for their work.

Aha! You must be fair-minded, because it's only fair that people get paid for their music, see?

Batt doesn't entertain the propsect for a moment that a fair-minded person might object to the deal that's been cut for reasons unconnected with the rights and wrongs of paying for copyrighted work; that a fair-minded consumer might have a problem with the idea that ISPs are being given a role which places them, however loosely, as having a reason for looking at what their customers are doing with the connections they provide, for example.

Or that a fair-minded person could - without losing any sense of reasonableness - conclude that the correct response to a customer base moving to a dubious distribution network is to accept the consumer is king and work out how you thrive in a new reality rather than spending hundreds of thousands of pounds trying to protect a world that has gone.

Batt, though, is surprised that not everyone is applauding his BPI chums:

But there has been negative comment. Last week I read an article by an otherwise sane and respected musician and journalist who said that downloading music free was like “downloading air”, implying that because you can’t see it, it should be free.

I'm trying to decide if Batt is really unable to understand the journalist's point, or if he's just feigning stupidity. It can be so difficult to tell the difference, but let's be fair to him and assume that he really does understand that the writer isn't making a "if you can't see it, you shouldn't pay for it" line of reasoning, and that Mike Batt knows that the point it that music is no longer a thing which is of limited supply - that always on, digital, hyperconnectivity limewired sharing services and cheap storage means that music has moved in the last two decades from being something you had to get a bus into town to purchase, to something that surrounds you. The writer's point, let us generously assume Batt actually knows, is that music is no longer a scarce product, and there are economic realities about products whose supply is unlimited.

Not that these have to be heartbreaking for those that would make a living selling music - after all, oxygen, being part of air, is both invisible and all around us, and yet the British Oxygen Company managed to figure out a way to build a fine business out of selling it.

But does Batt really know that he's misrepresenting the views of the person whose argument he has sketched?

He also said that it is “so cheap to get recorded music to the audience that artists no longer need a major label”.

He does. Interesting Batt chooses to decry his intellectual opponent - "otherwise sane" - without offering the man's name. Could it be that Batt was afraid that if he named the other writer people might look for the original article and see that he was deliberately distorting the other side of the debate? (It was, by the way, Bob Stanley writing - also - in The Times. If only Mike had mentioned that - the paper could have hyperlinked its two articles together. Maybe Batt was just afraid at making it clear that he believed The Times was publishing the rantings of someone who is, on this subject at least, insane.

But Mike has moved on - to dis the h8rs:

Hating major labels is about as useful as hating film companies and supermarkets. They exist.

We're a little lost here - saying 'hating a large company is the same as hating a large company' seems to be self-evident; it's like saying "hating the Bishop of Durham is about as useful as hating the Bishop of Chichester". It's not actually an argument against doing so.

And is it so useless to hate supermarkets? Might it not lead one to conclude you'd be better off trying to shop locally, or grow some of your own vegetables, perhaps? To take that hate and make some small changes which, ultimately, might make your life better? And even if you do accept that you won't bring Tesco to its knees, viewing it as hostile, and keeping an eye on it as it screws over farmers, ignores planning regulations, organises its taxes to ensure it gives as little as possible to the country that educates its staff and underwrites the welfare of its customers, or makes outrageous libel demands against Thai intellectuals, and making sure it is called to account when it does so - surely that isn't useless?

The other side of the Batt argument - "they exist" - hardly stands up to any consideration, either. They exist now - but, in the past, debtor's prisons existed. Truck ticket shops and highwaymen and Bradford Park Avenue once all existed, but the mere fact of their existence doesn't mean one is obliged to come to view them with delight. We think Batt is using their existence in the sense, though, that they exist like the sun, or HIV, or spiders and that their existence is inarguable and part of creation and thus we'd better get used to them and stop bloody well complaining.

But record companies are not natural phenomenona, and like Bradford Park Avenue and truck ticket shops and highwaymen, it is all too easy to imagine a world in which they didn't exist. Some of you, I suspect, imagine just such a world as you say your prayers at night, or offer up a small sacrifice to Hecate, or blow out your birthday candles.

Indeed, it's where Batt's linking together of the record labels and the supermarkets falls down. Imagine the consternation if all the supermarkets vanished overnight - it's hard to even see a way the food distribution network in the country would function. But should the hqs of EMI, Universal, Warners and Sony-BMG be ripped from the Earth by a tornado of some sort, a nation would scratch its chin, and hit shuffle on the iPod.

Still, Batt spells out some simple economics for us:

There will always be dominant players, but there are also about 800 independent record labels in the UK including my own, Dramatico, which has 14 staff and a network of about 50 freelancers around the world. Without the toil and passion of my employees my artists wouldn’t be selling records. Without payment for the music made by our artists we wouldn’t be able to pay our staff. Then the staff would leave and so would the artists.

Nobody would want to see those people thrown out of work, but - being honest - if you're running a business that's trying to sell something that people don't want to pay for, however sad it is, you're probably going to go out of business unless you can find a way to make money in some other way. Batt seems to be starting from the - admittedly understandable - stance of believing that his business must continue and that the world must be rearranged to ensure that happens.

But the world has shifted - in the same way it shifted and cost the guys who worked in video rental libraries their living, and made Tippex a less valubale commodity, and turned coalmen into yesterday's men. One of my forbears used to look after the horses for a brewery - I'd bet that he would have written an impassioned piece arguing that horses must be used to pull dray wagons had he be given the chance. But nobody was going to pay for horses when there were shiny vans to be had. Things change. People get hurt. But wishing it wasn't so doesn't stop it happening.

If you could download a loaf of bread free you would. But you can’t, thank God, because otherwise bakers would cease to exist and there would be no bread to download.

Actually, Mike, most bakers have ceased to exist - they were run out of business by undercutting from those supermarkets you don't want us to hate.

Is this true, though? After all, you can go to a hospital and have your broken bits fixed for free, but people still pay for operations privately. There are many free sources of news, but newspaper circulation is still surprisingly healthy. The Science Museum, apparently, introduced charges for some of its events because people didn't bother to turn up for free ones. Some people might take the download of bread, but others would continue to buy bread.

Batt, though, is warming to his world of digital loaves, and what a dystopia it is. A dystoastia, too:

Then we’d all be dead, and good riddance to us, because we humans are greedy, thieving, conniving bastards, every last one of us. That’s why there are laws to stop us.

What a terrible, terrible view of humanity this man has. What a black outlook. He's also a philosophical idiot, but let's just spend a couple of moments sending mental hugs out to Mike Batt. Let's show him some love, some of the love that he doesn't believe exists.

If every last one of us were greedy, conniving and thieving - leaving aside how Batt would explain charity and volunteering and those people who bring cakes into the office on a Monday morning - then we wouldn't have laws, would we? There are only laws because of an agreed moral code in a society; the codification of morals is there not because without it, nobody would be trustworthy, but because there are a small few people who would behave badly. I suspect that even Batt, if he was walking down the street and saw a dropped wallet, would not think "I'll have that", or even "if only there wasn't a law against stealing, I'd have that", but "where should I hand this in?"

There's also the bigger point that commercial music is not like bread in a very important respect - it isn't essential to living. Now, music - yes, that may very well be vital; certainly, I wouldn't have a life without some music in it. But commercial, recorded music is not the very staff of life. In that world we imagined a moment back, where there was no EMI, we can still hear music - birds singing, church bells ringing, a high school musical (as opposed to a High School Musical); the happy sound of a mother singing a nursery rhyme to a child. Let us not allow Batt or the BPI to pretend that the process of putting sound onto a recorded medium and pitching a marketing campaign is the actual music.

Batt, though, suddenly changes tack from his breadless land of dying bastards, and has a pop at Prince:

It is tempting to top up your profile by giving your music away free on the web, or as Prince did, by means of a newspaper cover-mounted giveaway to millions of people (his previous album had sold fewer than 90,000 copies in the UK).

But let’s not forget that Prince was paid handsomely for the stunt (at least £150,000).

Isn't this actually running against his argument? Since Batt has spent his time setting up a demand that music must not be free at point of consumption, as nobody makes any money, isn't it a bit foolish of him to suddenly point out that Prince has found a way of giving consumers music for nothing - besides the shame of being seen purchasing the Mail On Sunday - and still make enough to buy a good lunch and a gallon of petrol?

Equally Radiohead, who last year set up an honesty box for their Mercury-nominated album, In Rainbows, had already made millions with their previous albums, so you could argue they could afford to ask people to pay what they wanted to.

Actually, Mike, capitalism works on the belief that people pay what they want for things - the difference with Radiohead was that the price slid to zero. But it's a fair point - Radiohead weren't going to end up eating beans out of cans if everyone took the album for nothing.

Trouble is, of course, a lot of people did pay for it, didn't they, Mike? Which demolishes your claim that if people can get something for nothing, they won't pay for it.

And anyway, without being being cynical about their motivation, the “experiment” also wasn’t bad in attracting attention for the physical release of the CD, which followed a few months later.

Again, though, you've spent ten minutes insisting that if something is made available for free, nobody will ever pay for it again, but now suggesting that giving something away is a great way to persuade people to buy something.

It’s nothing new that the entertainment business is “dog eat dog”. When I came up to London three times a week on the train from Winchester in 1968, a hopeful 18-year-old trying to sell my songs or get signed by, well, anyone really, there were four majors – EMI, Pye, Phillips and Decca. And there are four today – EMI, Universal, Warners, Sony/BMG and Universal. It was just as difficult to have a hit then as it is now. Just as hard to get noticed. The business was just as full of arrogant charlatans with kind, helpful faces.

It's actually a lot easier now, Mike. In 1968 there was one pop station, no music television; certainly no internet. There was, of course, pirate radio still, in 1968, but given how much you object to illegal downloading I'm sure you would retrospectively condemn those guys, wouldn't you? The people who floated about, not paying transmitter licences, ignoring the needle time restrictions without which honest, hard-working studio musicians would lose their jobs? I'm surprised we haven't heard you calling for Tony Blackburn to go on some sort of show trial.

Now, though: MySpace. YouTube. Blogs. BBC Radio Humberside's Raw Talent programme. There are numerous outlets to build a fanbase. It's still hard, but digital makes it so much easier. And you don't even need a label to make money from your music - you can really do it DIY in a way punk only ever dreamed of.

Batt admits this:

Today it’s a different mixture, though, with different challenges and opportunities. Bands and artists can display their wares on YouTube and MySpace, and record companies can audition artists without even leaving their offices.

Hurrah! Right, Mike?

No, it turns out this is a bad thing:

But, because of this easier access, telling wheat from chaff is more difficult.

No it isn't. A good song is still a good song. If you mean there's a lot of stuff that isn't very good, well, yes, but there are also a whole slew of tools which make it easier to sort through and find what you like: last.fm, mp3 blogs, trying albums before you buy by downloading a couple of tracks. There is as much wheat as ever, but better still, there's much better winnowing equipment. And we - the audience - are able to hear a load of stuff that we'd never have got to have heard before. Stuff that we'd have not heard not because it was poor, but because it didn't fit with what the A&R person was after when they auditioned, or what his boss wanted, or what her boss was willing to fund.

A few years ago, for most people, hearing a recording by an unsigned artist was rare - like talking to a foetus or tasting an ungrown apple. The very fact of their being unsigned made it hard for their music to get to you. But now? It's hard to log on to your computer without having six or seven bands who only formed last night poking their demo stuff into your eyes. (Although Firefox users have the option of a plug in, I'm given to understand.)

But this is the trouble - Batt isn't really worried that music will disappear; or that we shall all starve culturally to death. He's afraid that the sort of music business he understands is vanishing. And, naturally, he wants to defend it, even if it means making yourself look foolish in the newspapers and calling for telephone companies to send angry letters to their customers:

Record companies have it easier and harder. It’s easier to get the music to the online customer, but harder to protect it from theft. New business models are being sought and invented all the time. ISPs talking to record companies in order to limit online music theft through their broadband channels is good news for everyone except those who think all music should be free and musicians should go out of business.

Nobody wants musicians to go out of business. But if everyone spends their time and effort trying to keep a structure of prices and way of working from the 1940s alive, a lot of recorded music businesses will go under.

If god started to rain bread down on the planet, which bakers would propser, Mike? The ones who called for the government to invest in an expensive bread umbrella, to stop the bread from falling? Or the ones who set up travelling slicing machines, went into partnership with the butter churners, and accepted that things have changed?

The Times legal pages: finger closer to the pulse than The Sun

While Gordon Smart was struggling to make something out of 'couple do different jobs; go to different places' this morning, he could have actually asked his colleagues on the Times' law desk if they had something a bit meatier.

They did: Frances Gibb and Adam Sherwin were reporting that Fiona Shackleton has been set up to represent Madonna if and when something decree-related happens. Shackleton, of course, took one for the Macca team when Heather Mills poured water over during the McCartney divorce sideshow, we think to indicate how terrible it was being portrayed as bit unpredictable by the media. It's not known if Guy Ritchie has an arsenal of water pistols, but chances are.

The Cameron talent hour

In today's Times, and built-around the Boris Johnson's sister band Second Person, is a piece about the rise of what, I suspect, we'll have to call Posh Pop.

Lloyd Grossman is wheeled on to explain:

“The Crewe by-election was by no means the turning point, but it was symptomatic of everyone having better things to do now than worry about class warfare. I have long held the view that the less you know about a performer the better. I honestly don’t really want to know where any musician went to school or what his parents did.”

Oh, good lord; it's not bad enough that politics has been overwashed with the privileged trying to suggest that we're all equal now, as if they're not being kept aloft by the pocketbooks of their parents - now they've come for music, too.

Of course, up to a point, Grossman's right: Kinky Machine were no worse for having been led by the son of an Earl; Kula Shaker would have been chased out of any right-thinking town if Mills' folks had been tractor drivers rather than actor-directors. But given that the Times found the class angle the most interesting thing to say about them, you are left with the feeling that if you don't have a guide to the bloodstock, all you're left with are a few rich kids who can afford the instruments and time off to have a jolly old time, with chums who have the cash to promote without needing to worry about the odd loss.

Suffering and poverty don't automatically make for better music, but when you're actually making real sacrifices to make music, that commitment can often be tasted in the mix.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet

Mick Hume in The Times lambasts Coldplay and a world without political pop:

In 2005, when the singer sent Mr Blair a love note declaring: “I think everything you're doing in terms of trying to sort the whole place out is BRILLIANT”, I called Martin “the musician that the Prime Minister always wanted to be, a prefect in the school of rock”. They shared an appearance of being all things to all men, with little real heart or soul behind it.

Three years on, Mr Blair and new Labour appear about as cool as Eurovision. Yet here are Coldplay, back on top of the album charts with their snappy toe-tapper Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends. The songs seem if anything duller than before. Such is the morbid musical mood, however, that they still command, says one bigwig, “the broadest appeal of any band around”. Blairism rocks limply on.

First spin: Hard Candy

The Times has had a first listen to Hard Candy, the new Timbaland and Pharrell Williams collaboration featuring Madonna on vocals. Pete(r) Paphides isn't entirely convinced:

When the songs work, it doesn’t much matter that Madonna is blazing a fourth-hand trail. After 25 years of reinvention, we can surely cut her slack in that department. But on Dance 2Night, She’s Not Me and Give It 2 Me, what surprises is how deferential Madonna is to her collaborators. Even the album’s showstopping ballad, The Devil Wouldn’t Recognise You succumbs to a default mode of vast beats.

By this late stage, you rather feel like you’re in your fifth hour at the Ambassador’s famous party. Great, but is there anything else on offer other than Ferrero sodding Rochers?

Fourth hand? If she's doing twenty-year old Prince style "2"s instead of "to"s, that might be over generous.

What appears to have happened is - as one of pop's foremost brands - Madonna has followed the logic of turning herself into a corporation to the ultimate conclusion. She's outsourced the album.