![]() At home I put them on the master stereo and did the same exercise. There was no discernible difference in sound. For the next 20 minutes I courted death by reckless driving as I fished out the official CD and plugged in the eMusic disc, then swapped them again, and again and again. I loved the music, so I finally bought the CD and gave it a spin in the car stereo as I drove home. Could the bass have been richer? Was there some mid-range layering I was missing? When I burned it to CD and played it back, I thought there was some sort of "space" missing in the overall sound. I'd downloaded Beneath This Gruff Exterior by John Hiatt & The Goners. True, I once lamented the "thin" sound of the mp3. And the sound quality of their mp3s is surprisingly fine. $10 a month gets you 30 downloads with no copy-protection or any other computer-fouling nonsense. I'll bang the drum for eMusic, one more time. But I make it a point to avoid file-sharing, choosing instead to pay for my music in the hope that the musicians will get a little coin for their product. I also regard iTunes copy-protection as invasive and malign. I agree with the article's premise that suing Napster was a fatal tactical error. They may have won in court and by some miracle retained their fanbase, but they loaded ( pun intended) the torpedo which sank the industry. Ulrich and crew were clearly displeased with the way this cut into their still-considerable profit margin. Then Napster came along and performed this function with a vengeance. There was a day when Metallica's Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield not only endorsed the practise, but did it themselves. Non-metal-heads might require a little context: the metal scene of the 80s and 90s grew in large part from kids joining pen-pal lists and mailing each other mixed tapes of their favourite bands. Here's the notorious Napster Bad video (language warning). I'd love to put the blame solely at the feet of record companies, but let's not forget that Metallica deserves some credit, too. Then Napster shut down, and all those 30 or 40 million people went to other. It was as if everybody was listening to the same radio station. "The record business had an unbelievable opportunity there. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster - that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," says Jeff Kwatinetz, CEO of management company the Firm. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. While there are factors outside of the labels' control - from the rise of the Internet to the popularity of video games and DVDs - many in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. ![]() According to this Rolling Stone article: "The record companies have created this situation themselves," says Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment Group, which operates Virgin Megastores. This is the record industry's worst year of sales to date. I recently asked her what she thought of the industry. It's been a couple of years since that contract was signed, and odds are the Big Label didn't quite manage to make my friend a spoken name in your household. New York's theory behind this episode was simply that it had been so very many years since McCartney had purchased anything with cash that he simply had no clue what a bottle of Jack Dans actually cost.ĪNYWAY. The gopher looked helplessly at the producer, who gently pulled the gopher aside and discretely told him to use the company credit card. "The largest bottle of Jack Daniels," he emphasized. McCartney opened his wallet and fished out. Things mustn't have been going as smoothly as he wanted, because he abruptly announced, "I think what this session requires is a large bottle of Jack Daniels." He signalled for the gopher, who trotted over. This was in the 80s, and Sir Paul was in NYC laying down some music for his yearly album. I caught a few of them second-hand, the most amusing of which involved Paul McCartney. He'd been in the scene since the 60s and had a million stories. A few weeks later a big shot from New York graced our village with his presence. They offered her a whack of money upfront, plus a contract she could drive a truck through (her lawyer confirmed this). A couple of years ago, a singer-songwriter friend of mine attracted the attention of one of the Big Labels.
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