It’s the conventional wisdom amongst some Reg readers that “the evil record labels” are dying, and deservedly so. But such a simplified view of the world overlooks the contribution of the independent sector – which operates very differently to the Big Four.

Independents have a different business model, and have embraced digital networks as an opportunity, not a threat.

In the past few years the indies have organised, and successfully fought mega-mergers in the European Courts; they licensed the original Napster, and shunned DRM en masse. More recently, the indies have pioneered a one-stop stop for global digital licensing, Merlin, something beyond the organisational abilities of the RIAA.

So after hearing from IFPI chairman John Kennedy here this week, you’d expect a very different view of the music business from Martin Mills, chairman of British indie the Beggars Group – and you’d be right.

[full interview at The Register...]

In an interview from the music business annual Midem, we speak to John Kennedy, chairman and CEO of the IPFI, the international trade group representing record labels. Here he talks about the new ISP strategy, and the future of the big label.

[Full interview at The Register here]

Move over Thom Yorke – there’s another candidate for Britain’s most miserable and mean-spirited millionaire. This week, fantasy book author Philip Pullman will join Radiohead’s ginger whinger in calling for wartime austerity measures and top-down social control.

Demanding strict state-controlled energy rationing, Pullman says in a new book:

“This is a crisis as big as war and you couldn’t trade your ration book in the wartime. You were allowed three ounces of butter a week, or whatever, and that was it. And this is what it should be like with carbon. None of this carbon trading. We should have a fixed limit and if you use it all up in October, then tough, you shiver for the rest of the year.”

Sounds fun. But then Pullman reveals why he’s wearing a rose-tinted spyglass:

“My childhood was formed during the austerity years after the war. So I still feel influenced by that. Curious, isn’t it, how we were much healthier as a nation after the war when the rationing was on?”

Ah, yes. Those glory days when tuberculosis and syphilis were rampant, penicillin was rare, very few males over the age of 30 still had their own teeth, and life expectancy was ten years shorter than it is today!
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Nick Carr’s weblog is one of the rarest things on the web: intelligent technology criticism that you’d actually want to read for pleasure. He’s an elegant writer with a waspish wit, and I’ve a special reason for seeing him prosper.

Back in 2002 I was living in San Francisco, a city that was in the depths of recession, when I first noticed the stirrings of the next wave of hype. Hope springs eternal, they say, and the Bay Area’s unemployed web monkeys, technology prophets, and a gaggle of marketing and marketing consultants – who had all been having a jolly good time until quite recently – began to figure out how to construct the next bandwagon.

The result is another web mania gripping the media. This one isn’t quite like it’s predecessor, however.

For a start, it’s much more limited in scope. It’s rhetorical, rather than economic. While the original dot.com bubble will always be remembered one of the biggest losses of wealth in human history, prompting ordinary investors to plunge their life savings into worthless stocks, the new web hype has been a much more modest affair. This time the asset bubble is property, not technology, and most internet users have simply carried on as before, happy to swap dial-up for broadband in the quest for idle chatter, free music and porn.

The “Web 2.0″ affliction of has so far only infected the media and political classes, with isolated outbreaks in marketing and the social sciences. (Naturally, you’d expect something created by ad consultants to hit ad consultants hard, but I didn’t expect the London media to fall for it the hardest.) But where it strikes, it seems to take over the unfortunate victim’s entire brain; and that’s still a lot of people with public policy influence. The zombie symptoms of the virus we all know today: gibbering about “new democracy”, “wise crowds”, and the rational faculties of a three year-old.

For three years I found myself the only journalist chronicling such phenomena as the new democracy that wasn’t, or the paradigm-shifting business revolution that couldn’t make money, or the global intelligence that was easily outwitted by trinket salesmen, or the encyclopedia that destroyed Universities. This was the Dawn of a New Punditocracy.

I fortunately had lots of help from readers, who’ve coined many of the pithiest descriptions of the web bubble. Lots and lots of help. The Reg readership includes a lot of people who implement technology, and then have to keep the systems running – and the distaste is quite visceral. (Most of you have rumbled quite early on that this web hype was presentation layer people trying solve system level problems, all the while hiding behind a lot of New Age marketing guff).

Pointing this out made me hugely unpopular with a small number of people (who’d figured out that these tools and processes could so easily game the media, promote their agenda) who naturally resented the lid being lifted. But this all-sweeping utopianism needed many more hands to pry apart. For the past two years, Nick Carr’s RoughType blog has done that job with style to spare.

[read the full review at The Register here...]

Last week, we reported the possibility that the lobby group that represents America’s sound recording owners (RIAA) might merge with the global sound recording owners lobby group (IFPI). This raised the awful possibility that the Recording Industry Ass. of America would disappear – making all those “Boycott the RIAA”-type domains useless. Zut alors!

The new organisation obviously needs the full Strategy Boutique treatment. But to begin with, what would it be called? The “Recording Industry Ass. of America” is hard act to follow.

So having lit the joss-sticks, validated our copy-protected whalesong CD against the DRM authentication server, and pressed the “Please Play Please Please” button, we threw the task over to readers.

Sadly, we were deluged by a great deal of vulgarity that can’t be printed; the suggestion – “DSSS”, or “Different Shit, Same Stink” from Colin Jackson being fairly representative. Too easy. No, the trick is to come up with an entirely plausible name for a trade association.

Time to open a window and light a few more joss sticks.

[full competition results at The Register]

The global financial crisis has encroached on that escapist Garden of the Id, Second Life.

Linden Labs is to ban virtual banks from the virtual playground, the operator said in a statement yesterday. The problem is that the virtual money-lenders operate rather too much like their real world counterparts. wrote Ken D., yesterday

“Since the collapse of Ginko Financial in August 2007, Linden Lab has received complaints about several in-world ‘banks’ defaulting on their promises. These banks often promise unusually high rates of L$ return, reaching 20, 40, or even 60 percent annualized…

“Linden Lab isn’t, and can’t start acting as, a banking regulator”

Linden Labs’ CEO Philip Rosedale once compared Ginko Financial (surely a name you can trust) to the Nobel Prize-winning microcredit bank Grameen.

Ginko Financial was one of around 30 virtual finance houses operating in Sadville. Ginko offered a 44 per cent yield rate – but even this improbable promise didn’t deter Sad investors – until a run on the bank. Investors lost around $700,000 in real dollars in the crash.

Linden Labs has requested that the virtual banks settle up with investors by January 22, honoring withdrawals. That should be interesting.

Lenders with a real-world license may continue to practice their usurious trade in Sadville.

The collapse of virtual banks in Second Life has led participants to label them as Ponzi schemes. But then the entire operation is a Ponzi scheme, as Shaun Rolph pointed out here a year ago, drawing attention to a little-noticed disclaimer from the operator:

“Linden Dollars are not money, they are neither funds nor credit for funds. Linden Dollars represent a limited license right to use a feature of the simulated environment. Linden Lab does not offer any right of redemption for any sum of money, or any other guarantee of monetary value, for Linden Dollars.”

Domestic “microwind” turbines, recently championed as “power from the people” by opposition leader David Cameron, are about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

A study of domestic turbines was published by renewable energy consultants Encraft in December. According to the study, only one of the 15 household wind turbines generated enough to power a 75W light bulb. The average daily output was 393.3 Watt hours: an average of 17W.

In all, only three of the turbines generated over 400 Watt hours of electricity, with one generating 1,790 Watt hours.

Four of the turbines didn’t even make it into three figures. By way of comparison, a washing machine consumes 4kW (4,000W), and a fridge-freezer 1.9kW. [PDF,1MB]

The average turbine also operates at only 1.84 per cent of capacity.

The carbon-obsessed BBC has suggested that a domestic turbine may contribute about “a fifth” of a household’s electricity needs – but the reality is this is only true if the household’s only electricity need is one fifth of a single crack-den-dim light bulb.

Encraft stresses it’s early days, which is true – the first 13 sites only went live last January, with 13 more following in October.

However, it appears that the measured windspeed for many sites fell below the predicted figure. Turbulence in built-up areas makes for poor windflow. Or as SK Watson, of the Centre for Renewable Energy System Technology at Loughborough University, observes:

“Those areas with higher capacity factor are where urban areas tend not to be!”

Worse, the measured energy output from the domestic turbines was far below the “theoretical” energy predicted.

Er, quite.

The trial has suffered other problems. One turbine was stolen, another damaged, and a further one was beseiged by pro-bat protestors. Several needed their inverters replacing.

“We have had some reality checks,” Encraft admits.

However, Encraft MD Matthew Rhodes, quoted in The Guardian found one “benefit” from the white elephants. Apparently, seven out of ten people who see a turbine say it reminds them to save energy.

The logic is, apparently, that when one sees one of these monuments to self-righteousness, one dashes back to turn the lights off.

But surely there must be cheaper ways of inducing feelings of guilt and low self-worth in the general population – such as availing oneself of the latest Radiohead album, perhaps?

Interbreeding between humans and aliens is a recurrent theme of science fiction – and late night talk radio. But could an example we’ve unearthed from near San Francisco, California, prove to be the first living example?

Scientists have been able to identify human DNA for over 40 years. And here at The Register, we have access to our own stock of Martian DNA – courtesy, of course, of cult commentator and philosopher amanfromMars.

The startling discovery that DNA may have leaped across planetary boundaries comes courtesy of literary agent John Brockman.

Brockman runs an online groupthink “salon”, called Edge.org, where his indentured science authors and a select band of ideologically-correct journalists are invited to congratulate each other on their insight. (Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Edge before – it’s only ever mentioned by Blokes who are already in it, or Blokes who would sell their mothers to get in.)

But it’s here, at Edge, that Brockman may have unearthed the greatest scoop of his lifetime; for here at least, one Martian-human hybrid walks amongst us.

New Year’s Day found a curious declaration credited to one “Kevin Kelly” – editor in chief of WiReD magazine.

“The success of the Wikipedia (sic) keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better,” he writes.

Of course, that’s an easy mistake to make… if you’ve just arrived from another planet. Here’s a more accurate measure of success, from earth-bound observers SomethingAwful.

Yet the alien visitor must be impressed by the high ethical standards exhibited by the project, its fair-mindedness, tolerance and generosity, and of course, its uniquely bottom-up democratic nature, for he is mightily impressed. So much so, that he sees in it a new way of organising society:

“The reality of a working Wikipedia has made a type of communitarian socialism not only thinkable, but desirable… I hate to say it but there is a new type of communism or socialism loose in the world.”

Alarm bells really ought to be clanging by this point. The Martian-Martian hybrid is using terms he has apparently heard, but doesn’t really understand – and can’t relate to the world around him.

The next statement can be construed as a promise that the hybrid DNA is here to stay:

“It may take several decades for this shifting world perspective to show its full colours …

Finally, here’s the clincher:

“I am convinced that the full impact of the Wikipedia is still subterranean, and that its mind-changing power is working subconsciously on the global millennial generation, providing them with an existence proof of a beneficial hive mind, and an appreciation for believing in the impossible.”

Pure Martian.

Europe’s most powerful quango, the European Commission, says it wants to accelerate a “single market” for online music, film, and games – and is threatening legislation to bring it about. Although the EU’s Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding sees the market for digital entertainment quadrupling (to €8.3bn by 2010), she feels the bureaucrats need to get involved anyway.

In a statement issued yesterday, the EC identified four areas for action – with the most ominous being a good behaviour pledge for online service providers.
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