Posts Tagged ‘Music’

Unfortunately, Silverchair Is Unkillable

Saturday, September 8th, 2007

Do you remember the band Silverchair? They made a slash here in the States in 1997 with some crap titled “Abuse Me” (with the lyrics, “Come on abuse me more I like it.”). Now, I was never a fan, because there was this other band that sounded just like them and had better music… what were they called… oh, yeah, Nirvana… and the MTV crowd at that point was basically done with grunge rock and ready to move on to crap boy bands. Really, we were all better off.

It turns out, however, that Silverchair wasn’t going to just go away. In 2000 they made a play for the Korn/P.O.D. hard rock crowd with the song “Anthem For the Year 2000″ (with lyrics like, “We are the youth, we’ll take your fascism away.” Really? Fascism? Didn’t Roosevelt and Churchill get rid of it already? No? Oh, OK, well thanks then.). Thankfully, no one gave a shit and they disappeared again.

But now they’re back, only this time cloaked in a veneer of Coldplay. Argh! Donald Rumsfeld gave up quicker than these guys. And honestly, I think Rummy sucked less than Silverchair.

For comparison, here’s a picture of Silverchair circa 1996:

silverchair1996.jpg

And here’s them now:

2007.jpg

The only plausible explanation is that Silverchair is a zombie band, roaming the Earth, trying to devour our brains (with their shitty music). That’s the only way I can comprehend why Silverchair is still making music and The Toadies isn’t.

PS: I will give them this: their stupid new song is actually kinda catchy. Dammit!

PPS: What ever happened to Spacehog?

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Universal Music’s Brilliant Plan to Bring Down iTunes Store

Friday, August 10th, 2007

Word on the street is that Universal Music is going to allow their songs to be downloaded as DRM-free, but only with non-iTunes music stores. So the tremendous1 number of consumers purchasing digital music from Wal-Mart, Google, Amazon, and RealNetworks will get interoperable music, and iTunes Store costumers will keep getting the same old only-works-on-iPods-and-now-iPhone digital tracks.

John Gruber asks,

Um, Universal won’t sell DRM-free music through iTunes because they don’t like Apple’s DRM? WTF? Am I even supposed to pretend this makes sense?

The only thing that doesn’t make sense is that RealNetworks is still in business. Seriously, it’s the Alberto Gonzales of technology companies; no matter how much better off the entire world would be without it we can’t seem to get rid of it, in spite of it’s own incompetence.

But the Universal Music thing? That makes perfect sense. I doubt anyone at Universal Music actually cares about who has what DRM or how that DRM works. What they care about is that Apple has a veritable monopoly on digital music distribution. By providing non-DRM tracks — a “better” product — to everyone but iTunes Universal Music is undoubtedly hoping to encourage sales at those other stores, diminishing Apple’s control of the market.

Universal Music cannot lose in this situation. Either sales go up at the other stores (and Apple’s power goes down) or there’s no change (which I predict) and they’ve only lost a miniscule number of tracks to the DRM-less wilderness. In a “perfect” world — the one Slashdotters think they live in — consumers will flock to these other stores to get DRM-free music, and then the market will be evenly distributed amongst five or six different digital music distributors. With market share nicely divided, Universal Music will be able to demand whatever they want of them with little to no fear of pushback. The control would be in their hands again, rather than in Apple’s.

This is absolutely brilliant. Well played, Universal Music. It will fail, of course, because in the field of digital music not-Apple sucks, but hey, it’s worth a shot.

  1. Sarcasm.↩

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