Cynicism is the last refuge of the idealist

Here’s an interesting story Mick Hucknallis rerecording his entire back catalogue so that he can have control of it for licensing rather than Warner Records.

The new recordings of global hits such as Stars and A New Flame will be owned by Hucknall’s own label, simplyred.com.
“Warner has all of the rights to the original recordings, but they don’t seem to be doing an awful lot with them,” says the band’s manager, Ian Grenfell. “We think we can do more with those recordings than they can. We’ve got a dozen people and all they work on is Simply Red.”

Personally I can’t bear to hear his voice for a second but I appload his standing up to the bullyish record companies. He’s also created his own record label to sell his work bypassing the record companies entirely - talk about shape of things to come

What terrible news - Ronnie Barker hasdied. I’m quite shocked to find out that he was only 76, he seemed to have been around forever.

Warner raises decapitation strategy for Apple

It’s obviously the week for the arrogance of the record companies to show through - today’s batch of idiocy comes from Michael Nash, Warner’s digital strategy chief.

What if Jobs says 39 cents or 29 cents per download - what then? The industry can say, OK we’ll cut him of - very few people people buy music from digital downloads,” said Nash, who pointed out that most of the music on iPods is from their own collections.

Now there’s a good way to encourage people to buy in to digital downloads - threaten to stop them happening

And how about this little corker

“It’s going to be difficult to get the consumer to stop thinking about owning music, and think about paying for participation instead,” said one executive.

So actually these arrogant bastards really want to get us enslaved to paying them over and over again for their music - they need to go out of business, all of them