Hey, Whats Been Happening?

I've been keeping a pretty low profile over the last few months, apart from an occasional blog and the odd tweet it probably looks like i've completely disappeared. Put simply i've been busy, you may know that i've been working on a new EP, that in itself has taken longer than i'd hoped but its more or less ready now. The main bulk of my time lately has been taken up with college coursework.

In case you didn't know i've spent the last two years studying music production at Access To Music in Bristol (CMP level 3), and its finally close to finished. For the record i should be on for a distinction. :) The whole course has been truly great, my production skills have improved significantly as has my own source of inspiration and sense of direction, next year i'm going to be taking the ADP level 4 course at Access To Music BANM in London which should be interesting and hopefully equally rewarding. For what its worth though i would highly recommend the CMP course for anyone interesting in making tunes, its government funded which means it costs next to nothing to do which is even better. Visit the website here.

Anyway, the last few months have been pretty hectic with a serious amount of coursework being due, the EP i have been promising has tied in with one particular unit at college, although thats done and dusted i felt like i needed to take a break for a couple of weeks before revisiting it and fixing a few fundamental problems with a couple of the tracks, i've also taken this as an opportunity to improve upon my mastering.

Honestly, i'm really quite pleased with how this new material sounds, its miles ahead from the demo-quality stuff i knocked out on Prelude (i'll talk more about that some other time) and a lot more dancefloor orientated. The beats are heavier and there's no pianos this time. I'm looking forward to getting it out there. I won't be releasing it as a freebie this time though, i wanna get it signed and out to a wider audience, we'll see how that goes.

I have got a free track i'll upload over the next few days though, its a collaboration i did at college with Danny Unkut featuring Ruth Royall on vocals and a few other guest players, its a bit slower than everything else but i hope you like it.

Aside from that, i'm working on a new website. If you've visited the current one, you'll notice that it hasn't changed much over the last 6 months. The new website is wordpress based and will become my main blog (i'll continue using the MySpace blog but i'll probably ditch the blogspot one). Aside from that, i will attempt to finish the Virtual Reality blog series i started and semi-abandoned over the next few weeks. Finally, i've also got a little bootleg project that i'll be unleashing this summer which i hope everyone will like.

Anyway, now i've got a bit more time to chill you will probably hear a lot more from me. The sun's out and summer's here at last, no more complaining about the weather. Take it easy.

The Drug Laws do not Work

(a copy of my reply to the discussion at myspace.com/commentuk)


We all know the drug laws don't work. But the harsh reality is that illegal drugs are big business, the second most profitable industry after weapons. If drugs were legal they would be a lot cheaper, they cost as much as they do simply because they are illegal. Big business rules this world and there are powerful influential "organisations" that make a LOT of money from illegal drugs and i'm not talking about street dealers.

The big businesses running the drugs trade don't want them to be legalised because that would seriously cut their profits. Instead we have a ridiculous system in the UK, and the rest of the world that criminalizes innocent people but is never actually effective in wiping out drugs.

The first step should be to allow cultivation for personal consumption of cannabis in reasonable quantities. There is significant evidence that cannabis use can have positive medicinal use for a wide range of illnesses, both physical and mental. But of course, the big pharmaceutical companies don't want you growing your own medicines because that would ruin their profits.

Ultimately, all drugs should be legal. The current system does not work for the people. While drugs are illegal, drug related crime will continue to be a problem in society as heroin and crack addicts will still be driven to theft, violence and prostitution to fund their habits. All the while, recreational drug users, many of whom contribute much to society through work and art, are forced to continue buying drugs from street dealers and ultimately funding organised crime.

We all know the drug laws don't work, but those laws don't exist for our benefit.

Some More Thoughts on Piracy

Considering the recent verdict on the Pirate Bay trial, the subject of piracy is one of much debate currently. I'm taking a break from the Virtual Reality series to look more closely at piracy and how ridiculous this whole verdict is.

The first thing I think needs to be mentioned is that the “victory” for the music industry is not a victory for musicians, nor is it a victory for copyright protection as many of us perceive it. I seriously doubt that any artists will see a penny from this, even if the fine does get paid it will end up in the pockets of record labels and publishers, the businessmen who have been controlling the industry for too long. That's what the music industry is, a very big and until now hugely profitable business.

The whole case has been clouded in this idea of morality, that copyright needs to protected for the sake of the artists, piracy is theft and anyone who actively partakes in piracy is not only a criminal, but a hugely immoral person. No decent person wants to steal from their friends, or indeed anyone they respect, the industry has tried to convince us that we are stealing from the artists we respect and admire, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. As I demonstrated in the previous post here, piracy as a form of theft is very different to stealing a physical item from your mates.

I'm not saying that artists are not suffering as a result of file-sharing, they are. There is a lot of independent music on small labels (or even self-financed) that can be downloaded illegally. These aren't successful pop stars, or big corporate labels, these are skint people just like you or me, struggling to make a living out of something they love. But this verdict has done nothing for them, no-one has been defending their rights, or trying to seek compensation for their losses. Like I said, this is about the big corporate side of the music industry.

Artists have been getting shafted by record labels and the like for too long. You think when you go out and buy a CD you are supporting the musicians involved? The small percentage of royalties the artist is entitled to only goes toward paying off the debt that artist owes to the label who loaned them the money to record the album in the first place. That debt is re-coupable only from record sales, if no-one buys the album, the artist doesn't have to pay it back. Axl Rose's Chinese Democracy cost Geffen $13m to record, it will never sell enough to pay back that debt. But Axl has lost nothing whether you buy it or copy it. That money could have been spent on better things (although I actually do like the album), but nevertheless I have to admire Axl for turning the tables on his label like that.

Rarely do successful artists “own” their music, the label owns the recordings, the publisher owns the copyright of the songs. Artists are tied to contracts forcing them to compromise their own artistic integrity just to meet deadlines and help the big boys make money. If you ask me, its about time for the whole system to change. Radiohead and NIN have recently proved that giving away music can be good for both artist and fans. If and when this greedy capitalistic music industry does collapse I for one will shed no tears.

Its time for the artists to regain their power, advancements in technology have made it possible for high quality professional studios to be set up in bedrooms and garages, the internet has opened up many new methods for inexpensive distribution and promotion. Music is art, not business. The need for major record labels is not so great any more. Fat-Cats getting rich off the talents of others should start to worry. Nothing could liberate music and musicians more than the death of this industry.

So, was this really a victory? I don't think so. Its just Napster all over again. Nothing changes, people will continue to share information freely just like we always have done. Artists will have to think differently if they want to be successful, embrace the future and learn from the past.

Music fans should support the artists by going to more gigs, buying merchandise, donating money if they can. Request your favourite Radio Djs to play your favourite up n coming artists, not the same old manufactured rubbish. Try to pay for underground music on independent labels via their own websites when you can (digital shops often take a large cut). But most importantly love the music you download, whether you have paid for it or not. Ultimately, any genuine artist does this because they enjoy it and they want other people to enjoy it too.

Pirate Bay may be the latest scapegoat for an industry that values its shareholders pockets over its artists livelihoods, but this industry's days are numbered. Don't fall victim to these capitalist lies and dubious claims of morality. The Pirate Bay are not the villains here, record labels were ripping off artists and stealing music long before file-sharing came about, and they'll continue to if we let them.

Virtual Reality - Pt 2: Digital Thieves

Something of a late follow-on post here, due in no small part to the various real world pressures that have a great deal of control over my life.

We previously looked at some examples of the ways in which our lives have become "virtual", how much of our consumer needs are now found in digital form, as opposed to the physical existence of the past. This has a huge impact on how we value these things. Our economy is essentially based upon scarcity, we can apply a value or worth to physical items as there is always a finite amount of them. However, as the old saying goes: time is money, as workers living in a monetary system we necessarily have to apply a value to time.

Digital goods are effectively nothing more than information. Music, films, software, all of these things we consume are ultimately binary code. Information has been exchanged freely for as long as mankind has been able to. Whether that be early man using basic forms of communication to share hunting/gathering info with his kind or a group of friends discussing their various thoughts and ideas on any subject they care to talk about. Of course, we also pay for information in the form of books (physical items) or education (time-based), but no-one can deny us our right to share the information in our heads (non-physical) with anyone we see fit.

This leads us into the subject of piracy. If your MP3 collection is ultimately non-physical information then surely it is your right to share it as you see fit. On the other hand a great deal of time and money went into the recording of those MP3s, which surely should be reimbursed. And this is where the dilemma lies. Its a simple fact that most people do not see piracy as theft. But theft is not so black and white, it has many shades. No-one can deny that there is a massive difference between stealing from a big corporate shop and stealing from your friends, likewise robbing a bank is not the same thing as robbing a granny. There are many different types of theft, each with their own moral and legal status.

Piracy is a form of theft, albeit very different to the others. To put it into perspective, if i go round your house and take your new U2 CD, then the result is i will have it and you won't, even though you payed for it. On the other hand if i go round your house and copy your U2 CD, then you have lost nothing. Clearly these 2 situations are different. However, while you may own that U2 CD that you payed for, you do not own the music within it, nor do you own the right to copy it (that of course belongs to the copyright holder). Essentially all you do own is the otherwise worthless piece of plastic that the music is stored on.

Now if we remove that mostly insignificant physical element of the album, we are left with just the information. As consumers, when we "purchase" and download an MP3 we don't own anything. Even the artists rarely own their music, publishers own the copyright and record labels own the recording. Believe it or not artists make very little from the actual sales of their albums, regardless of format. Music piracy harms the music industry more than it harms the musicians, and as we have seen there is a huge difference between stealing from a corporation than stealing from a person. For unsigned artists, or those signed to independent labels, it can be a bit different, certainly as far as the morality is concerned.

By no means am i trying to advocate piracy, as a musician myself i would obviously prefer people to pay for my music which i have spent a lot of time making (my only release to date is available as free download but thats not to say future releases will be). I am certain that without the needs of the physical world and the associated costs most musicians would be happy to give their music away, but unfortunately our society is not like that. It costs money to feed ourselves, it costs money to keep a roof over our heads and musicians should be paid for their work.

Nevertheless, piracy exists. It is not a new thing, but the semi-virtual nature of our world has made file-sharing so easy and huge that piracy is no longer contained to friends taping each others music. There is in principle no difference between a legal MP3 from iTunes and an illegally-sourced MP3 from PirateBay, infact often the DRM-free tunes from the latter make for a better "product" from the consumers perspective (i know Apple have dropped DRM, but that doesn't help the millions who have paid for tunes they can't even make copies of for themselves).

Has piracy devalued music? No. Has the digital/virtual nature of our media consumption devalued music as a product? Arguably, yes. These are just my opinions, but they are based on the way i see the world around me. Piracy is a big concern for the music industry, an industry that has been ripping off artists and music fans for too long. Piracy is an issue for the artists stuck within an industry that is rapidly collapsing. The "illegal" distribution of music through file-sharing is nevertheless an example of people taking back their rights to share information freely.

The monetary system has been around for a long time, it was conceived to manage the exchange of physical goods and services. Digital goods and virtual products cannot be valued in the same way. There is potentially an infinite availability of any MP3 or digital file, while the value of money is based upon its finite quantity. Clearly this leads to an imbalance. For the sake of this argument i have focused on music, quite simply because it is the industry that is being affected the most by this new digital age. You can find pretty much anything you want online for free somewhere, but this is of course limited to virtual goods or digital information.

In part 3, i want to look further at how the principles of the monetary system cannot be applied in the digital world. For now though, i would like to hope that the collapse of the music industry is the start of something newer and better, the opportunities for artists and musicians to empower themselves have never been greater. Whatever the future holds, people will still want to listen to music and musicians will still want to create it. Until now, huge corporations have controlled music and its consumption, but digital downloading has changed everything. The future may be unclear but the potential is great.

Virtual Reality - Pt 1: The Digital Age

It seems that our lives are becoming increasingly more virtual. Not in the all-encompassing way of films like The Matrix or Lawnmower Man (although its no great stretch of the imagination to envisage a world like that in the future), rather a virtual reality that we have a detachment from that keeps us in the real world. Digital technology has replaced the need for physical items in many aspects of our lives, most prominently entertainment. For many of us our computer has become central, integral even, to our daily business. As consumers, many of our favourite "possessions" exist on our hard drives, likewise a great proportion of our social lives are spent online.

If we look at music, the days of having physical collections of CDs or records taking pride of place in their rack, shelf or strewn about the place possibly not in their correct sleeves are gone, instead replaced by some sort of organised system found in the My Documents folder on your computer. The only physical space required for an extensive music collection is the hard drive itself, which we measure in terms of Gigabytes rather than metres (or feet). The way we acquire music has changed similarly, virtual stores like iTunes or Beatport have replace the traditional record shop providing convenience (instant downloads, pick the tunes you want, no disappointment of finding out the record you want is out of stock) at the cost of the record shop experience (the excitement of looking through the artwork on the way home, the personal touch of talking to the staff and receiving recommendations).

For movie lovers, downloading the latest Hollywood titles, and watching them on your PC connected to a TV or decent monitor, is often better than renting movies from the likes of Blockbuster or LoveFilm, only to find that when its finally in stock the disc is scratched and ends up skipping at the best bit. Again, the convenience of instant downloads comes at the cost of the personal touch of dealing with the film-lovers working at your local rental store. Although the sheer size of movie downloads can also take the "instant" out of the download process.

Keeping up to date with the latest news is even easier now with the multitude of websites that provide breaking stories almost immediately. The need to sit down and flick through pages of crap and adverts in newspapers that tell you what happened yesterday is effectively gone.

MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and the millions of forums and other social websites provide ways of communicating with each other that were practically impossible only a few years ago. We can talk with people all over the world at any time with costs and timezones practically irrelevant.

These are just a few examples of the sort of virtual reality that exists in our lives. Of course, we still exist in physical reality, we still need physical goods, we all need to eat, we all need a roof over our head, our computers, TVs and stereos need manufacturing and the electricity required to power them has to come from somewhere. Watching a film at home is not as good as going to the cinema, listening to music at home is a completely different experience to going to a concert or club event, reading a newspaper on the train to work is often more practical and convenient than surfing the net on a laptop. And of course, social networking sites are no substitute for real socialising and spending time in the company of your friends and loved ones.

Not everyone in the world has access to the technology that we do, while the internet is not exclusively for the rich, it is nevertheless a luxury only available to those who can afford it. For much of the world, this kind of virtual reality is the stuff of fantasy.

The subject of piracy is the root of many debates, with a great deal of differing opinions. The virtual world, not being bound by scarcity in the same way that physical items are, leads many to change the way in which they value the virtual items they "own" (in many cases we own nothing now, instead we merely purchase a license to use). In the virtual world money is not necessary, or at least not in the way it is now. Infact it is only the needs of the physical world that require any sort of financial costs to be applied to digital products. While virtual money exists, and has the same value as its paper companion, the vast amount of legitimate free music, information and software shows that the monetary system as we know it is rapidly becoming outdated.

These last points i will expand on and investigate further in my next post. For now though, i think we can see that while our relationship with the virtual world is more detached than that of the "virtual reality" concept, it is certainly true that the need for physical items has largely been removed in many aspects of our lives, instead replaced by a digital universe (webiverse even) through which we can not only satisfy many of our needs but also achieve so much more than we ever could in the real world alone.

Decriminalise Cannabis Petition UK

I've tended to avoid the subject of drugs and drug laws in this blog to date, for what its worth its a topic i would prefer to explore in greater detail rather than simple speculation and opinions.

Nevertheless, anyone with any intelligence can see that the drug laws are not effective. Not only do they fail to prevent the real crimes involved with drugs (infact most of these crimes are a result of the drug laws), they also fail to prevent the serious problems that arise from the use of hard drugs (crack and heroin). Drug laws criminalise a substantial proportion of the world's population, people who are otherwise decent law-abiding citizens.

While i personally believe that the only way we can move forward in this respect is the complete decriminalisation of all drugs, i understand that its a slow process and would require the co-operation of all the world's leading governments. However, the British government took a step in the right direction a couple of years ago by downgrading cannabis to a class C, unfortunately that decision has recently been reversed, due in part to the great media propaganda machine.

Full cannabis decriminalisation should be the first step towards a newer better system regarding drugs. Again, this is not something that can be achieved overnight. Aside from the fact that cannabis is a relatively harmless drug (unlike alcohol and tobacco), it is proven to have a great number of positive uses, especially medical. A great number of people with health issues can benefit from using cannabis, and research is constantly showing more ways in which this natural, easily cultivated plant can be advantageous to sufferers of many illnesses.

Unfortunately the current laws prohibit the use of this drug in these ways, forcing sufferers to criminalise themselves and turn to the so-called black market to relieve their suffering. At the very least laws should be changed to allow for people to grow their own plants for personal use without fear of prosecution. This would not only be an acceptance of the fact that a large number of people do (and will) use the drug regardless of its legal status, but remove the need for otherwise innocent people to have to purchase the drug from street dealers, and in doing so continue to support a criminal industry.

Surely this would be a better way to combat the crime associated with drug use than the current system of full-blown criminalisation. As we all know, the drug laws do not work.

The reason i have brought this topic up is because it has come to my attention that a petition within the UK has been launched to "petition the Prime Minister to Decriminalise cannabis cultivation for personal use only (not for profit)."

The petition can be found here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Growing-Cannabis/. Please sign it and tell as many people as you can, email your friends, post it in your own blog, make a video on YouTube, whatever you can. If enough people can show their support for what is a reasonable proposition, maybe our government might just take notice.

This is the Last Time I Talk About Snow

I'm going to keep this post short as i have said pretty much everything i wanted to in previous posts. There's still some snow but overall it seems to be clearing up now, to the disappointment of some and relief of others. However, it appears that a large number of employers are refusing to pay their staff for the days they were unable to attend last week. This is disgraceful, not only is it unfair (it might be illegal although i can only speculate), but in my opinion hugely irresponsible. Considering we are going through a serious recession here, any companies punishing their employees for a genuine inability to attend work are showing a complete disregard for the safety and well-being of their workforce, instead forcing their employees to risk their lives (and indeed the lives of others) by traveling in genuinely hazardous conditions just so that they can earn enough money to continue paying their bills. The government run Transport For London is guilty of this aswell as many other companies, both large and small. Again this is both greedy and irresponsible.

The BBC seems to have lightened up a bit on their reporting of this snow crisis a little though, perhaps due to the situation down in Australia. Aside from the few fatalities in Britain (and by no means do i wish to devalue them), the extremely hot weather down under has been far more serious than our freak snowstorm. Kinda puts it all into perspective, the value of the hundreds of lives lost in bush-fires is greater than the cost of the weather to our economy.

Nevertheless, i have dedicated a fair bit of time to this subject over the last week. As i have said previously, weather controls our lives in ways that governments, banks and religions can only dream of, this has been an example of that. It has not been my intention to criticize those so trapped within the work system as to be effectively forced into trying to continue with their daily business, regardless of the dangers. Instead i hope to have put forward an alternative viewpoint to that which has been propagated by the mainstream media, specifically the BBC. Hopefully, these last few posts, like the rest of this blog, has provided some food for thought if nothing else.

And for those that genuinely hate the snow, at least now you can look forward to plenty of rain!