Five Years On, Crackdown On File Sharing Still Provokes Questions

“Despite the crackdown, billions of copies of copyrighted songs are now changing hands each year on file sharing services. All the while, some of the most fundamental legal questions surrounding the legality of file sharing have gone unanswered. Even the future of the RIAA’s only jury trial victory — against Minnesota mother Jammie Thomas — is in doubt. Some are wondering if the campaign has shaped up as an utter failure.”

Researcher: Women Are Turned On By Fancy Cars

The researcher “subjected 40 men and women to the sounds of a Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari, then measured the amount of testosterone in their saliva. He found everyone had higher levels of the stuff — a measure of their arousal — after hearing the revving exotics, but the amount the women had was off the charts. The econobox, however, left everyone colder than a January day in Nome.”

Album Sales Are Improving (A Bit)

“Right now, according to the numbers published at Billboard.biz, album sales are down about 10.8% year to date. Through early June, they were down 11.7%. Through a stretch in June and early July, album sales were down 9.8%, and through late July and August they are down 9.3%. Those numbers show continued format substitution and challenges for the album format. The year-over-year improvement in the latter half of the year is a recurring trend over the last few years.”

Vinyl Records? Really? I Mean, Really??

“Yes, we all know old-school plastic records have a certain charm. But so do old churches, horses, the monarchy, salt and shake crisps and pre-decimal coinage. That doesn’t mean we want the return of threepenny bits, droit du seigneur, witch burning and streets knee-deep in dung from the royal family’s horses, does it? The resurgence of vinyl is a symptom of the dread diseases of authenticity and nostalgia – the terrible co-joined twins of cultural decline.”

The Opera Company, The Tabloid, And The Ticket Promotion

Britain’s Sun tabloid offered tickets to Covent Garden to its readers. “On paper, the initiative appears to have worked. Covent Garden confirmed to me that all 2,226 seats for the first night of Don Giovanni, with Simon Keenlyside as the bare-chested Don and Marina Poplavskaya as vengeful Donna Anna, were sold to people who bought the Sun on July 30. Rumor has it that not all of them are regular Sun readers.”

Is The e-Book A Reader’s Game-Changer?

“With pre-orders of ‘several thousand’ units, according to Waterstone’s, the launch marks a real change for ebooks: the country’s largest bookseller is putting its money behind what it believes is the best device out there. Publishers have committed to it as well, digitising thousands of books in readiness for its launch. But we’re not at the ebook tipping point quite yet.”