Posts by Yeah Right

Luddite and paranoid - why the big record labels failed at digital

They had their chance in 1997 and blew it - or snorted it.

In 1997 I put a complete digital download and ordering system with copyright protection to the record companies. The consumer would get a cheaper product. The record companies were offered more money than they were getting and the artists were to be paid more and be paid the instant their product was paid for by the purchaser.. Every CD had full-screen hi-fi videos and fan stuff.along with weblinks back to the band's site and digital downloads of tracks or custom CD's delivered to your door in 24 hours.

Dreamworks jumped in 1st with a Henry Rollins album and were very keen.

Universal was very enthusiastic.

BMG wanted me to do it just for them and no-one else.

Sony thought they could do it themselves.

I produced product for all of them - most of them just did it to try to reverse engineer what I'd done - even Intel couldn't get usable video bigger that a matchbox off a CD on a 486 back then.

In the end I realised it just wouldn't work unless Sony came on board.

They didn't.

Tony M it is all your fault. Sony was the worst.

I told them they would lose billions. They did and still are.

In the end I truly believe it was because the record companies didn't want the artists actually getting their royalties - there was a lot of funny stuff going on back then - like costs being inflated by everyone in the chain so that your album art cost $x and an ounce of cocaine for the record co executive.

The rest is history...

If the record companies want a second chance at the pie I've got something even better up my sleeve - for everyone - consumers, artists and the record labels.

Don't miss the bus on this one - it'll knock all the pirates, Apples, Telco's and everyone else with their snout in the trough for a six.

[e-mail]

UK gov issued 250k snoop licences in nine months

We sell ultra-secure comms

As a provider of unbeatable secure mobile communications I'm tempted to give our stuff away for free, maybe not, I like all that money, although at this rate I'll never be able to spend it all. The UK government is really helping sales! {almost as much as the US}

It doesn't seem fair that it's only the poor people who have to worry about being bugged. They can try and bug my phone any time they like. In fact I invite them to try [they'll want to buy it too] - after all remember the standard of intelligence available to the government on the crappy salaries they pay guarantees that only the easy targets are at risk - the poor people.eg Iraqi's and people living in council flats.

With so many people using mobiles they have little chance of processing all that info anyway and if you think their computers can do it just remember what fun you had last time you used a speech recognition system - it's a bit like trying to interpret an Indian call centre operator. To stay out of 'earshot' just don't give the council or the government your phone number.