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Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Ginger live

I managed to catch my old favourite Ginger (of The Wildhearts fame) at a local venue this week and as usual, a good nights entertainment was provided. As I've said many times, I rate Ginger as the most underrated rock songwriter ever!

The night kicked off with The God Damn Whores which featured (oddly) all 4 members of Gingers band, including the man himself on bass while Jon Poole took up guitar and vocal duties, Jase Edwards (formely of Wolfsbane) was on lead guitars. Their set was good enough to convince me to part with £10 for the CD which sadly has an appalling sound mix (6/10 for the album).

RoboChrist may be the strangest band I've ever seen live, if it even was live. Think industrial metal with more than usual samples and a nutter running around stage playing a guitar I'm not convinved was switched on, occassionaly singing into a microphone I'm not convinced was swithed on. I'm yet to be convinced this was a 'live' performance!

Ginger himself was on top form, interacting with the crowd and piling through some top anthems from his back catalogue like So Into You, Supersonic Shake, Yeah Yeah Yeah, Only A Problem and 29 X The Pain. There were a good few new songs from his new solo album Yoni (out this week) which sounded good enough to justify tracking it down later this week.

If you get the chance, I'd recommend trying to catch the tour (8/10)

Monday, January 15, 2007

Digital Rights Vs User Rights

Since DRM (Digital Rights Management) is an issue to everyone that loves music and movies, I thought the article I came across on the tech website Ars Technica would be relevant to everyone.

I'm sure anyone that is reading this has come across DRM in one form or another, this could be anything from only being able to put your iTunes Store music onto a handful of devices, not being able to copy a DVD to your portable media player or even just reading the news about the Sony Rootkit scandal.

DRM is about controlling how movies and music can be used, what devices they can play on, how often they can be played, etc. As an example, it is DRM that prevents music purchased from Apples iTunes Store from being played on any MP3 player except an iPod. It does have it's uses, however the primary argument is that it is to fight piracy, however every time something new comes along in the DRM world, crackers usually have it beaten in a very short space of time rendering it next to useless. So who does DRM actually affect? It doesn't affect people who want copied movies and music, they can find it DRM-less without much trouble. It affects the people that actually pay for their music and movies - is it even possible to buy a DVD these days without having to sit through 4 minutes of anti-piracy 'awareness' messages each time you want to watch it? You can be sure that those with the pirate copy do not have to sit through that, only those that have actually bought the thing have to be treated like criminals!

I would recommend that anyone who likes there movies and music have a read at the following article, it is important that people know about these things before they have the chance to become too overpowering and controlling.

Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070115-8616.html

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