A lament for physical media: Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (CD edition)

The last couple of weeks have been testing times. Really, they have. As a long time fan of Daft Punk (I saw them in '97 at the Mayfair in Newcastle) it's been tricky to avoid their carefully planned promotional strategy for the release of Random Access Memories. There's been the constant radio airplay of 'Get Lucky', there's been the teaser tracks, the ad spots, the full album stream via iTunes, etc. Let's just say the hype has been building for a while (check out Billboard's timeline here).

This has made it difficult to resist the allure of the various pirate offerings. There was the video that was compiled by fans using clips from the various Coachella adverts and Saturday Night Live spots. Then there were the various iTunes live stream audio captures of differing quality appearing all over the web. The official release of Get Lucky was prompted by an illegal leak captured from a Dutch radio station, forcing the hand of Columbia into releasing the single early.

Nevertheless, I purchased the single through iTunes and not long after I pre-ordered and paid for the iTunes LP (Mastered for iTunes) version for the sum of £8.99. I had succumbed to the hype, and on release day the album was pushed to my iPhone, my iMac and my Macbook so that I could enjoy the official release whereever I went.

However, I do have to admit to having downloaded the album in advance of this official release. I've tried all sort of versions: the supposed CD rip (Columbia / 88883716862 / CD), the WEB rip (Columbia / USQX913001 / WEB), the vinyl rip (Columbia / USQX913001 / Vinyl), and the special mastered version (Qobuz 24-bit / 88.2 kHz Édition Studio Masters / WEB). However, I much prefer the sound quality of the iTunes version. It's just a shame that if I wanted to buy the Japanese bonus track 'Horizon' I'd have to pay for an expensive imported CD (£22 registered airmail) or resort to piracy (Sony Music Japan / SICP 3817 / Japanese Edition + Bonus Track / CD).

It's an ethical nightmare

I'm a fan. I'm a fan who also loves the album - I will gladly hand over my money for Daft Punk product. However, I'm not keen on the excessive import/postage costs for 1 track alone. I want to legally purchase this music but it seems ridiculous that in the era of digital networks and near zero-distribution costs that such a disproportionate barrier exists.

And it gets worse...

It would seem that the availability of the UK CD release is less consumer-focussed than it could have been. Forgive me for sounding like a digital dinosaur (CDs are digital, right?) but I actually like to own physical media like CDs - even if I seldom play them - primarily because I've suffered several hard-drive failures over the years and lost large sections of my digital music collection. Secondly, I don't like the idea of being tied to Apple's proprietary compressed music format for the rest of time. Can I take this with me if I switch to a different device (Window Media Player? PS3?). At least with the CD, I can control the format and codecs I prefer in a few years time (without having to transcode the media and reduce the audio quality). Thirdly, it's a lot nicer to listen to CDs though my high fidelty audio setup than it is to listen to compressed music.

So if I want to buy Random Access Memories on CD I can use Google Shopping's search tool to find me a copy from Sainsbury's for £8.99. This is a price I'm happy to pay but where's the competition? Google Shopping doesn't even search most of the big providers. Tesco and Asda are both charging £10. Morrisons sell it for £10 but they don't have an online purchase option! What is this? The 1990s?

It seems like the supermarkets are the only physical music retailers left. This is okay if you are after something that's likely to chart but what about the leftfield music? HMV and Virgin are dead. Play.com has become a glorified market place where smaller providers offer products, often with a lack of detail or item description, and questionable feedback scores. Zavvi have stopped selling CDs altogether.

I guess I could always go to everyone's favourite tax avoider, Amazon (I will not link to them), but I find it morally repugnant to pay them £9.99 for a product when I know they'll go out their way to avoid paying corporation tax. CD-Wow were caught out by the Channel Islands tax loop-hole being closed down, so WowHD replaced them and they have the best price at £7.99.

So, I can buy the CD at a reasonable price but only because I know where to look (I'm not wanting to pay £19 Littlewoods!). But does everyone? And are people being offered a fair price for their supposedly obsolete media? As physical formats become less and less relevant to the consumer they'll inevitably become rarer as demand decreases, forcing the price up. This looks like its happening right now. I find this rather sad, but predictable. I guess we can always pay perpetual fees to access rather than own

EDIT #1

It seems I may need to clarify a few things about my initial whine:

My whinge here is partly about the death of the high street music retailer - I admit I didn't make that clear enough. I can go buy this album from a supermarket as it's a certainty to chart (the bookies recently slashed the odds on it being the biggest album of the year) but I've struggled to buy a less renowned artist, like Deerhunter (Monomania), from Asda or Tesco. I used to rely on specialist music stores to provide me with my physical media. Failing that, I'd go to the usual suspects (Play, Zavvi etc) who are also on the wane (Amazon excluded).

My initial lazy searches only turned up 3 recognisable UK stores selling the CD (Sainsbury's, Amazon and Littlewoods) with prices from £8.99 to £19.00. There was another company called Base.com, but I've no idea if they are reputable. Apparently they've been around for  decade but this was the first time I've heard of them. ScreamingCD.com showed up but they are Canadian based and postage is an issue.

Amazon are hardly offering music at a competitive price on all their products. After some digging around I found alternate prices: 25% cheaper in the end. This does matter to me at least. I actually spent more than I expected as I found some other bargains. I ended up buying 4 CDs for £30 rather than 3 meaning I could support more musicians, admittedly at a lower royalty rate. Then again, the royalty rate on CDs is better that than that on digital releases. The Gowers Report (2006: p51) showed that artists get 8%  from digital sales (less than the credit card company who handles the transaction!) while they get 9% from CD sales. This is marginal when dealing with one consumer (ie me) but the problem is scaleable. The shift to digital distribution is not always a best case scenario for creators.

Returning to Amazon, if you are the one-stop shopping destination for a substantial amount of internet consumers then monopolistic practises tend to occur. This is not my point by the way, it's one made in the BBC series The Virtual Revolution, in relation to sector market leaders becoming dominant (eg Facebook in social, eBay for auctions, Amazon for entertainment goods, etc) .

However, it's also about the death of the recognisable online retailer who used to provide me with many varied pricing options for my favoured consumer products. Put simply, I hate that it now takes more effort to find the things that I like when it used to so much easier.

It's easier to just buy the album via iTunes (even though Google Play and Amazon's MP3 store are offering it cheaper) - which I did. However, just because it's easier doesn't make it convenient or flexible. I still wanted the physical CD (which I have also purchased from HDWow) so that I can play the uncompressed sound through my Arcam/Mission/Marantz stereo.

A plea for help...

For the record, I can't get these 256 kbps .aac files to play in Windows Media Player without transcoding and making the lossy format even worse. If iTunes sold Apple Lossless (.alac) files then I'd be happy to batch encode them to .wav (well, actually, happy is not the best disruptive term for the process). If anyone has some helpful solutions for this issue then I'd be grateful for your advice. Likewise, I'd appreciate advice on how to get these .aac files to play on my Sony Playstation 3 without a reduction in quality. I suspect the answer is the CD ripped to .wav though...

Star Wars iPhone Edits

One of the things I've increasingly found myself doing in the past year or so has been the incessant editing of images on a very small screen, typically an iPhone 4 (or more recently, an iPhone 5). Photography-based apps are some of the most regularly downloaded bits of software from the iTunes store if the iTunes charts are anything to go by.

Indeed, there is a burgeoning mass of professional and amateur enthusiasts taking to the small screen with much gusto - just witness the success of people like Richard Gray (aka @rugfoot on Twitter) who teaches courses in iPhoneography at Kensington and Chelsea College. The iPhoneography website has (unrelated to Gray) has also been around since 2008, offering application reviews as well as a supportive network of creative individuals via their Flickr group.

Needless to say the rise of Instagram and other apps (eg Aviary, Instaeffects, Wood Camera, Vintique, etc) that offer quick and easy-to-apply filters, either for free or for very little cost, has produced an upswell in experimentation and creativity wherein even the most average of images can be transformed into something approaching professional quality. 

That's not to say that every user of such apps are suddenly professional photographers - far from it - but the techniques that used to be the preserve of a few are now being aped by algorithms and employed by the many, often with mixed results. Suffice to say there has been an explosion in the amount of images being circulated across various networks, as people increasingly photoblog their food or create digital pinboards of things they've stumbled across on a daily basis.

The thing that really interests me is the ways in which individuals can experiment with various applications in order to achieve some interesting results, often with some helpful feedback from others who witness said experiments. The limitations of mobile phone cameras (limited focal control, digital zoom, etc) makes for some interesting workflows as users find ways to breather new life into old images, even if that is simple bit of colour correction with Snapseed or, at the opposite end of the spectrum, total image destruction with Decim8.

With that in mind, I've been playing around with a few different applications as part of an experimental  Star Wars album so I thought I'd share some of those images here as they've been getting some fairly positive feedback from the people that have seen them. My intention with these images was twofold: 

1) experiment with a number of different applications in order to see what they could do

2) in doing so could I make the overly familiar somewhat unfamiliar yet still recognisable on a very small screen (<4 inches)

All the images below were edited on an iPhone. The applications used in the creation of these remixed images include iPhoto, Photoshop Express (with paid upgrade), PXL, Etchings, Decim8, Snapseed, Wood Camera, Vintique, and Instagram

You can find me on Instagram at http://instagram.com/robjewitt 

Any comments, questions or feedback is welcome

The morality of the press

This post is aimed at the Level 3 journalism students taking the Media Ethics modules (MAC373, MED312). It would seem that I haven't been given access to the module space in Sunspace yet, meaning that I can't add material, post content, respond to messages, etc...  In the mean time I'll post material here until I'm given the keys to the kingdom.

The week we are looking at the differences between morals and ethics in relation to professional journalistic practice. Radio 4 has a regular programme which quite often covers these issues so it's worth checking out the The Moral Maze, presented by Michael Buerk/David Aaronovitch.

In particular I thought I do is draw your attention to an episode that was first broadcast on 19th of November 2011 entitled 'The Morality of the Press'. It can be streamed in full from here. Here is the description that accompanies the specific show:

The Leveson inquiry into the culture and ethics of our press opened this week. In the wake of so many scandals has time finally been called on the industry that for so long has been drinking in the last chance saloon? Defenders of the press say any moves to impose external policing and regulation will threaten freedom of speech and undermine the vital role a free press plays in a democratic society. But why should we treat our press differently from any other industry that's key part of society? Broadcasting, energy, water - they all have external regulators. Is it still tenable to argue that the press is somehow different, special and should be exempt, when at the same time it operates within a climate that thinks it's acceptable to hack in to the mobile phone of a murdered teenage girl? And what about the noble calling of journalism itself? Has the financial pressure on the industry created a culture where ethics and morality come a poor second to doing whatever it takes to get a story that will sell? If we want to reset the moral compass of journalists is time for hacks to consider swearing the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath? Or are we actually looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Do we get the press we deserve and are the people we should be questioning are those you buy, read and enjoy the stories that have prompted the Leveson inquiry? The Moral Maze - the morality of the press.

Combative, provocative and engaging debate chaired by Michael Buerk with Clifford Longley, Kenan Malik, Anne McElvoy and Matthew Taylor.

Witnesses:

• Steven Barnett - Professor of Communications, University of Westminster
• Ian Collins - Radio broadcaster - Formerly with TalkSPORT
• Simon Jenkins - Journalist and Author, Former Editor of The Times and London Evening Standard
• Rasmus Kleis Nielsen - Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford and Assistant Professor of Communications, University of Roskilde in Denmark.

Er, hello

Wow - I haven't written a blog post here since May 2012. That's a long time. That might be something to do with the arrival of my first child at the end of April. Being a parent can be quite time-consuming. Hopefully, I'll start pushing some material out here over the newt few weeks...

BBC confuses Halo for the UN

Some of the things I like to point out on this site are those instances where in quality journalistic organs occasionally slip up and misreport video game footage or content as if it were the stuff of the 'meat-space'. Earlier in the year ITV got in trouble for mistaking footage form the game ArmA 2 for IRA training videos and there are often scare stories about the increasingly photo-realistic graphics of contemporary games.

So it should come as no surprise that the BBC have found themselves on the receiving end of what can only be described as a 'face-palm fail' moment wherein they mistakenly used the logo from the United Nations Space Command instead of the the logo from the United Nations Security Council. One is a fictional body from the popular first person shooter gaming series Halo, while the other is one of the principal powers within the UN charged with the maintenance of international peace and security.

The incident tool place during a lunch time One O'Clock News broadcast last Thursday in which the BBC were reporting on the current conflict taking place in Syria. From the screen shot Sophie Raworth can be seen discussing an Amnesty International report alongside the logo of the fictional UNSC. It would appear that a Google image search for the UNSC (United Nations Security Council) brought back multiple images from the Halo game that were then used in the broadcast. Currently, the UNSC has very little ambition to police the Covenant and are more focussed on Earthly incidents.

A BBC spokesperson told Eurogamer 'mistakes do happen' but this image was not broadcast in later bulletins. A segment of the video has been uploaded to YouTube and is embedded below.

The Harvard Reference System and citing tweets

Earlier this year The Modern Language Association (MLA) decided to devise a standard format to assist students and researchers who liked to cite data found on Twitter. Given that Twitter is increasingly becoming a place in which news can break, frequently ahead of mainstream channels, then it makes perfect sense to attempt to accommodate this platform. The MLA system works well with how Twitter functions.

They advise researchers that citation should being the entry in the works cited list (aka the bibliography) with the author's real name followed by the Twitter user name in parentheses. When only the user name is known, default to that. What should follow this is the entire text from the tween in quotation marks. Spelling mistakes and capitalisation should remain exact (don't change anything!). Finally, the entry should include the date and time of the message and the medium of the publication (in this case, Tweet). Here's an example:

Jewitt, Rob (@rob_jewitt). "The problem with nerd politics gu.com/p/37hyb" 14 May 2012, 8:55pm. Tweet 

If citing the tweet in the body of a paper the MLA recommends it is cited in its entirety.

Now this might seem fairly straightforwards but I do find it curious that the MLA ignores the unique URL provided by a tweet. After all, every status posted has it's own page. The above example could easily be supplemented by the link: http://twitter.com/#!/rob_jewitt/status/202124949522104322. I'd have thought that this would have been essential given that the exact timings on Twitter are subject to the timezone of the reader rather than the poster, meaning errors can occur.

The Harvard Reference system and web sources

At the time of writing there is no formal guidance for how to cite a tweet within the structure of the Harvard Reference (HR) system , but it should be possible to work within the current guidance dealing with websites and adapt the MLA system to come up with a solution. There are even automated tools like the CiteThisForMe page that attempt to auto format sources but it struggles with Twitter.

Students at Sunderland are encouraged to use the HR system as outlined by the resources over on the University Library Services site (direct link to "Cite them right" guide).

The common approach to citing an electronic source, like a website is to include the following info in this order:

• Author
• Year that the site was published/last updated (in parentheses)
• Title of Internet site (in italics)
• Available at: URL
• (Accessed: date)

There may be instances where the author is not known but the page includes a title, so that should be used instead. There may even be instances where neither of these can be identified, meaning that the only information that can be provided is the page URL. As you can see, this is less than ideal. Many sites and blogs are happy to identify an author or contributor, so where these are provided then they should be used accordingly. There are also extra fields (highlighted) to deal with:

• Author of message
• Year that the site was published/last updated (in parentheses)
• Title of message (in quotation marks)
• Title of Internet site (in italics)
• Day / month of posted message
• Available at: URL
• (Accessed: date)

So, following these rules,  this authored Lifehacker article should look something like this:

Thorin Klosowski (2012) 'Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out The Window', Lifehacker, 26 April. Available at http://lifehacker.com/5905347/living-in-public-what-happens-when-you-throw-privacy-out-the-window (Accessed: 15 May 2012)

Citing a tweet in the Harvard Reference system

By drawing on the guidance for citing blogs, then it's possible to come up with some easy to follow rules for citing Twitter. It is a micro-blogging service after all. The following example will use the tweet I employed in the MLA example above coupled with the HR advice for citing blogs. I propose the following method:

• Author of message (Twitter user name in parentheses)
• Year that the status was published (in parentheses)
• Full message (in quotation marks)
• Title of Internet site (in italics)
• Day / month / time of posted message
• Available at: URL
• (Accessed: date)

The aforementioned tweet should look something like this in the bibliography:

Rob Jewitt (@rob_jewitt) (2012), "The problem with nerd politics gu.com/p/37hyb", Twitter, 14 May 2012, 8:55pm. Available at http://twitter.com/#!/rob_jewitt/status/202124949522104322 (Accessed: 15 May 2012)

It might look a little cumbersome but it has the advantage over the MLA system in that it is more accurate and helpful for anyone else who might want to refer to the same message, or even check its veracity. This is by no means a definitive solution but it is an attempt to be consistent. Comments and feedback welcome

Virgin Media's blocking of the Pirate Bay: consequences

According to a report over at the BBC it seems like the hacker group Anonymous have taken down the Virgin Media website as a response to the company's blocking of the Pirate Bay. A tweet appearing to be attributed to @AnonCircle carried the hashtags #OpBayBack and #OpTPB, clearly referencing the infamous website.

VIRGIN MEDIA - Tango Down #OpTPB virginmedia.com #OpBayBack #Anonymous
— Anonymous Circle (@AnonCircle) May 8, 2012

Piracy research

Meanwhile, The Pirate Bay website is currently hosting a link to a research project ran by the good people at the Cybernorms Research Group (based at Lund University). In this follow-up study they are seeking to understand online norms and values in relation to effective laws and polices so are asking for help. This link will take you to a short questionnaire (no personal data or IP address info is collected). It really will take next to no time and will help contest the industry-led lobby-led research. More information can be found over at cybernorms.net.

TheSlyrateBay

I was also contacted via email by the founder of TheSlyrateBay -  a website currently helping online users bypass the Pirate Bay blocks. The founder suggests that the site allows you to log in to your personal Piratebay account without the need for any other external proxies or Virtual Private Networks (VPN). It's free and can be accessed form a browser. You use it at your own risk but it might help fill your Pirate Bay fix. At the very least, you can use it to get access to the non-infringing Pirate Bay blog.

EDIT: It seems like Orange are the second UK ISP to implement a block on the Pirate Bay judging by this post

EDIT #2: The Pirate Bay have taken to Facebook to criticise the DDoS attack on Virgin Media, critiquing the method as a form of censorship equivalent to web blocking.