Bowblog

There’s a big quarterly departmental meeting at BBC Audio & Music Interactive (which is where I work). We call it the ‘departmental’ and it’s always a pretty big deal – the magnificent Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House is the venue and it goes on all morning, spilling out into surrounding conference rooms for smaller sessions. [...]

Cory Doctorow’s got this wrong. He’s having one of those slightly hysterical moments that only someone who really understands technology can have. The technically naive idea that streaming and downloading are different things has got him all wound up: “But they’re the same thing! They’re the same thing!” I can almost see him stamping his [...]

The year is 1823. Nathaniel Burrell, sheep farmer, has stumbled upon a method for duplicating sheep. To cut a long story short, after years of essentially random cross-breeding he now can produce new sheep on demand at no cost. A quick twist of the tail of one of his miraculous cross-bred sheep and you’ve got [...]

If the last three generations (five years = one generation) of music industry executives had been contestants on The Apprentice they’d all have been fired by now. So many self-destructive manoeuvres, so many technological and commercial dead-ends, so little readiness to try stuff. And I speak as a supporter of the industry: I don’t believe [...]