Regurgitator are out of contract with Warner thanks to the Best Of release. They hint at a new album end of 2003 (silentuproar).
EMI Australia explain their CD copy protection (as found on the new Robbie Williams CD. Out of interest the CD appears to play fine in normal CD players (including my Pioneer car CD player). However when I played it in my computer it loaded it's own CD player (Windows based software in the data track of the disk) to play the CD. I haven't tried ripping it yet (I don't really want to, it's not very good). I hear it crashes iBooks.
From the EMI page linked:
The music industry in Australia has been faced with the issue of mass illegal copying of CDs and therefore copy protection since 2001. Although we would prefer to deal with musical issues, record companies have reacted to this market development already with reorganisation and restructuring measures. The "periphery" of the music business including music magazines, radio stations and music TV channels will also be confronted with this market decrease. In the mid-long term the production of local music/artists is potentially jeopardised.
Music magazines are becoming less popular because people don't like paying $10 for what they get on the net for free... oh, hang on...
Radio stations are less popular because they're play less and less variety, commercial radio is just one big ad for record company munge. But it's always this way.
TV music channels are doing fine. Tell me Channel V isn't making money.
I'm sorry but increased usage and variety of music (as is made possible by file-sharing etc.) can only increase the interest in music, and thus the "periphery" should prosper.
Unless of course the "periphery" business plans are all based around pushing posters and interviews and spam on mega-zillion dollar artists... oh... oops.
Two typical ADSL plans in Australia are about 1Gb per month @ 256kbps for $60 per month or 3Gb per month @ 512kbps for $80. Most plans include a per Meg cost if you go over your limit, of say 50 cents per meg. Some are much higher. A few (including mine) "shape" your speed down to between 22bps (Optus cable) to 72kbps (iiNet ADSL) if you go over your limit instead of charging.
The article above discusses the possibility of US broadband companies bringing in bandwidth limits. What interests me is the numbers. 10Gb plans. 80 cents per 100Meg over your limit. That's 100 times less what most people would pay in Australia. It really shows just how much cheaper bandwidth is in the US.
But what pisses me off the most is one of the main points of the article is file-sharing. Every man and his dog knows that if it wasn't for p0rn and file-sharing, most broadband ISPs in Australia would go bust because that's about 99% of their traffic. The article suggests that ISPs should put caps on their bandwidth users to stop file sharing?!
From the article:
Bell Canada's 10GB cap is unlikely to please many copyright holders. Pop songs average about 5MB; downloadable movies can average between 600MB and 800MB. That means the standard cap would allow a subscriber to upload or download about 12 movies a month or as many as 2,000 songs, although there would then be almost no bandwidth left for things such as Web surfing and e-mail.
If broadband companies introduce download caps with costs-per-meg for going over the cap, they go from a service that is trying to reduce the bandwidth their customers use, to a service that will try to get their customers to use as much bandwidth as they possibly can.
Not really in the interest of RIAA, MPAA, APRA, BLAH is it?
And then there are the usual problems with download limits. Download monitors don't work very well. iiNet are having problems with their monitor. For example, their connection log says I turned the connection off at midnight on Satuday/Sunday, and yet I somehow downloaded around 500Meg from midnight to 7am on Sunday, even though my computer was off. iiNet have been responsive about the issue and are fixing it, but the point is... this monitor is the decider on if you're over your limit or not. And then there are the fights over what a Gigabyte is (1000Mb vs. 1024Mb).
But... I've never been happier with my new ISP and the bandwidth caps are the reason. The speed and reliability is excellent.
I don't this the USians really know how good they currently have it.