Hard News: I'm marking Youth Week by being down with the kids
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re Flight of the Conchords
Noted, watched and enjoyed it yesterday, thanks.
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Heh. It would certainly be amusing if the balance of power in the singles chart moved away from the teen/tween demographic...
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iTunes gets around the credit card problem: either use gift cards, or get parents to put a limit on the account (or they can buy credit for the kids), and use their CC - eg $60 a month..... or something.
Works for me (well, I get someone else to buy me gift cards in the US, as I dont have a US credit card)
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There's also the full 'premiere' up on www.hbo.com/conchords. Or is that the same thing?
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A yes sorry same episode. The HBO link is bigger and clearer though :)
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In 1987, aged 12, I wrote (under a pseudonym, for some reason) to RTR Countdown magazine asking about how the singles charts were determined.
I thought it seemed silly that the chart was determined by sales of singles because no one bought records anymore, let alone 45s.
The answer was that the chart was determined by sales of 45s and cassingles, and also radio play.
I remember feeling uneasy about this truth. Why should radio playlists get to shape the charts?
Now, 20 years later, something has been done about it.
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I'm kind of surprised VISA debit cards haven't caught on here. VISA cards with zero limit, that is, where you have to put money in to use them. Kids can have them, since they require no credit checking. My first card ever, signed up in Ozzie, was like that, and was solely for the purpose of online shopping.
I wish I'd stuck with it.
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I prefer the Viz Chart. Placings are determined by amount of cash bribe.
Ben: you mean like the NZPost Prezzy Card. I'm surprised too but maybe they've deliberately soft-launched and are making sure the niggles (social and technical) are ironed out before they put pedal to the metal. Which is sensible (worked for SMS, unwittingly).
Incidentally it occurs to be that you could use these to shop on USA iTunes. Maybe I should get a few preloaded US VISA cards and sell them on TradeMe?
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NZ Post's Prezzy card is a way round this, no age limits, just stump up with a wodge'o'cash and they will give you a pre-paid visa to that amount, ( less $5 fee),
Also useful if you are buying things off merchants from less salubrious parts of teh 'net.
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Having spent much of the past month stuck in a generic hotel room in the US with little other than a TV and a 'net connection to keep me company (home at last!) - I must say Flight of the Conchords have been getting lots of push - quirky promo clips before all the big shows (final season of the Sopranos, etc etc)
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Note that Universal Search hasn't been propagated to google.co.nz yet, so you'll need to choose google.com.
Does anyone know of any easy ways to stop google.com automatically redirecting to google.co.nz? It annoys the hell out of me - if I wanted to go to the nz site, I'd type that in, surely.
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Kyle: www.google.com/ncr
[no country redirect]
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Westpac has Visa Debit Card. You can use it like eftpos card, only with the funds you have in your bank account. But it is a Visa card so you can use it for online purchases. Only bank in NZ that has this services as far as I know and haven't seen them pushing it yet.
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Yes, the banks don't push them because they can't lend money to crazy young people at usurious rates. But I'm glad to hear we've got them. I'm tempted, just for online stuff and security.
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The TV3 clip about bloggers and Fiji is here
I love how David's bookshelves make bloggers look so cerebral ...
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Bookshelves definitely are a fashion statement, rather like gym equipment. Whether they actually get used is another matter....
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I also noticed David's bookcases...I bet his house contains many leatherbound books, and smells like rich mahogony...
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It's a tough thing for the record companies to get their head around, but if the charts are actually to measure what people are listening to, then in real terms the p2p downloads would be factored in. How you do it, I don't know, but it's an odd situation where 90% of song acquisitions don't count for a chart which is supposed to measure popularity.
Robin, the singles chart has been a mix of radio and sales for years but when you were buying it was mostly sales. The old truism was that before the mid nineties the charts were controlled by by three retailers, and after that by three programmers, although common wisdom before radio came to dominate the mix (which was always a silly idea) was that in real terms the singles chart was determined in the cassingle rush in three hours on Thursday late night in Manukau City Centre.
That said, in the late eighties / early nineties, I often used to pass Friday mornings in Bassline Records in O'Connell St (who were a nominated chart shop but stocked virtually no local product) with the Auckland reps of Warners and Sony, who, over a cup of coffee would fill out ludicrously high sales for singles from a shop that didn't stock any of them.
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ah Baseline. I remember them. Wonderful place. We could sure do with an oasis like that here - away from the unrelenting soca-dub and imported R&B scmaltzopop
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Kyle: www.google.com/ncr
Cheers!
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It's a tough thing for the record companies to get their head around, but if the charts are actually to measure what people are listening to, then in real terms the p2p downloads would be factored in. How you do it, I don't know, but it's an odd situation where 90% of song acquisitions don't count for a chart which is supposed to measure popularity.
There are a couple of companies in the US that compile just those statistics -- and the record companies do use them internally. But asking them to publish them as official charts is a wee bit of a stretch just yet, I think ...
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The bookshelves were very interesting. I noticed that he was sitting (posed?) beside Geroge Orwell books visible due to large writing on the spine.
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. . . I've wondered about the p2p thing myself.
In theory -- given that it can be essentially free -- then it would seem to be an accurate yardstick of 'popularity' as without cost/affordability being a factor, then those tunes downloaded are simply those tunes that people want to hear.
However, out-of-theory, does this actually happen? If people are downloading material in terms of albums and/or discographies -- as seems to be the case given the prevalence of such multi-file offerings on most torrent search sites -- then surely much of what is downloaded (i.e. by volume) is more by association than anything else. You hear Peeping Tom's Kill The DJ on the b, jump online, find the album and cue it up. It's catchy, so you flick through Wiki, and find that this Mike Patton chap used to be in some other bands . . . 24hours later you've got the entire back-catalogue of Faith No More, Tomahawk et al. at your fingertips.
Is this a measure of actual, active popularity, or more the flippancy over over-accessibility?
How much of what is downloaded is actually/actively listened to . . ?
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The TV3 clip about bloggers and Fiji is here
I love how David's bookshelves make bloggers look so cerebral ...
D'you think they sat him in front of the Orwell on purpose? David?
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Chaos, it's not a perfect measure but it's definitely relevant. p2p is effectively the black market of music, but unlike most black markets it's able to give us real information back about what is popular.
Yes I download stuff and find I don't like it. But I usually don't repeat it with the same artist, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. So it's gotta be relevant.
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