Hydrgnc

Nov 7

“Water is patient… Water just waits. Wears down the clifftops, the mountains, the whole of the world. Water always wins.”

“Sixty years ago, a young woman named Mary Douglas studying tribal custom in Africa, came across the following belief: if a woman had been unfaithful, she risked miscarriage in pregnancy. This was viewed not as bad luck or magic, but as a law of nature, as today we might regard gravity. At the time she thought the tribe primitive, exercising a crude means of asserting power and ignorant of science. Later, Douglas, a celebrated anthropologist, came to the view that their behaviour was not primitive at all but normal in all societies. That is, what we call “risky” is often an expression of disapproval - though we might not be aware that this is what it is - as much as a measure of real danger.” BBC NEWS | Magazine | A risky business

“… I think by track sales are not only history, but the wrong way to go. You don’t want people making a million cheap decisions, you want them to make one big one, ten bucks a month.” Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » Streaming

Nov 5

“The problems in the Copyright Wars are not caused by technologies or by consumers acting badly, and they cannot therefore be solved by laws, and certainly not by more draconian laws. The problems—such as the decline in sales of CDs and DVDs—are the result of the copyright industries’ many and considerable failures to focus on satisfying consumers’ desires as opposed to stifling those desires out of a woefully misguided view that copyright equals control and that control equals profits.” Record labels keep blaming P2P, but it’s a hard sell - Ars Technica

Nov 4

“She’s not going to win [the] fight [over downloads],” Stone said. “None of us will win that fight. So let’s just accept it and see it as something that can be beautiful and might change music for the better. It might sort the weeds from the flowers.” Joss Stone: Lily Allen is not a singer | Music | guardian.co.uk

Nov 3

“Books, he says, looking at the book in his hand, and sighs. I read a book in nineteen-seventy-three, he tells me… It disturbed me… and I haven’t read one since… Not one.” The Bedside Crow: My customer sways in front of the counter like a drunk leaving the pub at midnight.

“The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity.” » Culture Technology music » The Future Of Music is… Indie! (via Dellh)

Nov 1

“The latest approach from the Government will not help prop up an ailing music industry. Politicians and music companies need to recognise that the nature of music consumption has changed, and consumers are demanding lower prices and easier access,” said Peter Bradwell, from the think-tank Demos, which commissioned the new poll conducted by Ipsos Mori.” Illegal downloaders ‘spend the most on music’, says poll - Crime, UK - The Independent (via loopier)

Oct 30

“I sometimes think there’s a faint melancholy in these zealous new young pop traditionalists/archaeologists that they weren’t around when the music they’re passionate about was on vinyl and had more of a direct impact on the social and cultural environment. This is allied with a sense of apprehension that those comforting old structures and belief systems are insistently collapsing, replaced at the moment with an environment that is fiercely and almost completely commercial, and also a sense of excitement, that there are multiple ways to potentially reach and enthral an audience. At the moment, the music transmitted throughout this radical new commercial environment is reminiscent of music that would have been around twenty, thirty, even forty years go, give or take an amount of techno tweaking and image massaging. This music is aggressively but not necessarily sentimentally nostalgic for when music craved a future, and more recognisably defined various generational anxieties.” Paul Morley’s showing off… Frankmusik | Music | guardian.co.uk

“As Oscar Wilde once said, I would rather weigh my press than read it. It doesn’t matter how much press there is, as long as there’s lots of it. Answering your point on the polarised opinion, I feel that it’s better to be somewhere of an extreme than somewhere very averagely in the middle. The NME review gave me one star, which was a horrific journalist writing these horrible things about me. I found that journalist’s old band, and it was the biggest load of crap I’d ever heard in my life. It’s just people’s opinions. I didn’t start making music because I cared about what anyone thought, so I should carry on that way.” Interview – Frankmusik. « Mike Atkinson