Michael Henley

I was talking with my Dad and brother this evening about the Times move to charging £1 per day. I don’t think moving from free to charged-for content will work for them because as far as we can see there is no new value added. It is simply charging where before it was free.

The analogy I came up with was, as usual, inspired by the glass next to me: “Imagine there are four glasses of wine here and at the moment you can pick up any and drink from them as you choose. Now think that one of them now costs you £1 to drink from, but the other three are still free. Which are you going to drink from?” He didn’t respond but then I decided to expand it because I realised my analogy was insufficient. The table in fact needs thousands of glasses, and whilst only a few of those wines will be ‘appellation contrôlée’, the choice and range that is available it almost boundless. Yes some will taste like vinegar, some won’t be to your taste, and some your parents wouldn’t approve of, but there will be some hidden gems in there from the New World that will fill the gap for insult, controversy and gossip that John Humprys seeks as well as doing what this little out-pouring fails to do in providing well written and considered ‘journalism’.

After all, what is journalism and why does it have to be something that is expensive to do well? The Internet might have choked how investigative journalism used to be done, but it has also opened up a wealth of information that used to cost large amounts to get hold of. Anyone can now easily be contacted, attribution found, and things investigated. In the UK, one of the biggest political scandals of the past decade has been that of MPs expenses. Amongst others, Heather Brooke was the main driving force behind this. She is a freelancer. This exemplified investigative journalism at its very best, and yet there was no backing behind it. Indeed, we see with initiatives such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism that there are third parties stepping in to fill this gap that is forming as newspapers shrink. We are told that investigative journalism will go away if newspapers do and yet the BIJ is showing that that will not be the case. The newspapers and the old dogs of the news world tell us that the only way for our democracy to survive is to continue with the model we have. If humanity had agreed with that principle we would never have moved from foraging to agriculture, from horse to car, or from land to air.

So far I have heralded the end of dead tree as the inevitable, something to be embraced and to welcome despite the pain that will come with it in the short term. I have based this belief on the fact that what they provide – opinionated essays, investigative studies etc – are being, and will be, provided elsewhere in what is a natural evolution. There is however one traditional organisation whom I believe should stay for a while at least. That is the BBC. We are constantly bombarded with complaints from the aforementioned dead tree crowd that the BBC makes their lives difficult, that it does too much and exploits its position as a state-funded provider. I actually disagree with this but even if it were accepted there is one aspect of the BBC that I couldn’t live without; their news. It is, like Wikipedia, theoretically non-partisan and so presents nothing but the fact with minimum opinion. If there is one thing that I will agree with John Humprys is crucial to our democracy it is this. Easy, reliable access to the facts. Yes we have twitter opening up a vast wealth of raw information but this is also a weakness. It is raw, unfiltered, the noise can drown out the crucial point. When I hear of a development the first place I hit is news.bbc.co.uk and Wikipedia for an outline, followed by twitter to keep abreast as things happen. The first two will have basics but need sources on the ground etc so what they say is most likely reliable but, at t=2 hours, is limited. Over the next few years I expect Wikipedia will take over this space for me and others to be the non-partisan provider of information but I don’t feel that has matured yet. It is getting there, but isn’t quite my first port of call.

This post was never meant to turn into the small essay that it inevitably has done, and indeed as the title reveals was probably meant to be a bit of a Murdoch-bashing despite this being the first time he has been mentioned. The writing is on the wall for newspapers. Some will move to media such as the iPad and other rich media tablets, some will move purely online and embrace the culture of free and open, and some, like the dinosaurs that survived the asteroid impact who lasted a few more years picking up the scraps of what used to support them plentifully, will eventually perish and in their place the small mammals of new media will flourish.

P.S. Dear Mr Humprys: This piece is opinion and it is provided to you for cheaper in real terms than any newspaper in history. It is admittedly probably not very rude, maybe not that offensive or disrespectful, but it is pretty bloody-minded. I actually do care who I upset, but that’s a personal thing and my name emblazoned beneath ‘The Sun’ wouldn’t change that. If you want gossip may I suggest you look no further than @eyespymp, for an iconoclast I point you to Guido Fawkes, and Heather Brooke seems to tick the troublemaker field. Those are just some political examples. So here is something that you would never see in a ‘posh’ newspaper – an opinion piece from a middle-class Oxbridge technophile. Please point me to the last piece of print from the Millwall terraces or saloon bar in a newspaper. Yours, Michael Henley

A few weeks back when I was wracking my brains for inspiration for my first re-attempt at the whole blogging thing, I drafted up a relatively self-righteous ranty post about how I had been getting hold of music for a long time, and what I thought was the main points the ‘industry’ was missing. After about four re-writes I canned it and that, I thought, was that.

Then along came Spotify.

First a bit of background (sorry history is the standard filler out there, even if we were warned against using it in our scientific essays…): Most people know my past thoughts on buying music in CD format – suffice it to say that I have a large iTunes library and own three physical CDs. I refused to pay for music with DRM included. I won’t be told what I can and can’t do with my media. If I want to copy it for a friend then I will. I actually get the reason that piracy has the music industry shit-scared, but that doesn’t mean that for a second I condone how they have gone about ‘protecting’ their copyrights. Therefore, in lieu of real alternatives, less conventional methods were employed for getting hold of my music.

I never really wanted to buy something like music without sampling first. I have no one taste in a genre, and so I can’t say that I will like everything by, say, R.E.M. and everything by their similar artists. To this end I usually tried to use the radio (whenever I listened to that – not really going to be a constant source of new music then..), hearing and tagging with Shazam or googling a line I remembered, and then getting the album which that track was on. My interest in David Bowie was sparked by hearing ‘Changes’ on the radio and then pulling down a copy of the Greatest Hits.

This worked up to a point, but there was no real way of sampling an entire album fully before paying for it. Last.fm worked up to a point when they introduced the ability to listen to full tracks, but they didn’t all of what I wanted. Recently I have come across Spotify, and was invited by @alexmuller. Finally I have somewhere to go to where I can search for a track, legally play it in full, and indeed play entire albums in full before I pay for them. There is the odd advert (oddly enough they all seem to be somehow related to the UK Government so far), which pays for my access to the content, and I am more than happy with that. They are not intrusive and I am happy with their presence. Of course I ignore every word between the beginning and the end, but then having been bombared with advertising on almost every entertainment vessel since I was born (God save the BBC and the licence fee I suppose, for the little respite it provides) I am pretty accustomed to that.

Once I am happy I like something, I can simply head over to Amazon MP3 (now my full time port of call for buying music), and within a few minutes (or hours depending on if I am connecting via LSOXS or not) I have my tracks in my library, importantly, in a format I can do whatever I like with. Regardless of the talk that MP3 is still copyrighted etc, the format is ubiquitous and has been the format of choice since day one. Maybe I will eat my words when I have a library full of music in a defunct format in a few years, but I think it will likely be a cold day in hell before that happens.

So I am finally happy. By now you have probably figured that is something I tend to admit to relatively infrequently. I can get my music in a way that is a) legal, b) convenient, and c) exactly how I always thought I should be able to. There is an R.E.M. album (Document, for those interested) sat in my Amazon basket along with some Kinks songs about to be purchased. The artist will get their very meagre cut from my payment, and I won’t get sued, arrested, black-bagged or any other form of financial/physical torture for enjoying it.

This has not been a comprehensive rundown of Spotify. Adam tested it a little more intensively, and seems to be using it in almost the same fashion as I am. Great minds think alike I suppose. Night all.