I’m not usually one to recycle content created by other people, but this is too good to pass up. Imagine, if you will, 1500 prisoners. Now imagine the video for “Thriller”, by Michael Jackson. Now imagine 1500 prisoners recreating the video for “Thriller”.

If you didn’t follow that link, stop what you’re doing, have a look and then come back.

Done? Excellent. How astounding it is aside, it really does raise some questions:

1. Did things like this happen before YouTube?
2. How the hell did they convince 1500 prisoners that this was worth doing?
3. Of all the things you could do with 1500 willing people, was this maybe a bit of a waste of time?

Think hard about number 1 for a second: I’m really genuinely curious as to how much outlandish stuff happens and gets filmed now that wouldn’t have before YouTube existed. I’m sure it happened sometimes (You’ve Been Framed does not count), but I can only imagine the volume has increased a stupendous amount.

So, the real question: if YouTube is powerful enough to cause the world to warp in this bizarre way, what else is it capable of?

I’ve been surprised that no-one in recent years has decided to give the idea of subscription music a serious attempt. By that, I don’t mean the sort of thing that eMusic are doing, where you pay an an intermediary a monthly subscription for a fixed number of downloads from a plethora of artists. In fact, I mean the opposite end of the subscription spectrum.

The way music works most of the time is that a band works on an album, then puts it out along with some singles, and tours it for a year. Then they do another tour with no new released material, have a break, and repeat. The album-tour-break cycle for many bands is 2-3 years, in which the bands have a flurry of buying activity near the start (album release), that rapidly trails off for all but the biggest artists. Although they’ll get royalty cheques through the in-print lifetime of their records, the size of said cheques declines soon after release (unless you’re Nirvana, in which case it gets bigger year on year).

Bands are always going to have a number of hardcore fans who will buy or download anything the band puts out. Albums, singles, b-sides, bootlegged live shows, acoustic tracks, even demos; the biggest fans will lap it all up. I just wonder to what extent bands could utilise that to guarantee a relatively steady income.

How much money do artists generate just now? The album itself is probably £10, and the singles are about £3 for all 3 formats in a modern release (thanks to deals that people like HMV do). After 3-4 singles, the total amount generated per dedicated fan is around £22. (Note: we’ll ignore touring costs, t-shirts, and other merchandise, because that doesn’t change).

Imagine a service where the fans agree to pay an annual subscription of £20. For that price, they get access to all the music the band release in that period. If it’s an album year, they get a copy of the album (either digital only, or a real physical copy), and all the singles. If it’s not an album year, they get a deluge of other material: live shows, acoustic versions of favourite songs, demos, maybe the occasional new song too. This is not necessarily a huge amount of extra work for the artists; they’re creating the vast majority of this stuff anyway. They just keep it to themselves, or sometimes it gets bootlegged. Why not make some money from it?

The less astute readers may be thinking, “hold on – £20 is less than the £22 the band were making beforehand”. You’re absolutely right, it is. But that’s what they’re getting in an album year. Currently, that £22 is all they generate from releases for the whole of the 2-3 year cycle. Years 2-3 get them very little. Move to a subscription model, and that’s £20 every year, or £40-60 for the cycle. A significant increase.

Not only that, but it’s a regular fixed amount of income. If you’re a small and independent band, you no longer have to worry month-to-month about sales: you’ve got at least some portion of it forecast quite nicely.

As I say, the extra material already exists for most bands. Live shows are recorded, acoustic versions exist, and albums get heavily demoed before production. They just have to ensure that they keep a decent and consistent stream of music going to subscribers. That’s an album and singles one year, and a few live shows etc the next. It’s not a big burden.

Another benefit from a label point of view is that suddenly you have a very engaged audience: you have people who are actively waiting for what you will give them. This means you can easily cross-sell similar artists (subscribe to X and Y? We’ll give you 25% off Z), or promote new bands (you like X? Here’s some free stuff by this new band Y who’ll be supporting X on their next tour; if you like it, subscribe with a small discount).

Complications? Of course there are. For example, what happens if a band splits early? You keep the money in a holding account and only pay it out to the band every month or quarter, pro-rata, so you can give it back to the fans if the band falls apart. I think with a little thought, this is a workable system.

It’s the end of May, and that signals the end of yet another TV season. Inspired by Matt’s season wrap-up, I thought I’d sum up some of the stuff I’ve been watching. (There are probably more than a few spoilers in here).

First up, the powerhouse of Lost has finished it’s 3rd season. After a meandering 6-part mini-series to start the run, this really started to go places. Sun/Jin and Charlie episodes had the same boring flashbacks they always do, but the rest of the season really started moving forward. Highlights include Desmond’s visions of the future started bringing a much more peculiar twist to the show (since everything else is apparently pseudo-scientifically explainable); the exploration of The Others and Dharma (and “the purge”) was great, particularly the insane episode where we finally meet Jacob (yes, he does appear for a few seconds); newcomer Andrew Divoff as the apparently unkillable Mikhail; and that flash forward ending and all of it’s implications. While they could easily jump the shark (yet another plot-vital hatch, you say?), I think we’ll see this through to a satisfying conclusion.

Next is Life On Mars. I’ve only watched season 1, but thoroughly enjoying it. We constantly want to know why John Simm’s character is in the situation he is in (trapped in the past, somehow) and figure out his hallucinations, but that frequently gets side-lined by the excellent DCI Hunt. A man in the mold of The Sweeney, he’s a great character that proves to be the real driving force. Can’t wait to see the second season soon.

Another long-since-aired show I’ve been watching, Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the consistently best comedy series from the US. Larry David, as a caricature of himself is superb, the semi-improvised style is fresh and reinforces some of the excruciating situations the lead gets himself in. Best described as “what would happen if you didn’t have that voice in your head telling you to stop, ever”, if you haven’t seen “The Group”, you don’t know how painful comedy can be.

More comedy, this time in the form of Peep Show. I’m late to this as well, having watched all 4 seasons in the space of a few weekends recently, but I’m very impressed by this Mitchell and Webb series. Despite fairly well explained character motivations, and effective resets every week, Jez and Mark repeatedly surprise, repulse and entertain. As with all comedy, the terrifying thing is seeing small elements of yourself in the characters and thinking you might do the same in their situation; the comedy duo play perfectly on this.

For the sci-fi fans, Battlestar Galactica goes from strength to strength. This season had a reasonable amount of filler (who cares what’s going on with the labour disputes or the chief?), but also some pretty big hits. The rise and fall of Starbuck, the fall and fall of Gaius Baltar, the increasingly maddening delusions of Six/Baltar, the wrath and authority of General Adama, and the increasing peeks into Cylon society (the ship-hybrids, for example), there’s a lot of meat to this season. With the surprise ending, I would say the next (and final) season is going to be great.

Finally, Heroes. I don’t mind saying that I hated the first few episodes of this. The plot dragged, the characters were dull, and the acting was appalling (who hired the guy that plays Peter? They deserve a slap). I stopped watching after about three episodes, it was that painful. After being convinced by a number of people, I forced myself to watch another few and got hooked. The acting is still woeful (barring guest appearances by the likes of Christopher Eccleston), but the storyline quickly picks up. I’m a sucker for big, well-planned, interweaving stories and this is a masterclass in that. Everything converges, and there’s plenty in the background for second viewings (or dedicated fan communities) to be worthwhile. The ending is a bit anti-climactic but the season as a whole is well-executed.

I’m missing more than a few things here, but that’s the cream. Looking forward to next season, but the off-season should also be decent (The 4400 and The Dead Zone return very soon).

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the latter part here.

I have data that I never want to lose or have to recreate: photos, music, documents, and a wealth of other stuff. I’ve considered backing up to DVD but I’ve had so many back experiences with them (another CRC error, you say?), that it’s not an option. Instead a RAID array seemed like the obvious choice.

If you want a decent personal NAS solution, all roads lead to the Infrant NV+. It’s quiet, powerful, and has excellent RAID options. The proprietary X-RAID option gives hot-swapping and hot-expansion of the disk array, and provides single-disk failure at the cost of just one disk.

So if you start with 2 * 500Gb drives (as I did), you get 500Gb of effective storage and it doesn’t matter if one drive blows up. Want more room? Shove in another 500Gb drive without switching off, or any downtime for the array to rebuild, and it still doesn’t matter if one of them blows up. Upgrade the size of the drives one at a time, and you don’t have to rebuild the array from a remote source.

Other interesting features they keep quiet include the DAAP server (for iTunes compatible streaming music), the UPnP server (for different av streams), the rsync server (for anything else) and one-button backups to attachable storage.

My only grumbles are the NFS transfer speeds are a little low (being worked on, apparently), and no shell access (if I could put a torrent client on there, I’d be very happy).

All in all, a great piece of kit.

Roughly a year ago, I wrote a piece called Ubuntu and Storage about my ideas for both upgrading to Ubuntu (from Windows, it is an upgrade) and setting up a better storage solution. I’m going to focus on the former part here.

It was probably a year and a bit ago, before Ubuntu really started kicking off, that Stuart Langridge recommended it to me. After a quick browse I was sold, and got the live CD. Problems quickly arose.

The biggest problem I had was the perennial problem for former Windows users: wireless networking. My wireless card just wouldn’t work, and no amount of ndiswrapper was fixing it. I did briefly consider writing a device driver, but I thought that if I don’t have time to keep this site as up-to-date as I’d like, then maybe that was a tad ambitious. Instead I got a new wireless card that had a manufacturers driver… which didn’t work. Bollocks.

That set me back a good few months. Sadly, in my old flat, the router was too far for a wired connection, and couldn’t be moved to a more convenient location. I got round this inconvenience by moving flat and using good ol’ ethernet. Sometimes we use a sledgehammer on a nut because it’s so much more satisfying than a nutcracker, or repeatedly smashing our head against the wall that is wireless support.

That gripe aside, it’s mostly good. Beryl is impressive (though mostly just eye candy), and package management is just amazing. Having absolutely everything on the system update automatically, safely and uniformly is just how it should work. The individual updaters on Windows seem positively prehistoric in comparison.

One last complaint though: why the hell does everyone love Amarok. It’s feature-rich, sure, but it looks and behaves like an absolute dog. Want to go randomly through your music collection? You don’t want collection, you want a playlist. The play/pause/forward controls? Tiny and relegated to the middle of the bottom edge. Have the designers never heard of Fitt’s Law? Though I used to be a big proponent of WinAmp, I prefer iTunes now and nothing on Linux comes close.