Its exhil­a­rat­ing being back in Asia again after almost a month in Auck­land and sim­ply get­ting off the air­craft at KL Inter­na­tional was enough to feel the rush…the faces, the lan­guages, the mass of it all.

A month in New Zealand is almost enough to dull my senses but you never lose the feel­ing there that some­thing is miss­ing. I love Auck­land, and had a total ball, of which more some­time soon, but all it feels so damned mono-cultural. Not as mono-cultural as Aus­tralia, a land in which the non-whites seem only to be allowed entry so the elite can pro­claim, self right­eously, how cos­mopoli­tan they all are, for­get­ting that there is an ongo­ing rea­son why it’s indige­nous souls are in such a sorry state…you, as a peo­ple, suf­fer two cen­turies of mur­der, dis­place­ment, abuse, and the whole­sale theft of vir­tu­ally every­thing you sit on of value (or have given birth to) and see how dys­func­tional your soci­ety would be. A cou­ple of us mused recently that if John Howard announced com­pul­sory pro­tec­tive camps for all Abo­rig­i­nals “for their own good”, there would be an over­whelm­ing mur­mur of ascent in the great south­ern land.

But NZ feels mono-cultural only a lit­tle less. For all its Paci­fica and Te Reo, New Zealand is a very white, and increas­ingly so, if not in skin colour but atti­tude, soci­ety, with the com­mon tar­get for almost all races being that per­fect white ideal as por­trayed by the mag­a­zines and the TV. And for all the deri­sive com­ments made about the aver­age (who does, of course, not exist) American’s global igno­rance, many “kiwis” are, despite still hav­ing some way to go, aspir­ing to the same level of ill-informed xeno­pho­bia. Lis­ten to any talk­back, or watch TV news and tell me it ain’t so.

Try telling folks you live in Bali and watch the reac­tion. The world view is per­ceiv­ably get­ting nar­rower in these TV2 times. After a brief, rather exhil­a­rat­ing burst of global curios­ity a few years back, the retreat is obvi­ous when you jump back in for short bursts.

All the fuss about ter­ror­ism in the Bay of Plenty, what­ever the sub­stance of the charges (and lets be real, NZ’s police force has not had a ter­rif­i­cally good record in recent years for being open and even handed..that mono-cultural focus men­tioned above often is even more focused, and cou­pled with nar­row big­otry in a force like that, by it’s very nature) was an eye opener, if I needed one.

The swathe of Maori-phobic com­ments I encoun­tered from mid­dle class New Zealan­ders, of all races, really shocked me when I arrived a few days after the arrests. The only recent par­al­lel I could draw on was the after­math of Don Brash’s speech in Orewa, a ram­ble that could really have been dis­tilled down to two words, for the same effect: “Fuck­ing Maoris”. And of course as a mass, many New Zealan­ders, good keen men and women all, rose up and screamed “Yeah! Fuck­ing Maoris”. Of course for Mr Brash to couch his ral­ly­ing cry in the cloak of a “polit­i­cal” speech gave it some mass legit­i­macy, espe­cially from the media.

But, all that rant­ing aside, It’s quite a buzz to step back into the world again.

KLs a funny place..caught some­where between it’s past and try­ing to fig­ure out what it’s future is. On one hand there are mon­ster malls, hi-tech parks, hi-speed trains and swathes of free hi-speed inter­net con­nec­tions; and on the other it’s tear gassing its cit­i­zens for dar­ing to have an opin­ion and actively dis­crim­i­nat­ing against its racially Chi­nese cit­i­zens (many of whom have been there longer than time is able to record) because they con­trol the nation’s wealth. And just to con­fuse mat­ters more, it now offers its youth, com­pletely free, income assisted edu­ca­tion any­where in the world. It can’t quite decide what it wants to be.

And the technology..cheap, even free, cut­ting edge and absolutely everywhere…which brings me back to Auck­land again.

What seems increas­ingly obvi­ous though is that the pace the planet is chang­ing at is increas­ing. You can apply Moore’s law to far more than pro­cess­ing power these days. And what is also hits you when one returns is that NZ, as buf­feted as it is by its enor­mous estab­lished wealth (only four mil­lion peo­ple, almost no nat­ural resources and you are moan­ing about that stan­dard of liv­ing???) is slowly but obliv­i­ously slip­ping behind the rest of the devel­oped world (and make no mis­take, many of those so-called “3^rd World” nations define devel­oped now) as they gal­lop along doing the Moore mul­ti­pli­ca­tion every 18 months or so. You have to ask how Sin­ga­pore and Malaysia can both offer free pub­lic access Wi-Fi almost every­where when you can’t even pay for a decent con­nec­tion in much of Auck­land. New Zealand has gone from decid­edly first world to being a tech­no­log­i­cal back­wa­ter in less than decade, and it’s quite noticeable…slow inter­net, no hotspots, ludi­crously expen­sive 3G and GPRS, a real lack of tech retail­ers, etc.

Lots of nice expen­sive cars though…..

And the world jumps ahead, just a lit­tle bit more, this morn­ing…Radio­head of course dis­missed the count­down site lead­ing to their new album in the last day or so, but rather con­ve­niently (and co-incidentally?) it have them a fairly large bump in pub­lic­ity lead­ing to today’s announce­ment of their new album.

Of course this news is gonna be every­where later today, but the thing is, like the Ama­zon site, Radio­head have con­verged the dig­i­tal and the tac­tile worlds together. Their new album is avail­able on their site from the 10^th of the month…and you pay what you want. The stam­pede is pred­i­ca­ble..Radio­head fans are obses­sive. The thing is, that the ter­res­trial ver­sion is not out until Decem­ber and then with fancy pack­ag­ing and a bonus disc.  So every­one wins, the fans and the artist, and every­one thinks Radio­head are well cool.….and I agree (I like them again now..I have ever since I fell for Tom Yorke’s album last year)

Whilst the big record com­pa­nies wan­der around form­lessly won­der­ing how it should be done, and suing their cus­tomers (could any com­mer­cial organ­i­sa­tion be per­ceived any more neg­a­tively than RIAA, or those it rep­re­sents?), Radio­head, who are now label free, have shown how it could be done (not should…those pos­si­bil­i­ties are too wide, to make that much of a defin­i­tive state­ment) by using the dig­i­tal world to pull every­thing along. Who cares if they make zip out of the down­loads in the very short term..look at the big­ger pic­ture, and watch it roll out.

I tried to sug­gest a sim­i­lar thing a while back…releasing a sin­gle on Limewire and Soulseek. Blank stares mov­ing towards clear hos­til­ity was the result. Giv­ing a lead sin­gle away in large quan­ti­ties adds to your long term cur­rency, not detracts.

Ok, that’ll do….

I linked a few days back to Andrew Dub­ber’s inter­view at Home­tracked, and men­tioned his down­load­able free e-book, on the new indus­try, and ways to nav­i­gate such. Since then Andrew has found him­self in the mid­dle of quite some lit­tle Inter­net firestorm. It all started when he posted a link to a post on a site called Down­load Squad. The story had to do with a law­suit a cer­tain Ms. Del Cid of Florida is fil­ing against the RIAA to counter an action the US indus­try body is tak­ing against her.

The piece on Down­load Squad is worded as a per­fectly straight­for­ward news story with a few opin­ions thrown in there, the strongest being

The RIAA has been ter­ror­iz­ing many peo­ple who they knew didn’t have any­thing to do with alleged copy­right vio­la­tions, includ­ing dead peo­ple, young chil­dren, and the elderly.

Which, I guess from the RIAA’s POV, is strong stuff, but really no more so than what is more less gen­er­ally pub­licly per­ceived. The RIAA has been roundly crit­i­cised across the spec­trum for the way it’s pur­sued down­load­ers, often very insignif­i­cant, and the mer­ci­less per­se­cu­tion of peo­ple who’s lives would likely be ruined by the action.

Andrew’s blog’s pri­mary focus is the way the new tech­nol­ogy can be utilised to advan­tage by artists and labels, and a story like this is clearly highly rel­e­vant as the result of the suit could poten­tially be prece­dent set­ting. So he linked to the story.

How­ever a cer­tain Paul Birch, owner of an inde­pen­dent UK label, Revolver Records, took excep­tion to the link and so began the astound­ing email dis­course which can be found here. Mr Birch is also a board mem­ber of the IFPI…the inter­na­tional body rep­re­sent­ing the record industry.

The back and forth was gob smack­ing, Mr Birch, clearly a man of some stand­ing in the UK’s indus­try was at times abu­sive, threat­en­ing, irra­tional and con­tra­dic­tory. But the upshot was that he gave the impres­sion of an unpleas­ant bully threat­en­ing to shut Andrew down, and make a com­plaint to his employ­ers sim­ply because Andrew linked to a site mak­ing a com­ment, under the pro­vi­sions, I guess, in the US, of the First Amend­ment. It was very ugly and unnec­es­sary. And Andrew was never less than polite and com­pletely pro­fes­sional in responses.

Mr Birch says, amongst other things:

I think that what is more desir­able is to take down links from your site that pro­mote this hatred of the record­ing Indus­try, because the assump­tion is that by link­ing to them that you sup­port the extreme view heralded.

Really?

Andrew sent through, with Mr Birch’s per­mis­sion, the con­ver­sa­tion as a part of his reg­u­lar blog email updates, and I received it on Sat­ur­day evening.

With 24 hours it had gone around the world, was highly placed on digg, had a thread on the US Indus­try forum, Vel­vet Rope, and had hit dozens of blogs.

Paul Birch was famous and for all the wrong rea­sons. He was, uni­ver­sally derided for both his stance and his nasty bul­ly­ing; Andrew’s site crashed for 24 hours because of excess traf­fic and Mr Birch had given the orig­i­nal story brand new legs.

None of which seems sur­pris­ing because look­ing at Revolver’s ter­ribe web­site and their half baked My Space, they are truly lud­dites, dinosaurs…the world has passed them by. A major inde­pen­dent UK label which has vir­tu­ally no web pres­ence, and what there is includes a bunch of badly for­mat­ted links to var­i­ous copy­right issues. This guy doesn’t under­stand the mod­ern world, but he seems to be aggres­sively obsessed by tilt­ing at it.

And as if any­thing could be more indica­tive of the hole the record indus­try finds itself it, and is dig­ging ever larger every day, our lud­dite bully boy is on the board of the world’s record­ing indus­try body (I must tell the story of the time a Blam Blam Blam mem­ber asked the pres­i­dent of said body if he had any drugs…but not now), which of course includes the RIAA as it’s largest mem­ber. The same body which is accused, on paper, screen, and now in the courts of threat­en­ing and bul­ly­ing behav­iour. Gosh…..

As an opin­ion­ated aside, look­ing at Revolver and its sub­sidiary, the imag­i­na­tively named “Heavy Metal Records” (a forth­com­ing album on the page due for release in Jan 2006!), it’s hard not to want to throw some of the blame for any pain Mr Birch might be feel­ing back in his A&R face. What an appalling cat­a­logue of shabby dated acts, dodgy live record­ings, fallen acts’ re-recordings of their hits and the like…and he’s on the board of the IFPI.

It speaks vol­umes, no?

Update:

A day later Andrew found him­self explain­ing basic copy­right para­me­ters to Mr Birch