Pete Townsend gets it SO wrong

I've just listened to the inaugural annual BBC John Peel lecture, given by elderly rock dinosaur Pete Townsend.

Read a BBC report HERE

Watch the lecture HERE

I expected him to ramble on about how great the old record industry was and to whinge about piracy and modern distribution methods for music. Well, fortunately he don't do quite what I expected. Unfortunately, though, he still delivered a rambling, incoherent and confused set of contradictions.

He went into some detail about how John Peel (pbuh) had acted as a filter, an introducer, a source of glorious random discovery of unexpected but brilliant music. He then went on to assert that such a person or process didn't exist in the modern digital music economy. He then went on to list many of the ways it actually DOES exist in the modern digital economy. Like I said, confused and contradictory.

He clearly had no real idea about podcasts or music blogs, despite talking about them.

Like everyone from the dying music industry or the radio industry, he made no mention of netlabels. They are not mentioned so often in discussions about the music industry that it has to be deliberate.

Next year, let's hope the BBC picks a speaker not because he was a member of some old band who made some good records 40 years ago but someone who actually has a finger on the pulse of emerging creative music. They're out there, BBC.

To use modern parlance, epic fail BBC! What a sadly wasted opportunity.

Cassettes

In these days when the traditional mainstream music industry is in freefall and anyone can make and release tunes very easily, some people are messing about with older physical formats - I guess there's a certain perception of 'coolness' about releasing your music on 7 inch vinyl for example. I've been aware that a few people have been releasing on the crappiest old format of all, the cassette. Here's a picture of some I saw today. I have no particular ideological objection to cassettes (apart from thinking they're shit) but to charge £12.99 for a cassette is nothing less than blatant thievery. Rough Trade should be ashamed of themselves.