Jazz Hands

The man who has taken over EMI and intends to shed a third of its staff isn’t just about the asset-stripping. Some of the changes Guy Hands is making, which are aimed directly at cost-cutting, make sense; duplication can indeed be cut right down, while the fact that 85 per cent of what the company releases makes no money and 30 per cent of its artists who receive advances never go on to make albums shows that things could definitely improve.

At yesterday’s meeting for all staff at the Odeon cinema in Kensington, however, he also presented other ideas for generating money in the harsh new music download world—among them, this:

“Football teams have very distinct corporate sponsorship. Why shouldn’t some of the leading bands have the same sort of relationships?”

As an example, he said EMI could help bands who would not make it on the international stage find local sponsors who want to break into the student market. [Financial Times]

[Poll #1122119]

Straw man

The English ban on prosecutors talking to alleged rape victims, unknown elsewhere, is expected to disappear this year when prosecutors have been retrained. Director of public prosecutions Sir Ken MacDonald said: “This ban stems from the days when mostly private prosecutions were brought with bribed witnesses. It is the origin of the phrase ‘man of straw’: they used to stand outside court with straws in their shoes to signify their testimony could be bought.” To stop the practice, prosecutors were banned from speaking to witnesses outside the hearing itself. “In typical English fashion, this then lasted for ever.” [Guardian]

RIAA

At the tail end of last year the Recording Industry Association of America was said to be pursuing a case against a man for ripping 2,000 tracks from CDs he already owned for use in his personal computer and MP3 player. This seemed to be bonkers even for the notoriously overzealous RIAA, and it’s some relief that it turns out not be the case; they’re actually pursuing him for 2,000 tracks he downloaded illegally. However, the fact that no-one disbelieved that the RIAA would be quite content to pursue you in your own home for in any way duplicating items that you owned outright shows that any respect it might once have had as a representative body is dwindling fast, and this site (Their motto: “Proofreading is for losers who aren’t busy getting their photo taken!”) thinks it may soon be losing its funding from the record companies. It won’t be particularly missed.

Picture nabbed from The Modern Humorist.

"#Purple Hain, purple Hain..."

The possibility that the “think tank” that Peter Hain’s rogue £103,000 was channelled through is phoney is an intriguing one. The Progressive Policies Forum doesn’t even show any signs of thinking; it does nothing but exist—even “sentient tank” might be stretching it—while it appears that the funds went into the PPF and were transferred out on the same day, which, by a bizarre coincidence, looks an awful lot like money-laundering. In fact the only thing that mitigates against the PPF having been set up purely as a slush fund is that, as this article says, “that seems unlikely. It's difficult to see how any rational person could ever think it would work”—but that’s not a defence I’d want to rely on in court. I can’t help but be reminded of when, in the mid-1990s, the Tories were found to have set up unconvincing front companies to launder their own donations. Note to the faithful, though: just because this was a shifty, unscrupulous Tory habit does not make it okay for Labour to do it too.

Apparently, because Hain initially declared that he had received £82,000 in donations to fight for the deputy leadership, he had to fork over a mandatory 15 per cent (£11,550) to the Labour party. When he eventually revealed the existence of the extra £103,000, he suddenly found himself owing the party 15 per cent of that as well—around £16,000. He is said to have “no immediate plans” to cough this up, as would most of us if suddenly faced with a similar unexpected bill. Then again, Gordon Brown himself has been lax in paying his 15 per cent to the party—he appears to have paid £0 of the £32,355 he owes—but in his case there will doubtless be a perfectly sound, principled reason for this, as opposed to the “incompetence” he has ascribed to his own minister this afternoon.