Kraftwerk: We are the robots - sound pioneers Kraftwork

Check out this 3o min documentary on Kraftwork. You might find it interesting in terms of sound and sound design. Kraftwerk: We are the robots. Marc Riley traces the career of Kraftwerk, whose 70s electronic music owed more to the experimental German classical compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen than to any pop tradition. When you've listened comment on it here. Enjoy. (I've fixed the link now Kym)

User generated content

There is an enormous amount of material provided by people who are not media professionals. Referred to as User Generated content (UGC), some is obviously derived from consumers while at other times its less clear. Even the Royal Television Society has an award for the best use of UGC. This was recently won by Sky News " in recognition of its groundbreaking work in getting users involved in content and distributing video news." The UGC award was won by Skys's Green Week, which saw people throughout the country invited to help create a snapshot of climate change. In addition to special reports, exclusive interviews and practical advice, contributors were invited to make a video about the environment. Sky are not the only industry professu=ionals making use of UGC. Jake reports that Sony and Yahoo have collaborated on a venture to use this content. Michael makes the point of the implications of the use of UGC on journalists and broadcasters. Rob also highlights the way that the media industry feels threatened by UGC and while they expect to be making money from it over the next few years they are unsure as to exactly how!

Blu Ray and HD DVD

In this weeks session we talked about these competing High def DVD formats. Here is a basic round up of the formats. It should clarify the issue for you, albeit slightly!

NEWS from week starting 5th November

How much to download music?

Several weeks ago Radiohead released their latest album 'In rainbows' by making it available for download at whatever price the customer wants to pay. As a differnet approach to marketing and pirating it has been closely watched by the record and media industries. In July Prince provided his Planet Earth LP free with the Mail on Sunday provoking anger from the music biz and retailers (see this guardian piece). Free CD's on magazines are not new - they provided the lynch pin for Bath based Future Publishing - but this was the first studio album. (BBC website). However for Radiohead the figures are now coming in and showing that rather than downloading the album from the Radiohead website fans are still preferring to use bit torrents provided by Peer-to-peer sites. Why might that be?

A recent Canadian commissioned survey on P2P found that Down loaders actually buy MORE music. So why the fuss?