It's generally very depressing reading the newspaper, which I why I don't do it terribly often. I used to read two newspapers every day, then one, then one now and then plus a glance at the Financial Times in the office, then none except at weekends. Now I just buy The Telegraph pretty much other Saturday. Physically, most of it goes straight in the bin because I throw away property, travel, weekend (except for the crossword), magazine, motoring etc etc. I read the money section now and then. I read the first part of the sport section about football. But mostly I just read the main section.
Now and then you do stumble across some good news, though. I was trying to think of the last time I read some really good news, and I had to cast my mind back a few months to the time when I read that Mr. Robbie Williams, the world's most famous karaoke singer, had gone on strike. Not only are we to be denied his dreary warblings for some time, but apparently he may also be sued for countless gazillions. He probably won't even notice: his record company (EMI, the same people who once paid $50 million to Mariah Carey to NOT make any more records) gave him EIGHTY MILLION QUID to make four records so he must have some of it left. Sometimes the good news veers into the surreal: Mr. William's manager is quoted as saying that EMI is acting like a "plantation owner", implying that Mr. Williams is being treated as a slave. What planet are these nauseating people living on?
Anyway, I was thinking that as bands stop behaving like farmers and instead adjust to the new realities of the "intellectual property" business (despite their products not being property in any real sense of the word and not being intellectual in any way at all) the inevitable adjustment will be that the cost of recorded music will fall to zero and the cost of live music will soar, as the market prices the economically scarce resource appropriately.
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