Dear friends. Tonight marks our 10 year anniversary. We shall celebrate the occasion at Club Infektio in Helsinki, TONIGHT.

Join us.

We’re on a lovely mobile broadband connection here, wishing you were here.

EDIT: And that’s that. Unfortunately mr. Eskola decided to protect the streaming computer from his wild stage antics by closing the lid of the laptop. Hence, no video from Riga for you.

This is live video and audio stream from Tallinn / Club Rockstars. Älymystö will perform at 23:00 (in 40 mins), followed by ATYD around midnight. Enjoy!

11PM local.
9PM GMT.
4PM EST.
1PM PST.

EDIT: Unfortunately justin.tv had a hiccup just as we were saving the stream, and nothing got archived. Which is annoying, as this may have been a pretty nice set. If anyone has tips on how to recover a lost stream, let us know, OK?

Anyways, thanks for watching, we seemed to get a pretty nice crowd tonight. Tomorrow it’s Riga for us, hopefully with a net connection. If we can get our filthy paws on one, expect to see OVRO, us, and NIKO SKORPIO live tomorrow.

EDIT2: Internet problems are no obstacle for our furious skills. Click here for the show. Audio is direct from the board this time.

Danger, Will Robinson – the button doesn’t open a new browser page!

People usually blog about restaurants and bars only when they get crap service, some exceptions aside. I thought I’d write a bit about nice customer service I, or we, got in Helsinki’s Schönes Freulein restaurant.

In the last Band Camp I realised that my second theremin (aka sparemin) was missing from my instrument bag. The last time I remembered seeing it was last October, when we were playing in City newspaper’s Best in Helsinki gala, where we were nominated as the best noise in Helsinki. We had to do a quick exit from the stage and it was possible the theremin had fallen out of my bag then.

The evening had been fun, not the least because of the nice service we got. We as a bunch didn’t feel that much at home amongst the celebrity party scene, so after our short gig we asked a waiter if there was some peaceful nook in the restaurant. He let us in to an another floor, which was actually closed for the customers in general. The guy kept checking on us and refilling our beers – we had a fun evening, with what felt like a private floor of the bar. I actually meant to send positive feedback about it, but of course I forgot.

The gala was a half a year ago and the place is quite busy, so I didn’t except a whole lot when I mailed the restaurant and asked if they had found this small black box with an antenna jutting out of it. The theremin isn’t that expensive in the end, but replacing it would have been a bitch. The ones I use are hand made by this guy in the States and I’m not sure if he’s still in business. And yeah, even the modest expense would have made an uncomfortable dent in my finances right now.

Surprise surprise, the manager mailed me back a couple of days later with the news that the theremin had been found by the technics guy, who had saved it, and it was waiting for me in the checkstand of the place. So I just got home, with the sparemin intact apart from a couple of new beer splashes.

So, thanks to the staff for a nice customer service both in the gala evening and in taking care of the instruments of drunken noise musicians for half a year.

(Photo by Graphixar.)

Almost every day we can read or hear some of the old-guard media assholes slowly turning their heads and understanding that piracy in it’s current, most common form – the digital download – is not a crime. But there’s still a long road to travel. Luckily, there are people in the influential positions not scared shitless to say how they really think things are.

Just few weeks ago Jason Holtman from Valve, one of the biggest game production companies in the world, was talking at Game Business Law Summit, explaining the ways to really solve one of the huge reasons why people do digital downloads instead of paying for the stuff. Now this is games, but the same thing goes with film.

“We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia,” Holtman says of Valve. “The reason people pirated things in Russia,” he explains, “is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television — they say ‘Man, I want to play that game so bad,’ but the publishers respond ‘you can play that game in six months…maybe.’ ”

“We found that our piracy rates dropped off significantly,” Holtman says, explaining that Valve makes sure their games are on the shelves in Moscow and St. Petersberg, in Russian, when they release it to North America and Western Europe.

The final sacred cow that Holtman took a stab at was the issue of piracy. “There’s a big business feeling that there’s piracy,” he says. But the truth is: “Pirates are underserved customers.”

I think the last line is really one of the best ways to put the problem, and the companies – in game, film and music – who understand this will evolve their products and distribution to meet the needs of the people out there and will survive the next 5-10 years.

A British distribution company Revolver tried this also few months ago, and released their horror film Mum & Dad simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, as a download, and as VOD. One would think that since this has never been done before that the industry would be following with a great interest on how the new radical approach – which really tries to deliver a film day-and-date to all media distribution platforms – would work. But instead, the cinema association wrote an open letter and asked the cinemas across UK to boycott the film, since it’s taking them out of business.

So yes, there’s still a long road ahead, a lot of concrete-headed wankers scared as hell and ready to put their full arsenal and throw it against the new technology.

But the ex-boss of EMI Norway, Per Eirik Johansen, puts it very clearly:

“No one has ever won a battle when fighting against new technology,”

Mr. Johansen used to be a valiant fighter against pirates while still working on EMI, but now that he’s working on his own label, he has come out of the closet and is talking his mind freely.

He now believes the music industry’s fight against piracy has been useless and says he disagrees with the assertion that illicit file-sharing is the same as theft. Referring to an earlier EMI anti-piracy initiative, Johansen noted, “The message of that campaign is that there is a reason why we have copyright, and I agree.”

“But the main thing is that a whole generation already violates copyright, and the only thing we can do now is find better solutions,” he says pragmatically.

Quotes from GameDaily’s article and TorrentFreak’s article.

In 2004, a man named Chris Anderson came up with a theory he was calling The Long Tail. It was an idea of the future of shopping in the environment where shelf space is unlimited – that is, of course, online.

Mr. Anderson’s theory dictated that in the future people will start buying a much wider spectrum of products online, now that they are easilly available, and they don’t have to stick with blockbusters – suggesting that in the future the blockbusters would die, and the future of business would be “selling less of more”.

Anderson called this Long Tail, because, instead of the traditional way where people buy what’s popular, so you need to sell popular stuff in order to make money, consuming habits scatter through a much wider range of products along the long tail of the marketing curve (as shown on the graph on the left, stolen from New Scientist.)

Now, the latest results of the Internet shops claim that mr. Anderson was wrong: it is still the blockbusters that rule. For example, Internet music business, that was one of the great examples of the long tail in effect, shows that out of 13 million tracks only 52,000 (0,4%) cover over 80% of the sales made online, and rest remain virtually untouched. And the same phenomenon keeps on repeating through most of the products on the Internet.

As an example, let’s take HIM and Älymystö, and a music store owner who wants to sell great ambient industrial noise. According to the traditional way, he’d have to sell HIM instead of Älymystö, because that’s what people were buying and that’s what kept him paying the bills. Now, according to Long Tail theory, he takes his shop off the street and moves it to the Internet, and starts selling Älymystö and hundreds of other noise musicians in addition of HIM and The Rasmus, and he would’ve believed he’d make the same income by more people buying only few units of different noise musicians that are wonderfully available through his webstore.

But what happens, he still finds out it’s the HIM the people buy, and nobody buys any units of Älymystö or other great stuff he’d loved to sell. So no matter the fact that now there’s a much wider range of stuff available, people still stick to the big sellers instead of exploring the tail.

This is also shown with Levyvirasto’s recent statement of the inexistent Long Tail effect there: half of the small bands at Levyvirasto don’t sell any units.

According to New Scientist, who wrote an interesting article on this topic, it’s because buying blockbusters is, in addition of being easy way to get entertainment, a way to belong to a bigger group, and that’s what people are all about: belonging to a group. Sort of depressing, but not very surprising.

But I still believe that Long Tail effect does exist, it just takes a much, much longer time for it to actually work. The evolution of consuming is, in the Internet era, always thought of taking maximum of 5 years and after that everything is changed. I’m much more skeptic, and even most of the small changes will take at least 6-10 years to actualize. Also, I think there’s a problem in the marketing – people are still fed with this blockbuster mentality, and the idea of “start exploring” still means “oh, HIM has done other albums, too!”, instead of really getting people excited of digging deeper into the long tail.

RIAA has stopped suing individuals, but makes the ISPs the Judges of the Internets.

“I will bang my fist on this concrete wall until it crumbles down”, he said. “It’s not going break, however hard you hit it”, they said. “Fuck you, I’ve got bigger fists and harder knuckles than all of you together,” he replied, and continued banging.

After few hours, he stopped. His fist was all bloody and bones of his hand were all shattered. Everybody had already left, except for the five guys who were charging people to come over and watch “the stupid man who bangs the wall”. They were bored as well, but were doing well financially. But he hadn’t stopped, yet! He stood up, wiped the blood off of his hands and went inside the house. Returning, he was dragging the janitor, and now bellowing him to continue his job.

So the bloodiest battle the Internet ever saw went on.

Backstage in Riga, November 2007.

Greetings children. We will play a live show in Dog’s Home, Tampere, 8th of this month, which happens to be next saturday. The event has free entrance so come along and get merrily wasted while wondering what does our fresh mind do on stage.

The teaser of AJ Annila’s, the director of Jade Warrior, horror film Sauna has just been released, and to accompany it, a website with a nice little text game, with the background soundscape by Älymystö (song Periplaneta A. from Atomgrad.

The trailer:

And visit the website here.

- Mr. V.