Alex Harries's diary

Well folks, that's all from me. As of 5pm last night I ceased to be an employee of the University of Portsmouth Students' Union. Tom Worman has officially taken over the reins of the Media & Publications Officer role, and as I speak is probably swinging 50 new projects into action.

I've been employed by the Union in one capacity or another for one month short of the last six years, so it's quite strange to think that yesterday was the last time I'd be poking around the place as an employee. In my time there, I've learnt to pull the perfect snakebite (although I've probably forgotten how to, as well) as a bar monkey, put together and run a sound system and lighting rig as an ents monkey, been involved in designing, building and running the website as a pixel monkey, and - for the last year - been the media officer, looking after the Union's student media output.

I've made a few friends, upset plenty of people, and been given some very cool opportunities, so really this is a thankyou from me to everyone who's made the last six years - and especially the last year - as fun, interesting, and challenging as it could have been. To all the staff and students I may have upset with my git-like behaviour, please remember it was never personal (if it was, I would have told you explicitly!).

I'm not sure what's next for me. I have a one-way ticket to Ibiza booked for this Saturday, and I'll be out there looking for a job and a flat with next year's Pugwash editor Steph Hall. We might only survive a week and find there's nowhere to live, or we might get lucky and make it through the last two months of the summer season - I really don't know. If you fancy laughing at me, join the Facebook group and I'll keep you updated on the latest stupid thing I've done...

Anyway, I'm off properly now. I'll be over at Greyhead.co.uk and no doubt in the news soon for being involved in some embarrassing scandal involving a goat and a nudists' beach in Ibiza.

Rena, Elle, Mike, Steve, Jaf, Fraggy, Tom, Jacob, Tallie, Laura, Pete, other Pete, Ben, Darby, other Steve, Jo, Karen, Tracey, Cherelyn, Sharon, Graeme, Wayne, Cat, Gamel, other Tom, Aakash, Caroline, Gina, Fred, Maz, Sloppy, Carl, Clive, Jim, Ryan, Rob, Hannah, Bex, Shrey, Rich, Alex, Scott, Janet, Stuart, John, Mario, Adrian... ok, «everyone» at the Union: thanks :) 

Good luck Tom, goodbye everybody and, of course, bloody cheers :o)

/al

Rejoice! As my time at the Union draws to a close, I've actually managed to get myself organised and have moved my blog over to a new interwebsite - none other than Greyhead.co.uk. Huzzah!

So, apart from a few work-related bits and bobs on here, if you want to keep up with my Fascinatingly Interesting Life, you'll need to come over to the new website.

Huge thanks go to Clive at Meteoric for providing the hosting for the new website (as well as UPSU.net) at a great rate.

And, just as soon as I can figure out how this interweb malarky works, I'll be putting up some podcasts of my latest mixes.

(Please note: everything in this post was written tongue in cheek. Apart from the thanks to Clive - he really is a top chap. So please don't think I actually think my life is interesting. It isn't. Apart from the bits where I get to hang out with wild llamas. That's pretty cool...) 

Mini-update time:

• Ibiza: Steph and I have booked our flights back to 'beefa for the 2nd August. We're outta here, baby!
• DJing: new mixer arrived today. Nothing spectacular at all - just a (very) cheap 'n cheerful Behringer mixer (with an instruction manual featuring a late-80's photo of the German chap who runs the company complete with a very shiny comb-over, saying "Hi, I'm so-and-so and I'd like to thank you for buying my mixer", etc etc etc). Fun times.
• New website: Greyhead.co.uk has its own hosting, courtesy of the amazingly Clive at Meteoric. You want super-fast, reliable web hosting with a personal touch? Go speak to Clive, and tell him Bob sent you... I'm currently tweaking a Wordpress installation and working out how to get it to automagically generate podcasts. Wee!
  
• Mixes and podcasts: to kick off the new website, mixer, Final Scratch's resurrection (I finally got it working again on the Mac - woo), and my impending trip to Ibiza, I'm going to knock together a few mixes and podcast them from the new site. If you fancy some free tuneage, I'll stick a big "get the Greyhead house music podcast here" link in the side-bar of the blog once I've figured out how to use the incredibly good Podcast Maker from Lemonzdream.com
• Photos: the Nikon D50 is lovely - very fast, very easy to use, and produces great photos. What more could you ask for? :o)

Sadly (for my colleagues) I'm back to work next Monday - boo. Still, it's only 2 1/2 more weeks left before Ibiza - yey!

One tune which will definitely be leaving an indelible imprint on the memories of clubbers in Ibiza this year will be Paul Keeley's "Homecoming". The tune's floaty synths coupled with the chugging bassline will have no trouble getting even the most laid-back clubbers to work up a sweat, and I promise you'll remember exactly where you were when you first heard it played out.

I can't remember whether I heard this at Space or in Paul Van Dyk's amazing Cream Amnesia set, or if I imagined it and actually heard it somewhere else, but I don't care - this is an absolute builder :o)

£1.99 at Beatport now :o) (out on Anjunabeats)

Two things have been bugging me today. The first is reviews - mainly, in this case, music reviews. I'm going to preface what I'm about to say with this disclaimer; this is just a question. Nothing more, nothing less.

Ok, with that out of the way, my question is this: is there a significant number of publication readers who actually bother to read beyond the first 50 words of a review of a single or album? And of the minority who definitely do, do the extra however-many-hundred words make a significant difference to the opinions they'd already formed from reading the first 50?

I'm only asking because I have a gut-feeling that the shorter and snappier you can express your thoughts about a tune which might only last 3 1/2 minutes, or an album which someone might pay £10 for and then only listen to in its entirety once or twice, the more likely you are to actually influence someone's buying decision.

And that, surely, is the whole point of writing (and by extension, reading) music reviews?

Note that I think, if anything, the opposite is true of gig and event reviews - the more you info you can provide, the better (bitesize chunks though - great big monolithic blocks of text are only attractive to Sunday supplement readers).

Anyway, onto the second thing that's annoyed me today: territory restrictions when you're trying to buy music over t'interweb.

If you use the iTunes store, you probably won't have run into this phenomenon as iTunes simply doesn't (as far as I remember) show you the songs which you can't buy in your country, but for users of websites like BeatPort - a major provider of quality tuneage - it can get just the tiniest bit annoying to be told "Sorry, you can't buy this track as it is unavailable in your territory".

This, apparently, is a result of the licensor (usually the record label) restricting sales to one geographic region.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is buy a copy of Eric Prydz's "Pjanoo" (stupid name, epic song) and the new Man With The Red Face remix (again, awesome tuneage).Will the bloody website let me? Will it b******s!

Now, I understand that there are arguments for this which appear perfectly sensible when they're explained by a record company drone, but the simple explanation here seems to be that, on the globally-available world-wide interwebnet thing, it's once again the record labels that are cashing in a short-term profit by restricting sales to a territory.

In the long run, though, it's the whole music industry that loses out, since the vast majority of people who are really keen to get hold of a track and find they can't get it through legitimate means will simply turn to illegal sources, for example torrent sites. Get enough people into the habit of checking the torrent sites before they look at the legal download shops, and all the hard work put in by the online record stores to make it easy to buy fair-priced music online goes out the window.

I don't expect the online music shops to cut off their noses to spite their faces so to speak - if they simply don't stock a track, then the people who could have bought it (i.e. the people in territories which the record labels will allow it to be sold to) miss out as well, and the record shop doesn't benefit either.

So, once again it's down to the record labels, PR companies, and (in a few cases), the artists themselves to be less selfish - sorry, it's the only word I can think of here - and to accept the fact that the global music distribution landscape is changing, and their actions will determine whether they sink or swim.

Anyway, it's just a thought.

If you're looking to buy albums and singles online, you could do much worse than check out DJ Download or About 16 more words in this entry