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.

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