Here is the original, but its all quoted below.

I write this to explain why I’ll be holding back my album, 1989, from the new streaming service, Apple Music. I feel this deserves an explanation because Apple has been and will continue to be one of my best partners in selling music and creating ways for me to connect with my fans.

I make lots of money from iTunes, and this could be profitable too, so I had better do enough grovelling first to let me change my mind if I have to.

I respect the company and the truly ingenious minds that have created a legacy based on innovation and pushing the right boundaries.

They are really good at marketing, just like me.

I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months.

It is shocking that anything new in the music industry does not make even more money out of fans.

I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.

Apple is really good at extracting money from consumers, so we want a slice.

This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows.

This is entirely about me, but people are horribly unsympathetic when a super-rich 25 year old complains she is not making enough money.

This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt.

That is assuming that lots of people listen to them on Apple Music, and no one buys downloads or CDs or anything, and assuming unknowns people actually make lots of money from their first single. Its not like this is an industry where a few stars make all the money of something!

This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create,

A lot of my rich and successful friends and colleagues will not make enough money out of this either.

just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field…but will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs.

I think a bit more sucking up here will make me sound better.

These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much

These are the complaints of a spoiled, petulant bunch of rich people who want more money, but are scared of upsetting Apple too much.

We simply do not respect this particular call.

We will respect a call that makes us more money.

I realize that Apple is working towards a goal of paid streaming. I think that is beautiful progress.

It would be really great if people paid to listen to streaming services, and then paid again to buy downloads. No physical product, gross margin of almost 100%. That is what I call beautiful.

We know how astronomically successful Apple has been and we know that this incredible company has the money to pay artists, writers and producers for the 3 month trial period… even if it is free for the fans trying it out.

Apple needs this to work badly enough that my friends and I can squeeze some money out of them, even if they are not making any money out of it.

Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing.

I want the money now.

I say this with love, reverence, and admiration for everything else Apple has done. I hope that soon I can join them in the progression towards a streaming model that seems fair to those who create this music. I think this could be the platform that gets it right.

Pay me from the start, then I’ll be happy.

But I say to Apple with all due respect, it’s not too late to change this policy and change the minds of those in the music industry who will be deeply and gravely affected by this.

We can squeeze pretty hard if we want to.

We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation.

…because the cost of producing an iPhone is near zero just like the cost of producing a copy of music. I may use free software to run my website, but I need more money than a geek! Its not like anyone ever produced art or music without being assured of royalties first.

So what is the real purpose? It varies, but the key in most cases is to control consumers. Consider the the Amazon Kindle and the DRM Amazon applies to books. Again, the content is available without DRM through the Kindle Cloud Reader: although, as far as I have been able to find out it is in any case fairly simple to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks, so no one bothers the more awkward process of intercepting the DRM free content in Cloud Reader.

The real purpose of Kindle DRM is to make it expensive to switch to to another device. A consumer who has a collection of books and wants to switch to another ebook reader must purchase new copies of every single book they want to keep. This ties consumers down, maintaining market share against existing competitors and making it very difficult for a new entrant into the market to gain share at all. The tech savvy minority will strip the DRM, but for the majority of customers switching will simply not be an option.

Of course many services have exceptions to DRM: much of the music Apple sells is now DRM free, and Amazon Kindle software can be used to read Kindle books on an Android tablet (and the Cloud Reader to read on any platform), but the remainder is still a very high barrier to switching. Furthermore, none of these are guaranteed to remain available: they may turn out to be a  way of leading customers into lock-in, and may be withdrawn once their purpose has been sufficiently served. In Apples case its customers are locked in in multiple ways, not just DRM, so selling some content without DRM does not loosen the lock very much.

The bottom line is that DRM is a way of limiting competition; a way of routing around free market competition.

I will leave aside my view that the government should not protect people from themselves, and, just for this post,  and, for the moment, accept the consensus that the role of the government includes forcing people to do what the government judges best.

Lets start with the missing information. What is meant by “More than 200,000 people could die early from alcohol-related diseases, accidents and violence over the next 20 years”? Does it mean that the death rate will be 200,000 more than if no one drank any alcohol? Does it mean that 200,000 people will die from diseases, accidents and violence in which alcohol is one of (many) avoidable risk factors?

Of course, as always, The Guardian, fails to but the numbers in context. 10,000 deaths a year is not a huge number in a country the size of the UK: barely over 1%. Depending on he exact meaning of the numbers, the actual number of deaths caused by (as opposed to “related to”) alcohol could be much lower and comparable with, for example, the 3,000 suicides a year. Given the distressing nature of suicide, and its impact on the friends and families of its victims, I think that is sufficient to argue it should be a higher priority.

Compare the impact of alcohol with that of bad diet (too much sugar, too much, and harmful types of, fat, etc.): . There are at least 30,000 deaths a year related to diabetes, and that is almost certainly an underestimate, and it is worsening rapidly, and it is only one of many diseases caused by unhealthy diets.  Worsening rapidly is something of an understatement: the number of people who have diabetes has doubled over the last thirty years.

Diet bring us to another issue. The health effects of different alcoholic drinks is very different:  the amount of carbohydrates in one pint of beer is comparable to an entire bottle of red wine.

That is one possible reason for the lack of correlation between alcohol consumption and life expectancy. Given that, what reason is there to think that reducing overall alcohol consumption will improve public health. In fact a WHO study found that the countries with the lowest level of alcohol related health problems are the wine drinking countries of south western Europe, many of which have very high levels of consumption.

In fact, it may even worsen public health. Moderate drinking improves life expectancy, so price increases that deterred moderate drinkers would lead to lower life expectancies. Heavy drinkers, especially very heavy drinkers, may be addicted, and will therefore be likely to spend more rather than reduce consumption. Abstaining entirely from alcohol carries a similar risk to heavy drinking, why are there no calls for government action to encourage teetotallers to start drinking?

The criticism of a government strategy that relies on voluntary cooperation from the industry, has two serious fallacies. They claim that “the primary requirement for these industries is to deliver shareholder value by maximising consumption”. This is wrong. Individual firms want to maximise profit, which is not the same as maximising consumption: the profit on one bottle of expensive wine is likely to be far more than on many bottles of plonk. It is even possible that a minimum sales price may may the industry more profitable by killing the lowest margin products.

The other fallacy is that because a businesses aim is to make a profit, it is entirely uninfluenced by anything else. Companies are run by individuals who are just as likely to act from ethical motives as anyone else, they are subject to public pressure, and the ability of governments to coerce companies to act “voluntarily” is enormous. Consider the success the government has had in getting internet service providers to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s controversial, secretive, undemocratic, ineffective and unaccountable censorship scheme.

I have become very cynical about the reasoning behind calls for action on alcohol. It seems to reflect a fixed, and puritanical, idea that alcohol is bad, rather than an assessment of evidence and likely benefits.

The last week was mostly dominated by short stories. I carried on with Poe, but am a long way from finishing his complete works.

As before, looking for free books has read me to read things I would otherwise have missed—this time a whole genre. I have always said that, with very few exceptions, I disliked crime fiction apart from that by a handful of authors (Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, and, more recently, Christie). I have now found a lot more that I like.

One was a book from which I have previously read two short stories in anthologies. The Golden Slipper : and other problems for Violet Strange.

The next was an excellent anthology The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English. I skipped some of the stories I have already, read, but it is a substantial anthology so that was not much of a loss. I discovered some authors I did not know (such as Egerton Castle: which I was amazed to discover was not a place).

The Lock and Key Library Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Old Time English was less to my taste, but it did start of with a hugely enjoyable Dickens story I have not read before, The Haunted House.

So that draws my experiment to an end. I have enjoyed it, and have read a lot that I would otherwise not have read. I can find new free books to read faster than I can complete them, and more video than I have time to watch. I am left with a backlog of downloaded but unread and unwatched books and video, which it would have been very good to be able to write up.

I am no longer bound by the conditions of the experiment, but I have no doubt that free will continue to dominate my reading and watching: its convenient, cheap, and there is no reason to look for paid except when there something I particularly want. There is no longer a need to, for example, brose bookshops looking for books to buy.

Imagine how outraged people would be if Microsoft altered Windows to only run software purchased through MS. Now imagine that they went further than tried to take charge for every thing that was read, watched, or listened to on every Windows PC?

This is exactly what Apple have been doing with iPhone’s and iPods. Software can only be installed through Apple’s own “App store”.

Now Apple have prevented ebook reader apps (i.e. software) like those from Amazon and Kobo from directing users to buying ebooks from those companies websites: all purchases that apps promote (or made through apps) must be made through apple.

Apple have done what I asked you to imagine Microsoft doing. With both Apple and Microsoft planning app stores for their PC operating systems (i.e. MacOS and Windows), we are likely to see this spread. It is unlikely that the app stores will initially be the only way to install software, but once the mechanism is in place, it is likely to get locked in.

Its worth pointing out that Linux has had the benefit of app stores (sans payment mechanisms) for a decade, but without the vendor control. Apples innovation consisted of doing what Linux does, in a technically inferior and less flexible way (no dependency handling), but integrating the payment mechanism.

It is not just an operating system that can give you this basis for making suppliers of stuff for your platform pay. What Apple is doing to Amazon, is exactly what Amazon is positioning itself to do to authors and publishers. Amazon already takes a substantial proportion of the retail price of an ebook (30% of what is left after deducting a distribution charge), a huge amount for essentially listing the book on a website and handling a payment. This is more than the author typically gets for doing the hard work. As the Kindle’s market position goes stronger they will be in a position to increase this if they wish.

Facebook now requires game developers to accept Facebook credits for in-game payments. Again, this means Facebook keeps 30%, a lot more than the game developers ever had to pay normal payment processors (sounds familiar).

The common strategy is this: you build a platform, people build applications or content for your platform, and you then charge them for the privilege. They are already committed, and you control access to the users giving you a monopoly over selling to those users.

Telecoms companies attempts to charge websites that their customers use (ending what is called “net neutrality”) is a similar strategy. You own the customers and charge for access. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that they are not charging businesses that want to receive phone calls from their customers).

Ultimately this is about controlling customers. You lock the customers into your platform. The software industry has long done this, but limited its exploitation of it to selling upgrades. Now, this control can be exploited in many ways. You have a group of customer to whom you are a gatekeeper: its like owning all the shops in town, but without the pesky attention from competition authorities that doing that would attract.

Nothing much new regarding films and video: the one film I watched was Four Eyed Monsters, which was a disappointment. Despite god reviews, and a good start, the premise of the film quickly got tedious and the characters silly and pretentious.

As for books, I enjoyed some nice light reading in F Anstey’s The Brass Bottle. I know so little about books from further back than a few decades, unless they are major works of literature. This experiment has, once again, taught me that there is a lot out there that I do not know about.

I have also read two stories from a complete (I think!) works of Poe.

I have also started reading The Wealth of Nations. This is also going to be a test of whether, as I feel is likely, hefty books are easier to read in electronic form. It is not a book I expect to complete in the next week, but I will blog further on it as I read through it (and I will be reading other books in parallel).

The most notable books were those I did not read: George Gissing’s New Grub Street had an unremitting quiet desperation in all its characters that was simply too much for me to enjoy. The Rainbow started off well, but, like all of DH Lawrene’s novels, I could not complete it. Lawrence can right powerfully, but he does go on, and on, and on.

At least they were free downloads so I had not wasted any money on them!

JM Barrie’s (as in Peter Pan) The Admirable Crichton was familiar, and I suspect I have read it a long time ago.

William Morris’s A Dream of John Ball and A Kings Lesson are as much political manifestos as stories, but, like Chesterton, Morris manages to make this enjoyable, and his depictions of people and places are beautiful.

I went back to some SF with Philip K Dick’s The Variable Man. This is not out of copyright in most countries, but is in the US. It is fun, makes an outwardly ordinary man its hero, and has an element of critique of a society drifting towards discouraging mental agility.

I discovered a great many interesting films, but only had time to watch The Lionshare, which is a superb film: original, touching, funny and full of energy.

Given that film making is supposed to be expensive, I am amazed at how many free films there are that are at least as good as their big budget Hollywood peers.

One of the reviews of it realised that my rules for this experiment neglect one important point. What about cases where piracy is encouraged by the copyright holders of the creators of a work? This is the case with the very interesting looking Ink. Not only have they said they “embrace the piracy”, but they even have a donate button on their website so that those who enjoyed a pirated copy can contribute financially.

Anyway, even though I have not watched, as the reviews are good, and their attitude is good, here is their trailer:

The only books I read completely were Genellan: Planetfall by Scott Geir (yet more SF) and Chesterton’s A Short History of England. I did spend a lot of time reading software documentation, which is free, but not really of interest in the current context!

I also dipped into two books, both of which I want to read later, but which I do not really feel inclined to read now. They are Walden and an anthology called The Best American Humorous Short Stories. I have not read enough of the former to comment on it. The latter is promising, not just as an enjoyable book, but because many of the stories are by authors I have not heard of, or who I only associated with a different type of writing (Poe funny!).

A Short History of England is the first non-fiction I have finished as part of this experiment. The latter chapters make too many references to WW1 and are clearly influenced by being written at that time — something that Chesterton’s closing comments show he was clearly aware of.

It is a great corrective to the contemporary tendency to think of the 19th and 20th centuries as a time of growing liberty, by pointing out the loss of medieval liberties that preceeded it (in passing I might add that we ignore many losses of liberty because we are accustomed to them). I do not have the knowledge of history to judge how accurate his picture of medieval life is, but it is certainly true that many movements for liberty and equality have been crushed, even that times that seemed promising: the Peasants Revolt, the Levellers and the Chartists, and, no doubt, many more that are much less well known because they failed. Chesterton makes many telling points, such as the inability of Mary to reverse her father’s dissolution of the monastaries: she was allowed to persecute the poor, but not to make the rich return what they had stolen. She, fatally to her aims, could restore the worst of Catholic England, but not its best.

I may return later to the politics of Chesterton, and the correctness of his history, but in the context of this series of posts what matters is that an out of copyright work of popular history retains the power to inform and to challenge. Its ideas remain controversial and relevant.

I started Thackeray’s Book of Snobs, but simply did not get it. I suspect the humour has dated. I tried his Men’s Wives. It has a nice balance of humour and tragedy (not exactly tragedy in the first story which has a happy ending, but a depiction of distress).

I continued reading SF with Andre Norton’s Star Soldiers, the two parts of which were originally published as separate books. When I started the second part I realised that I had read it before, and I was not that keep to re-read it (the first book is far better), I stopped there.

That brings me to one great advantage of free books: if you decide you do not like a book part way through (which has happened several times), you have not wasted any money!

I have also dipped into some non-fiction. I found a translation of part of St Augustine’s The Literal Meaning of Genesis, which Calibredid a reasonable job of converting to epub format. The book it self is not of great interest, but it disproves the misconception, shared by creationists and atheists, that creationism was the norm for Christians until the last few centuries.

I have also dipped into more non-fiction, but I will not say more until I have read more of it. One thing I wish to see is whether large and heavy books are easier to read as ebooks.

Looking for music gave me a pleasant surprise. I had expected good free music to be mostly classical. For example, I have the BBC free downloads of Beethoven’s symphonies. Sorry no link as they are no longer available. There is also unlikely to be any more free music from the BBC: the recorded music companies were upset by the competition, and, as the regulators think corporate profits are more important than utility maximisation for society as a while, it has been firmly stopped.

What I found was that Jamendo has a wide range of fairly good music. There is now an awful lot on the site, so the way to find the good stuff is by listening to their “radio” streams and looking for play lists you like.

I enjoyed some Jazz and electronic music.

Not a bad two days, and I still feel I have not even scratched the surface of what is available.

The only book for the day was Ventus by Karl Schroeder, which I read at Richard Beddard’s suggestion. It is a very difficult to describe this book, or pin down exactly why I liked it. It contrasts two very different human societies (a clash of civilisations writ large), and deals with super-intelligent artificial intelligences, but keeps the story and key characters on a human scale.

Rather to my surprise I found two really enjoyable funny videos: one a short documentary, and the other a reasonably long film.

The documentary was Crazy Golf, following the British Team in the 2005 World Mini Golf Championship, as the struggle to avoid coming last. It is only 25 minutes long.

There is a faint air of ludicrousness about the idea of international competition in crazy golf/mini golf, especially as some players obviously take it very seriously. Of course this is not fair. What other than custom makes this sport any more ludicrous than any other?

The film (only 51 minutes long) is Ginger and Snow, a Russian film showing a day in the life of a student. It is in Russian with English sub-titles.

It is hard to understand the plot, or character’s motivations, or, in general, understand what is going on. Despite it feeling somewhat bizarre, the comedy works and the film as a whole is absorbing.

It is beautifully shot in black and white, and this does add to the enjoyment.

At the end of the first week of this experiment, I no longer fear that there will be any problem in finding enough to read and watch to keep me going: there is enough out there for years, if not a lifetime. The problem is now whether I can cover a sufficient sample in just a month.