Almost, but not quite. Jesus, Stuarts of London... really? At no point did you see the way the votes were going and think 'let's quietly kill this, or lie and say, I don't know, Kele from Bloc Party or something'.
Noel Gallagher won.
Let's look at Noel when he's dressed up, shall we?
Noel, there, with that guy who was in the Chilcot Enquiry. Yeah, that's stylish.
Noel beat Liam Gallagher - yes, the next-most-stylish rock star is a bloke who wears fussy parkas and Lennon specs. Third place was Alex Turner.
This could also, you appreciate, a list of pop stars that the people who run a London trouser shop might have heard of. Best to approach it on that basis.
There's a survey been gathered by Netmums, which is a bit like Mumsnet but with its name the other way round; they're attempting to work out when childhood ends by asking parents what they think.
Only 23% spend time reading compared to 41% of their parents at the same age, while half the number of modern tweens listen to music (17%) compared to their parents (39%).
The musical sky is falling in! The musical sky is falling in!
But hang on a moment. The summary of the findings isn't exactly scientifically worded. Take this bit:
Parents also slammed retailers provision for tween fashion, especially for girls, with over half (54%) angry that stores only provide 'clothes that can be too sexual, such as overtly short skirts or crop tops'.
It's a valid concern, certainly. But did the research actually ask parents if they were "angry"? Or just if they agreed it was happening? And the word "only" in there is suspising. Stores only sell clothes that can be too sexual? The "only" seems quite definitive, but the "can be" seems more vague.
And what does this mean about the other 46%? Are they okay with the idea? Do they not believe the proposition?
Perhaps in the original research this question is a bit clearer, but without access to that data, all we've got is a presentation that has been designed to generate headlines.
So, we should approach this finding with caution. But even if you take it at face value, are less than one-in-five tweens listening to music?
Almost certainly not. It's probably more a generational difference in what constitutes "listening to music". Across the last generation, music has crept more and more inside personal devices, listened to through earbuds, with silent, gestural interfaces; music is purchased remotely and doesn't enter the house in plastic bags, making its arrival harder to spot.
And while a parent can think back and recall that at a social gathering, they listened to music, they're less able to judge if "listening to music" is part of an event that is pitched to them as "having mates over".
And there's probably a smidge of generational snobbery in there too - when I had a young, fresh face, i can recall scraggier, more wrinkly people telling me that my generation didn't really listen to music.
For their cohort, it was communal experience, rolling ciggies on the album sleeve and communing with the music, whereas us lot? We just had it on in the background and stuck photos of popstars in scrapbooks.
Are the current generation of parents any different? Kids today don't listen to music like Justin Jespen. It's not like them and The Spice Girls, where you had to really pay attention to understand the message.
So, less than one-in-five tweens listening to music? We could try asking them directly. But we'll have to wait until they've finished making their Harlem Shake video.
Müllensiefen is an academic at Goldsmiths college, which provides a worrying aspect to his findings, drawn from talking to 2,000 people. Let's just hope, then, that he just happened to choose the wrong person 2,000 times for his research, as the findings are - well, let's be fair to the good doctor and go with "miserable" rather than "unlikely-sounding".
Let's start with that one in the headline up there - 1 in 3 people can think of a song that's better than sex. Now, I love music, a very great deal. A very, very great deal. And music is there for me. It got me through some barren times. And maybe at those points, I could have told myself that 'these songs are better than sex'. But, just as when you walk home in tears and throw your takeaway over a hedge and mutter to yourself "he stinks anyway", you know you're just being brave.
Music is a great replacement. It's a wonderful comfort. Like instant coffee, it can give you warmth and a sense of flavour and tell you that it's going to be alright.
Now, I'm told that sex can sometimes be pretty underwhelming, that it isn't so great all the time. But this poll is putting one single song up against sex as a category; I guess some fair-minded people may have approached the question scientifically and gone with the median point in their sexual history rather than the night they'd normally think about if they were in bed alone, only they're not because they're thinking of this one song instead. But surely an academic would make that clear in their report? "1 in 3 people can think of a song that's better than the mid-point sex they had in a declining relationship'.
But if 1 in 3 people are telling this doctor that they know a song which is better than sex, then the headline is not that music is great, but 33% of us are either doing sex totally wrong, or not at all, or both.
But hang on. There's more. For this isn't 660 people thinking of 660 different tracks. Apparently, the group think goes deep enough that Spotify have managed to draw up a chart of songs which are better than sex.
Which they have hen shared with us.
And so we can now discover these better-than-sex tunes. I shall give you a moment to go and slip on something a little looser. To take the phone off the hook. To close the curtains. And to send children out the room.
Ready? Here we go...
Livin' On A Prayer - Bon Jovi.
Yes, because what could be more erotic than a song about people trying to survive during a withdrawal of labour following a problem down at the docks? On this basis, Boys From The Blackstuff would be better than never having to use the safeword.
Meatloaf - Bat Out Of Hell
- Do you want sex, honey?
- Oh, no, because I'm humming along to a bloke in a frilly shirt two sizes too small for him spitting in my face as he tells me that nothing ever grows in his rotting old hole.
- Yes, I surely can't compete with that
Robbie Williams - Angels (I'm not embedding that, but you know how it goes; like one of the Kray twins has had a bit too much ginger wine at a party.)
I'm not sure people really mean that this is better than sex; it's surely rather the phrase "sex on fire" is guaranteed to make you never want to have sex again, coming as it does with the imagery of a large course of penicillin and needing to wear very, very loose-fitting trousers for two or three months, while having to send out postcards to your exes.
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
Better than sex? Even if you buy the idea that it's actually possibly to find a scale upon which you could measure both 'sex' and 'songs', and even if you travel far enough along that hypothesis to conclude that some songs might outrank sex, we are expected to believe that this is the track for which the gap between 'sexy sex' and 'music' gets to be the greatest. Really?
Really?
Did 660 people get halfway down the street from the interviews and all clutched their heads and say "sex! That thing with two or more people and rubbing! I thought he was talking about those new Dyson handdriers. God, I told him that I thought the overblown and overplayed Queen song BoRap was better than sex, when all I really meant was that it's a bit better than waving your hands through a jet of hot sterile air. And, to be honest, if there was some way of using a Dyson to dry your armpits Madonna-style, I wouldn't even have handed Queen that victory. Boy, I hope another six-hundred odd people don't make the same mistake, or else the results are going to look a bit crazy."
There's some other findings - apparently people will still lazily yell "Marvin Gaye" when asked any question about music and sex; the hum-and-humping survey equivalent of premature ejaculation.
Because, let's face it, there's nothing sexy about Sexual Healing - as soon as Marvin announces that he's got a heart like an oven, the moment has gone. Your heart is like what? An empty box with a light at the top and a stain that's baked on which might be cheese sauce from the Christmas before last? Is it a gas oven? Are you saying your heart is wanting me to be some sort of Sylvia Plath figure? Put the fucking lights on, give me back my shorts, I am GOING HOME.
Other people, asked to name a song that's best for "flirting on the dance floor" choose Lady In Red.
No, I thought that - 'it must be a different song' - but they say Chris DeBurgh. And no, it's not a different Chris DeBurgh, either, or a typo. It might just be Daniel Müllensiefen including a response so unbelievable he's actually sending a coded message; that he's sat handcuffed to a radiator somewhere thinking 'surely people will realise that my claiming Lady In Red is a flirty song is a signal that the Lobster People have stormed my office and are keeping me as a pet; surely now help will come?'
But let's assume it's not. ("Ha! Your plan failed" snurfles the King Of The Lobster People.)
First of all, where on earth would you be that plays Lady In Red - to dance to, under circumstances that would mean the dancefloor has people on it with whom you would wish to flirt? Seriously, in even the circumstances of the most ill-judged office party booking, long, long before Dave Doubledecks opens up the Chris DeBurgh jewel case anyone with whom you might ever want to flirt would have abandoned the event.
More bizarrely, even if you did manage to maintain an interest in sex, or living, while Lady In Red plays, how would you be flirting to it? It's a slow song. It's an end of the night song (or, more honestly for its target audience, it's a 'you better leave now if you want to make it home for Emmerdale' song.)
If you're going up to someone and flirting with them while Lady In Red plays, you've missed your opportunity. You're turning up too late. And if you're just continuing a flirt from the previous song - which would have been Agadoo - your flirting if failing.
Finally, for our dip into these statistics:
40% of people think listening to music is more arousing than touch during sex
Sorry? Only six people out of every ten get more sexually aroused by touching their partner than by having Westwood on in the corner of the room?
There's some fascinating data tucked into the Columbia University study of music collections in Germany and the US.
The first, and most important thing to notice, is that people who get a lot of files they shouldn't have tend to have more files that they have paid for.
(This isn't a surprise; we've seen these reports before.)
This, though, is the bit that should make sphincters tighten in offices where music is sold:
Around 79% of 18-29 year olds have music files, compared to only 14% of those over 64.
That, then, means that one in five young Americans have no music collection at all - or at least, none that are digitised.
It could mean that the survey spoke to a surprising number of hipsters who only buy hand-woven vinyl records; or possibly that a lot of American youngsters have become unshackled listeners, happy to just suck down tracks from a streaming service like Spotify whenever they need music.
Or it could just mean that twenty per cent of American young people have decided they don't need to collect music.
That presents one hell of a structural problem if you business relies on people amassing collections of songs.
Top line stats from the eMusic research, which questioned 1000 music fans (some eMusic users, some not), include that 91% said they preferred to own tracks because there were no limitations on listening, while 86% said they felt ownership offered more security, ie tracks aren’t likely to randomly disappear. 76% said they used streaming services to discover and sample music that they might then buy, and, presumably as a result of that fact, 74% said they wouldn’t pay to access streaming platforms.
What eMusic don't reveal is how far the desire to earnown dwindles as you head towards younger respondents - the assumption has always been that the so-called 'digital natives' have seldom bought physical product and, thus, would be more comfortable with the idea of not having a digital collection. You suspect if the findings had overturned this conventional assumption, eMusic would be making a bit more of it.
Following the shutdown of Limewire, music industry research monkeys NPD were quick to claim a significant victory:
[T]he percentage of Internet users who download music via peer-to-peer services was at 9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to 16 percent in the same period earlier in 2007
As Alan Wexelblat points out, that is pretty impressive, given that Limewire didn't shut down until, erm, the fourth quarter of 2010:
The claim, then, is that an event that happened in the last 3 months of a three year period somehow caused a retroactive drop? Either that violates causality as I understand it, or someone in the P2P industry has invented time travel and isn't sharing it. Or maybe, NPD is full of shit[...]
To cut NPD a small amount of slack here, they do admit that former LimeWire users are moving to other sharing networks. But really, this is just marketing puffery. NPD has no idea what caused the drop in self-reported file sharing over the past three years. Maybe it was that people thought it was an increasingly bad idea to admit that they used LimeWire to random marketers when there was a relentless stream of bad headlines about LimeWire.
It's possible that the drop was also caused by more people coming online, and those new users less interested in peer-to-peer filesharing and such pursuits, just wanting to watch video or make Skype calls to grandchildren.
Still, if the music industry really does believe the drop in figures are significant, it must be sucking a thoughtful tooth - a big drop in filesharing activity without actually having the need for an expensive, fractious court case. Money well spent.
Music Week reports on a couple of surveys about unlicensed music:
The debate around P2P and its impact on music sales is never short of controversy and now two new studies have been published which reveal the extreme ends of thinking.
Eamonn Forde's piece doesn't quite live up to this eyecatching opening. Not much is "revealed" at all - indeed, one of the surveys is little more than a crunching of other survey findings.
This is done by the Canadian copyright farming industry, which looks at other surveys from between 2005 and 2008, and concludes that people who use peer to peer networks would spend an extra £110 a year on music if p2p didn't exist.
As Forde points out, looking at a survey about the internet in 2008 to draw conclusions about 2011 is flawed from the very start, and even if you can get round that problem, and except their rather elaborate extrapolation, you're still left with the basic problem that this is all "so what?"
If there weren't p2p networks, people would spend £110 more on music. Maybe. If there were no proper shoes, I would wear flipflops. If there wasn't rain, people would spend less on umbrellas. Perhaps the Canadian Intellectual Property Council might like to conduct a survey into what would happen if there were really unicorns?
The second survey is also a bit "so what":
Meanwhile, TorrentFreak is running details of a study into P2P user behaviour and ethical stances by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Denmark. It found that 70% of those polled said that it was “acceptable” to source music illicitly from the web. Three-quarters, however, said they had moral objections to anyone then selling that illegally acquired music for profit.
People who use peer to peer networks don't have a problem using things like peer to peer networks to obtain music without proper licences. Excuse me while I frantically recolour my worldview.
Nielsen Music has released a new study that should make record labels very nervous: Fewer than 20 percent of internet users worldwide pay for downloads of individual songs, and even fewer pay for downloads of full albums. Americans and Europeans are the most likely to purchase downloads, while users in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East overwhelmingly favor free downloads.
The survey doesn't say that "[f]ewer than 20 percent of internet users worldwide pay for downloads of individual songs", it says that in the last three months fewer than 20 per cent had.
And that's really not a bad figure - how many people were buying a record in any three month period prior to the digital disruption? I'm working on guess and anecdote, but I'd imagine it'd be roughly one in five people, in a good month. More than that, in the UK, the 1980s would have been selling far, far more records than they actually were.
More to the point, though: if record companies are still seeing their business as selling individual files to individual consumers, they're still not really coping with their new business. Sure, it's a nice little business, a bit of side dealing to make some extra money, but really, for a record company individual sales should be treated the way petrol stations think about the sales of air fresheners. Silly not to get the sales if you can, but it's not what you're really there for.
PRS collect all the money they can, and give it all to the artists, right?
PRS for Music and MCPS pay money collected to their writer, composer and music publisher members. Both organisations are ‘not for profit’ and only deduct a small administration/commission fee to cover operating costs.
Yes. They just deduct a small admin or commission fee, to cover operating costs. And who could begrudge them that?
A small commission, covering the costs of office space, collecting the money, contacting people with licence problems.
Oh... and creating totally spurious surveys:
Latest research undertaken by PRS for Music, reveals that The Flintstones’ theme tune is the most recognisable of kids’ television programmes, according to UK adults.
The survey of 2,000 adults across the UK, also show that Baa Baa Black Sheep is the nursery rhyme we remember most from our childhood, while up to 28% of females and 23% of males listen to music to make themselves feel younger.
Are you one of those artists who the PRS are so worried about not getting much money? Aren't you delighted that they're spending the little bit you do get finding out these things?
Why have you done this, PRS?
Commenting on the results, Ellis Rich, chairman of PRS, said: “Many of us find our first love for music as children through singing nursery rhymes and humming along to our favourite theme tunes on television. It is a truly wonderful sensation when the recollection of music can bring back those nostalgic emotions of how music made us feel as children; emotions and memories which continue to live on inside so many adults, still to this day”.
This seems to have an awful lot to do with getting the name of Ellis Rich (seriously? Rich?) into the papers, and nothing whatsoever to do with collecting and distributing royalties. It's not even a made-up survey worth making-up, to be honest.
It would be unfair to charcterise the Europe-wide survey being promoted in the UK by the Trades Union Congress as effectively a load of waffle-iron run-off, but it is:
Brendan Barber, general secretary of the TUC, said the study stresses that "the growth of unauthorised filesharing, downloading and streaming of copyrighted works and recorded performances is a major threat to the creative industries in terms of loss of employment and revenues".
"The scale of the problem is truly frightening now – let alone in the future if no firm actions against illegal filesharing are taken. If there was ever the proof needed to demonstrate why the Digital Economy Bill is imperative for the protection of our creative industries, this report is it."
Except it's not "truly frightening now", is it? For an industry which isn't actually selling anything essential [not in the food and shelter sense] and whose stuff is so easy to get without paying, the music business is doing pretty well - especially what with the way the general economy has been. Sony Music is happy to spend millions on buying up the Michael Jackson back catalogue. There's money to fly Dappy to America. Admittedly, both those thoughts frighten me, but not in the way you mean.
Let's fling some figures around, though, shall we?
Across the EU, as many as 1.2m jobs are in jeopardy as piracy looks set to strip more than €240bn (£218bn) in revenues from the creative industries by 2015, unless regulators can stem the flow. In 2008, the creative industries contributed €860bn to the EU's GDP – almost 7% – and it employs 6.5% of the EU workforce, or 14 million people.
It's also expected that as many as sixty million kittens might be crushed under steamrollers driven by online pirates. "They'll be laughing as they roll forward" warned the TUC, "laughing as the kittens get squished."
Of course, there's not really any reason to assume that the lack of an ever-more-tightened copyright regime would lead to steamrollers heading out over kittens, but the contention is about as strong as the figures being offered here. No attempt is made to prove the vital contention that downloading a thing represents the loss of any revenue at all; no explanation of what would happen to that £218billion pounds if it isn't being spent on buying Dollshouse on DVD or Climie Fisher CDs.
In fact, even if the survey had any basis in fact, you might argue that it'd be better for our economy if people spent the money that would otherwise be jammed away in Simon Cowell's back pocket or servicing EMI's massive debt with an American bank on, say, solar panels or eating out. Imagine if that £218bn "lost" to the creative industries found its way into the manufacturing industry.
If only it wasn't a non-existent pile of cash. Imagine the stuff we could do with it.
ConsumerFocus published a survey this week which laid out its case in a rather blunt headline:
More must be done to make Consumers aware of legal options to buy music online before an enforcement approach is taken.
Which you'd have to give two cheers to, although, frankly, the problem with the Digital Economy Bill is not that people don't know what their legal options are, and more about the whole throwing-people-off-the-internet-because-a-Japanese-electronics-company-says-so approach.
The survey makes an eyecatching claim, as surveys tend to:
The research released today shows that four in ten people are unable to name a single online music service at all – despite there being over 20 services on the market.
If you twist that round, it actually says that 60% of the UK population are able to come up with the name of an online music service, which is quite good, I'd have thought.
The problem is that ConsumerFocus focus on these 40% who can't. They suggest if, in a room of ten people, four can't even come up with Amazon or iTunes, that's a pretty shabby state of affairs:
Jill Johnstone, International Director, Consumer Focus, said: “The music industry is shooting itself in the foot by not promoting legal online music services. If file sharing is causing the damage the music industry claims, why aren’t they putting more effort in to promoting the legal alternatives?
“Before we go down the enforcement road it is only fair to ask the music industry to do more to make people aware of the legal options.”
You'll know that I tend to not be a great fan of "the music industry", but this seems a little unfair on them. Why should you expect a wholesaler to pay for their customers to build their retail brand identity?
More to the point, is a 40% shrug rate actually bad? After all, is someone who, when asked to name an online music store, can't even think of iTunes really going to be then going home and searching for torrents? Not even the RIAA have suggested that the Pirate Bay has infected the files it tracks with a drug that makes users forget the name of legal services.
And while Consumer Focus doesn't bother to share much of its methodology in the press release, it does offer this:
The face to face omnibus survey was carried out by BMRB Omnibus Surveys from Thursday 18th – Wednesday 24th amongst 1995 adults aged 15+. The findings are representative of the GB population.
So they've asked everybody. In which case, amongst those four-out-of-ten who can't name a music service is quite likely to be the two out of ten who have never even been on the internet [according to the ONS].
So, that's ten people, six of whom do have knowledge of legal online brands, two who don't, and two who don't go near the internet at all. Surely not a major problem?
Universal music are currently doing a spot of market research, aimed primarily at seeing what Spotify is doing to the music market. It's being run by an outfit called Angus Reid Strategies through a service called Springboard UK, and the idea behind it makes sense.
Disruptive technologies being disruptive, why wouldn't you want to try and work out what they're going to do to you?
One problem, though: when the survey gets onto torrents, it starts to sound less like a disinterested investigation, and more like it's - and let's be generous here - trying to educate. Hence the torrent systems themselves as described, more than once, as "non-legal" services.
Apart from being wrong - and deliberately confusing the networks with the data on the networks - if you make the question sound so hostile, isn't it going to skew the responses you get? "Did you touch that naughty thing?" is much less likely to get an honest answer than "do you use that thing?", right?
The good people at More Or Less have been having a poke around in the figures for filesharing cited by Mandelson and chums to justify the clunking fist.
It turns out - after they dug and dug - that the figure is based on a report commissioned by the BPI. So, not entirely impartial, then.
Oh, and the survey size was quite small. So it turns out these 7 million filesharers are based on the confessions of just 136 people. And they were only 11.6% of the sample, so the research company just whacked the figures upwards:
That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it." The report's author told the BBC that the adjustment "wasn't just pulled out of thin air" but based on unspecified evidence.
How would you even be able to have a solid figure for making that assumption?
Oh, and also, the seven million figure is not only based on deciding arbitrarily to boost the numbers of filesharers, but by also adding an extra six million people to the numbers online - Jupiter, who did the research, estimated the size of online Britain as 40 million people, but at the time, the official estimate was just under 34 million.
If you adjust the figures to reflect the truth, then the seven million filesharers turn out be closer to 3.9million. Still, on the bright side, the Government can now claim to have helped reduce the figures sharing unlicensed files by almost half.
Yes, thanks for stating the bleedin' obvious, Microsoft and Intel, who have produced some figures to point out that downloading electronic files has less environmental impact that having to wait for someone to make a product, drive it to a store, and then take it home from there.
Tomorrow: Microsoft produce a graphic showing that it's easier to correct errors using a word processor rather than a typewriter.
UK Music - the group which represents the bits of people working in music who choose to be represented by it, and nobody else - has issued a report which... well, you know what it will show. People download music and don't pay for it.
It turns out Sharkey's people are now throwing their weight behind all-you-can-eat pricing - presumably because they imagine that the major labels can slice a subsidy off the internet service providers without any really noticing.
The survey finds that a majority of respondents use file-sharing:
Feargal Sharkey, former lead singer of the Undertones and now chief executive of UK Music, is phlegmatic about young people's behaviour.
"Have they got the message that there is a thing called copyright and there is a philosophy of copyright? Yup. They get it. They just don't care," he says.
"What they're quite clearly trying to explain to us at the minute is that we can get it for free and we're not going to get caught."
Well, not quite, Feargal. What you and the RIAA still are having trouble grasping (once again) is that people respect there's copyright in music; it's just that they perceive the market value of individual song files to be zero, or nearly zero. Until you come to terms with that, you're not going to be able to develop a strategy for making money in the new world. (All you can eat, by the way, is not a strategy.)
Some interesting data from the Leading Question [pdf] this morning, which suggests that in the UK, the CD is still people's first choice for music:
• 73% of music fans are still happy buying CDs rather than downloading • 66% of 14-18 year olds prefer CDs • 59% of all music fans still listen to CDs every day • CD burning is top of all sharing activities (23%), above bluetoothing (18%), filesharing single tracks (17%) and filesharing albums (13%)
The conclusion, surely, is if people still love buying CDs, but aren't buying as many of them, then there must be something wrong the offering of the product.
Those who are paying for a digital music subscription service (such as Napster or Musicstation) spend more on CDs each month than most music fans (£16.87 per month compared to £11.37). • Music streamers (ie those who listen to streamed music on their computers every day) also spend more on CDs (£12.17 a month) and downloads (£7.02 per month compared with a survey average of £3.81) than most music fans.
I don't think it would be unfair to extrapolate from that 'people who collect digital music' generally are more likely to be buying music in whatever form.
A survey has discovered that the number of people willing to tell strangers they share unlicensed music has decreased a little in the last twelve months.
The MusicAlly survey has been called good news for executives in some places over the last few hours, and perhaps it is: at last, something they can point to to pretend that the last ten years and millions of dollars spent fighting filesharing has been a success.
It's not really such good news, of course - MusicAlly don't know where they've all gone:
MusicAlly's MD Paul Brindley told us more research was needed to find out where they were going, pointing to the rise in popularity of Bluetooth device-to-device transfers and instant messaging.
"More fans are regularly sharing burned CDs and bluetoothing tracks to each other than file-sharing tracks," says MusicAlly.
But there are other forms of instant gratification than acquiring a recording. An earlier MusicAlly survey, conducted in January, highlighted the importance of YouTube as a music source: 31 per cent of the yoof demographic listen to streaming music, compared to 18 per cent of the general population.
The whizzing CD burner is back? It's going to be cassette tapes again before you know it...
The songs of popular musicians like Lady Gaga have been passed on 14 million times each in one year alone with no payment to the artist, according to a report by PRS for Music, the organisation that collects royalties for songwriters and composers.
That clunkily-written standfirst suggests that this is basically a report which attempts to stick a made-up number on downloading. And it is. Oddly, the actual report doesn't appear to be on the PRS website at the moment, which means we are stuck seeing it through the Telegraph's eyes:
The research involved analysing billions of swaps on global music sites like Pirate Bay and its findings illustrate just how rampant illegal filesharing has become.
On average the most popular files were swapped over 14 million times for the twelve-month period.
What does that actually mean, though - "on average"? And how were these "billions" of swaps get "analysed"? And how, exactly, were any of these swaps "on" Pirate Bay?
The Telegraph piece is written by Urmee Khan, who has the title Digital and Media Correspondent, and yet they seem to fundamentally misunderstand how the Pirate Bay works. It's a bit like having an agricultural correspondent who says that potatoes grow on bushes - it's near enough, but suspiciously wrong.
According to the authors, the Pirate Bay trial - where its founders were jailed - did little to dampen illegal activity from the popular site which advises people on the best ways to download the latest films, music and video games.
It's a search engine, Urmee. Yes, there is a 'how do I download' page, but it's very basic.
And the founders have been given a prison sentence, but haven't yet, actually, been jailed.
Still, it's nice to see the PRS has spent songwriter money on an expensive survey which just confirms that the Pirate Bay trial did not a piece of good for anyone's bottom line. Indeed, it's hard to see what the point of this work is at all. Lots of people share files, and many of those files result in no payment going to the artist. Do they think that there is anyone on the planet who would care about this, and yet doesn't know?
I get that the PRS thinks that, by saying "ooh, there's millions of swaps every second", they'll spark some of sort of crackdown, but really they're doing the opposite. Sticking out a press release which shows that billions of files are being swapped all the time, and that even a high-profile prison sentence can't dent the levels of activity, really just underlines how the PRS and the RIAA have totally lost. This should spark a big shake-up - but the shake-up is needed for the copyright capitalists to admit their business has changed forever.
Now, Eavis is a nice enough guy; his festival is successful and although he might sometimes neglect fact in favour of a sunny précis, his intentions are usually well-meant.
But one of the 100 most influential people on the planet? Really? How would you see his influence? Men proud to have their heads on upside-down? A few dozen me-too festivals around the globe? But if it was the latter, would you not expect to see a few more of the Glastonbury-clones being run on a not-for-profit basis at the very least.
Tell us, how did Time choose Eavis?
Coldplay singer Chris Martin paid tribute to Mr Eavis in an article for Time...
Oh, really? Could it be, do you think, that Time asked Chris to write about someone, and then slotted that someone into the run down?
Still, Chris: one of the most influential people on the planet. How does that stack up, then?
Coldplay singer Chris Martin paid tribute to Mr Eavis in an article for Time, writing that Glastonbury was "the biggest rock cathedral in the world".
"Michael is one of the people to whom I owe my life and career," he wrote, explaining how the offer of a headline slot in 2002 had "changed everything".
"We've headlined other festivals, but Glastonbury is the only one that feels like - and is - a family event. It's also the only one where we received some handmade cheese as a thank you," Martin added.
So: he gave you a cheese and helped make Coldplay famous - which you suggest is a good thing? And that's influential, is it? On Martin's life, perhaps, but on the world?
Come on, Time: this is meant to be a serious endeavour, isn't it? You're seriously suggesting Eavis belongs here? Isn't this for statespeople and scientists and...
He is one of 100 people listed, along with US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown...
You see?
... teen actor Zac Efron and TV host Oprah Winfrey.
Oh. That's the calibration, is it? As you were, then.
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