Now I do know that small labels get sucked up by larger labels all of the time. They don't exactly disappear but being an imprint on a larger label isn't quite the same as being a smaller independent label, is it? I have bought so many albums by Too Pure and Beggar's Banquet artists over the years that I can't count. I also have a lot of stuff by 4AD folks too but... well, it's just not gonna be the same is it?
A farewell to Beggars Banquet's indie charms
The label that's home to bands such as Stereolab is to fold, with its acts moving to 4AD. Sad news indeed, but not a disaster
Sad news arrived yesterday afternoon, in the form of an email titled "sad news". Two of the UK's best-known independent record labels will cease to be, after 4AD announced it was "expanding" and enveloping the artists currently signed to subsidiaries Too Pure and Beggars Banquet. 4AD is currently home to the Breeders, Beirut and Scott Walker, so it's hardly a monstrous major. Still, these are labels that will be missed.
Beggars Banquet began life as a record shop in south west London that concentrated on mid-70s punk such as the Lurkers, who provided the music for the label's first ever release. Considerable success followed with Gary Numan, and, to a lesser degree, the Fall, while the current roster includes St Vincent and Stereolab. Too Pure began later, in the late 1980s, and went on to discover PJ Harvey, who released her debut single Dress through the label in 1991.
Today the label is synonymous with Singles Club, a monthly mail out of singles and 7"s that one blogger at drownedinsound.com, described as "amazing slices of heaven".
The official line is that restructuring at parent company Beggars Group, which is also home to XL Recordings, Rough Trade and Mo'Wax amongst others, means that the rosters from Too Pure and Beggars Banquet will be absorbed into 4AD. But whether they'll be equally resourced seems to be in doubt.
There are worse things that could happen to a band than to shift from one Beggars group imprint to another, of course. Too Pure and Beggars Banquet haven't actually gone under, so to speak. And at least they're not at the mercy of Terra Firma. Will you miss these two famous labels?
Showing posts with label hefner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hefner. Show all posts
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
gotta sort the good fruit from the bad fruit
I found this today. I hadn't seen in a long time and really, it's probably my favourite Hefner video. It's simple. The song is lovely and so is the video.
This article amused me a lot. Suck it kids. Some of us "old folks" are probably using some of this before you are and some of us have been "online" since before you were born.
Youth Vs. Adults in Gadget Wars
CHICAGO (AP) — Scott Seigal was awakened one recent early morning by a cell phone text message. It was from his girlfriend's mother.
His friends' parents have posted greetings on his MySpace page for all the world to see. And his 72-year-old grandmother sends him online instant messages every day so they can better stay in touch while he's at college.
"It's nice that adults know SOME things," says Seigal, an 18-year-old freshman at Binghamton University in New York. He especially likes IMing with his grandma because he's "not a huge talker on the phone."
Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.
Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.
Young people have responded, as they always have, by searching out the latest way to stay ahead in the race for technological know-how and cool. They use Twitter, which allows blogging from one's mobile phone or BlackBerry, or Hulu.com, a site where they can download videos and TV programs.
They customize their cell phones with various faceplates and ringtones. And, sometimes, they find ways to exclude adults — using high-frequency ringtones that teens can hear but most adults can't, for instance.
Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.
Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it's "creepy" when an older person — we're talking someone they know — asks to join their social network as a "friend." It means, among other things, that they can view each others' profiles and what they and their friends post.
"It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party," Rudman says. "It just doesn't work."
It's a particular quandary for image-conscious teens, says Eric Kuhn, a junior at Hamilton College in upstate New York, who's blogged about the etiquette of social networking.
He accepted his mom's invitation to be Facebook friends and has, in turn, become online friends with other adults she knows. But so far, he says, his 16-year-old sister has declined to add their mom "because she thinks it is not cool."
Lakeshia Poole, a 24-year-old from Atlanta, says "my Facebook self has become a watered down version of me." Worried about older adults snooping around, she's now more careful about what she posts and has also made her profile private, so only her online friends can see it.
"It's somewhat a Catch-22, because now I'm hidden from the people I would really like to connect with," she says.
Lauren Auster-Gussman, a freshman at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, says it's particularly awkward when one of her parents' friends asks to join her social network. She thinks Facebook should only be used by people younger than, say, 40.
"I mean, I'm in college," she says. "There are bound to be at least a few drunken pictures of me on Facebook, and I don't need my parents' friends seeing them."
There are ways around the problem.
It's possible on some sites, for instance, to limit what someone can see on your profile, though some users think it's a pain to have to deal with that.
"That is the beauty of Facebook and other online social networks. If you want to only interact with your peers, then you can adjust the settings to only allow that," says Katie Jones, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University, who's studied ways prospective students use Facebook to contact students at colleges and universities they're interested in attending.
It's also possible to simply decline or ignore an adult's request to be an online friend. Or adults could back off and only use social networking to contact their own peers.
But it's not always so easy to relinquish that control, especially for parents of teens, says Kathryn Montgomery, the author of "Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce and Childhood in the Age of the Internet" and mother of a 14-year-old.
"As parents, we have to figure out where to draw the line between encouraging and allowing our teens to have autonomy, to experience their separate culture, and when we need to monitor their use of media," says Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University.
She says it's especially important to help young people understand that social networking is often more public than they think. Sometimes monitoring them is the best way to do that.
Sue Frownfelter, a 46-year-old mom in Flint, Mich., thinks it's less of an issue for parents who discover technology with — or even before — their children. Among other things, she has a blog, uses Twitter and has a Chumby, a personal Internet device that displays anything from news and weather to photos and eBay auctions.
Her children, ages 9 and 11, begged her to allow them to have a MySpace page, because she does. Instead, she suggested Imbee.com, a social networking site for kids that allows parental monitoring.
"I can't imagine my life without technology! It has truly become an extension of who I am and who my family will likely be," says Frownfelter, who works at a community college.
Still, in today's world, parents are finding that the urge to stake out technological turf is starting at a very young age.
Jennifer Abelson, a mom in New York, says her 2-year-old daughter asks every day if she can play on the "'puter" on such kid-oriented sites as Noggin.com and Nickjr.com.
"She's constantly telling us 'I will do it!' and 'Go away!' if we try to interfere with her 'working,'" Abelson says.
"It's pretty amazing to see technology ingrained at such a young age. But I know she's learned so much from being able to use technology on her own."
Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://myspace.com/irvineap
This article amused me a lot. Suck it kids. Some of us "old folks" are probably using some of this before you are and some of us have been "online" since before you were born.
Youth Vs. Adults in Gadget Wars
CHICAGO (AP) — Scott Seigal was awakened one recent early morning by a cell phone text message. It was from his girlfriend's mother.
His friends' parents have posted greetings on his MySpace page for all the world to see. And his 72-year-old grandmother sends him online instant messages every day so they can better stay in touch while he's at college.
"It's nice that adults know SOME things," says Seigal, an 18-year-old freshman at Binghamton University in New York. He especially likes IMing with his grandma because he's "not a huge talker on the phone."
Increasingly, however, he and other young people are feeling uncomfortable about their elders encroaching on what many young adults and teens consider their technological turf.
Long gone are the days when the average, middle-aged adult did well to simply work a computer. Now those same adults have Gmail, upload videos on YouTube, and sport the latest high-tech gadgets.
Young people have responded, as they always have, by searching out the latest way to stay ahead in the race for technological know-how and cool. They use Twitter, which allows blogging from one's mobile phone or BlackBerry, or Hulu.com, a site where they can download videos and TV programs.
They customize their cell phones with various faceplates and ringtones. And, sometimes, they find ways to exclude adults — using high-frequency ringtones that teens can hear but most adults can't, for instance.
Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.
Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it's "creepy" when an older person — we're talking someone they know — asks to join their social network as a "friend." It means, among other things, that they can view each others' profiles and what they and their friends post.
"It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party," Rudman says. "It just doesn't work."
It's a particular quandary for image-conscious teens, says Eric Kuhn, a junior at Hamilton College in upstate New York, who's blogged about the etiquette of social networking.
He accepted his mom's invitation to be Facebook friends and has, in turn, become online friends with other adults she knows. But so far, he says, his 16-year-old sister has declined to add their mom "because she thinks it is not cool."
Lakeshia Poole, a 24-year-old from Atlanta, says "my Facebook self has become a watered down version of me." Worried about older adults snooping around, she's now more careful about what she posts and has also made her profile private, so only her online friends can see it.
"It's somewhat a Catch-22, because now I'm hidden from the people I would really like to connect with," she says.
Lauren Auster-Gussman, a freshman at Juniata College in Pennsylvania, says it's particularly awkward when one of her parents' friends asks to join her social network. She thinks Facebook should only be used by people younger than, say, 40.
"I mean, I'm in college," she says. "There are bound to be at least a few drunken pictures of me on Facebook, and I don't need my parents' friends seeing them."
There are ways around the problem.
It's possible on some sites, for instance, to limit what someone can see on your profile, though some users think it's a pain to have to deal with that.
"That is the beauty of Facebook and other online social networks. If you want to only interact with your peers, then you can adjust the settings to only allow that," says Katie Jones, a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University, who's studied ways prospective students use Facebook to contact students at colleges and universities they're interested in attending.
It's also possible to simply decline or ignore an adult's request to be an online friend. Or adults could back off and only use social networking to contact their own peers.
But it's not always so easy to relinquish that control, especially for parents of teens, says Kathryn Montgomery, the author of "Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce and Childhood in the Age of the Internet" and mother of a 14-year-old.
"As parents, we have to figure out where to draw the line between encouraging and allowing our teens to have autonomy, to experience their separate culture, and when we need to monitor their use of media," says Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University.
She says it's especially important to help young people understand that social networking is often more public than they think. Sometimes monitoring them is the best way to do that.
Sue Frownfelter, a 46-year-old mom in Flint, Mich., thinks it's less of an issue for parents who discover technology with — or even before — their children. Among other things, she has a blog, uses Twitter and has a Chumby, a personal Internet device that displays anything from news and weather to photos and eBay auctions.
Her children, ages 9 and 11, begged her to allow them to have a MySpace page, because she does. Instead, she suggested Imbee.com, a social networking site for kids that allows parental monitoring.
"I can't imagine my life without technology! It has truly become an extension of who I am and who my family will likely be," says Frownfelter, who works at a community college.
Still, in today's world, parents are finding that the urge to stake out technological turf is starting at a very young age.
Jennifer Abelson, a mom in New York, says her 2-year-old daughter asks every day if she can play on the "'puter" on such kid-oriented sites as Noggin.com and Nickjr.com.
"She's constantly telling us 'I will do it!' and 'Go away!' if we try to interfere with her 'working,'" Abelson says.
"It's pretty amazing to see technology ingrained at such a young age. But I know she's learned so much from being able to use technology on her own."
Martha Irvine is an AP national writer. She can be reached at mirvine(at)ap.org or via http://myspace.com/irvineap
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