Barry

This sadly is not simply a matter of the BPI being poorly informed: Thing is, industry lobbies aren’t trying to quash file-sharing because they think that piracy is stealing sales, they want to quash it because it’s diluting sales. The big problem is that file-sharing is effectively a form of grassroots advertising, and file-sharers are turned on to many bands and artists that they might not otherwise learn of. That’s great for the artists, but it is perceived as hurting the label’s bottom line: if they farm 10 new artists in a year, market-test them and then focus advertising on one in particular the end result will likely be one artist that shifts a lot of units and a bunch that (because they never really had a chance) do not and get their contracts torn up. They make a truckload of $$ off one act and scrap the others to keep development costs down, and the cycle beginds anew the next year. If instead they farm 10 artists in a year and a comparatively small number of people hear about each band and snatch up their albums, then they have 10 mediocre-selling artists and no way to cull the herd, meaning that their A&R costs will be 10x higher than if they only had one artist selling out of the bunch. Sad but true, but the current model the record industry follows requires that the majority of artists in their catalogs not sell.

Who cares what your opinion is? A woman died.

Wow, way to swipe ARC90's project name and everything. Does this mean that a future Readability project from them is going to have to be called Readability 3?

T-bag, I'm starting to see how appropriate your name really is. I mean, a nutsack in your eye would explain how you are unable to see that you are a TOTAL FUCKING MORON!

I really, really wish there was a way to filter Vladimir Cole's posts out of my Joystiq feed in Google Reader. Does anyone know of a way to do this?

I like Joystiq, and appreciate the news that is provided here, but I am really sick of Vladimir Cole and his shoddy writing, to the point where, if I can't filter out his posts, I will just unsubscribe from the feed and rely on the other gazillion video game blogs out there.

I get a higher quality of video game commentary from the 17 year old yokel behind the counter at my local EB Games. Really. No joke.

Oh and by the way, I am not writing this because I don't like people bashing Nintendo. I have absolutely no problem with that. It is his poor writing, insistence on flame baiting, and generally unwarranted smugness that is driving me away from this publication.

Hey Brian, next time shut the fuck up.

If the game's beta then it's been through a shitload of QA testing. Games can't declare beta until 95% or so of the projected bug totals have been found. So is Sony bullshitting or is it that Joystiq knows very little about the industry it covers? I'm thinking it might be a bit of both.

Or it could do the same thing that music downloading has done and introduce consumers to all kinds of new comics and genres, widening comic culture beyond just superheroes, while revitalizing the tired and counter-productive distribution model that mainstream comics currently employ.

I really, really wish you guys would stop using Comic Life to add word ballons to every bloody image you include on this site. It's getting old fast, especially considering that the jokes the average Joystiq blogger makes tend to be less funny than when my sister died of tuberculosis.

Oh, and check out unpopularculture.net, my new favorite webcomic. It's much funnier than you guys.

Trent is a wiener!