Spotify

It's funny, I was having a discussion with a friend recently about how the music industry is out of date with it's listeners and needs a new revenue model. The current one is decades old and doesn't benefit many except the record companies and a few large artists.

People want free access to music that they have payed for, and want to pay a reasonable price. We already got ripped off with "indestructable CDs" that you can spread jam on and they still work. Ha! One tiny scratch and they're coasters! Vinyl is much more resilient; and better quality sound. Also, the price is too much. 12-15 quid for CD with 8-10 tracks on it is too expensive unless you're a real fan. To get the real money you have to bring more people in, which means getting people to experiment, but people won't at those prices. 6-8 quid and you're talking.

I've heard about Spotify recently, but there is a lot of buzz on the internet and a lot of things don't really pan out. But I really think this will. This is the new model I was talking about. If you are a casual listener it's great for skimming songs, finding new artists and listening to old stuff that you lost; the catalogue is huge!

Ahhhh.... I'd forgotten just how good Daydream Nation is. Silver Rocket is my favourite.

Riddled with viruses

Whilst updating my media server I did a virus scan and discovered it's riddled with trojans and various viruses! Oops.

I use AVG free version but it seems to have circumvented that. Even after a full virus scan various strange things still happening, including getting redirected to Windowsclick repeatedly whilst trying to fix the problem. Seems other people had the same problem.

Running Malwarebytes Anti-malware (free version) initially didn't work. You have to rename the mbam.exe to get it to work! The trojan is blocking it running. Clever. So after a rename, a quick clean and a reboot that seems to have gone. Wonder what else is left.

So, lesson learnt:

• Update Windows automatically. I had this turned off because I don't want the server resetting randomly.
• Run full virus scans regularly. I was just running quick scans occasionally.
• Viruses are getting more devious.
• If you can't follow this link then you have it too.
• I post stuff like this because I found what other people put really useful. Thanks!