Diana Krall on the BBC

I have, a little bit, taken leave of my senses! Having been conscious for a while that the Music section of my blog hasn't particularly received a lot of attention since the inception, I've decided a quick-fire method to address this is to post short, simple notes on what I'm currently listening to. Hopefully this will evolve into more in depth musing on music in general. Time will tell!

Anyway, first up is Diana Krall. Having the fortune of an empty office for once, I've been listening to her recent concert on BBC Radio 2 on the BBC iPlayer. I've become more and more impressed with Krall the more I listen to her. Most notably because my iPhone seems to have developed a 'thing' for her when in shuffle mode! I knew Michael Parkinson was a fan but didn't really get why. Slowly but surely that's changing. I like her style of song, her melodies and voice but mainly how the piano gently accompanies the voice, changing gear for the solos in a subtle yet distinct manner. Her solos aren't manic, but are more energetic than they can often sound!

I shall by taking a closer look at the new album come pay day!

Gmail out of Beta!

I know they have their arguments as to why it has been in Beta for the past five years; continual innovation etc. but Google are one of my all time favourite companies and I'm glad to see GMail, Calendar and Docs are all out of beta nonetheless!

As announced on their Twitter profile, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-apps-is-out-of-beta-yes-really.html

Tioti TV+ vs SKY+ for iPhone...

v's

I'm at a cross roads!

I've posted a couple of times now about my experiences remotely recording my Sky+ box (using Tioti TV+ and Sky+ iPhone Apps). Although I could not reach any formal conclusion, since trying both applications I've tended to stick with Sky's offering. Tioti TV+ lost marks because I could never get my head around the social networking aspect of the site. I duly signed up as I said I would and had a rummage around but is just didn't do anything for me! Sky won over basically because it came down to brand loyalty and the fact it was their application for their own product, a concept I like.

However since OS 3.0 Tioti has moved first! They've released a new version of their app which includes the holy grail of push notifications. You can now select a programme to record, mark it for notification and add it to favourites. The latter will also push notifications 5 minutes before the programme start. I really like the feature and have found myself moving back to Tioti TV+. It also, in hindsight, seems faster than Sky's application.

The new release has really put Sky's offering into perspective for me; using their own API's they have cobbled together a simple offering that seems to have required very little thought, less still imagination or innovation. Maybe they'll catch up but until they do I can't see their app will get much use!

All of which brings me to my cross-road: I want to use Sky's application but I want the functionality of Tioti's! My logic is not sound, I know. I like the concept of using additional innovative offerings by people like Sky. To be it shows that they are committed to ensuring they offer the best possible service to their customers. I think I mainly want them to succeed, rather than an objective aligning to what they have to offer.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out...

PS. Just had an email from Sky saying I can watch the ashes on my PC (previous charge had applied). All is forgiven! Tioti TV+ who?

WT20's place at the top table?

I always find it useful when discussing Twenty20 to find out exactly what camp someone sits in before they start! It's not to pre-judge their opinions based upon my view of these camps, more to understand why they make the points they do. To clarify, I think there are three main camps: Traditionalist, Modernist, InBetweenist! OK, so I need a new name for the third but that'll do for now.

To work within my own guidelines, I confess I'm the third, as yet poorly defined, category. Traditionalists and Modernist are fairly easy to understand; one prefers Test Matches and views anything other as 'not quite cricket'. The other [modernist] aligns their wants of cricket to more contemporary sports such as football and rugby, where pace, entertainment and gladiatorial power are more sort after commodities than grace, tactical acumen and polite sportsmanship. Neither I believe to be right or wrong, which I guess explains why I find myself in the middle of the two!

I've always liked Test Match cricket. When people ask why I like Cricket in general, I've always referred to sitting outside on a sunny summer's day, watching sport and drinking beer! I like the pace of the game and the gentleness of its appearance. Like most cricket forms I also enjoy the fact that the most drama or mediocre of matches all unfold the same way: bowler runs up and delivers. From there anything can and often does happen. Listening to Cricket commentary it so often appears that the bowler is in charge. They set the field, dictate the line and length of the ball and can make the ball leave the hand with subtle, yet effective variations. However this does not keep a good batsman down for long! The battle between batsman and bowler is the most fascinating part of cricket and at its most prevalent during test match cricket.

I will also admit that I viewed Twenty20 cricket with an element of disdain. Not because I'm incapable of being a modernist, or accepting of change in the game, because I don't think I'm guilty on either count. My main objection was that the introduction of 'ugly' cricket shots as the norm in this particular format of the game. I felt it was unnecessary to promote elements of batting that required little skill. I've since climbed down on that particular remark as I do appreciate the hand/eye co-ordination and sheer power required to slog the ball to the boundary! Improvisation (for example, Dilshan's Scoop) I'm all for, but the slogging element does still erk me. My other negative thoughts towards Twenty20 mainly come from sitting with 10,000 Lancashire supporters in the rain watching Yorkshire get thumped a couple of years back!

With the World Twenty20 just about to get underway, I was however looking forward to the tournament. When this summer's schedule was announced it was just something that filled a calendar month before the Ashes and I had no immediate plans to watch it, but as it grew closer I did find myself more intrigued. I held little hope for an English success from the Men's team, but wanted to study the format in closer detail. I was impressed with the tournament for a few reasons:

The first thing that stuck me was that improvisation was no longer the right of the batsmen. I'd watched Saj Mahmood of Lancashire bowling slow-ball bouncers in the domestic competition and was impressed at the success it had in controlling an over. On the international stage it was also used to good effect. When Harbhajan Singh refused to bowler once Kevin Peterson adopted the Switch-Hit stance, that was another scalp in the rights of bowlers during this tournament! It was spin bowling however, that seemed to see the greatest resurgence during the tournament.

The second most notable outcome of the World T20 however was the role of the established test player. Kallis for South Africa, Dilshan for Sri Lanka in particular but Gayle, Vetorri, Harbhajan, Chanderpaul all showed that a truly class cricketer can prosper in all forms of the game.

My final observation was mainly a personal one. Although the 'ugly' shots were still on show, much of the big hitting was a) from established players and b) clean hitting (for want of a better phrase!). I also found myself enjoying the flying sixes in matches, particularly when the power plays were being exploited by the batsmen. I came to the conclusion that maybe you can forgive the odd slog!

However my overall view on WT20 is slightly more calculated. I noted a few times on Test Match Special and Sky commentaries that our experts often said that in T20 teams who lose early wickets simply don't have the time to rebuild an innings. I don't necessarily agree with that and Sri Lanka can cite a good case in point when looking at the final game. They didn't post the biggest total after losing early wickets but they adopted a strategy and it almost worked for them.

This first observation also seems to lead to the second, in which it was often felt that T20 cricket would replace 50 over cricket in the future because it eliminated the lull in the middle overs of 50 over cricket. I would again argue otherwise! A lot of matches I watched involved the same format. Big start to the innings, then take the singles at 6 per over for the next nine or 10 overs, hoping for a boundary ball every over or so to top up the total before letting lose at the end. It's not too far fetched from the 50 over game plan. I'm not an expert but I'd guess this is probably due to the age-old one-day philosophy of keeping wickets in hand for the end of the innings. I'm not sure T20 has overcome that mindset quite yet.

So to WT20's place at the top table? I'm not convinced it should replace 50 over cricket, although that's not to say I don't see that happening. T20's main advantages lie logistically. As seen in this tournament, more than one match can take place per day and back-to-back matches are realistic. I'd much prefer this approach introduced into the international format, maybe at the expense of lots on 50 over cricket and the Champions Trophy. After a test series why can't three of more countries contest a couple of 50 over games and then a quick T20 tournament over a long weekend or holiday period? You shouldn't have to search the globe with teams to make up the numbers either. In Europe we have Ireland, Scotland and Holland who would benefit from the exposure of playing more established teams. There are plenty of other smaller national around the world who could do the same.

Whatever is decided, the mantra should be Quality over Quantity. It will take resourcefulness and innovation to make that commercially feasible but it's not impossible. In short, more tournament T20 I think is the future, where it can share it's place alongside 50 over cricket and test matches.

A Twitter Experience...

About 6 months ago Twitter.com became huge. Almost overnight. It got an incredible amount of press and everyone wanted part of it. I'm not a natural bandwagon jumper for social networking progressions so it was only after the Mumbai terror attacks and Hudson River plane crash and the role Twitter played in breaking those stories on a world stage I started to take notice. Even then it was more to register my username before someone else did! (that's twitter.com/benchadwick in case you were wondering).

I decided not to post any of my experiences on Twitter until I'd passed through a couple of stages: these were notablly signing up and getting started, understanding how it worked, getting the most (for me) out of it and finally progressing past the novetly factor. Hopefully by waiting I can give a better account and comment on how I found the process.

I began, as I suspect most people do, with the following:

benchadwick: Don't really have anything to say! 2009-01-16 15:49:29 

source: http://myfirsttweet.com

Impressively as I manually search back through some of my early tweets, I seem to have avoided the cliched 'Don't really understand twitter', 'how does this work' and 'this is my first tweet' postings! This can possibly be attributed to the fact that I knew a bit about twitter before signing up or more probably sheer luck!

Lots and lots and lots of people have written on the different stages people go through when using twitter, so I won't! For the record these are good examples: Rohit Bhargava's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance (pictured), Jason Hiner's 4 Stages for ZDNet and this by Jemima Kiss (of the Guardian fame). 

So I'd signed up to secure my username, done the usual search of people already on there and started to follow them, all with quite an open mind. Using the search function it started to become easy to see how the plane crash and terror attacks could spread. Almost everything tweeted on Twitter is searchable in seconds. There are also ways of following tags (popular subjects such as #hudson or #uksnow to group information together). I also noticed how easy it was to follow other people. In the main you don't even need to ask them first! What slowely became obvious is that Twitter could be a great source of information, depending on the people you follow, but as such following these people on the web can be a bit constrictive.

Not wanting to name drop but I read a tweet by Krishnan Guru-Murthy (twitter.com/krishgm) who said that about 800 was the right amount to follow. I struggle with 60!! In fairness there are third party applications you can use such as tweetdeck to do this, but I've never bothered. Using the web is more restrictive but it also helps you decide who to follow and who not. 100 posts in 10 minutes by one person can be annoying, especially if they are a news outlet. It can be too much to take in, so I found I tend to folllow people who tweet little and often!

So I'd started getting into the swing of things, following a mixture of the rich, famous, news outlets, journalists and friends. I found it easy to follow themes and conversations as they developed as well as taking part myself (note once had an exchange with the mighty @krishgm! I found head to head against Facebook I'd started to prefer it as new information was in far greater supply. However after a while I found that the novetly was wearing off and that unless I had something I thought people might like to hear, I wouldn't say anything. Too often all I could muster was a comment on the salt outside of my office window! 

Maybe it's just the changing of the seasons: holiday mode is kicking in and people spend less time in front of their twitter pages? More likely I believe both myself and twitter are evolving in our uses. Even during my few months with Twitter I've noticed the commercial world stand up and take notice. Some I like, others less so. The main attraction for me is the access to the usually inaccessible. What @simonmayo, @richardpbacon and other public figures think. How journalists such as @jemimakiss and @davidbartlett1 prepare, research, deliver and comment on stories and in the inside track of what is happening on @bbc5live or @channel4news. [incidentally that's how you send people a message, eg. '@benchadwick' in Twitter. I've found people now refer to other people on Twitter with the @ prefix. Presumably because it links to their profile, but I find it amusing!]

There's a whole other side to Twitter that I am yet to embrace, and that I probably won't ever bother to. Ironically this is one of it's main USP's! Because what we say, who we say it to and are basics stats are all easily searchable, Twitter is a goldmine of information to sift, pick out and target for whatever related aspect you are peddling. I found that out the other day. I'd used a service called Nozbe.com and tweeted my experience. The next day a professor from America had sent me a message regarding it! For me what was a little too small a world! For her it opened up a whole new medium for research. 

To conclude my experience with Twitter over the past few months; I've enjoyed it, will probably use it for the foreseeable future but maybe less frequently than in the beginning. I don't have the personality to drive my usage as far as it can go: making friends, contacts, networks online is not something that interests me. I also don't have a professional interest strong enough to follow through. I can't use social networking to enhance my professional career at this point in time. These are the main drivers behind my twitter use falling into line with the likes of Facebook on the social networking front, and the internet sites I visit as a daily ritual! (the beeb, guardian, google reader being the top set) 

  

Missa in tempore belli

Having decided that my 'Music' section is lacking somewhat in content, I thought I could easily rectify this by incorporating some of the works I'm coming across for the first time, while playing for the South Liverpool Rehearsal Orchestra (SLRO). Next week is my first concert with them (a rehearsal orchestra as the name would suggest does not perform that much!) and we're playing the aforementioned Missa in tempore belli, or Mass in Time of War. 

My initial thoughts of the mass is that I feel fortunate it incoporates a war theme, as that gives the Trumpet something to do! Also, whilst rehearsing I've come to like the musicality of it as a standalone piece of music, I'm equally looking forward to hearing it with the Choir for the first time tomorrow (at which point I might even be able post the Choir's name!).

I think I'll post two comments for this one: the choir's name and initial thoughts on the Mass as first heard with Orchestra and Choir, then a second comment following it's performance. 

Why Football is a Business and Fans aren't important

There's a lot to be said for football cliches. Or is it that there's lots of football cliches said? Either way they form an integral part of our game. They are part and parcel in the game of two halves, the funny old game that often leaves you at sixes and sevens early doors, when there's no easy games because they're all to play for, even if you do take them one game at a time! Whole passages of play can be described in cliches (see here, for example) and the atypical pre-match interview does not sound like this!

So why are cliches so important in football (and to a certain extent, sport in general) and how do they relate to the commercial aspect of the sport? There are many definitions of cliche, the one that lends itself to football probably being: [OK, 'lends itself' will be the last intentional cliche]

cliched - repeated regularly without thought or originality; "ready-made phrases"

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

This definition is relevant to football for it serves two purposes: it epitomises the closed-shop, comfortable and familiar aspect that a sporting mentality brings; a world in which you can become accepted and belong by adhering to a simple code, and with its ready-made phrases it simultaneously sticks two fingers up at the business and media obligations to the sport. Anyone can play the part by learning the lines (again reference the template example above). 

Football cliches serve to minimise the importance of the business role, to diminish the contribution of finance and maintain the perception that sporting principles rule, OK? As has been proved year on year since the Premierships inception, that is no longer the case. The power balance within football has been shifting for the past 17 years and is now firmly held in the corporate world's favour. Naturally such a change will encounter resistance and even denial, especially when encountered during the period of change. Fans are no longer the most important institution in footballer. However much it is disliked, the facts to support such a claim exist. 

The average ticket at Liverpool this season costs approximately £38 (see LFC website). For premiership games, an average gate of 44,000 over the 19 home games brings a fan-based revenue of £31,768,000 (2006 results for Liverpool show £25,219,000). Add to that merchandise revenues (Liverpool made £16,322,000 in 2006) and that makes a fan-based financial contribution of approximately £47,000,000. Consider the corporate revenue streams available to football clubs and the picture changes slightly. In 2004/5 Chelsea earned £30,000,000 from Sky by winning the premiership (source: telegraph). For the 2008/9 season the winner will collect £50,000,000 from Sky whilst the bottom club will collect £25,000,000 (In 2005/6 Liverpool collected £29,643,000 according to their annual report). Even under the older Sky deal, that's a big income. Move into the world of corporate sponsorship and the numbers are there again. To continue the Liverpool example, sponsorship revenue in 2006 was £17,904, seemingly a poor return attributed to a dispute with Reebok (the kit is now manufactured by Adidas) and 9% lower than the previous season when they won the Champions League. Consider for the 2009/10 season Liverpool are planning to increase this amount to £60,000,000 when renewing their agreement with Carlsberg (source: IMScouting) and again the picture begins to form more clearly in the business world's favour. Finally add in £22,000,000 of shareholdings for Liverpool (source: 2006 annual report) to complete the picture. 

In summary (and by no means the result of any qualified analysis!) sources of finance for Liverpool can be attributed as the following:

Fan-based: £47,000,000

Corporate: £132,000,000 (assuming they win the League and gain the maximum sponsorship deal with Carlsberg).

By no means do I advocate that football is all about money. It's not far wide of the mark, however. If you were to view Liverpool as a business, your major stakeholders are without doubt Carlsberg, then Sky, then the fans followed by the Shareholders. But in truth the shareholders have a large stake in the company as they own it, so that leave the fan base out in the cold. 

The argument is based on the assumption that money matters, and it does! From a fans perspective they need money coming into the club to strengthen the team, ensure ticket prices remain reasonable and allow the club to develop, progress and ultimately improve on the pitch [is that a football cliche?]. It is important to note that out of a combined income of £179,000,000 the fan-based income weighs in at a significant 26%. It's this 26% that affords the cliched-indulgence that fans are the most important aspect of a club. Another factor that furthers this perception is that the fans are also the club's (and more importantly their benefactor's) customers. As a customer to Liverpool football club, purchasing tickets and merchandise you are afforded a certain importance. As a captive market for sponsors and other third parties this importance is furthered yet still. 

In fact the entire premise of the fact that football fans aren't important to clubs anymore stems from this. If no fans turned up to Anfield all season, Liverpool would lose that revenue. However Sky could still show their games, advertise and promote their own products and people would still watch. So Liverpool's value to Sky remains despite Liverpool fans attendance at games. Liverpool's relationship with their fans is a necessity of Liverpool's relationship with Sky. A similar scene can be found with Carlsberg (to a lesser extent).   

If it is accepted that money is now the most important factor in football, and that this has changed the dynamic between clubs and fans, then why has money and thus business, become so important? Ironically in some ways it's because of the fans! Take any aspect of a Premiership football match where money is concerned, and the entity that ultimately funds it is the fan. How many times is a new player or stadium funded (at least in part) with ticket price increases? Why does Carlsberg pay Liverpool so much money? So it can persuade the Liverpool fan to drink Carlsberg. And Sky? So football fans in general will buy Sky to watch the matches. Convinced? Take it a stage further. How do Sky find the money to fund football? Companies pay to advertise during their TV programmes. Why? To convince Sky's viewers to buy their products and services. And Sky's viewers are......!

Football is a business. Simple. Further to that, football has become a business to make money out of fans. In economic terms a club is merely an entity with much-valued assets: fans. So how do the football businesses keep their assets? They indulge the cliched lifestyle of a football fan and ensure they remain loyal to the club through marketing the club attractively and promoting fans' core values. Football clubs want loyal fans so they can facilitate other businesses direct marketing to them. Everything else, unfortunately, is a side-show. 

To determine whether this shift to corporate-dom is good or bad is difficult. If on balance a football fan is still relatively happy, is that OK? If money is flowing in football than the non-financial aspects of football will remain healthy as a result. At least they should. As a pure concept though, money in football will mean the sport can no longer be a sport, and that for many is a problem. For the vast majority of people they will learn to accept a compromise. Where the situation often gets complicated, is when the football fan feels aggrieved for a particular reason and cites the corporate world as source of that grievance. 

This can be seen recently with Setanta's coverage of the England internationals. The debate in the Guardian summed the conflict up quite well. To summarise my contribution to that blog, Setanta took the blame from most football fans and I pointed out that this took focus away from the FA and the government's decision to make money through the coverage as opposed to focusing on the wishes, wants and needs of the fans. I argued that English football needed a Setanta-type figure to challenge Sky's monopoly on TV rights, and that this was merely an example of how the concept was right, the execution not so. Finally I concluded with:

Either change the current perception that it's the fans that are the biggest stakeholder in football in the UK (to a realisation that money talks!) or change the structure of TV rights to ensure the fans can watch football at affordable prices.

Now whose going to volunteer for that? The FA, the government, Media????

The decision point is clear: money talks or put fans first. I doubt the latter can ever win.