This Wasn't Supposed To Happen

As I may have mentioned before, I put up a few CDs to sell on Amazon to see what would happen.  I didn't really want to sell any of them, so I set my prices deliberately well above the cheapest available (all except for one, the story of which is detailed here.

However, I'd sort've forgotten about the other few and one sold yesterday (Friday 07/10/16) at £7.76 (plus the mandatory £1.26 postage and packing.  It was my own fault really, the lowest prices were £7.49, £7.50 and so on; I really should have priced it a lot higher.

The album was this one, Metro Area's self-titled debut from 2002; it was in pristine condition so I listed it as "Used - As New", which I considered an accurate description:

So now I was faced with having to send it out without really being geared up to do so.  Fortunately, as an inveterate hoarder, I had a box of 100 CD-sized padded envelopes that I'd picked up from my old workplace for about a fiver, so that cost was negligible really.  But then there was the hassle of packing it up and taking it to the Post Office, having it weighed and classified (107g, Large Letter for those interested) and paying the postage, which was (as again, I've mentioned before, is currently £1.27 for first class post for a properly-packaged CD in a full-size jewel case); this kind of makes sense of Amazon's £1.26 postage addition for CDs as it ensures that minor sellers can't make money on postage costs (sending second class makes scant difference, a few pence less, that's all), and sending out "properly" (as I see it) in fact means a penny lost for each CD sent in this way.

But it does skew the market in favour of the big sellers, whose postage costs per CD - even if they were all sent out in the same manner (proper padded envelope, etc.) would typically be about 75p or less, due to negotiations on volume sales/day.  Add into this that many CDs these days come in cardboard sleeves and so can be sent at Letter rate, bringing the big players' average per-CD postage cost down to about 43p (obviously these rates don't apply to sellers only sending a few items each day; us plebs pay full price).  Anyway, I packed it up (ensuring that it remained in pristine condition) and paid my £1.27 postage the next day (Saturday 08/10/16).  But it doesn't end there, because Amazon like to take a large margin all for themselves, depending on the selling price.

For those interested, the full breakdown for sending this one are as follows:

Selling price:  £7.76 - Mandatory P & P:  £1.26, totalling £9.02.  Amazon listing fees:  £2.58, leaving me with £6.44.  Minus the actual postage cost £1.27, this gives me £5.17 in profit.  I'm not complaining by any means, but it's a far cry from the £9.02 and it means Amazon are actually taking a whopping 28.6% (gross) on the sale, which seems to me a little much.

So, I thought that it's no wonder that the likes of Music Magpie and their ilk list a lot of CDs at a penny each.  With their postage discounts taken into account, they should be making around £0.75 per CD just on postage (that's an estimate, obviously). However, if I was to list a CD at £0.01, I would still be charged £0.99 as a listing fee alone, which ostensibly means that I'd lose quite a bit of money on every item sold.  It makes me think that the big resellers must have some other deal with Amazon when it comes to listing fees, otherwise why do it at all?  Free listings if you can demonstrate that you can sell more than 100 CDs per day?  I really don't know.

Obviously I've a lot to learn if I want to get into this business (which I don't, really).  And I'd obviously have to streamline my process, should I actually do it, like get a printer that actually works without having to literally shove the paper in manually (amongst other things).

Anyway, hope this casts a little more light on the whole process and if it helps anyone else in a similar position, all the better!

Odd Songs #001: Captain Of Your Ship

[Edit @ 22/09/2016:  This wasn't meant to be a series to begin with, but it's turned into one, so I've slightly altered the title to reflect that.  And by "Odd Songs" I don't really mean that they are odd - although many of them are - it's just a catch-all title for any fabulous songs that I want to write about]


For well over thirty years, I've sort of been obsessed with this song.  I blame those fucking Mullerice adverts from the late 80s (but that's another story).

The first time I was properly aware of it (and its long history) was from Betty Boo's Doin' the Do:

At first listen it seems that the divine Alison Clarkson (Betty Boo was, unsurprisingly, a stage name) just took the "you're going to lose a good thing" bit and interpolated into her song, but the more you hear it, you can pick out other bits of melody from "Captain Of Your Ship"; they don't seem sampled from a particular source, but are definitely in there.

Anyway, Betty was just one of a long line of pop stars directly covering the song, or taking elements from it.  It's a song that - whilst hardly being in "Yesterday" territory - has a lot of cover versions, all the way from 1968 to the present day.  But the interesting thing is that these cover versions vary enormously in how they approach the song.

OK, back to the original, written by Kenny Jones and Ben Yardley, recorded in 1968 by Reparata and the Delrons:

It's an amazing thing, all made up of seemingly unrelated bits of other songs stuck together (this seems to be something of a Kenny Jones trademark, but more on that later) with weird sound effects (foghorns, radar blips, etc.), rapid changes in tempo, almost anything, and yet it all seems to hold together as a song.  Certainly it's a product of its time.  The Reparata version was a top 20 hit in the UK but didn't do much business elsewhere.

However, since then it seems to have taken on a life of its own.  The number of cover versions is bewildering.  Some are relatively straight covers (e.g. the version by Bette Bright & The Illuminations), some totally rework the arrangement (e.g. the Ratpack version) and the rest fall somewhere in between.  If you listened to all the cover versions of this song, the songs based on it and the songs that sample it, it would...er, take quite a long time.  I know of about fifty but I'd be willing to put my life on there being at least that many again.

Maybe one day I'll try to make sense of the whole thing, particularly regarding the role of Kenny Young, who has been involved in so much pop stuff from the last fifty years (and remains active), but that'll have to be another time, because at the moment...

..the version that interests me is this one, by the 1970s band Fox, although assembled at some point in the 1980s (1986 is the best guess that I can find):

The reason I'm interested in this version is because Kenny Jones (the co-writer of the original song) was in the band Fox and I say "assembled" because I'm convinced most of the vocals and instrumentation were recorded when Fox were active (probably sometime in the mid-1970s).  But the Fox version of the song, as released, has such an obvious 1980s influence with all its synth stabs and stuff that it can only have been put together in that decade.

The latest possible point at which this version could have been released is 1986, as it featured on a Fox "greatest hits" album released that year.

Now I can't possibly be the only person that noticed that at 1:12 (and repeatedly elsewhere - the example at 2:31 is probably the most obvious) there's a stabby synth riff that was never in the original song, but still fits.  Thing is, it's the identical riff that forms the entire basis of 2 Unlimited's "Get Ready For This", released in 1991:

It's slowed down a little bit and has a slightly different cadence, but essentially it's the exact same riff.

And it set me to wondering, in today's climate of high-profile music plagiarism lawsuits (think Marvin Gaye vs. Robin Thicke/Pharrell etc.) I wonder if Kenny Jones (and any associates involved in the Fox version) could make anything of this?

FUN FACT:  Noosha Fox is Ben Goldacre's mother.

General Election 2015: General: (3): Some scenarios

Parliamentary MPs returned under FPTP

The winners

SNP:  1,454,436 votes / 56 seats / 49.87% popular vote / 25,972 votes per seat

Conservatives (inc. Speaker):  11,340,398 votes / 331 seats / 37.83% popular vote / 34,261 votes per seat

Labour:  9,331,617 votes / 232 seats / 31.13% popular vote / 40,222 votes/seat

Plaid Cymru:  181,704 votes / 3 seats / 12.13% popular vote / 60,568 votes/seat

Obviously the SNP and Plaid have a big advantage because they concentrate their efforts on seats in their respective countries and probably should be considered as a separate bloc.

The can't-really-complain brigade

LibDem:  2,415,862 votes / 8 seats / 8.06% popular vote / 301,983 votes/seat

Given that they were always going to be up against it after cosying up to the Tories, they did remarkably well, all things considered. If they hadn't spent the last thirty years shoring up their targets, they'd have been wiped out completely. 8 seats was a good result.

The losers set up to lose

Green:  1,150,809 votes / 1 seat / 3.84% popular vote / 1,150,809 votes/seat

UKIP:  3,862,740 votes / 1 seat / 12.86% popular vote / 3,862,740 votes/seat

The most striking thing here is that if Labour had backed the Lib Dems on the AV vote in 2012 (and won) then the Conservative party wouldn't have a majority of any description (nor would anyone else, but it does seem in retrospect a very poor decision on Labour's part).  It's impossible to tell how the election would have turned out under AV - as there isn't any data - but it couldn't have delivered a Conservative majority under any circumstances. You can pretend to know where the second, third, etc. choices would have gone, you can make a guess, but no more than that. Point is, it would have given a hung parliament.

FPTP is a great system for those in power as it artificially preserves the power base long after the support has in reality gone elsewhere. That's why Labour and the Conservatives like it...they get loads of votes from it for free.

Here's the FPTP vote:

This would have been the result under PR:

Doesn't say much really. Worse? Better?

I have other ways.

More later.

The Mundaneum

Google's doodle today (23rd August) is great.

This is what it looks like and I must confess I hadn't got a clue what it was about when I first saw it:

It's about The Mundaneum. I'd not heard of it before but now I've read about it, wow, what a thing.

It's a great example of a Google Doodle in that it gets you to learn about new things; but in this case it's even better because it makes you think about things, too. I would think of this massive edifice, with its drawerfuls of indexed information as something akin to a giant physical database. But now with computers easily capable of storing far vaster amounts of information, why hasn't an Internet Mundaneum been set up?

Maybe I'm thinking of it wrong - i.e. the physical Mundaneum is more akin to the architecture of the internet - and the digital Mundaneum is the internet. Or perhaps it's more akin to Wikipedia? I don't really think the latter can be true, as a true digital Mundaneum wouldn't limit articles at all; the way I see it, a real digital Mundaneum would have all the publically-available information in the world, right down to the tiniest detail. Wikipedia doesn't fulfil this criterion for lots of reasons.

So then, it's more similar to the internet. But that doesn't work either; not only is there the "right to be forgotten", there are huge swathes of archived material (newspapers spring to mind immediately; most of them haven't got around to digitising their pre-1990 material, but you can view most of them on microfiche right the way back to the first editions, if you're lucky enough to still have a library with such state-of-the-art 1970s technology.

Of course the original Mundaneum didn't contain everything known in 1910, so bemoaning the lack of a digital version isn't really fair. But I wish more newspapers would pull their fingers out and get their really old stuff onto the internet, that would be a decent start.

This all plays into one of my current obsessions: making a simulation of UK politics. I know it might not seem relevant, but I guess what I mean is that, within the simulation, each person would represent one of the Mundaneum's index cards...that's for another post, I think.


Edit:  Oh my, I've just found out about The Dymaxion Chronofile.  I might explode.