Glad to hear we agreed! We agreed about Burma too (although others were less concerned what the Socialist Govt had been up to there, eh-hem...) Did you see that the former Burmese PM died today? I fear there were few tears shed for him. We may even agree on other things, who knows?
) But I've been marked as Parish Pariah, so take care no-one sees us talking
At our end of Europe file-sharing is so widespread it barely even attracts notice. Many major labels refuse to distribute their stuff at all here - for fear it will be pirated. This is of course is stupid, because it only takes one copy to create a pirate-master, and then it's pirated anyhow. All they are doing is hurting themselves by denying themselves the chance of legitimate sales. Or do they really think they can prevent a single copy of their disks turning-up here? They should see what I get delivered from Amazon each month! (I wish my bank-manager didn't see the bills for it all, though). But the upshot of it is since NOTHING is available in the shops (we do not have ONE classical cd store in Moscow. Even St Pete's only has one. There are some stands selling cds in the lobby of the Tchaik Concert Hall and the Conservatoire Great Hall) you have to go on the scrounge for file-shared copies of anything you want. The situation is even worse for anyone in provincial cities. I got a desperate email from Novosibirsk from a PhD student that began "are you the Englishman in Moscow who likes Janacek?".... two disks went off the next day by mail. If you want to get anything by Terry Riley (except for "in C"), or Harry Partch, or PMD... you have no chance whatsoever. So my view is - the record companies have abrogated the right to distribute their products, so they are responsible for causing the anarchy that arises.
