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Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Nine people have died in bush-fires in the region of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia. The fire has spread over 40,000 hectares of scrub, bushland and farmland so far and is still burning out of control. Hundreds of firemen have been fighting the fire, but conditions have been difficult because of strong winds and temperatures soaring well over 40 degrees Celsius. Of the nine who have died, eight were attempting to escape the advancing fire in their cars. Four children were among the dead. Locals of some rural towns fled to the ocean to escape the fires. Thousands of sheep and cattle have also been killed in the fires.

Separate fires have also been burning around Mount Osmond and Cleland National Park in the Adelaide hills. No fatalities have been recorded in this region. Fires also burn in country Victoria.

Bush-fires are annual occurrences in Australia, but these fires have been the worst in terms of deaths since the Ash Wednesday fires that killed 28 people in South Australia. Two years ago, over 400 houses were burnt down in a bush fire in the Australian capital city, Canberra.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Tad Brudzinski is running for the Family Coalition Party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Newmarket-Aurora riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.

He did not answer the question “Of the decisions made by Ontario’s 38th Legislative Assembly, which was the most beneficial to your electoral district? To the province as a whole? Which was least beneficial, or even harmful, to your riding? To the province as a whole?”

Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.

Thursday, August 5, 2021

Rapper Dababy (cropped).jpg

Following remarks by the rapper DaBaby regarding HIV/AIDS at a Miami, Florida festival, his remix of Dua Lipa’s song Levitating has lost a significant amount of radio audience in the United States of America. Yesterday, Billboard reported that, out of all the radio plays for Levitating, DaBaby’s remix now only makes up 49.5% of the radio plays for the song, a 20.7% decrease from last week.

At a performance at the Rolling Loud festival in Miami, DaBaby told an audience, “If you didn’t show up today with HIV/AIDS, or any of them deadly sexually transmitted diseases that’ll make you die in two to three weeks, then put your cell phone light in the air”, and went on to say, “Fellas, if you ain’t suck a nigga dick in the parking lot, put your cell phone lights in the air.” Lipa responded on her Instagram story by writing that she was “surprised and horrified” by DaBaby’s words, adding that “we need to come together to fight the stigma and ignorance around HIV/AIDS”.

Audacy, which is the second-largest radio group in the USA, told Billboard that they had removed the remix of Levitating from their stations “in light of DaBaby’s homophobic statements”. Jeremy Rice, who is the programming and branding director of Long Island-based WBLI in New York, has said that his station shifted to the version of Levitating that solely features Lipa, saying that WBLI management “just think it’s the right thing to do” given what he called DaBaby’s “plain wrong and hurtful” comments.

Fellow rapper T.I. defended DaBaby, arguing that “If you have a Lil Nas X video, and him living his truth, you gone damn sure have people like DaBaby who are going to speak they truth.” Lil Nas X is a gay rapper, who released the music video for his single Industry Baby on July 23, which “depicted him and a crowd of male dancers seemingly performing nude”, with their genitals blurred, according to Snopes.

Although DaBaby initially stood by his comments, on August 2 he apologised “to the LGBTQ+ community” for what he called “my misinformed comments about HIV/AIDS”. While saying that he appreciated “the many people who came to me with kindness, who reached out to me privately to offer wisdom, education and resources”, the rapper also wrote that “social media moves so fast that people want to demolish you before you even have the opportunity to grow, educate and learn from your mistakes”.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Every September, the Apple iPod is redesigned. Last year saw the release of the iPod Nano 5th generation, bringing a video camera and a large range of colours to the Nano for the first time. But as Apple again prepares to unveil a redesigned product, the company has released their quarterly sales figures—and revealed that they have sold only 9m iPods for the quarter to June—the lowest number of sales since 2006, leading industry anylists to ponder whether the world’s most successful music device is in decline.

Such a drop in sales is not a problem for Apple, since the iPhone 4 and the iPad are selling in high numbers. But the number of people buying digital music players are concerning the music industry. Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian, wrote that the decline in sales of MP3 players was a “problem” for record companies, saying that “digital music sales are only growing as fast as those of Apple’s devices – and as the stand-alone digital music player starts to die off, people may lose interest in buying songs from digital stores. The music industry had looked to the iPod to drive people to buy music in download form, whether from Apple’s iTunes music store, eMusic, Napster or from newer competitors such as Amazon.”

Mark Mulligan, a music and digital media analyst at Forrester Research, said in an interview that “at a time where we’re asking if digital is a replacement for the CD, as the CD was for vinyl, we should be starting to see a hockey-stick growth in download sales. Instead, we’re seeing a curve resembling that of a niche technology.” Alex Jacob, a spokesperson for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which represents the worldwide music industry, agreed that there had been a fall in digital sales of music. “The digital download market is still growing,” they said. “But the percentage is less than a few years ago, though it’s now coming from a higher base.” Figures released earlier this year, Arthur wrote, “show that while CD sales fell by 12.7%, losing $1.6bn (£1bn)in value, digital downloads only grew by 9.2%, gaining less than $400m in value.”

Expectations that CDs would, in time, become extinct, replaced by digital downloads, have not come to light, Jacob confirmed. “Across the board, in terms of growth, digital isn’t making up for the fall in CD sales, though it is in certain countries, including the UK,” he said. Anylising the situation, Arthur suggested that “as iPod sales slow, digital music sales, which have been yoked to the device, are likely to slow too. The iPod has been the key driver: the IFPI’s figures show no appreciable digital download sales until 2004, the year Apple launched its iTunes music store internationally (it launched it in the US in April 2003). Since then, international digital music sales have climbed steadily, exactly in line with the total sales of iPods and iPhones.”

Nick Farrell, a TechEYE journalist, stated that the reason for the decline in music sales could be attributed to record companies’ continued reliance on Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, saying that they had considered him the “industry’s saviour”, and by having this mindset had forgotten “that the iPod is only for those who want their music on the run. What they should have been doing is working out how to get high quality music onto other formats, perhaps even HiFi before the iPlod fad died out.”

When Jobs negotiated a deal with record labels to ensure every track was sold for 99 cents, they considered this unimportant—the iPod was not a major source of revenue for the company. However, near the end of 2004, there was a boom in sales of the iPod, and the iTunes store suddenly began raking in more and more money. The record companies were irritated, now wanting to charge different amounts for old and new songs, and popular and less popular songs. “But there was no alternative outlet with which to threaten Apple, which gained an effective monopoly over the digital music player market, achieving a share of more than 70%” wrote Arthur. Some did attempt to challenge the iTunes store, but still none have succeeded. “Apple is now the largest single retailer of music in the US by volume, with a 25% share.”

The iTunes store now sells television shows and films, and the company has recently launced iBooks, a new e-book store. The App Store is hugely successful, with Apple earning $410m in two years soley from Apps, sales of which they get 30%. In two years, 5bn apps have been downloaded—while in seven years, 10bn songs have been purchased. Mulligan thinks that there is a reason for this—the quality of apps simply does not match up to a piece of music. “You can download a song from iTunes to your iPhone or iPad, but at the moment music in that form doesn’t play to the strengths of the device. Just playing a track isn’t enough.”

Adam Liversage, a spokesperson of the British Phonographic Industry, which represents the major UK record labels, notes that the rise of streaming services such as Spotify may be a culprit in the fall in music sales. Revenues from such companies added up to $800m in 2009. Arthur feels that “again, it doesn’t make up for the fall in CD sales, but increasingly it looks like nothing ever will; that the record business’s richest years are behind it. Yet there are still rays of hope. If Apple – and every other mobile phone maker – are moving to an app-based economy, where you pay to download games or timetables, why shouldn’t recording artists do the same?”

Well, apparently they are. British singer Peter Gabriel has released a ‘Full Moon Club’ app, which is updated every month with a new song. Arthur also notes that “the Canadian rock band Rush has an app, and the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor – who has been critical of the music industry for bureaucracy and inertia – released the band’s first app in April 2009.” It is thought that such a system will be an effective method to reduce online piracy—”apps tend to be tied to a particular handset or buyer, making them more difficult to pirate than a CD”, he says—and in the music industry, piracy is a very big problem. In 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated that 95% of downloads were illegitimate. If musicians can increase sales and decrease piracy, Robert says, it can only be a good thing.

“It’s early days for apps in the music business, but we are seeing labels and artists experimenting with it,” Jacob said. “You could see that apps could have a premium offering, or behind-the-scenes footage, or special offers on tickets. But I think it’s a bit premature to predict the death of the album.” Robert concluded by saying that it could be “premature to predict the death of the iPod just yet too – but it’s unlikely that even Steve Jobs will be able to produce anything that will revive it. And that means that little more than five years after the music industry thought it had found a saviour in the little device, it is having to look around again for a new stepping stone to growth – if, that is, one exists.”

Friday, November 13, 2009

Wikinews interviewed author Marc Headley about his new book Blown for Good, and asked him about life inside the international headquarters of Scientology known as “Gold Base“, located in Gilman Hot Springs near Hemet, California. Headley joined the organization at age seven when his mother became a member, and worked at Scientology’s international management headquarters for several years before leaving in 2005.