Oh dear! Ireland's real-life "My Lovely Horse" moment came true last Saturday night, when Dervish came last in the Eurovision. The post-mortems have been ongoing since then, with the performers and songwriters taking most of the flak.

Much of the criticism is unfair, I think (as indeed is my headline.) Unlike Ted and Dougal's infamous ditty, the song wasn't expressly chosen to lose Ireland the competition. Whatever one's opinion of the song - and I hold none, because (a) even though I have heard it a couple of times, I can't actually remember anything about it, and (b) I tend not to opine on the merits or otherwise of individual Eurovision entries - there is no doubt that it was the wrong song for the occasion.

I caught a bit of the discussion on the Ray D'Arcy show on Today FM this morning, and one very good point was made. The song was chosen on the Late Late Show, which has a much older demographic than the voters in the Eurovision. While the song might appeal to the over-35s, it cut no ice with the under-25s.

Secondly, Dervish is a traditional Irish music band, in the same sort of mould as the Bothy Band or Planxty. They just weren't the band for this sort of song. You can't imagine Planxty or the Bothy Band going on Eurovision in the 1970s playing a hybrid diddly-eye/pop song. If you want to do soft-pop diddly-eye, get a band who do it well, like the Corrs.

If Ireland is ever to have notions of winning the Eurovision again, the strategy involved must change dramatically. Forget the idea of meaningful songs. Eurovision is as gay as Christmas, so to do well, Ireland's entry needs to camp it up. Two and a half minutes of fizzy Europop, that kids can remember just long enough to vote for it, performed by a pop starlet or a boyband/girlband. Skimpily clad dancers swishing their hair around, all that sort of stuff. Nothing deep and serious, as that just scares the votes away.

And another suggestion from Ray D'Arcy's show - maybe the performer should be a native of Eastern Europe.

And even though everyone has seen it thousands of times already, the original "My Lovely Horse":

Apple and EMI have announced a deal whereby the music company's entire digital content will be available for sale in best quality and DRM-free from iTunes Stores from May.

My thoughts on the deal here

Today's "Pricewatch" in The Irish Times was all about music purchasing, and comparing the price of downloading with buying a physical CD.

While Conor Pope was happy enough about the value available for those seeking to buy singles, he felt that album purchases weren't such good value.

"While a CD single costs in the region of €4 - for which you also get the B-side and other material - often of dubious merit - a song can be downloaded from iTunes for just 99 cent. It is not a lot to pay for a single. The price of a full album downloaded from iTunes is not quite such good value, however, particularly when you consider how little it costs to make the music available."

He took the example - the only one he provided and upon which he based his entire argument - of Snow Patrol's current album "Eyes Open", which was available at the time of his writing on CD Wow for €9.99. This is the same price that Apple charge for a download of the album from the iTunes Store. His argument was that given that the costs of delivering the music via download are virtually negligible in comparison to those of producing and retailing a CD, how come they cost the same to the end consumer?

"The CD of Snow Patrol's Eyes Open currently tops the CD Wow! chart and has a price tag of €9.99. On iTunes, Eyes Open is selling for the same price even though the costs associated with delivering it to your computer are negligible. There's no shiny CD or plastic packaging to factor in, no sleeve to print and no one has to be employed either to sell it to you or to put it in an envelope and stick it in the post."

The problem here is that his argument is baseless. Eyes Open may have been €9.99 on CD Wow when he wrote his piece, but it is €11.99 as I write this. It's still €9.99 on iTunes though. I also saw it in two central Dublin record shops today, in one for €19.99 and in the other for €14.99.


I don't know the exact figures involved, but I would imagine that sales of music, on CD and paid for over the counter of record shops would still account for the largest part of the market. There is no doubt that shopping online can get you bargains when it comes to music, but not always. I just checked the price of Snow Patrol's album on HMV's site and it came out at £8.99 (€13.66), but this was before the VAT was recalculated or any shipping price added. I did the same on Amazon.co.uk and with shipping and Irish VAT, it finished up at £10.47 (€15.91).

So what Conor Pope forgot to say is that the price of CDs is very variable, whereas on the iTunes Store, every album is the same price, €9.99. (Some longer albums are a little more. For example, U2's recent compilation "U218", with 27 tracks is €15.99.)

While the cost of preparing a CD for retail sale is undoubtedly more than it would be to offer the album for download, there are substantial costs involved in the latter method. The music has to be coded into a format that can be downloaded and put on servers. I can only imagine that Apple's monthly bandwidth bill must be enormous.

There are advantages and disadvantages for the consumer when it comes to downloading. One of the great advantages is that you can get your music almost instantly, anytime you like. So if you want to buy a new album at 11pm on a Friday night, you can be wiggling your booty and shaking your thang to your new purchase at 11.05pm. If you prefer to buy it on CD, you either have to wait until the shops open on Saturday, or until your CD is delivered the following week from your online retailer of choice. Either way, it will result in deferment of booty wiggling and thang shaking. Another advantage is that you don't pay a premium for a new album. The price of most new releases hitting the shops these days is in the high teens or into the twenties. On iTunes they are €9.99.

The big disadvantage of downloading is DRM, which surprisingly Pope did not mention at all in his article. Buying music online means you only have limited rights as to how you may use it. Music from iTunes Store will not play on any MP3 player other than an iPod, and you may only play the music on a maximum of five computers. You may however burn as many CDs as you like, but after seven burns, you must rearrange the track listing. Some see DRM as an abomination, but as long as it is reasonable then in my opinion, it's a fair trade-off for being able to buy the album at a lower price and getting access to it straight away.

The other thing that Conor Pope ignored completely was the subscription model of downloading, whereby you have access to the music for as long as you maintain your subscription, or you have the facility to download a fixed number of songs for keeps (and usually DRM-free) per month.

Overall, I felt it was a poorly researched article. Pope had made up his mind that downloading was poor value, and sought to build an argument around that. Unfortunately, the facts got in the way.

I have pdfed the article, which you can download from here.

Apple have introduced a "publish to web" option for iTunes Playlists, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

It's a selection of some music I have been listening to over the last year or so. Not necessarily a "Best of 2006" or anything like that, as some of it dates back to 1998.

If you feel motivated enough, you can buy it in its entirety from iTunes, or just pick individual tunes off it.




To make an iMix, you first create a playlist in your copy of iTunes. Then highlight that playlist in the iTunes sidebar and either click on the arrow beside its name or else select File->Create an iMix. Beware at this point that iTunes will attempt to match the attributes of your list with that which it holds for the same tracks in the iTS. If they don't match, iTunes may leave the track off the iMix. This could be a conflict like a differing genre, or even a spelling variation. It's a good idea to check each track before you try to publish, just to be sure the iTS has it. If it doesn't come up even after this check, have a look at all the attributes and try to match as closely as possible.

It's a bit of a pain in the hoop, but it works eventually.