John Harris

My problem with Spotify – even though I’m a subscriber | John Harris

Monday, January 29th, 2018

It’s a miracle of the age, but Spotify’s suspect ‘playlists’, shaky finances and low pay are bad for music fans and creators alike

In the last 20 or so years of technological revolution, has any artform been as transformed as music? Film and literature may still be adjusting to new platforms and business ideas, but they cling to the same basic rules. Art and theatre seem largely unchanged. As Netflix and Amazon Prime embed themselves in our lives, even TV is managing to hold on. But, though songs still form the soundtrack to our lives, everything that surrounds them has changed beyond recognition.

Only a generation ago, we all had to pay to own music; now, it is either free, or available in abundance in return for paltry subscription fees. The ubiquitous chatter of headphone noise attests to how many of us drink in a great ocean of sound, while a lot of the people who create it wonder how on earth they can make a living. Such, perhaps, is the price of the fulfilment of a simple wish. As a high-ranking tech executive once put it: “people just want to have access to all of the world’s music”, and for good and ill, we are now living with the consequences.

Music industry insiders now talk about artists nipping and tucking their music according to the playlists’ vanilla aesthetics

Related: ‘They could destroy the album’: how Spotify’s playlists have changed music for ever

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My problem with Spotify – even though I’m a subscriber | John Harris

Monday, January 29th, 2018

It’s a miracle of the age, but Spotify’s suspect ‘playlists’, shaky finances and low pay are bad for music fans and creators alike

In the last 20 or so years of technological revolution, has any artform been as transformed as music? Film and literature may still be adjusting to new platforms and business ideas, but they cling to the same basic rules. Art and theatre seem largely unchanged. As Netflix and Amazon Prime embed themselves in our lives, even TV is managing to hold on. But, though songs still form the soundtrack to our lives, everything that surrounds them has changed beyond recognition.

Only a generation ago, we all had to pay to own music; now, it is either free, or available in abundance in return for paltry subscription fees. The ubiquitous chatter of headphone noise attests to how many of us drink in a great ocean of sound, while a lot of the people who create it wonder how on earth they can make a living. Such, perhaps, is the price of the fulfilment of a simple wish. As a high-ranking tech executive once put it: “people just want to have access to all of the world’s music”, and for good and ill, we are now living with the consequences.

Music industry insiders now talk about artists nipping and tucking their music according to the playlists’ vanilla aesthetics

Related: ‘They could destroy the album’: how Spotify’s playlists have changed music for ever

Continue reading…

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We can solve the UK’s housing crisis – with a little imagination | John Harris

Monday, January 22nd, 2018

Too many of the new houses being built in Britain are unaffordable or badly constructed. But viable alternatives exist

Housebuilding, housebuilding, housebuilding. Last year, Theresa May pledged to make “the British dream a reality by reigniting home ownership in Britain once again”, and insisted she was taking “personal charge” of the effort to solve the country’s housing problems. Not long after, the chancellor, Philip Hammond, promised to eventually ensure the construction of 300,000 new homes a year. And fair play to the government, perhaps: in 2016- 2017, 184,000 new homes were built in England – the highest figure since the crash of 2007-8, and possible proof that the prime minister’s dream of a country building “more homes, more quickly” was starting to be realised.

Related: Britain has enough land to solve the housing crisis – it’s just being hoarded

Impossible land prices cut out developers beyond the tiny handful of giants who dominate the market

Related: House prices aren’t the issue – land prices are | Patrick Collinson

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What happens when the jobs dry up in the new world? The left must have an answer | John Harris

Wednesday, January 17th, 2018

We need to address the questions raised by rapid automation, and find new ways to redistribute power

If modern Britain has a defining problem, it boils down to an across-the-board failure to leave the past behind. Brexit, self-evidently, is a profoundly retrogressive project, helmed by Tory politicians split between continuity Thatcherites and devotees of a supposed one-nation Conservatism who still yearn for a quiet, sepia-tinted England. The latter are personified, in her own shaky way, by the prime minister. Labour, meanwhile, has a clear set of moral responses to an obvious social crisis, and the first stirrings of a convincing programme for government. But it, too, has a tendency to take refuge in fuzzy dreams of yesteryear: 1945, old flags and banners, the idea that a dependable job in a factory is still a byword for emancipation.

Related: Let’s wrench power back from the billionaires | Bernie Sanders

Related: Should we scrap benefits and pay everyone £100 a week?

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Rats, mould and broken furniture: the scandal of the UK’s refugee housing

Thursday, January 11th, 2018

The Home Office says that asylum seekers deserve ‘safe, habitable’ homes. What too many of them get is filth and squalor

The cramped upstairs box room was meant to be used by one of Duminda’s children, but it is not in a fit state. An old mattress is propped up against the wall, and behind it is an expanse of black-green mould. In the downstairs bathroom, there is similarly widespread damp, and a smell that suggests the problem is serious. “We worry about the kids’ health,” Duminda tells me.

He and his partner, Kriti, are both from Sri Lanka. If either of them were to return, he says, they would be at risk of violence and imprisonment. He received his last asylum refusal from the Home Office two years ago; she was turned down around the same time. They are now preparing a fresh claim, and anxiously waiting.

It is the responsibility of our Compass contractors to provide accommodation that is safe, habitable, fit for purpose

You can actually hear the rats, chewing and gnawing at the floorboards, and running around. And that’s scary

Related: How do you live on £36.95 a week? Asylum seekers on surviving on their allowance

They put me in a house with two people in each bedroom. No privacy. And in the winter, no heater

Related: ‘I want to study and play sport’ – a young asylum seeker in Britain, one year on

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