I was glad to stumble over Kilowatts (aka James Watts) and Vanek's (aka Peter van Ewijk) new album today when for some impulsive reason googling for "Kilowatts & Vanek". K&V's first album, titled Rawq, was an innovative result an online collaboration between the two musicians through the Internet. They didn't meet in person until they first performed the songs live.

Standing in the kitchen washing up some plates today I suddenly started thinking about the pricing of DVDs and music. Perhaps the thought came since I watched a film with some friends last night, a film I had bought at discount price. I started wondering why people are prepared to pay more for a movie than an album, since an album in most cases has more replay value. This lead me to some other thoughts regarding why we buy music and movies in the first place, because it's not always and only about listening or watching them.

A complete surprise, Finland won the Eurovision Song Contest this year and I can't imagine a better or more deserving winner. Finland's never done better than ending up sixth place and that was back in 1973. Best of all, they didn't just win with any song, they won with Finnish trademark music: heavy rock, so this is great news indeed!

I just finished watching the semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest, a relatively popular event here in Europe. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's an annual contest where several European, as well as non-European, countries compete in music. Each country chooses an artist to represent it. The winnining country gets to host the contest the next year. As usual the quality was uneven, there were some potentially great ones and a lot that were mediocre and some that were outright bad. Also as usual, the results of the vote made absolutely no sense.

The debate on filesharing is heavily polarized and seemingly dominated by two camps; the record companies with their signed artists as allies attempting to come off as guardians of justice forming the vanguard of an army of lawyers marching on the supposedly anarchistic, irresponsible filesharers. I think this view, which is popularized through media, is extremely inaccurate and is an obstacle in every attempt to try and understand the issue and its underlying causes. Filesharing was inevitable and is here to stay, in fact its success is in part due to record companies' strategies.