If only there was a form of media where the advertising was valued as much as the editorial. There is.

Newly-published piece of research from the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism says almost 50% of people are already using ad-blockers while browsing newspaper websites.

The only reason the other 50% haven't done the same thing is they haven't yet realised they can.

The same report says they're not over-keen on banner advertising being replaced by native advertising either.

This is a big problem for the advertising industry.

Now if only there was some form of media where the advertising content was valued as much as the editorial.

I'd rather take musical recommendations from a machine than a DJ

If I hit the Discover tab on my Spotify page it lists "Top Recommendations" for me.

On the top line at the moment (above) are Mice Parade, Markley, Yusuf Lateef, Can, Bill Frisell, ESKA, Wizz Jones, James Yorkston, Les Ambassadeurs Du Motel De Bamako, David Lang, Quentin Sirjacq, Greg Foat, M. Ward, John Fahey and Land Of Kush.

I've heard of only seven of those names and of those I have consciously listened to just four.

Further down the same page Spotify lists albums by artists it thinks I might like based, more specifically, on my listening to Max Richter, Judee Sill, Jamie X, Led Zeppelin and the English Chamber Orchestra.

Then there are some people I might like based on my listening to people I'm not aware of having listened to at all, artists such as Tsegue-Maryam Guebro and Akira Kosemura. 

If I scroll down the entire page, which contains over 300 recommendations, I would guess I have heard about twenty of them. And I've heard a lot of music.

I'm assuming that somewhere in Spotify is a digital genie, tracking the things I listen to, noting the ones that I switch away from as well as the ones I return to, until it builds up some cloud-like picture of my tolerance. In which case it seems to be doing quite a good job.

Previous experience with recommendation engines has tended to result in a menu of records either so obviously in my taste cloud that I could have thought of them myself or so popular that the only explanation for why I hadn't chosen them myself was prejudice (which is, let's not forget, always a huge part of what people do and don't listen to.) The introduction of science into the serendipitous business of musical taste has tended in the past to come up with results too broad to tempt anyone. I might like Joni Mitchell. No kidding. These Spotify results have avoided that by proffering stuff I haven't heard and taking cues from the things I listen to on Spotify, as opposed to the far broader church of things I happen to like.

Apple's competing foray into the world of streaming, announced last week, makes much of their investment in "curation" by real DJs like Zane Lowe. I'm not sure about this. Disc jockeys are the very last people I would seek recommendations from. That's because they are required by their professional code and inclined by their temperaments to pretend that there's lots of new and exciting music coming along every single week. There isn't.

The music business, together with that part of the music media that aligns itself so closely with the business that it may as well be part of it, spends all of its energies on the new, new thing. The public, on the other hand, doesn't.

The Ron Moody I didn't know

The death of Ron Moody has been announced. He was ninety-one.

Ron lived at the bottom of my road and I used to see him from time to time, returning from the shops or ferrying his kids around.

I always wanted to say something to him. I'm quite good at casual interactions with legends. Pick your place and time, don't do it when people are watching, shake the hand, say a few well-chosen words and make it clear that you'll be gone in less than a minute. In my experience the legend never minds and is every bit as much in need of bucking up as anyone else.

The problem with talking to Ron is that I knew I could never get my tribute beyond Fagin in "Oliver!", which was one of the greatest turns in the history of show business in these islands. Obviously I'd seen him in other things over the years but the memory of them would be bound to be over-shadowed by that one great role.  If you had one minute with Geoff Hurst you'd be talking to him about that hat-trick, wouldn't you?

But then Geoff is probably quite happy to be remembered for his exploits on that one particular sunny afternoon. Actors, in my experience, are a bit less happy to be defined by their performance in one part. But then, most of them never get to be this good and have cameras around to record the fact.

A few things worth reading

The most important story I read recently was The Economist's "Men Adrift", which is about the fact that nobody has much use for badly-educated males in advanced industrial societies these days. It seems of a piece with the most frightening story I read recently, the New Yorker's account of how a Belgian teenager ran off to join ISIS. This one paragraph captures his chilling combination of cluelessness and determination.

On the music front Steve Albini is interesting as ever on copyright and the foolishness of trying to restore the old certainties of the music business.

Then there's this short Adam Gopnik item about the right and wrong way to appreciate Frank Sinatra.

Five things War and Peace taught me about football

Inspired by the BBC's radio version of "War and Peace", I bought a copy of Tolstoy's book, which is almost fourteen hundred pages long. I finished it the other day. It made me think. It made me think about football.

1. Much as sports journalists might wish it so, the outcome of football matches isn't as a result of the managers' planning any more than the outcome of history is decided by the generals. Wise leaders simply find a parade and march in front of it. 
2. There is no guarantee that what worked in the past will continue to work in the future. Napoleon did the same things at Borodino as he did at Austerlitz, "yet the terrible stroke of his arm had supernaturally become impotent".
3. If anyone makes history it's the supporters. They are the life-force of a club. "Kings are the slaves of history. History, that is, the unconscious swarm-like life of mankind, uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes."
4. Players, like soldiers, do nothing most of the time, which is irritating but it's the way things have to be. "The chief attraction of military service lies in compulsory and irreproachable idleness." 
5. For the overwhelming majority of clubs each new season will be much like the last one. "Every action, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in a historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity. This particularly applies to Spurs."

Brian Case's lovely little book about jazz, film and crime fiction

On the Snap: Three Decades of Snapshots from the World of Jazz, Film & Crime Fiction is a slim volume of reflections from Brian Case, whose speciality is writing about jazz, crime fiction and anything else he finds stirring. You could read it in an hour. Then you could read it again.

Whenever I sent a hack to interview somebody I used to ask them to make sure they included the little details they told  everyone in the office the minute they got back. A lot of the time they didn't. The transcript takes over and you lose some of that gossipy human interest. This has got lots of those details, the kind you tell the family. Jack Nicholson has got short legs. Dexter Gordon was six foot five. Michael Caine had liposuction to lose weight for "Shirley Valentine". I'm not sure I'd take all of it as gospel but that doesn't matter.

And at the back it's got three lists of things he likes. There are some films, some crime novels and twenty jazz albums. He's not trying to be definitive, not saying "these are the ones you've got to hear before you die" or anything similarly bombastic. He's honest about the fact that by the time he got to encounter the likes of Duke Ellington they were past their best. He stopped liking Miles Davis when he went electronic. He only likes Tom Waits because of one line. Case reminds me of Joe Bussard, the man who collects 78s of early jazz and blues. Both know when to say "there's nothing for me here". I find that liberating. It's Case's impatience with the commonplace that awakens you to his ear for the remarkable.

When Duke Ellington tore it up and grandad just applauded politely

On November 7th 1940 the Duke Ellington Band played a ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota. Two young radio engineers got permission to record the shows on condition that they didn't issue them commercially. (The full story of how they eventually came to be issued is here.)

The shows were recorded direct to a disc cutter using sixteen-inch discs revolving at thirty-three and a third RPM. It was a novelty for the band to be able to hear themselves playing for as long as fifteen minutes. Studio recordings were generally no longer than three minutes.

This was the heyday of the Blanton-Webster line-up of Ellington's band, with the young bassist Jimmy Blanton, who would die of T.B. not long after, and the saxophonist Ben Webster, who soon left to become famous in his own right.

It doesn't matter what you think of jazz or of Ellington; this is exceptional music performed in a way were find difficult to imagine today. No individual microphones, no amplification, just an announcer who occasionally comes to the front and tells the people what the next number is - and no post-production jiggery-pokery. This is the unvarnished sound of one of the greatest bands who ever drew breath having an on night.

Which makes the ripple of applause at the end of the number even more amazing. The kids in this dancehall in the middle of nowhere have just been exposed to one of the richest musical experiences of the 20th century and yet their reaction is no more than polite and approving. In time their great-grandchildren would be trained like Pavlov's dogs, to over-enthuse, often before a note has been played.

Remember when radio DJs were famous enough for sitcoms to make gags about them?

When Mark Ellen and I had our chat with Johnnie Walker at Word In Your Ear the other week - now available as a podcast - I teased him with the fact that he was always the housewife's favourite. He shrugged it off.

This weekend I was watching some old episodes of "Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads", including their most famous show in which they try to avoid accidentally hearing the result of England's game against Bulgaria.

They visit Terry's long-suffering housewife sister Audrey, played by the lovely Sheila Fearn. The first thing they do is switch off her radio. "One day without Johnnie Walker won't do anyone any harm," says Terry. Big laugh.

That's a kind of immortality. Back in the day when sitcom writers would make gags about DJs. Back in the days when audiences knew who they were.

It's amazing how well Sinatra sang when you consider how much sex he got

"You won't make much money but you'll get more pussy than Frank Sinatra."

With those words Ronnie Hawkins convinced Robbie Robertson and his fellow teenagers to sign up as his backing band the Hawks.

I often think about this line and whether Frank did indeed get more women than Elvis Presley or Steve McQueen or, well, name your contender.

And then I was listening to this tremendous playlist somebody's put together of Sinatra's performances of the songs that Bob Dylan did on "Shadows In The Night".

A lot of the recordings that built Sinatra's reputation were of songs where the woman leaves him. This is a situation of which he had so little real-life experience to call upon that it can only increase your admiration for his artistry.

There can only be one reason Russian oligarchs haven't had The Sopranos treatment

Seriously, what do Russian oligarchs have to do to get their own TV series? I'm thinking something like The Sopranos or House Of Cards or Mad Men. I keep waiting for it to arrive and it never does.

You can't say the raw material isn't there. These people have more money than God. They spend like drunken sailors. They have gorgeous girlfriends dripping with jewels. They own football clubs. Newspapers. Yachts. Submarines. Art. Governments. They can get any pop star in the world to sing "Happy Birthday" at their party. And because they have more feuds than the Labour Party a remarkable proportion of them come to sticky ends. Honestly, could they *be* any more long-form TV?

So why isn't Showtime or HBO or Channel Four announcing the imminent launch of "Oligarch!" Obviously this can't be because they haven't thought of the idea. And clearly it can't be because these fearless seekers after truth are frightened of the consequences which might befall them....

(Thinks.)

Isis is the very model of a modern media organisation

On this morning's Today Programme Matthew Glanville and Muhannad Haimour were talking about ISIS taking the Iraqi city of Ramadi. They said ISIS isn't an army. It's a brand.

True enough. It doesn't have an HQ or command structure. It crosses borders with impunity. It's got young people talking about it. Out of nowhere it suddenly has a big voice in international affairs.

How has it done all this?

Through the manipulation of our imagination.

And social media.

This is what the would-be Citizen Kanes of 2015 dream of.

The busman's life of B.B. King

B.B. King has died at the age of 89. For most of the last sixty years he's been on the road, playing as many as 250 gigs a year. He retired more than once. Each time he came back. He spent his life on a bus.

"Being a musician is not a job; it's an incurable disease," said one of the senior musicians my young friend Alex Gold was playing with in his ukulele orchestra. That's a very good line. Sadly this very musician died earlier this year. He was on the road at the time.

If I managed a young rock band these are the seven things I'd tell them

I've never been in a rock band but I've stood and watched enough up and coming bands perform to have realised a few things the people in those bands still don't appear to have realised. The other night I saw another lot of up and comers and found myself thinking the same things I've thought for years.

1. The most precious resource is not your music, it's the audience's attention. Don't let it drop for so much as a second.

2. Introduce yourself or be introduced. Bob Dylan has a man whose job it is to list his achievements and remind the audience who he is. And he's Bob Bloody Dylan.

3. Get on stage and start at least two minutes before your agreed time. And start, don't faff. In the early days Elvis Costello and The Attractions would *run* on clutching the tools of their trade, which was a signal. Any band who didn't want to waste their own time weren't going to waste yours either.

4. Audiences only really like two parts of a show - the beginning and the end.  Prolong the former by rolling directly through your first three numbers without pausing. End suddenly and unexpectedly. Audiences reward bands who stop early and punish those who stay late.

5. Between songs never approach the microphone and say the first thing that comes into your head. The chat is as important as the music.

6. In his excellent book The Ten Rules Of Rock and Roll, Robert Forster says "no band does anything new on stage after the first twenty minutes". Try to prove him wrong by doing one thing they're not expecting you to do. That's what the people will talk about on the way home.

7. Finally, there's nothing an audience enjoys more than hearing something familiar. If you think your songwriting and all-round musical excellence are enough to entertain a bunch of strangers for an hour with songs they have never heard before, bully for you. The Beatles didn't, but what the hell did they know?

The inescapable parallels between political parties and magazines

Eavesdropping on the vicious in-fighting that always comes in the wake of a major political defeat I can't help thinking about the parallels with what we used to say about magazine publishing.

There are two ways to launch a magazine. Either:

1. You look around at how the mass of people are behaving (which is always different from how they *say* they're behaving) and produce a magazine that goes with that grain.
Or;
2. You produce the kind of magazine you would like to read yourself and hope that a lot of other people will like it as well.

Guess which one works.

What's happening in Word podcast land

The interview with Johnny Rogan about his book Ray Davies: A Complicated Life that Mark Ellen and I recorded a couple of weeks ago is now available as a podcast.

If you go to wordpodcast.co.uk you can stream it and subscribe so that you get future podcasts, including the one we're recording next week with Johnnie Walker and Michael Watts, also in the salubrious but intimate surroundings of The Islington. Tickets.

When rock was rock, selfies were rare and something inevitably went wrong

When Mick Watts (he's the one on the right) sent me this pic, he apologised for the quality. Along with Johnnie Walker, Mick's our guest at Monday's Word In Your Ear, talking about his time working for Melody Maker in the 1970s. Tickets here.

Back in the 70s if you did manage to get a picture of yourself with the star you were interviewing, it was inevitably either out of focus or one of you would be partially obscured. Nobody carried photo-taking apparatus in their pocket. And if you did have a picture taken it was imperative that both you and the subject posed in such a way that sent up the very idea that you were having your picture taken. Even then it probably wouldn't "come out".

If you were lucky what you ended up with was a prototype selfie like the one above. While the subject wasn't actually operating the mechanism it was a selfie in that the only person really interested in the picture was the less famous one in the picture. The rarity of the "me with very famous person" snap has been devalued by mobile phone cameras and the increasingly military organisation of the meet-and-greet. Taylor Swift must already have had her picture taken with far more people than Frank Sinatra ever managed in his long career. Nowadays I don't know anybody who hasn't had their picture taken with Bruce Springsteen. It wasn't always so.

The Riddle of the Sands Adventure Club is a beautiful, pointless thing

I've never read Erskine Childers' Edwardian spy thriller The Riddle Of The Sands but I'm delighted that two blokes have developed such an obsession with it that they've started a website all about it and are now doing a podcast describing their plan to re-enact the events of the story in their original location.

When Jude Rogers and Keith Drummond and I were all working in the same office and reading the novels of Patrick Hamilton, which are set in a similarly alluring vanished world, we spent a fair bit of spare time investigating old Fitzrovia pubs which were supposed to be the inspiration for the Midnight Bell, trying to work out the location of the last Lyons Corner House in London or looking at pictures of the spivs hanging about outside motor dealers in Warren Street in the 50s. Sometimes there's nothing like losing yourself in the background world of a book.

That's what these guys have done. They start by visiting the last ship's chandler in London, then try to source some Raven Mixture pipe tobacco, look into a prismatic compass, unravel the Schleswig Holstein question, drink grog and just do the kind of harmless, nourishing things that middle-aged men prefer to do when they probably should be reading to children or insulating the loft.

What they find at every turn is this strange remedy or that arcane perquisite which once formed part of a clubman's daily life in the later days of the reign of Queen Victoria is actually still available in some form if you know where to look. Furthermore, if you find it you'll also find people only too happy to talk about it. It would take a very hard heart not to share some of the their innocent delight in each tiny discovery.

Bill Bryson said the thing he loved most about England was the way its people could get so thrilled about something as tiny as a biscuit. This project, I like to feel, could only have happened in England.

When did school mottos become 'mission statements'?

"We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad...” 

There's a good adaptation of that book, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, on Radio Four at the moment.  Waugh was a cynic about most things, but schools in particular. It doesn't matter what the masters at Llanabba Castle do, in Waugh's world it's all about the boys and the boys will put any amount of energy into avoiding work.

That's obviously one extreme. Yesterday, on passing a school minibus, I got a glimpse of the other extreme. Beneath the name of the school was this motto:

"Igniting the spark of genius in every child."

I know no organisation every outperforms their aspirations and all that but, as Waugh would have said, WTF? The above sentence is not a coherent thought. It's a bunch of words put in a line and nudged in the direction of a sentiment. And because it's a pious sentiment, one of the kind we all theoretically buy into, everybody sits back and applauds when really they should pelt it with fruit.

Honestly, why is everyone from school governors to the people who provide dry cleaning services trying to tug our heart-strings by using emotive words like "genius" and "passion" when any rational being knows they have no part in what these organisations do?

Think back to your school days. However good, bad or indifferent your school was, there probably wasn't a lot of genius ignition going on. Where's the school whose motto is "teaching kids things"?

If there's one thing I thank my school for teaching me it was how to take a sentence apart and examine how it works or doesn't. I use that every day. In fact my old school should change its motto to "calling people on their shit since 1591." In Latin.

In praise of the Health app and Instapaper

It was Matthew Parris in the Times who alerted me to the fact that the iPhone in my pocket has an app which is measuring how far I walk every day. As soon as I discovered this I became, like him, obsessed with trying to maintain my average. At the moment this is 9,257 steps a day, in case you're interested. On the days when I don't have any reason to leave the house I go on long circuitous walks round the neighbourhood to try to keep up.

I've been using another gismo a lot recently. Instapaper is a site and app where you can store long reads from magazines and newspapers to read at your leisure. Since I never read anything longer than 300 words on a screen that's a fair bit of stuff. I've just added Kate Mossman's piece about Bruce Hornsby where it sits alongside an Esquire story about the early days of Silicon Valley, another about the ownership of the copyright of "Happy Birthday" and David Simon's interview with Richard Price.

I read these stories on my phone on the tube. Most of them will last as long as it takes to travel from Oxford Circus to my home. If it weren't for Instapaper I wouldn't read them at all.

Leaving a record collection in your will is like bequeathing a minor stately home

When I made my first will, thirty years ago, I asked an old friend to be an executor. I had a lot of records. He had a lot of records. I figured that if it came to it he'd either take them or know what to do. A lot's changed since then. CD made vinyl seem passé. Then CD turned out to be even more passé. The world turned digital, fewer people had space for lots of stuff and my friend moved to Australia.

The other day my son asked me what I was planning to do with it all and I didn't have an answer.
He's far-sighted enough to know that it's going to be a problem. None of the kids are going to want more than the odd souvenir. They're all moving house at the moment and it's clear they don't have the same attachment to stuff we had at that age. No reason why they should. On the other hand they're sensitive enough to know that several thousand vinyl LPs and as many CDs can't just be chucked on to the council tip.

In the light of all the vinyl fetishism around Record Store Day I asked on Twitter whether anyone had made arrangements for their record collection in their wills. A few said they'd said that friends could have their pick. Some had specified that particular records should be left to particular people. That's probably OK if you don't have a massive quantity. The problem with a large collection is it's simultaneously precious and a pain in the arse. Bequeathing it is like leaving somebody a dog or a minor stately home. Not everyone wants the responsibility.