You either love or hate The X Factor. I love it. It gets me booing like I’m at a pantomime, extolling my “expert” views on A&R much more fluidly than in the pub and swearing more when I stub a toe. I also have to admit that Simon Cowell is one of my heroes. In my first day in my first proper job, I had to take some photocopies into his office. Noticing that he hadn’t met me before, Simon invited me in, told me to sit down and chatted to me. I was a nervous wreck on my first day and very much appreciated this – not everyone was as supportive or as welcoming. It may have been cheesy but he ended the conversation by telling me that “I started in the post room and you’re already a level above that. You’ll be my boss in 10 years time.”

Thirteen years later I’m clearly not his boss, but I’ve followed his work and tried to apply some of his thinking to mine, with some success (I think anyway). Simon doesn’t care about cool and he always seems to know what he doesn’t know. This allows him to operate in areas that the music industry as a whole wouldn’t consider, and to think about different ways to reach his audience. Now that both musicians and critics have been forced to take a more realistic view of forming partnerships with brands, you could argue that the music business is coming round to Simon’s way of thinking. Hallelujah! I tell you all this so you know my biases before I get into the point of today’s blog.

You may have noticed a Facebook campaign to make Rage Against The Machine’s Killing In The Name this year’s Christmas Number One. This is their mission, as taken from Facebook:

“Fed up of Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No.1? Me too… So who’s up for a mass-purchase of the track KILLING IN THE NAME from December 13th (DON’T BUY IT YET!) as a protest to the X-Factor monotony?”

Now, I can see why many may think this is Karma-positive. Obviously an artist with such passion performing alternative rock and, you know, using the actual ‘F’ word must be superior culturally than someone who has just won a talent competition? Well guess what? I reckon it’s an epic Karma fail.

Why? Firstly, Simon’s Syco imprint is part of Sony Music, the same major label group that RATM are signed to. This means that the protest amounts to saying “Fuck you, I won’t buy what you tell me – but can I buy this from you instead? Thanks.”

Secondly, if you’re going to take a stand against ‘this type of thing’ then do it properly. Why not get behind an artist who is self-funding their project outside of the major label system? Surely that’s a better way of saying you won’t just consume what you’re told. I really like RATM but, passionate though they are, they are a corporate US rock band on a major label. Come on, people. You could choose an act signed to an indie, or even Hamfatter (steady on). But a band so serious in its conviction against corporate America that it signs to a major and storms to global fame by singing the equivalent of “I won’t tidy my bedroom” is most certainly not sticking it to the man.

But the real reason that this campaign is Karma-negative is because it pretends that the way something is made, and who funds it, is a factor in deciding whether or not it’s any good. The X Factor has produced some utter dross, but it’s also produced some talent, including the fantastic Leona Lewis who looks like being, deservedly, one of the biggest stars of her generation. Does it matter that she won a talent show? Is The Farm’s version of Stepping Stone better than The Monkees’ just because The Monkees came to fame through a TV programme? Is a record better just because it was released through an indie? My view is that a lot of music is dross whether it’s through X Factor, an indie or self-funded.

If the answer is “yes, it does matter”, then recorded music doesn’t have a very bright future. If we’re to continue to have professional artists, then this indier-than-thou-Bill-Hicks-anti-sell-out view of the creation of music and art in general has to change. Artists will have to turn to increasingly more commercial and more “corporate” ways to earn a crust. Will they be pre-judged on how their art was paid for, or on the quality of their art?

My final question is to those considering making a protest this Christmas. Have you really done enough to support music this year to have a right to protest?

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You can follow the RATM vs X Factor argy-bargy on Twitter with the  hashtag #ratm4xmas

It will be no surprise to anyone who has ever read the music magazine I write for, or looked at its website or followed it on Twitter, that hardcore music fans love Spotify to the point where it bores everyone else around them. Endless music on tap in a conscience-warming legal environment, an interface so slick and simple it shames all the other streaming services, and the occasional C.o.I. advert to convince you that you’re actually paying (with a small sliver of your attention) for what you’re listening to… it appears to be the very model of Culture Karma in action. Do something loveable and people will love you for it.

The truth is that Spotify is far from a business slam-dunk and may not survive its current breakout stage from word-of-mouth hit to the mass market. The founders are cagey about how many people are migrating from the ad-funded platform to the £9.99 a month commercial-free Premium tier – it’s estimated to be fewer than ten per cent of users. Founder Daniel Ek admits that a purely ad-funded future for Spotify is not feasible. Meanwhile it’s estimated (very roughly) that it costs Spotify 1p in publishing and mechanical royalties alone to stream each song, per play, which doesn’t sound like much until you realise that the service has at least 5 million “freemium” users averaging over 70 hours’ use a month each. The figures are dizzying. Surely Spotify needs to wean us off freemium and onto premium as fast as it can?

Well, yes, but where the hell are the brands? The ones with deep pockets, the ones who swear blind that they are committed to music, its strongest supporters – the ones who banner up every music festival until you feel you’re at a telecoms or drinks industry trade fair? Spotify would appear to be an open goal for a smart Culture Karma move by one of these entities. “Premium, ad-free Spotify for everyone – brought to you this month by [[YOUR BRAND NAME HERE]].”

The case would appear to be a strong one. There is a massive audience to be converted and a clear and present need, specifically to stop that bloody advert for Robbie Williams’ Reality Killed The Video Star from interrupting your playback of Mogwai or Fairport Convention every three songs. (I actually don’t believe that Spotify use sophisticated technology to target you with ads you’ll like. I think they zero in mercilessly with ads you’ll actively detest, to drive you towards that sanity-saving tenner a month tier.)

There’s also a strong possibility that if a brand committed to giving everyone a month of free Spotify, it would “stick” in the way that yet another badging of yet another festival, or yet another on-bottle ticket giveaway, just doesn’t. Give people something they will genuinely appreciate and who knows, maybe the relationship will extend beyond the usual transactional knee-trembler and become something longer and deeper. You’re not going for more data capture and eyeballs, you’re going for Culture Karma.

The case against? As is so often the case, it would not so much be an objection to the idea itself as the inconvenient fact that “we’re doing something else right now”. Brands have been knee-deep in music for a decade now and realised some time ago that simply repeating “we love music!” to a disinterested audience solves very little. Dreaming of a double-bubble on music sales and data throughput, telecoms put their energies into trying – and failing – to own mobile music delivery. But oh dear, Spotify Mobile blows that out of the water and is a steal at £9.99 a month. (And isn’t it strange how something that’s expensive when tethered to a computer immediately feels like a bargain when hooked to a mobile?) Meanwhile drinks brands have their festivals, tours and pop-up nights. It’s going to take a brave person to argue for a game-changer that’s simple, scalable and based not on complicated, client-baffling mechanics but on an established – and super-hot – offering. A move that’s pure Culture Karma.

Any volunteers?

(Full disclosure: No, I don’t get paid by Spotify. It just looks that way)

The music industry knows it already. The newspaper industry suspects it. The BBC fears it. The thing that keeps them all awake at night is the dawning realisation that a generation is coming to maturity who want the things they provide but has no intention of paying for them.

Teenagers are just as keen on The Ting Tings as you might have been on The Stone Roses at their age. What makes them different from your generation is that they’ve grown up with virtual juke boxes like YouTube at their fingertips. They haven’t once needed to reach for even a single thin coin to access the music of their choice.

Students want a newspaper just as much as you did but given the choice between a broadsheet which costs the best part of a quid and a bunch of yesterday’s press releases wrapped in a picture of Lindsay Lohan, thrust into their hands at a travel point at a cost of precisely nothing, they will take the latter every time.

For all its efforts to ensure that its programming has the requisite “edginess”, the BBC finds the amount of time young people spend watching its TV output is dropping steadily. This is going to make the licence fee an even more difficult sell when these people become law-abiding householders. And it won’t be much use pointing out the riches of the BBC’s web activities because these same people have grown up believing that there is nothing that cannot be banished from their life with just one click and then replaced with another just as easily.

It’s not surprising they feel that way. They have grown up in the waning years of a boom during which cheap credit and irrational optimism combined to shower them with information and entertainment that has been either free or paid for by someone other than the end-user. This has allowed them to preserve their cash for the things they remain happy to shell out on: alcohol and phones.

The music business (and by that I mean your personal favourite rock star, not some mythical “suit”) is reacting to the fact that the few records it can sell are 50% cheaper than they were ten years ago by jacking up the price of concert tickets. They’ll bumble through the current upheaval because music is less a business than a lifestyle and most of its hardcore practitioners wouldn’t know how to live any other way. Over at the harder-nosed end of things Rupert Murdoch is talking about making some of his company’s websites only available to people who will pay. If he manages it the other publishers will do the same because they all know that the vision of an advertiser-funded digital future disappeared with Lehmann Brothers. The people who put their faith in yet to be specified “new models” will, like 7th-Day Adventists, have to wait. You would be amazed how many of these transformational companies have got their fingers crossed hoping they will be bought by a rich, clueless uncle. I love Spotify but can’t help thinking that the day it gets enough advertising to pay for it it will have too many ads for us to want to listen to it.

I sympathise with companies trying to find a way to arrive at an honest price for what people have been allowed to get for free. As an independent operator in the world of ink, I would, wouldn’t I? The people I have no time for are the users who believe they will always be able to get by, their information needs met by Google News or the Metro, music piped into their homes courtesy of Spotify, TV and radio entertainment provided in perpetuity out of a licence fee that doesn’t get any bigger, with no need for local news and a belief that specialist information needs will be met by internet forums and blogs. Recent research by a journalism foundation at Harvard indicated a strange disconnect between the things the young audience valued and their willingness to pay for it. They lived on Facebook but wouldn’t dream of paying for it. They thought it was important that there was such a thing as serious journalism but couldn’t imagine supporting it out of their own pocket. If maturity is the realisation of consequences then maturity is being postponed indefinitely.

Given attitudes like these you wonder if in the near future there will be Two Nations. The Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay majority will be content with a digital version of a free newspaper while a small reading public will actually pay more money to access the old fashioned, in-depth newspaper experience, which will no longer be available on line. It’ll be like the days when the informed classes spoke Latin or French. I blogged about this very subject recently. Among the feedback I got was an observation from an education professional. He said he had been talking recently to some bright students. They found their information needs could be met by five headlines from the Yahoo homepage and took it as an article of faith that they didn’t pay for anything online except role-playing games. What were they studying? Politics, Philosophy and Economics. I might add they’re probably not studying it enough.

This is not a political blog, much less a party political blog. But if companies and brands are part of society then so are other types of organisations – so I don’t think it’s going too far for us to talk about the Communications Workers Union and the postal strike and why, in my opinion it’s an epic Karma fail.

Firstly let me get this straight, I’m not opposed to industrial action. A good employer-employee relationship is a partnership, but even the best partnerships have their downs as well as ups so both parties need some recourse for when the other partner is abusing the relationship. Employers have a wide range of disciplinary measures they can deploy so it’s only right that employees have their own measures too. So we’re clear: I’m not against striking.

But what we see in the UK is industrial inaction. This is not the place to go into the details of this dispute, and for the sake of this blog we’ll assume that the postal workers are sincere in their claim that they’re trying to protect the mail service. But even so, nothing says “I want to work but I’m withdrawing my labour in the best interests of society” like standing round a flaming barrel eating a scotch egg.

Here’s the rub: I don’t think the public really buy the “we want to work but we’re doing it to protect services” line, and why should they? It looks lazy, it is lazy really and it’s holding the punters to ransom in order to exert pressure on the employer. Are you really looking to protect the public interest, or are you looking to leverage the public?

So I propose a new way of taking industrial action that would make a point and demonstrate that those taking action really are sincere. Here’s an alternative. Turn industrial inaction into positive action. Do something.

In France, when their transport workers take industrial action they go into work as normal, run the network, but refuse to take any payment from the public. They provide the service and don’t disrupt everyone else’s day – but they get the point across to their employers where it hurts. So that’s one option that has to be better than striking.

But how’s about this for an option? If you really want to make your point and you really do want to work – and you really are doing it for the good of us all – then why not take your labour and use it elsewhere? Take your labour and use it in the community. Take on a project in the community, go and paint some old people’s houses or do their gardens, give a carer a day off, get rid of some graffiti… take on any one of a number of projects that a group of people could do in a day if they applied themselves. Would that not be good karma? And which plays better in the public eye?

1) Standing around a brazier smoking tabs and cheering whenever a car drives past and honks? Or

2) Inviting cameras to see the workers taking positive action in the community, because “we want to work but reasons x, y and z mean that we’ve been forced to withdraw our labour”?

Maybe striking is lazy – not in the sense of being workshy, but mentally lazy. It’s a lazy approach. It’s lazy thinking.

So my challenge to the CWU is to become karma-positive. If you really must strike in the run-up to Christmas then why not take positive action with your time? No-one ever won hearts and minds with a placard, but if you help some poor old dear with her shopping she’ll back you all the way. We could call it Strikecorps or something.

I’m going to start off my contributions to this blog in probably the very worst fashion, by writing about something that’s actually not currently in the news. I’m sure it’s blog suicide, but it’s one of the reasons that I was so interested in starting the blog as I think it expresses at least part of the essence of what this blog is all about. The topic non du jour is Orange Rock Corps. As a brand, Orange have always (seemingly at least) been a ‘nice’ brand, from the pre-FT days when they featured Stephen Fry’s vocal talents in their advertising before his ubiquity and even their Geordie call centre staff seem warm and a bit reassuring. However, many brands manage to say one thing in their communications whilst not delivering on their promise. Just like a predatory guy at a party telling his target that he’s “not like other guys” they throw around buzz words like ‘community’ all the while wilfully behaving like rogues.

For those of you that don’t know what Rock Corps is, I’ll rewind back to the start. It was devised in the US as a way to get young people to dedicate some time to helping the community, by offering them an incentive that was valuable, compelling and that they couldn’t get anywhere else. My old agency KLP brought it to Orange’s attention and the idea was brought to British shores (and now beyond into other Orange markets). In a nutshell, participants take part in properly organised and managed Rock Corps community service events. In return for dedicating a minimum of 4 hours, they get free tickets for special Rock Corps shows or other exclusive rewards. As a concept it’s simple, it’s elegant and it manages to give the “warm glow” factor to the brand, the participants and even the artists that are engaged to participate (but more on talent later).

There are three things I like most about it. Firstly, it introduces a new audience to voluntary work – most participants have never done any kind of volunteer work before. Now I’m sure the vast majority of participants never do again, but a small percentage will and for those that don’t, there’s surely no harm in getting involved just the once. Just once go and pour tea for some old ladies, or revitalise an urban space, or just help put some fences up. Secondly (and I may be getting a bit wistful now) I think it’s excellent that for many participants they spend some time with people from a different demographic (or to your average teen, a different world). Our older and younger generations have never been further apart, so isn’t it great that a brand are helping both the young and the old put a human face on each other. Finally, it’s one in the eye for all those that say that music has no value for the young. Well they seem willing to surrender four hours of their life to get tickets to a one off show, so it must have some value surely? This is where programs like this become really interesting. Perhaps we can look at music’s value in other ways? Maybe we should be paying some more attention to the social value, the kudos and dare I suggest it, the Whuffie value that music has? But let’s not get onto the old freemium debate.

That’s not to say it’s not entirely without fault. I felt that hiring an artist (Busta Rhymes) who at the time was embroiled in legal issues and was initially refused access to the UK for the inaugural London event was an error. It’s not that you should never hire an artist who has had brushes with the law, just not for a show celebrating community work whilst they’re in the middle of some fairly hefty legal issues. I also believe there could be some stronger messaging around the achievements, I can’t help thinking that all this energy could be put into something bigger, but maybe that would be missing the point, maybe helping refresh local parks is what’s needed and my London-centric, marquee project thinking is the big issue here.

However, we’re here to praise though, and praise-worthy this most certainly is. Gold stars to all.

Today’s Twitter-frenzy around Lord Mandelson’s appearance at the C&binetforum bigwigs’ retreat – the “Creative Davos”, as we are being urged not to call it – proves that nothing puts virtual bums on digital seats like a proper star turn. I was on C&binet panel about filesharing on Monday night and the hashtags did not fly at anywhere near the same velocity. I got the feeling that the audience was rather disappointed that they didn’t get an entertaining ding-dong between copyright absolutists (representatives of the Featured Artists Coalition, UK Music, Virgin Media, the BBC and Warner Music) and a music journo (me) who would surely call for the end of copyright, the Man to be burnt in effigy and the reign of sweet anarchy.

Unfortunately, we all seemed to agree on the main points – that it’s not unreasonable for artists to decide whether or not their work should be shared, and that three-strikes-and-you’re-choked is about as reasonable a sanction against persistent uploading as can be imagined – leaving the panel a conference organiser’s nightmare: one where nobody got irate and the fur did not fly. Maybe they should have put Nick Griffin on instead.

The nearest we got to sparks came in audience questions, specifically from delegate Anita Ondine Smith of  Seize The Media. She questioned the panel’s diversity – and yes, we were all white males, although I think she was getting at the fact that the other panelists represented large media interests and there was no-one from the Pirate Party/Copyleft brigade to be seen (at least I hope she was. I’m not sure that race or gender qualify or disqualify one from taking a position on filesharing). She also raised one of the favourite touchstones of copyright liberationists, that quote about candles from Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me.” (I wasn’t taking notes so this is pinched from here).

I hesitate to go against the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence but while this is snappy, easily-assimilated and beautifully-put, it strikes me as almost entirely inapplicable to file-sharing. One of the hurdles that impedes a proper understanding of digital media is a lack of workable metaphors. Is the internet like a pipe? Is it like a cake? Is it like a swarm of bees or a weather system? Er… yes and no. I’ll tell you what, though: infinitely replicable digital media is not like the flame of a candle. If you light your candle from mine, sure, the light of my candle is not diminished and nor is its market value (research and development on fire was completed some years ago). If you copy a song or film or program without payment, however, you make it less scare and therefore microscopically less valuable. Also, you have failed to repay your teeny-tiny share of the investment that made that product possible, therefore making it less likely that the producer will create more, similar products. You have begun to erode the work-leads-to-ownership compact that makes intellectual endeavour worthwhile. And when thousands of people do what you did, those very small infractions build up into a real and present danger to all intellectual property. This does not happen with candle-light, which does not have scarcity and therefore market value as digital media does. Thomas Jefferson isn’t wrong, he’s just being misapplied.

My fellow panelist John Reid from Warner Music had a much more concise rejoinder: “Never mind the light, who made your candle?”

Free. Free. Free. Free. The word is everywhere and it doesn’t sound as cheerful as it used to. “Free” used to extend the promise of a life-enhancing little extra to brighten your day. Years ago, when I was learning the magazine huckster’s trade, I was told that you could secure an interview with Kurt Cobain or Kylie Minogue or the Risen Christ if you liked, but none of them would be as good on the cover as the word FREE in bright red on a bright yellow background – even if the cassette you were giving away only had Hothouse Flowers and the Paris Angels on it. It didn’t matter. Free was fun. Free was your friend.

Now free has turned nasty. Never mind the burden of encumbering crap you’re faced with in the course of your day (farewell, thelondonpaper, we hardly knew ye). Free is now lapping around all our ankles like a rising flood. It carries not the promise of a nice little something for nothing, but the threat of working for nothing, at least for those of us in what are now called (pretty generously when you think about it) the “culture industries”. What happened to the music business is now happening to everyone else – “they came for the A&R men, and I did nothing…” – and worse, it’s got influential cheerleaders.

A book by the American Wired magazine’s editor argues that Free will become the default price for pretty much everything digital. Somehow things like music, television, software and journalism will just happen, says Chris Anderson, as the hobby products of amateurs who will magically perform better in these disciplines than people who have to meet a certain standard or lose the month’s rent. (Anderson also thinks that “news” and “journalism” themselves are now meaningless concepts, which presumably means he sees no difference between Christopher Hitchens and the guy who runs lolcats.com). Meanwhile Sweden’s odious Pirate Party has set up shop in the UK, bringing its toddler’s manifesto of contradictory demands. Let’s severely diminish copyright and patent law and ensure freedom of speech, they say. On the question of how musicians, writers, developers and dramatists would exercise that right to free speech if their platforms disappeared and they had to work in Netto to survive there is silence, or a lot of waffle about not protecting “failed models”.

Well, yeah, boo hoo and who cares about a load of skint musicians and jobless journo’s? It’s not like any of them are doing real jobs, like bin-men and bank managers and private security consultants. It’s not like anyone would miss them. I can understand the former opinion but not the latter. I freely admit than I and many of my fellow professionals have never done anything like a proper job – meaning one with zero opportunity for independent thought, sloppy dress code or daytime use of Twitter – for more than five minutes and that if we did we would have nervous breakdowns. And compared to the average musician we’re the ones who look like engines of industry. But that is not the point. The point is that art, media and entertainment set the temperature of a society. They are the air that we breathe. Deprofessionalise them, and hand them over solely to zealots and hobbyists, and we all lose out. Your news will become even emptier and less trustworthy than it is now. Your pop culture coverage will become more elitist and obscurantist (see: Pitchfork) because even niche magazines like this one have to keep a keen eye on the cashflow. And anyone expecting a great flowering of music from bands who couldn’t get signed is invited to rummage in the box of CD-R’s under my desk to find out what unsigned bands really sound like. It’s not pretty.

I’m not a Luddite. I love a good blog. I run WORD’s Twitter feed and despised the Phil Space brigade (Janet Street-Porter, Jackie Ashley, the fool Liddle again) attacking this fantastic service without understanding the first thing about it. But you can’t run the world entirely on goodwill. As a nation we love the amateur – Churchill was a watercolour painter who ran the war in his spare time, and all that – but the idea that the best art is produced by the enthusiastic Corinthian was always a myth. The best art is produced by the enthusiastic amateur who want to become a well-rewarded professional as quickly as they can. Good stuff costs money, and the most expensive resources are talent and the space to use it. Kick away the ladder up to that place where you can make a living from doing what you love, and all you’ve got left is people’s private doodles.

In the absence of a solution, I propose we extend the principle of FREE to everyone else’s job, and see how they like it. I’m going to drive the bus to work tomorrow. Who cares if it’s late, it goes the wrong way and the driver loses his job? Fares will come down to zero and anyway, I’m not responsible for his old-world thinking and crowd-hostile vision and failed business model. If that works out, I might try running a pub.

This blog exists to praise the good work of organisations, heralding organisations and executives who show genuine support.  We want to be positive, so it’s more about applauding the good than criticising the bad.

If you want to get involved, or know of work that deserves the credit (it could be someone else’s it could even be your own), then get in touch.