This actually plays into my fears about the gamification of education. A lot of game-games use achievements as a "Skinner box" (as Extra Credits terms it) to encourage mindless return business, rather than simply employing good game mechanics. If your achievement or "challenge" is to play 20 times, that doesn't encourage the player to improve their technique -- it's just grinding. Is "grit" not what you get left with after grinding? Rewarding grinding in education or the workplace is little more than institutionalised presenteeism.

"Everyone's a winner" was a lazy philosophy resulting from Chinese whispers in the teaching profession. The educational psychologists asked teachers to be more mindful of what they say, because they noticing that across the board, underperforming students got more negative reinforcement for mistakes than positive feednack when they got something right. Teachers weren't supposed to start giving uncritical praise, but just to smile more when kids get things right. It's not that hard to do, and everyone benefits, but it wasn't simple enough for the crappy resource packs and brain-dead seminars that much in-service training is built around.

Don't be so quick to judge people's intentions so harshly. Many people genuinely believe that what they're doing is for the best, and attacking their intentions rather than criticising their methods won't get us anywhere. The Tories cling to the belief that publuc services are intrinsically inefficient, and when they privatise contracts to their friends, it's because they know that they friends have good intentions too. And when they leave politics and take up directorships, it's because they've proven that they're good guys. The oroblem isn't intentions, but the unwavering belief that market economics are good for everyone, and an ideological inability to recognise that the inevitable result of competition is corner-cutting.

As long as we allow ourselves to misrepresent their intentions and define them as inhuman monsters, we tacitly encourage them to do the same to us.

Take a closer look at nature. Competition occurs when resources are limited. Wolves compete against other predators and their prey, but cooperation is what wins them the race. Humans compete with other animals, but farming is inherently cooperative and increases the availability of food for everyone. The only place where we really need to compete is in the reproductive stakes.

I personally thought No Doubt were overrated.

Non-competes are legally unenforceable when they stop you realistically changing jobs within your field. Things get murkier when your new employer isn't in that field already, and you're the one that brings the into it. It's murkier still when your new employer is YOU. This isn't a question of non-compete, it's a question of trade secrets, because when the employee is working from the ground up, his prior knowledge is based entirely on the previous employer's project, whereas when there's a partly-built product to work on, there's already a seed that will take the development of the product away from the old employers device.

Ironic that you can't cite even one, though...

You clearly have never met a woman. Wedding fever is probably even worse among the non-believers than religious people.

Lazy? A woma who spends all year teaching, composing, recording, touring and playing weddings, and whose holidays are almost always combined with work? A guy who plays and records with multiple bands and works as a theatre janitor because the theatre management understand his need for flexible work so he can go on tour? A guy who spent years on the breadline trying to get his break as a session musician in London, and now spends most nights in pubs singing other people's songs? Etc

Lazy people don't survive in music, and my friends all manage to make a living doing what they love. They don't do that by selling T-shirts.

Fuck off. Does that seem rude to you? To me, it's less rude than "get off your ass", because I'm not assuming anything about you when I tell you to fuck off. None of my friends who perform professionally or semi-professionally are lazy, but your statement assumes they are. They are hard-working and dedicated, but none of them sell mugs, T-shirts or keyrings because their audiences just aren't interested in tat like that. I don't buy band T-shirts, mugs or keyrings, and I'm not going to feel guilty for that. Do you know what I'm happy to pay for from musicians? I'll give you a clue: for doing their job; for making music. Should a baker have to sell T-shirts to his customers to make a living? Should I reward my taxi driver by buying a wallet with his face on it? No.

That's an entirely different matt. But the advances are calculated on potential sales anyway, and if they're never going to make any sells, they'll never pay any advances.

If that "better way" doesn't make profit for the labels or the artists, then why exactly should they support it? Spotify themselves bleat about making a "loss" on the free end of freemium whenever the labels and/or artists complain about low profits. But Spotify make money on every single advert for a free user, and the "losses" on free users all are just shuffling of moneys from premium users' plays to free users' plays, and they profit from both types of user. In the end, users get a cheap service not because of efficiencies or innovation at Spotify, but because Spotifypays its suppliers as unsustainable low rate.

That's a strawman. We're not talking about track-bundling here, we're talking about freemium services that are little more than leeches.

The problem with the "go to shows and buy shirts" mentality is that it ignores the diversity in musical culture - band shirts are only really typical in the hard to heavy end of the rock spectrum, or restricted to superstar bands.

Recording contracts set out labels' and artists' shares as a percentage. Anything that increases the total income therefore benefits both label and artist. The whole point of a commission-based system is ensures that making money for the client is always in the representative's interest.

Artists negotiating direct with Spotify would be stuffed. Labels may not do a brilliant job of negotiating on artists' behalf, but they do negotiata. And they have to, because they receive a percentage of royalties, so if prices rise, both the label and the artist profit.