An Explanation and a Plan

An Explanation

I wanted to provide an explanation to my fellow bloggers who may have noticed that this blog has undergone a name change, and that I’ve had to un-follow and re-follow your blogs. A few weeks ago, I noticed that I had received a visit from a strange URL. Out of curiosity I looked it up, and it was a site where image owners can report use of copyrighted images. I looked through pages that had recently received visits, and realised that I’d used an image that had a faint author’s name and copyright image. Some Googling revealed that there are harsh penalties, even for non-commercial blogs like this one, that can be enforced before even receiving a notice to take down the image first.

Here’s an article that outlines what the penalties can be like: http://www.contentfac.com/copyright-infringement-penalties-are-scary/ The potential penalties are frightening, especially given that the page and post that had used the image in question had received only 18 visits between them. While I imagine it’s very frustrating being a photographer and having your work misused, there should be initial warnings for people who are not repeat offenders and who are not operating in a commercial capacity.

Because it’s been a few weeks, and I haven’t heard anything, I’m assuming I’m in the clear. But I should have been more careful, and I’m only using album covers in my blog from now on. I wanted to put the message out there to my fellow bloggers to be careful about what images you use.

A Plan

I’ve had to quickly think of a new name. I think my reviews are generally concise, so I googled synonyms for short, and chose the most pretentious one. I’m currently using aphoristical as my URL. Aphoristic was unavailable, and Aphoristic Album Reviews looked like Aproristical Bum Reviews when it was all strung together.

I used to have an album review site between 2000 and 2007, and a lot of what’s on this blog so far is simply slightly edited versions of that. Because of this I’ve been able to create content very quickly to date – since starting this blog in June 2016, it’s already at more than 500 pages. But it’s obviously going to slow down as I run out of pages to bring across.

I’d quite like to cover some of music’s most major artists – they’re mostly very well trodden already, but since I’d like to cover the canon I think I’d like to get to them sooner rather than later. Here’s a list of the 20 most acclaimed album artists from http://www.acclaimedmusic.net/Current/1890-19arta.htm. While it’s a little bit lacking in diversity, I think all of these artists are major and are worth covering.

1 The Beatles
2 Bob Dylan
3 The Rolling Stones
4 David Bowie
5 Miles Davis
6 Neil Young (in progress)
7 Bruce Springsteen
8 Radiohead
9 R.E.M.
10 Led Zeppelin
11 The Who
12 The Velvet Underground
13 Elvis Costello
14 Pink Floyd
15 Prince
16 Tom Waits
17 Van Morrison
18 U2
19 The Beach Boys
20 Jimi Hendrix

I’ve already covered the artists that are crossed out – although I’m only halfway through Neil Young’s discography at the moment. I already covered some of Van Morrison and Tom Waits on my old site, so I think they’ll be next off the ramp, while I think The Beatles, U2, and Elvis Costello (at least through to 1986) will be in the near future as well. Miles Davis is a little tricky for me; if anything I’d probably just cover his fusion era.