Folding magazines: Classic Rock & Metal Hammer

This would be grim news at any time, but just before Christmas amplifies the grimness: Team Rock have Team Rock, who publish Classic Rock and Metal Hammer magazines, have called in the administrators:

Thomas Campbell MacLennan, Alexander Iain Fraser and Jason Daniel Baker of FRP Advisory LLP were appointed as Joint Administrators of Team Rock Limited (“the Company”) on 19 December 2016.

The affairs, business and property of the Company are being managed by the Joint Administrators, who act as agents of the Company and without personal liability.

The Company is being managed on a care and maintenance basis only whilst a buyer for the assets is sought. Accordingly, the TeamRock website will be unavailable for the foreseeable future.

The administrators are assessing the position regarding publication of magazines. If you are a subscriber to the Company’s publications the administrators can be contacted via email at teamrock.subscribers@frpadvisory.com.

27 people in Scotland and 46 in London have lost their jobs. According to the BBC report, Team Rock had been losing money for quite a while; they're hopeful the brands will find a buyer - and so hopefully some of those staff will be rehired.

They've been torn since Bros was cool

Your first instinct on hearing that Bros are reforming for a ten million quid tour is "ten million? Is it buggery going to be a ten million tour."

They've not even got Ken on board, right? (Craig Logan isn't coming back.)

But it's more an indication of how fucked the economy is - there's not going to be much profit in a Bros tour, but with interest rates now so low, they don't have to make much of a profit to make it worthwhile. Or at least a better investment than letting money sit in an account.

And, with the pound having been sunk by the Brexit vote, and much of the tour is in Europe, which ratchets up the relative costs in pounds.

So, the ten million pound comeback isn't suggesting that Bros are more popular than you thought. Just that ten million pounds is less than you'd hope.

Puff drops a million to his alma mater

Puff Daddy has given a million dollars to the University he went to:

Puff Daddy has donated $1 million to the Howard University in Washington D.C.

Mr Daddy was a business student at Howard, and nowadays he's nudging close to be worth a billion.

If you wanted to be cynical, you might notice that he dropped out of the university after two years. But if Howard have their wits about them, they'd be running "if you can become a billionaire with just two years with us, imagine how great you'd be if you graduated" ads.

Standon update

If you read the piece last week about how Standon Calling has somehow hit difficulties in returning money locked into its cashless wristbands, it probably won't surprise you to know that yesterday's promised deadline for returning the cash floated by again without a recharge.

Shrewed move, making the promise for the start of a Bank Holiday Weekend...

Standon orders

Last month was Standon Calling, and we went to the first day.

There's a bit of a problem, though.

Not with the festival itself - well programmed, lovely location, friendly staff. The Hives were an amazing amount of fun, and they goaded Suede on to giving a brilliant performance.

The problem, though, is with the cashless nature of the festival.

Your wristband becomes your wallet; once inside the festival ground all transactions flow through the little RFID chip on your arm.

I can see the attractions - you don't have to worry about accidentally dropping all your cash into an unpleasant toilet; you shouldn't have your money pinched; it makes waiting behind people as they fumble in their pocket for a card that hasn't been maxed out a thing in the past.

The trouble is, this is a bit of a fiction: unless you're turning up at the festival, Lenin-style, in a sealed train, you're still going to need to have cash and cards on you to buy pasties and petrol en route.

And while removing the payment point as a potential focus for clusterfucks developing, that's not really the cause of slow moving queues at festivals. Sure, paying is a breeze, but you still have to wait ten minutes for a coffee between bands while a family of ten take their time choosing between three types of waffle topping.

There's also something a little philosophically worrying about the idea that you're entering a place where every piece of business transacted on the site is channelled through the hosts.

In action, though, it definitely worked - "here, you have given me a tub of delicious macaroni cheese, in return point your little device at my wrist" is a pleasingly friction-free transaction.

The background organisation, though, wasn't as friction-free.

First, there's the problem of having to preload the wristband. This has to be done in advance, which means I'm having to surrender the liquidity in that amount to Standon.

In other words, the cash that gets locked into the wristband is no longer available to me to spend as I wish - if between preloading and the festival day, I need to suddenly purchase a papermaiche swan with that money, I am unable to.

This might sound like the sort of point that barely matters outside of GCSE economics, but it's important because attendees have no choice but to take part in this scheme.

There's a structural problem, too, of knowing how much to put on the wristband. You don't want to overload it - because you're losing that liquidity - but you also want to have enough to ensure that you're not going to have to face queues at the places in the festival where you can add more money to the band. (Yeah, you can do that - apparently, although the festival is totally cashless, there are sheds where sterling somehow still works.)

We were going for a day, and figured that between the pair of us we'd probably spend about thirty quid. (I've more or less stopped drinking alcohol, and try to avoid buying 'stuff' that is going to need to be carried in the front row. Also, I'm incredibly cheap.)

Here's a problem, though - if we were using money, or cards linked to our joint accounts, it's not a problem if one of us bobs to the bar or the macaroni cheese stall to get food or drink. That notional money flows easily between us. Not so with wristbands, where the money is linked to our actual physical presence. I can't say 'go get yourself a drink at the bar', I have to be at the bar to buy you a drink.

Still, at least you can have a decent stab at preloading the amount you need, right?

Not so much.

Because you preload in £25 increments.

Somehow, a system which allows you to pay £1.50 for a cup of coffee without a problem doesn't allow you to decide exactly how much you wish to spend.

Between the two of us, then, we're expecting to spend about thirty quid on the day. But we're forced to hand over fifty to Standon, in advance, to hold.

What if you underestimate what you load? Well, yes, you can go to the queues to top up - awkward if you're halfway through buying a pizza when you realise you're out of funds.

Helpfully, though, there's an autotop up facility. When you preload, you can choose to allow the organisers to notice when you are low on wristband cash, and take a fresh payment to allow you to carry on spending.

The minimum amount you can allow this to happen with is twenty quid; but you can choose an option to allow sixty quid a time to be moved from your bank outside the site, onto your wrist. To sweeten the deal, if you click on this option, Standon will give you money to spend in the bar.

And if you're as cynical as I am, you'll be thinking "when people are bribing you with beer to do something, that's got to be something you're not going to want to do, right?"

You're allowing a business to dip into your bank account or credit card and help itself to money at will.

But why would that be a problem?

Everything's regulated by terms and conditions, isn't it?

This is where it gets really murky. There is a link on the page about cashless on the Standon website to terms and conditions, and when you hand the cash over, you have to agree to those t&cs.

Trouble is, the terms and conditions are useless. (I've saved a copy of them for when the website changes.)

They're terms about the ticket registration, not about the cashless transactions. Sure, they're mentioned:

Cashless payment service (see further under 4.3.1.)

There is no clause 4.3.1, and section 4 is about intellectual property, not cashless transactions.

Amusingly, the intellectual property clause forbids saving any content from the website - which, in effect, bars you from saving a copy of the terms and conditions you've signed up to for future reference.

When I asked about the cashless terms and conditions, Standon pointed me back to the page that pointed at the pdf:

@norock full terms and conditions link from https://t.co/Dg2GKqBRKF relate to the cashless system at Standon Calling 2016

— Standon Calling (@StandonCalling) July 28, 2016

Except the pdf expressly says that it doesn't:

The present Terms of Service govern the use of the website [www.standon-calling.com] and all of its sub-sites (hereinafter “Website”), housing that “online ticket registration service”. The present Terms of Service do not govern the RFID-services themselves, that may be subject of specific terms and conditions as determined by Standon Calling and / or third parties.

No explanation of who is holding your money, or where it is. No rights to reclaim. No indication of how much all the infrastructure is costing, or any fees levied on transactions. If I have a dispute with a trader, do I take it up with them or with Standon, or the PlayPass company who is running the system? What happens when the festival is over and I want my unspent money back?

It's pretty shabby way of handling people's money. And with 10,000 people attending, even if they're all as cautious as me and only load the barest minimum amount, that's quarter of a million quid we're talking about, being put somewhere, with no proper contract. The truth is, there's going to be a lot more cash involved.

And what of the unspent money? Inevitably, this is a circus, too.

Although your wristband is linked to your account, and your account is linked to the bank which you used to load the wristband with, and they've managed to track your transactions as you move around the site, somehow this data falls apart when you leave the site.

You have to reclaim the money. Rather than it being returned automatically.

And you can't reclaim it as soon as you're done. You have to wait.

Then you fill in a form, and wait again.

And... inevitably, eleven days after putting in a request for my own money to be given back to me, in comes an email:

Hi Everyone,

Alex here, Founder and Director of Standon Calling festival.

As you may know it is now fourteen days since we launched refund requests for any outstanding balance on your 2016 festival wristband.

We had hoped to begin payments today. Unfortunately, and with regret, this timeline has had to change. We will now process all requested refund payments by Friday 26th August.

I would like to offer my sincere apologies to those awaiting their refund. I understand this has been a frustrating process.

Overwhelmingly, feedback on the 2016 cashless experience at the festival has been positive. It is a shame then for you to experience this delay on your refunds.

Be assured we are working with Barclays to process refunds as efficiently as possible. We have learnt lessons from this experience and I am committed to an improved refund system in 2017.

Assuming that this new timetable is stuck to, that's a month after the festival. Four weeks to get back money that you had no choice but to pass to Standon on trust.

It would have been nice for some sort of explanation as to why there's this delay - there didn't seem to be a problem with the system when it was being used to turn wristbands into gin at the bar and - presumably - the cash was being held in a separate, secure account and not just sloshing about in the general Standon accounts, right? Right?

If only there were some terms and conditions governing this, but - that's right - there weren't any.

Now, it's only a few quid, and I'm not exactly sweating on it. But there's a principle here, that Standon are telling customers they're going to look after money for them, that it's a better experience - and then when asked to stump up the refunds, they're patting their pockets like Terry-Thomas when the restaurant bill comes round.

When I started going to festivals, I was at a time in my life when a shopping trip meant adding every penny in a running tally in my head. The ticket was a luxury, but I figured that the experience was worth it and if it meant a couple of weeks on No Frills beans, that'd be fine.

If getting home I discovered that the money I needed to buy the beans, though, was being held for no apparent reason in the account of the organisers, I think I'd have the right to be very pissed off indeed.

EMI: Hands handed arse; tries to save face

It's been a while since we heard about Guy Hands, the man who borrowed large sums of cash to buy EMI and then discovered he wasn't very good at running a record label.

He's been in court this week, trying to blame his failures at EMI on CitiGroup, in a legal case which was basically Hands' Terra Firma going "waah waah, why didn't they tell us".

The fraud case was supposed to last into July - rather like Euro 2016 - but ended somewhat abruptly with a humiliating defeat - rather like England's Euro 2016.

Hands climbed down:

“Terra Firma confirms it unreservedly withdraws its allegations of fraud,” David Wolfson – standing in for lead QC Anthony Grabiner – told the hastily convened court. Terra Firma will also pay the costs of the US bank, likely to run into millions of pounds.

Hands, who had been claiming at least £1.5bn from Citi, had been questioned by the bank’s lawyer for the previous two days, and his evidence had been expected to last into next week. He had faced repeated questions about his recollection of events in 2007 when Terra Firma took over EMI just before the credit crunch and had been accused of having a “hazy memory”.

At one stage during his questioning of Hands, Mark Howard QC, representing Citi, said: “The problem is, Mr Hands, your story is shifting and it is impossible to reconcile these different versions.”

Much as EMI had relied on releasing poorly-conceived best of 'special edition' collections, Hands was trying to sell a bunch of remixes of old material, but the court wasn't really buying.

His case having crumbled underneath him, Hands was left trying to whistle a brave tune:

Hands, who was not in court, said the latest claim had been brought in good faith. “However, it has become evident that our documentation of the fast-moving and complex events, and memories of these events after nine years, are no longer sufficient to meet the high demands of proof required for a fraud claim in court,” he said.

“The matter is now closed,” said Hands, saying that the Terra Firma business he founded in 2003 was looking to the future. “We have an exciting portfolio of companies, a talented and experienced team, supportive and loyal investors and €1bn of capital to invest,” he said.

It's funny, isn't it, that he hadn't noticed he couldn't remember all that "fast-moving" stuff until he'd been taken to pieces on the stand.

And while Hands might believe the matter is closed, that isn't entirely true. Terra Firma have agreed to pick up all of Citi's costs. That Billion of capital might be whittled down a bit in the coming weeks.

Spotify: An upside-down pyramid

Digital Music News report on the proportion of users who Spotify rely on:

90% of Spotify’s Revenue Comes from 30% Of Its Users

This, surely, isn't that surprising though - if you're operating a freemium model, it's probable that most of your revenue will flow from the premium end rather than the free end:

89.9% of Spotify’s revenues come from just 31.4% of its users, according to more financial data now surfacing. The 2015 filing, registered with EU regulators last week, showed that paying subscribers generated a hefty $1.96 billion in revenues. By stark comparison, free, ad-supported users generated a relatively paltry $222 million.

It is a problem for Spotify, though, who are currently burning money like you wouldn't believe.

That effectively translates into a cash inferno, with everyone seemingly benefiting… except for artists, a group witnessing deteriorating per-stream revenues over the past few years. According to the same filing, rank-and-file employees are enjoying sharply-rising salaries, with average compensation now surpassing $168,000 per year. At the upper end, top executives and board members are pulling down north of $1.3 million a piece, with stock options potentially minting billionaires after a successful IPO.

Not, of course, that Spotify's business plan is to get close enough to profit in order to cash in its chips. Of course.

50 Cent might not be as broke as he claims

If you're filing for protective bankruptcy to avoid having to pay people what you owe, there are some things you might not want to be doing.

Fifty Cent's Instagram of him ironically spelling out the word "broke" using money has landed him a trip to court to explain.

Taylor Swift shakes it off, rakes it in

Ever wondered what Taylor Swift takes home from a live appearance? Quite a bit:

One thing that is clear is that the concert appears to have made money for everyone involved.

The show earned $843,947 that will be split between the authority — hence taxpayers — and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Bucs get half of the profit under the team's stadium agreement with the authority.

Swift's fans bought $40,784 in merchandise during the show. They sipped and gobbled $244,626 in drinks and food at concession stands. The parents of fans and those old enough to drive paid $124,798 in parking.

That's what everyone else made, of course. Swift would have made at least four million dollars by pocketing the full revenue from the tickets - or, at least, the Corporate Taylor Swift.

It's quite a distance from Suede's current run of dates, which - as Mat Osman explained to a fan hoping for US dates - aren't quite as economically viable:

@texalese I doubt it Alese. TBH we're losing money on every show we do this way so we have to keep the tour shortish.

— Mat Osman (@matosman) November 14, 2015

Via @jamesthegill & Hypebot

Protecting the cash cows

Lest we forget that most large-scale music enterprises are fundamentally no different from other large businesses, The Guardian explores the world of gig insurance:

The amounts of money at risk can be phenomenal. “For a stadium show, it could be anything up to two million quid,” says Enthoven. But it is not just the income from ticket sales at risk. “For an act like One Direction, they possibly make more money from merchandise than they do for the tickets,” suggests Twomey. So that has to be factored into their policies, which are often taken out at the earliest stages in planning a tour and will only run for as long as the tour lasts. “They are not annual policies, like car insurance, where you rack up year after year of no claims,” says Howell. “It is very specific to the life and health of the individual or the band members that you are insuring.”

A policy is generally worked out as a percentage of what the act will make at the end – typically 1.5%-2%, a figure that has not really changed in decades. “If more acts cancelled shows time after time, the premium rates would go up,” says Phil Middleton, general manager at ATC Management whose artists include Radiohead, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Catfish and the Bottlemen.

This suggests, then, that the number of gigs which get pulled is roughly the same as it ever was, even if the value of those cancellations has skyrocketed.

It does make you wonder, though, how the music industry hasn't managed to improve its cancellation rate over the years - it's almost as if they know what breaks musicians, but are prepared to take the risk.

And, of course, if there's ability to insure against your musician breaking, you're going to take a few more risks with them.

You might wonder whose interest the insurance is in.

[Thanks to @zaichishka]

Joe Elliott doesn't like streaming services

Streaming services, amirite? They're like the work of a demon. A minor demon, perhaps, but a demon nevertheless. Tell us why, Joe:

"I signed up for the Apple one, Beats. It's kind of semi-evil, because whoever owns Spotify is worth more than 50 times than Mick Jagger, who's been in this business for 50 years. And that's just not right.

Mick Jagger, according to The Richest, is worth 360 Million Dollars. So to be worth fifty times that, you would have to be an eighteen-fold billionaire. 18 billion is roughly the GDP of Honduras.

Just to be clear: Daniel Ek is not Honduras. In fact, according to Time, he's worth 300 Million Dollars, which puts him behind Mick Jagger in terms of wealth.

Obviously, the point Joe was trying to make was that it seems absurd that a person who works in the tech industry is worth a lot of money compared with someone who works in the music industry for fifty years.

Although that doesn't make sense generally: it's not like the tech industry away from music is known for being a place where the bosses take home tiny pay packets.

It also doesn't make any sense in this specific case. First of all, it could be possible that Mick Jagger had just invested incredibly badly, or had been generous with his money.

Secondly, although Mick has been in the industry fifty years, Ek's not exactly a newcomer - he started when he was 14, so nearly twenty years, and he made a fortune selling his first advertising business. So it's not like he's built his money up entirely from not making Mick Jagger even richer.

Also: both these people have obscene amounts of money. Even if Daniel Ek was fifty times richer than Jagger, that would mean Jagger had six million dollars. You can buy a bionic man with that.

But you had a point, Joe, to make:

Because when you read stories about Lady Gaga getting 127 dollars for 60 trillion plays, or whatever, you're thinking, this is bullshit.

Well, yes, there were stories five years ago that GaGag got USD127 for a million streams - it's funny that Elliott was spot-on with the amount there, when so many of his other figures are grossly overestimated in favour of his argument, but then I think we all know people in our own jobs who do that.

But why was GaGa doing so poorly out of streaming? Not because of the semi-evil streaming services, but because of the fully evil record labels:

[In] some explosive comments made by Gaga's ex-manager Troy Carter. Carter states that Gaga's label, Universal Music, cheated the artist out of streaming royalties due to her from Spotify and other streaming services during the height of her pop popularity.

Carter, who is no longer handling Gaga's career but is active as a music and technology entrepreneur and investor, said, "We've always gotten screwed from record royalties ... So when you look at it, the live business and the merchandise business have always been the bigger piece of the pie. And with record labels, I think it's more of just chickens coming home to roost. Well, let's rephrase that: labels made a significant amount of money off of Spotify that didn't match up to the artist royalty statements ..."

How evil of Spotify to, erm, not be party to the main point where artists are getting ripped off.

Anything else, Joe? Do you perhaps have an "I can remember when it was all trees round here" argument to offer?

And when you get on Spotify, it's very insular. Which the whole industry has become. Everybody is on headphones now. It's just Zombieland, and we're all guilty of it. I do it too, but only when it's necessary, like on an airplane.

Yes. People listening to music on headphones. In the old days, people used to go to their bedrooms to be insular and listen to music. How can Spotify have ruined that by, erm, inventing headphones or something or... what?

BPI want to see the colour of BBC money

Earlier this week Tony "Memorial" Hall made a speech about the future of the BBC where he promised all sorts of entertaining, educational and informative things to come, for all the world like a man whose funding wasn't being choked off by George Osborne.

Amongst the ideas was a music streaming service which would, somehow, offer the last 50,000 tracks played by the BBC for licence fee payers to dip into somehow, and for some reason.

Clearly, Hall was just making up ideas which sound lovely, like news for North Korea and something something Royal Shakespeare Company probably on iPlayer or whatever. Nothing seemed that well thought through, least of all the music streaming.

But this hasn't stopped the BPI from running forward to demand to know the precise financial details of the half-formed idea. Billboard reports:

U.K. music industry body BPI expressed some worries about the plans. “The starting point for some of the BBC’s suggestions, around how such a service might work, involved launching such a service but paying no money for it," CEO Geoff Taylor said, according to music business strategy and information company Music Ally. "I just don’t think that’s viable."

He added: "There will have to be a sensible deal behind it if it is going to happen.”

I wonder if Geoff Taylor was ever asked out on a date:

- Hey, Geoffrey, I...
- Geoff
- Sorry?
- I prefer Geoff. It's funkier.
- Uh... right. Well, I was wondering if you'd like to go to the cinema with me sometime, maybe to...
- I insist you tell me now how you propose we fund the raising of any children which might result as actions set in train following this proposed event
- What... I...
- Tell me now, or there will be no cinema dates.
- I... uh... how about we make musicians sign punitive contracts which takes huge fees off them for services, one of which could be funding a self-important lobby group that can pretend it speaks for "music" as if it was a democratic body, which you could run for a huge salary?
- Hmm. Good plan. I'll pick you up at seven on Saturday, and we can go see The Goonies.

Tony Hall hasn't yet addressed BPI concerns, but has been heard muttering about "why shouldn't chickens be connected to a creative journalistic nexus?"

David Cassidy won't be coming back

Sad times for David Cassidy fans, as he's never, ever going to come back to the UK because... well, he he didn't make very much money last time:

Asked by [This Morning] if he would be touring the UK soon, Cassidy, 65, replied: “Probably not. The problem is there is a 20 per cent foreign entertainer’s tax, and with everything else that it costs to go there – no, I don’t think so.
“I’d love to, but I ended up making $630 (£408) last time I went there, so it didn’t make a lot of sense.”

It's true, there is a tax on foreign entertainers, but it only kicks in if you make more than the UK personal tax allowance. If Cassidy ended up with less than five hundred quid, it seems that was less because of the tax regime and more... well, that he didn't make enough money in the first place.

Cassidy also bristled when asked about being bankrupt:

Speaking from the five-bedroom Fort Lauderdale house via video link, Cassidy became irritated when asked about reports that he has filed for bankruptcy.

“Are you trying to rubbish me?” he demanded in response to Holmes’s questions.

“When you declare bankruptcy in this country, it's something you do in order to reorganise what you have, your assets, so I'm not going to discuss that.”

The house sale “has nothing to do with declaring bankruptcy, that was a totally separate issue. I’m doing it because I’m in the middle of a divorce,” he said.

When Langsford attempted to steer the chat into less choppy waters by asking if Cassidy was glad to have the support of his fans during a difficult period, he snapped: “Don’t interrupt me,” before telling her nine times to “wait” when she tried to speak.

What a shame that he won't be coming back to Britain. What a loss.

Ed Sheeran makes money like he's a house in Kensington

Ed Sheeran. He makes money. Lots of it:

Ed Sheeran earns a staggering £15,000 a DAY, according to new figures filed at Companies House.

The flame-haired singer, who is listed as a director of Ed Sheeran Limited, made an eye-watering £5,679,456 in pre-tax profits last year - which works out as £15,560 a day. Now THAT is pretty impressive.

Business experts say that the last time something so inoffensive but ultimately pointless had such a huge earning potential compared to talent, it was when that puppy off the Andrex packets made it big.

The €20 love note

You might have come across the story of the love note scrawled on a €20 note:

Leech went on to explain that they eventually broke up and Megan met someone else. "After I saw the €20 note on a FB post, I called her," he said. "She told me she had written it on a note she used to pay into one of my gigs about 6 months ago. I didn't know she was there. She told me she thought I'd get the cash directly but I obviously didn't. She took it that I didn't want to talk.

"So, now we're in touch again but the situation is quite different.”

Perhaps the most touching aspect of this story is that Megan somehow thinks an artist at a gig is going to see any of the money from his gig by the time he comes off stage.

In which Taylor Swift has a point, and wins the day

You'll have read this elesewhere, by now, but Taylor Swift's gentle-but-firm open letter to Apple (alright, open Tumblog) does gently nail Apple and leave them hung out looking like greedy butt-danglers:

I’m sure you are aware that Apple Music will be offering a free 3 month trial to anyone who signs up for the service. I’m not sure you know that Apple Music will not be paying writers, producers, or artists for those three months. I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.

The historically generous company which, for example, could have quite happily offered a discount on iMacs to educational institutions but chose instead to create a lower-spec model.

But could a flattering approach, even from Taylor Swift, work?

Actually, yes. It worked:

Now Apple says it will pay artists for music streamed during trial periods.
"We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple," tweeted executive Eddy @Cue.

Of course, it's not so much the candy coating of Swift's letter that worked. It was the greed-shaming of putting right in the front of people the idea that it was musicians and songwriters who were actually paying for that three month free trial, not the cash-rich Apple.

Being shamed by a popstar. Thank god that can still happen - but it's still shabby it took Taylor Swift for Apple to understand they were pulling a shit move.

Charlotte Church: "Woman has accountant" shocker

Let's turn to Guido Fawkes. Guido persists in using his pseudonym as if we don't know he's Paul Staines, like a crap unmasked superhero still booking hotel rooms as "QTipMan" even although the receptionists always reply "okay, Mr. Staines, that's booked for you now." And he's managed to parlay his blog into a column in the News Of The World - the paper which still uses the pseudonym The Sun On Sunday. It's from this let's pretend world that he's tried to attack Charlotte Church following her appearance at the anti-austerity march yesterday.

Staines lives up to his chosen pseudonym, of course. Much as Fawkes was a dupe who got to do the dirty work of richer, more powerful types and ended up looking like a nasty piece of work, so too Staines trots out an attack line to try and deflect criticism of the government.

His problem with Church? Why, she calls for closing of tax loopholes, and yet... sorry, what was the pisspoor attack line again?

After joining the People’s Assembly against Austerity – whose aims include ‘increasing taxes on the super-rich’ and ‘closing tax loopholes’ – perhaps the Cardiff crooner turned campaigner should look at her own economy.

Church is the director of five companies that are all registered to the London address of Thomas Harris Accountants.

“Lowering and deferring tax is, of course, a key aim” boasts the firm’s website, by “taking advantage of allowances and reliefs of which many people are unaware.”

I don't think that there's a single major accountant which doesn't offer to minimise tax for its clients, and I don't think there's anyone who has a company that doesn't require some sort of accountancy service. So, really, this is on a par with going "well, David Attenborough calls for a reduction in fossil fuel use, but he has a car which uses petrol."

If Forkstaines has something solid - Church deliberately booking gigs in Bratislava for tax write-offs; a massive scheme to use foxes to channel cash through Nutwood; something like that - maybe there's a story there. But going 'oh, she wants tax loopholes closed and yet she has someone do her taxes for her who knows tax law' is weak, even from someone who clings to an outdated pseudonym.

If McDonald's staff were paid a decent wage, Man I Feel Like A Woman would never have happened

It turns out that McDonalds pay their staff the least money they possibly can as a service to humanity, and not because they're bastards:

If the food stores paid their frontline workers enough to survive on, Shania Twain would still be working there, a shareholder claimed at the company’s annual meeting this week.

The unidentified man, who said he’d been a McDonald’s investor since 1990 according to BuzzFeed News, used a Q&A session to rattle off a list of successful celebrities like Twain, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Hollywood star Sharon Stone who had worked in a McDonald’s earlier in their lives. “I’m sure if they were making $15 an hour, they’d still be working at McDonald’s,” he said, as thousands of current McDonald’s workers protested outside.

"Hi, is that Sharon? It's your agent. I've got you a callback for that TV series... oh, you're only two sessions away from getting one of those little airplane pins for your namebadge? Okay, sorry to bother you. I'll try Meg Ryan as I think the iHop is cutting back on hours right now..."

You paid your taxes. Do you want a prize? Oh, okay then.

YoonA, K-Pop star, has been given a special prize from her government:

And now . . . she is the recipient of a presidential award from the South Korean government for being a dutiful and honest taxpayer who has made a significant financial contribution to her country. As part of the award she will be an honorary ambassador of Korea’s National Tax Service, helping to promote her fellow citizens’ duty to pay taxes.

In South Korea, you're celebrated for paying your share of tax. In the UK, you get an OBE if you don't.

Noel Gallagher puts a price on an Oasis reunion

Is an Oasis reunion out the question? Not as far as you might hope, as Noel Gallagher has terms:

Noel Gallagher recently sat down for an interview with Vulture, stating he would reform Oasis for a fee of “half a billion”. Gallagher readying the release of his new High Flying Birds album ‘Chasing Yesterday’, which is out Monday 2nd March.

Asked about a possible reformation in the future, Gallagher added: “If somebody puts that on the table, I’ll pack my bags in the morning and say, “How many gigs do you want?”

To paraphrase Churchill: we know what sort of man he is, now we're just haggling about the price.