Once again, my Dread Rat bosses have hijacked and redirected what might have been a great blog in another, even richer direction.I noticed that Thom Yorke had broken the silence on Spotify's rapacious attitude to younger artists and wanted to riff on that. The main Radiohead transistor has courageously pulled his handful of solo werk from the rubbish Platform on a very valid basis. Streaming corporate digital piss loads are all well and good for the established, but what of the New? As it in like all digital stuff the established and the big big benefit. Spotify is privately held which means that the fact in pure business terms it is less profitable than a corner shop overall is not really addressed. But informed folk have like Yorke have realised that if you get 1 million plays of a track an artist gets around £3,200. That won't pay for a weekend in a major studio. So the shock of the new is poo for any kind of emerging artist or anyone that is not Godzilla huge. The kinds of big records that are household names for multiple generations, and will never be made again given the change in the economics.I wanted to riff more on this but hey we know Spotify sucks dead ape right? But now it emerges Mr. Radiohead has tuned into another streaming site so I smell PR all over this like a dog exercise area. He just wanted the punters to get over to another site.And exercise is one of the only remaining reasons to visit a mainstream High Street. Reports came in of the reeking reality of what's left of HMV, straight from the mouth of my masters.You'll remember the story.A business run into the ground as slowly as a milk float driven drunk by a zombie into a stack of cakes. It was always a choice. Now in the modern style, some carrion chef came in debt free and bought the damn carcass. And there were plenty of casualties.One of them was in Londonderry, in Northern Ireland.Much like the undead in Dawn of the Dead who wander around a Mall as if it mattered the place HMPee infested on the High Street had some value as a music and video retailer.Tony Cregan, a clearly clever manager who has ears and a soul went and got some local backers to enable him to keep the store open in a refreshed, newly independent form. Under the name HVM he kept it up like a teenage trouser snake.Locals loved it more than before, and things were looking good. But the new "owners" of HMV, vulture capitalists Hellcoo decided this was major uncool. Punters were likely to confuse Tony's renewed local shop with the cynically revived HiStreet skidmark that is Nipper's Ghost.For once, The Man came down on the right side of things. All Tony had to do was flip the sign round to say WAH. This accidental genius is rather more impressive than the reality of the surviving stores. We received an anonymous report about a Rat connected funkateer visiting the Isblington branch to snag some new Daft Punk. The idea of a vinyl sized bag was one they could not spell, so our friend was forced to leave the shop with his precious record in a black bin liner. That's real life symbolism right there.We don't sling magic in bin liners, but in the Rat racks.It's been very hot and a bit quiet most of the week, but thankfully Philippe still managed to focus and price tons of records for this Saturday. We'll have some nice 70's funk and soul, more awesome classic rock (a few nice bootlegs in there), nice reggae 7"s and LP's, and more of our much loved stack of grime, UK garage, jungle and drum and bass. Names from the front of the piles : Brian Auger, Juicy, Blacker Dread, Isaac Hayes, Johnny Osbourne, Shotgun, Ohio Players, 9th creation, Bernard Purdie, Stagard, Slick, Kwick, James Brown, Wiley, U roy, Dave pike, The Gaylads, Burning Spear, Baaba Maal, Roy Harper, Moshudi Durojaiye, The red Crayola, Robin and Barry Dransfield, Bert Jansch, and of course zepstonebeatlecream etc.Feel it there...