I'm a little late with this update, but since things are as usual a bit quiescent in January that's not so important. After the New Year's Day '10', I've been trying to knuckle down to some proper training. As usual, this corresponds to quite a lot of turbo training, and if anything this aspect has assumed greater proportions than in previous years, since the weather has been frankly hideous! Unfortunately my working pattern has made effective training something of a challenge.It's too early to say whether my form is coming along well (my feeling is that I've plateaued a bit since Christmas), but at least I've survived so far without illness or injury. I managed to cock up some dates in March, so due to work commitments I won't be riding the usual season-opener, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25'. Instead, Team Grumpy will ride a '10' on a similar course - solo of course - a week earlier.On website matters, the site devoted to a defunct bike club - the Northwood Wheelers - that I maintain had a bit of a boost over Christmas after a former member made contact and sent some memorabilia, including 20 issues of the club newsletter/magazine dating from the 1950s. These have now been scanned in and can be read online.After the last North Bucks Road Club AGM, I've taken over the club chairman role. This means I have to attend all the meetings so I can chair them! This as well as maintaining the club website...

2013 was a bit of  a mixed bag for me cycling-wise. In terms of results, my racing was decidedly sub-par. We didn't have our usual cycle tour in Scotland. But I did at least hang in there and not give up!Time Trials. Once again, illness and injury really hammered my season, and I found form very difficult to come by. I suppose my advancing years didn’t help! Things were looking really good up until Christmas 2012, when I fell ill with a horrid cold that left me with a hacking deep cough that took an age to shift. Then when it did shift, I put my back out (once again) that set my training back to at least April. Most of the year seemed to be spent desperately trying to get under the hour for 25 miles, which was not good at all! I didn’t race at any distance above 25 miles this year, and in fact rode only a few open events, probably my lowest number in any season in the last decade.Once resumed, training seemed to go pretty well, though I was still far from fully fit when Team Grumpy regrouped for the 2013 Duo Normand. We were therefore rather pleased with our second place in the Corporate category since one of us was rather unwell, and we had no realistic chance of beating the eventual winning team anyway.New tandem. Following our second front tyre blowout on the Dawes touring tandem, and taking into account the bike’s age, we decided to take the plunge and fork out a wad for a new Thorn tandem. This was quite a big step, and we made the most of it when specifying the kit for the tandem. Notably, we plumped for S&S couplings, which means we can transport the tandem inside our car (albeit with the back seats folded down) rather than on a roof rack. You can see my multi-part review of the tandem elsewhere on the site (Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5). Suffice it to say that six months down the line we’re still happy with the tandem, though the flat stoker bars had to go. Needless to say, the Dawes hasn’t been disposed of, and we now house three tandems!Changes to our work calendar meant that we had no Scottish cycle tour this year, but two trips to Normandy compensated. We took the new tandem to France and had a great time in very nice (some would say too hot) weather. Plenty of excellent food, too.Team Grumpy. As far as I can recall, the 2013 Duo Normand was the only 2-up outing for Team Grumpy in 2013. We did regroup for the Port Talbot Wheelers ’25’ in early March (our usual season-opener), but unfortunately my back was so painful I could barely stand. Unsurprisingly, we didn’t ride. Anyway, given Team Grumpy’s lack of form, the Duo went pretty well, indeed better than we might have expected, particularly given the aftermath of a nasty cold suffered by one of us. We to second place in the Corporate category (behind a team that we frankly had no chance of beating, barring misadventure).New kit. For the last few years, I’d been using the ‘poor man’s power meter’ - the Polar system that uses chain tension and vibration to estimate power output. When it worked, it did well, with consistent data values (though perhaps on the high side). Unfortunately it was so unreliable as to be pretty much useless on a day to day basis. Eventually I cracked and coughed up for a Hed Disc with a Powertap hub. I selected this over other systems for several reasons. Firstly, I wanted an ANT+ power meter so I could hook it up to my Garmin Edge 500. Secondly, I wanted something that could be easily transferred between bikes. Reading up on the ANT+ Garmin pedal based system led me to believe that switching the pedals between bikes might not be so straightforward, and the crank-based systems aren't really an option for rapid shift between bike.The Hed disc wheel was quite pricey, but is so much easier to use than the Polar system. It delivers data to the Garmin Edge 500 via ANT+, connects reliably and calibrates easily. I’ve been using this not only for time trials but for turbo training as well (it’s effectively a spoked wheel with bonded on carbon sheets). I still don’t believe that training to specific power levels is necessarily the best way, and actually think that training to a measure of one’s physiology is smarter - i.e. heart rate.

Having missed last year's New Year's Day '10' through illness, I was particularly keen to ride this year. Of course the weather looked less than promising, with strong winds and rain forecast for mid-morning. Despite the forecast, at the time I got the bike ready to go out, things looked pretty promising and I decided to stick with the front trispoke. As it turned out, this was something of a mistake.By the time we lined up at the start, the strength of the wind had increased considerably...and the rain had not only started but had become quite heavy. I hate racing in bib tights or leg warmers, so I'd removed my bib tights. I quailed at taking my rain jacket off, and decided to leave it be for the race. Some of the riders had been out on the course and had reported how tough it was over the first couple of miles. They weren't far wrong...I grovelled up to the dual carriageway section where things, if anything, got much much worse, at least for those of us who'd made an unwise choice of front wheels. I was confronted by a stonking headwind that alternately tried to throw me rightwards into the carriageway and leftwards into the verge. Most alarming was the sensation of being lifted off the road as I passed under the first flyover. I'm almost embarrassed to related the lowest speeds I noticed during the outbound section - 13.5mph. I was struggling so hard to control the bike that I really couldn't even think of putting much effort in.Once round the turn, things became a bit better. I horsed back along the dual carriageway in top gear, feeling much advantaged by what was by now a major tailwind. Things became a bit more blustery heading back to the finish, but it was gratifying to be cheered on by a bunch of riders in a layby (mostly Bossard Wheelers I think). I finished in 27:59 - the slowest '10' I can recall in many a year, but rather delighted I'd finished without any mishap. Full results can be found over at the North Bucks Road Club website.

2013 was the year that I started to take music streaming seriously. I embarked upon a premium subscription to Spotify around February (largely  for playback via an old iPad while training in the garage), and it has revolutionised my music habits. Not only have I experienced music that I wouldn’t normally have encountered, but it gave me opportunities to share music that I’ve not been able to take before. I’ve taken quite an interest in how Spotify may or may not impact on the music business, and I do believe that there’s a lack in understanding how it does affect individual expenditure on music. As Dave Allen points out (Musicians versus Spotify: It’s about scale), Spotify itself is still a relatively small player in terms of numbers of consumers. My view is that too little information is available out there on how Spotify impacts on cash flow within the music business. I’m quite prepared to accept that I’m unusual in not stopping buying music in favour of streaming, but I’d like to see some decent information on this. I can’t believe that these studies haven’t been conducted as part of basic market research. Here’s one writer’s take on Spotify as a replacement for a music collection: Spotify, you’re wonderful, but I have to quit. Here’s a clue - it’s not a replacement!For my part, I’ve shifted far more towards buying downloads rather than physical media - mostly because I live in a small house. There are some exceptions, notably the extravagantly produced Deluxe edition of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ album Push the Sky Away, which includes CD, vinyl and a reproduction of Nick’s notebook. Unfortunately I missed out on the autographed edition!   The Velvet Underground’s second album White Light/White Heat gained its 45th anniversary Super Deluxe Treatment - with stereo and mono mixes plus a live CD housed in a hardback book, it was a little less over the top than last year’s VU and Nico 6 x CD reissue, but still nice. In particular, some of the out takes and the mono version of the album are rather good.The upshot of subscribing to Spotify has been a substantial increase in the amount I’ve spent on music. And mostly this isn’t the big name acts that get all the press as Spotify “high earners”. At the same time, I occasionally buy hard copies from the very excellent Norman Records in Leeds.Having bought into the Squeezebox system of streamed audio a few years ago, it was disconcerting in August 2012 to find that Logitech had ended the line. Squeezebox users have ended up in a kind of ‘phony war’, where the Logitech maintained server mysqueezebox.com still continues, and the various devices in my house still run my local music collection via Logitech Music Server running on a small QNAP NAS. At the moment I have a fair variety of players - a Squeezebox Touch, a Squeezebox 3, two Squeezebox Radios, software that turns my two iPads into Squeezebox music players (iPeng and SqueezePad), and the software player SqueezePlay (which emulates a Touch on my laptop). So there’s life in the system yet. There seems to be considerable open development of hardware and software out there to keep a similar system up and running for some time yet - Daphile, Squeezeplug, Wandboard, Raspebrry Pi and others frequently pop up for discussion in the Squeezebox forums.Of course, I’ve been looking for commercial alternatives in case my Squeezeboxes start conking out. I’m attracted by Bluesound, but its appearance on the market seems to be rather slow, and I don’t see how it can gain traction against the likes of Sonos. It doesn’t appear to have an equivalent of the Squeezebox Radio. Sonos is probably the market leader, but also has some limitations (for me, a major issue is again the absence of an equivalent to the Squeezebox Radio), including file data types and, for those with rather larger music collections than I have, an upper song limit of 65,000 tracks. I also find the superior and evangelical tone in the Sonos user forums rather off-putting, in the same way as one sees in Apple forums (and I’m OS-agnostic, I use OSX, iOS, WinXP, Win7, several Linux distros and Android). But that the plug and play ethos of Sonos and (I expect) Bluesound would win at the expense of the more flexible Squeezebox system was perhaps inevitable.I’m gratified that HiFi makers have stepped up to the mark with their streaming systems, though from my perspective it shouldn’t take much in the way of hardware to stream bits accurately to a HiFi: the quality sound experience must surely be derived from downstream analogue processing. Hence the profusion of software packages aimed at utilising budget computing platforms such as Raspberry Pi and Wandboard.Some of my top albums of 2013:[embed size="compact"]Teho Teardo – Still Smiling[/embed]Interesting collaboration between Teardo and Bargeld.[embed size="compact"]Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Push the Sky Away[/embed]The dear old blokes just keep on hitting the spot with their excellent new album.[embed size="compact"]Wooden Shjips – Back to Land[/embed]Modern guitar-psych, and strangely reminiscent of Suicide at times.[bandcamp album=1105741548 bgcol=FFFFFF linkcol=4285BB size=grande]Immensely entertaining surf-punk from Leeds.[embed size="compact"]Simon Fisher Turner – The Epic Of Everest[/embed]Excellent soundtrack to the eponymous film released 2013 using the original footage from the ill-fated Mallory-Irvine Everest expedition[embed size="compact"]Black Pus – All My Relations[/embed]Crashing noise-fest from Brian Chippendale. Excellent on the turbo trainer.[embed size="compact"]Nine Inch Nails – Hesitation Marks[/embed]I'm not the world’s greatest NIN fan, but I did like this. I have both the regular and audiophile versions, but on my iPod the difference is marginal!Reissue of the year : The Velvet Underground - White Light/White Heat super deluxe 45th anniversary reissue.[embed size ="compact"]The Velvet Underground – White Light / White Heat[/embed]I also caught up with some other albums I’d missed out on in previous years, and discovered an affection for ‘near-ambient’ music!

Prompted by an article in The Guardian (Spotify opens up analytics in effort to prove its worth to doubting musicians), I visited a Spotify website which seeks to de-mystify the periodic brouhaha around Spotify's business model and whether or not artists are paid properly for their music which is streamed via Spotify. The article by Spotify is really a series of mini-blog articles on a new site (www.spotifyartists.com).It's an agreeably affable page that makes a series of assertions:

Spotify’s model aims to regenerate this lost value by converting music fans from these poorly monetized formats to our paid streaming format, which produces far more value per listener. The chart below shows the money a Spotify Premium customer spends per year compared to the average spend of a US music consumer who buys music (not including those who spend $0 on music).

There's also the claim that Spotify Premium users in the USA bring in $120 per annum to Spotify, and therefore a proportion of that makes it to the artists. There's an overview of the annual royalty payout in the period 2009-2013 (it looks almost exponential). Taken overall, the average Spotify user apparently coughs up $41 per annum. But presumably this is the trackable income that Spotify makes through direct user subscriptions and advertising (for example $10 per month = $120 per annum - it's a fair bit more pricy in the UK). There's evidence of a solidly growing user base:[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="299"] The growing Spotify user base[/caption]Spotify also outline how their revenue is split - approximately 30% is kept by Spotify, with the rest going to rights-holders. I guess it's up to labels and the like what proportion of that gets back to the artists. But the means by which rights-holders get their slice seems a little complex, and it's not on a per-play basis. Essentially the criteria are as follows:

An artist’s royalty payments depend on the following variables, among others:

Been a while since I posted about cycling - the explanation is that I've mostly been in the garage pounding the turbo. To deal with the tedium that is turbo-training, I've been listening to a variety of music via Spotify (via an old 1st generation iPad). In no particular order, here's some recent training music:[embed size="compact"]Mindflayer – It's Always 1999[/embed]Loud, fast, noisy - just what's needed. You can't listen to gentle ambient when you're trashing the turbo!On the other hand, a bout of mid-70s nostalgia led me to It's Alive, a double live album by the Ramones. I mean, what can you say beyond One Two Three Four![embed size="compact"]Ramones – It's Alive[/embed]Sadly, It's Alive seems to be unreasonably expensive as a download, presumably because many sites price albums on the basis of the number of track. And when most songs are about 2 minutes long, there are a lot of them!And an Oblivians album:[embed size="compact"]Oblivians - Desperation[/embed]Related to Mindflayer, and in a very similar vein is Lightning Bolt:[embed size="compact"]Lightning Bolt – Hypermagic Mountain[/embed]On the other hand, recovery sessions on the turbo don't demand such an aural assault, and the latest album from Wooden Shjips fits the bill.[embed size="compact"]Wooden Shjips – Back to Land[/embed]This is billed as "psychedelia" - to be honest it sounds to me at times like Suicide but played with guitars.As ever, you can view my listening habits over at last.fm.And how is the training actually going? I've returned to the training programme that has served me well in the past, the Black Book (a.k.a. The Annual Manual) by Pete Read. This training manual seems to have achieved mythical status and appears to be hard to come by. Essentially, it describes a month by month progressive turbo training programme, based on heart rate. I guess it pre-dated the advent of affordable power meters. In any event I still prefer to train using heart rate over power, on the grounds that HR better reflects my physiology and the effort I'm putting in. I use the power meter data to better understand how a particular turbo session went and to estimate my fitness level as I move through a training plan.I do have a bit of experience with turbo training and, with a bit of work-life balancing, now train on the turbo early in the morning before cycling to work. This gives a good balance of higher intensity work with easier recovery style riding. The big hope for this winter is that I can make it to the 2014 season without a Christmas cold, or a recurrence of my lower back problems - both of which had a dire impact on my racing last year.The metrics as analysed using Golden Cheetah seem pretty encouraging, and I'm looking forward to the club's New Year's Day '10', about 6 weeks away. At the moment, I'm optimistic.

Here's a BBC News page with a segment from a recent Newsnight programme discussing Spotify and whether it does artists a disservice -Spotify - friend or foe of musicians?We still see the issue of low royalty rates for the musicians, but increased ticket sales as a consequence of exposure via Spotify is mentioned as a bonus. But, at the risk of sounding like a stuck record (!), why has no-one actually looked into the effect of music-streaming services on music purchases? Perhaps I am an oddity who buys more because I can listen first, and extensively before buying an album?The internet offers a hugely diverse route into finding music, particularly the social aspects of last.fm, Spotify, Bandcamp and Soundcloud (all of which I use), and many others I don't have time for. Maybe this isn't all about piracy, lost sales and the like but is a new way of business that needs to be grappled with.

I've been a Spotify subscriber for about 9 months now, and I view it as a really exciting and useful way to listen to new music. But some in the music industry view it more darkly - see for example comment articles by David Byrne and Thom Yorke. These two articles provoked a response from Dave Allen, who takes a different view.Personally, I think there's a fundamental problem with the discussion (though I think I tend towards Dave Allen's view): that is that none of these articles really contain hard data on music purchasing within the Spotify subscribers (and indeed comparing those people with non-subscribers).For my part, I'm of an age where my music listening and buying has seen several game changes. My first record was this:[embed size="compact"]https://open.spotify.com/track/2A0VyjrAJQPXVKxRzxEePG[/embed]And my first LP was Dark Side of the Moon:[embed size="compact"]https://open.spotify.com/album/3a0UOgDWw2pTajw85QPMiz[/embed]But in those days, finding and buying music was very different. I spent loads of time browsing through the inky music papers (NME in my case), listening to friends' LPs (and taping them), and above all frequenting dark record shops. Most of those record shops were bizarrely idiosyncratic in their owners' attitudes (see this listing for examples!). My memories of those days are obviously coloured by rose-tinted spectacles, but the sense of community was great, along with pressures of poverty meaning that every music purchase was most definitely considered thoroughly. And not just in terms of the music itself - peer group issues were very definitely an issue! My affection for vinyl remains because my shelf of LPs, perhaps 5 feet of LPs, contains records firmly registered in my memory as markers of my life: I can recall the circumstances in which I bought virtually every one of them. I recently digitised the majority of them, and the process became the most astonishing memory trip. I suppose the affection I have for vinyl is obviously related to the the packaging, almost invariably superior to a CD package, but also relates to the need to look after, cherish, the object.CDs became the medium for music (I ignore the cassette tape). Oh how wonderful it was to not have to worry about scratches, crackles and generally damaged product. But something was lost for me - buying records became a rather humdrum and unexciting business, and as internet ordering became the norm, I found myself less and less likely to actually visit record shops. I live in a town almost bereft of record shops now, and the overall effect was that my interest in, and purchase of, music reached an all time low.A few years ago, a review of a device made by Logitech - the Squeezebox - in a Linux magazine piqued my interest. I've blogged before about this system, sadly discontinued by Logitech, though it lives on beyond the grave (see also other systems such as Sonos). I quickly began ripping my CDs to disk - running a music server on an old Ubuntu linux box, I made the initial false move of ripping to mp3. Recognising my mistake, I re-ripped to flac! Listening to music through my home network really revitalised my interest music. There were so many advantages in accessing albums without ferretting around shelves of CDs, searching for obscure tracks became so much easier and so forth. Over the years, my Squeezebox system grew. Now I operate a Squeezebox Touch, my original Squeezebox 3, two Squeezebox Radios, plus I use a software player on my MacBook Pro, and apps on iPads and Android devices. Along the way, I started using last.fm as a way of interacting with others, and trying to find new music. But still, accessing new music remained an issue, despite buying Mojo (for classic rock music and dead, decrepit and generally missing in action musicians) and The Wire (for my more avant-garde tastes).Enter Spotify. Admittedly, I was a little late to the music streaming party but I've been enthusiastic ever since. I rapidly upgraded from the advert-laden free account to a paid Premium account, largely to enable listening on my iPad. I only interact with one friend on Spotify, but even that is enough to open my eyes to a wide variety of music I wouldn't normally here. I frequently don't like her suggestions, occasionally hate them, but quite frequently really enjoy her playlists. I also widely use Spotify to check out albums I've read reviews of.So, in all this, what effect has Spotify had on my music listening? Well firstly, it's enabled me to listen to music I'd ordinarily never hear. Secondly, it allows me to check stuff out before shelling out for it. I can use Spotify in conjunction with the Squeezebox to generate "Smart Playlists", uncovering some hidden gems.And guess what? I have greatly increased the numbers of albums I buy. This is an impact on the music biz that doesn't seem to be considered in many commentary articles on music streaming services. Maybe I'm an outlier here, but the exposure to music leads to increased purchasing, at least in my case. And I blundered across a review of music listening/purchasing trends among 'young' people (with a foreword by Feargal Sharkey) which as I recall seemed to indicate an unexpected (to me) desire to own the music rather than merely have a download. Another important factor is that the young do have a lower disposable income, and I would expect them to use copying to increase their music collection - much as I and my fellow students did with cassette tapes back in the 1970s. I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that this whole issue of fair remuneration for artists is wholly unresolvable without a robust dataset. And, of course, we can add to the discussion the role of the music companies in all this.

Thorn Cycles have a 100 day return policy (with some obvious conditions). Those 100 days are pretty much expired. Will we send the new tandem back? Absolutely not. See the multi-part review for the explanation.

I haven't written a preview of the 2013 Duo Normand, principally because both of us have had particularly lacklustre seasons this year for reasons of pressure of work and of illness and injury. However, on a recent joint holiday to Normandy, we did seem to see the vague signs of returning form. I built on this by riding five events between coming back from Normandy and returning for the Duo Normand. Everything seemed to be falling into place. From my perspective, at least. Things began to change a few days before we were due to leave for the Duo Normand - Gerry reported he'd picked up a cold. What was worse, it appeared to be quite severe. Not to worry, I observed, it'll probably pass before the race itself. But I found myself sharing a cabin on the overnight ferry to Caen on the Wednesday before the race with a severely bunged up and coughing team mate. It was looking a bit bleak for our tenth outing at the Duo Normand.