Edited highlights

Sometimes it's hard to keep up with multiple blogs and I've given up archiving the mercury blog here.

However, it may be worth putting the outtakes in this space, so from this blog, I couldn't find a way to shoehorn this bit in - because I thought I'd already covered the territory.

It refers to U2's high-profile of late and the evolution of the music industry. Older acts are back out hawking their wares, but what space does it leave for those trying to break thru? Do we still need the older acts to finance the newer ones? The answer is 'probably'. Here's the out-take:

The fact is that all acts have to work harder these days because they're becoming less relevant to our lives, we have so many more choices of what to do with our leisure time from DVD box sets to Twittering. In some cases the audience has moved on, got older, doesn't listen to as much music (tragic, I know) and certainly doesn't buy as much. U2's biggest album The Joshua Tree achieved over 25 million sales, 'No Line' will be lucky to do a quarter of that. Coldplay's Viva La Vida, last year's biggest-seller, is currently around 7 million worldwide sales. The work that U2 put in now may not alter that but it certainly buys the media's affection for a while.

It's not like a DVD extra but maybe it is. Or not.

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