But what about the traditional music media? Well, let's do TV first, and aside from the bespoke music channels, which continue to multiply, the general entertainment channels continue to fail to deliver any really inspired music programming. No replacements for 'Top Of The Pops' or 'CD:UK', which both disappeared in 2006 of course, were particularly forthcoming. Channel 4, in their defence, did launch numerous new music programme formats, though generally they were the same format with different names and sponsors. Some were quite good, but none caught music fans' imagination like its 'Popworld' show had in its heyday. 'Popworld' had lost Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver as presenters in 2006, and under new presenters Alex Zane and Alexa Chung it was, frankly, a bit shit. So it came as no surprise when it was quietly axed in July. Elsewhere on the telly, with the exception of 'Later With Jools Holland', which is still brill, the best music programme on the box was probably a show that is more comedy and quiz show than music show - BBC2's 'Never Mind The Buzzcocks', now back in its prime with its newish host, the aforementioned Amstell. Preston walking off it was a true moment of telly gold.
Elsewhere in TV land, CMU time was spent admiring just how vindictive the fall out between Virgin Media and Sky became - with the latter pulling its channels off the former's cable TV network. Plus we also enjoyed greatly all the dodgy phone in scandals - when it turned out numerous TV shows had been encouraging viewers to call premium phone numbers for competitions that were closed. Brilliant. Those scandals led to other revelations about the ways in which TV producers sometimes fix things (though no real surprises there, surely) and of course led many viewers to doubt the reliability of phone in polls, seen this week by all the hoo haa about the final 'X-Factor' phone vote.