Monty's Gaming and Wireless Outlook - Issue 177

Junk food giant McDonalds has come up with another way to ensure its McWorkers never take a day off sick. Members of the same family who work in the same outlet are now able to swap shifts without prior notice or asking their McManagers for permission.

Wow, what a precedent. If George Bush is feeling a bit peaky, he could get his dad to sit in instead, but maybe that's a bad example, that's already happened. A better example might be replacing England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson with his grandmother, who could do a better job than that rapacious football-whore who could then retrain as a lookalike for Monty Burns (from The Simpsons).

McDonalds, of course, don't really care much about hamburgers at all. Their business is essentially a real estate business. They open an outlet in a crap part of a town, see prices rise as other emporia flock to open their businesses nearby, and then move to another crap part of town once prices are at their height.

Not many people know that, but a lot of people do know the music business is changing on a daily basis. At this week's Midem event in Cannes, the buzz wasn't just about online delivery models and iPods, it was about mobile and how music companies are readjusting to the New World.

Warner is one company that has sprung into mobile after the global success of Madonna's Hung Up single. The song was launched as a ringtone a month before it was released to radio stations and consequently went to Number One in 29 countries.

I'd prefer to put the success down to a very sexy Madonna in a very sexy video, but it has prompted Warner to put together the SMS tone, an innovation that comprises music and video on receipt of a text message. Not a bad idea, but I wonder how much it will cost.

Extending the airplay of music is something the traditional games industry understands very well. If a song is picked as part of the soundtrack of a decent-selling games title, that song is heard by countless more people than the radio. Bands are broken in the US by such exposure.

And on that note, a sad farewell to Chris Penn, the voice of Grand Theft Auto and a vastly under-rated actor. Unfortunately, even in death he was cheated. Vast swathes of the US media showed their sensitivity by reporting his demise as 'Brother of Sean Penn found dead'.

Unlike McWorkers, Sean Penn could never stand in for Chris Penn who was brilliant in countless movies. Even so, Chris, like most of us, wouldn't have minded standing in for Sean when he was going out with Madonna. Ah, families, don't you just love 'em?