Post Music

29 August 2006

A fun time was had by all at this year’s Reading Festival. Highlights included Tapes ‘n Tapes (above) who played an excellent set on Sunday, Giant Drag who were both brilliant musically and quite funny, TV On The Radio who should really be a lot bigger and the always excellent Raconteurs.

Of note was the Klaxons performance – which was great, but that’s not why it’s noteworthy. No, that goes to the fact that not only was the tent full (admittedly the Carling tent, which is the smallest at Reading) but it was 20 people deep outside as well. The last time that happened was last year, and it wasn’t as busy as it was for the Klaxons.

That band? The Arctic Monkeys.

This ties back round to what I’ve been talking about previously with the current online music scene; it’s what gave birth to the Arctic Monkeys, and the Klaxons are following along their path; bringing a whole scene – “New Rave” according to NME – with them. The hype from traditional publications such as NME has really only just begun in the last month or so, and can no way be responsible for the thousands that turned out for them on Sunday. In fact, NME has seriously being playing catch up and has hence plastered anyone they consider being “New Rave” all over their pages.

A dying breed, the music weekly – they’re rapidly becoming not only obsolete due to online publications, but completely irrelevant. Why get your recommendations on music from a paper full of biases when you can follow your friend links and listen to new music on MySpace now?

While we’re on the subject of music, an interesting news item popped up in my Bloglines today: SpiralFrog to launch free music downloads

What’s most interesting from my point of view is that they’ve managed to get Universal on board for this, as it’s quite obviously going to suck. Not that the majors seem to have a problem with trying to shift sucky product…

Let me elucidate; the concept of free, advertising-revenue-based downloads sounds great in theory, but in reality they’re either not going to make anything like enough money, and go under pretty quick (or go under slowly, gouging several VCs in the process á la YouTube), or they’re going to have expose the user to a huge amount of adverts per-song. It sounds to me – if you follow that link – that they’re going to try the later, utilising WMA-based DRM to both force you into watching adverts and to stop you from sharing the tracks.

Hey, doesn’t that sounds like a great user experience?

From: Articles

29 August 2006