David Emery OnlinePitchfork.tv: The National - Terrible Love
The Brooklyn rockers bring their big sound to an abandoned castle overlooking New York's Hudson river.
This track is just astonishingly good live:
Visit ➔Spotify Goes Social
In its newest app update, and the biggest since launch in 2008, Spotify users will now be able to connect to their Facebook page and import friends from their profile who are also registered Spotify users. Connected friends will become visible in the Spotify browser, and this opens up a whole new landscape of interaction and activity which can now be published simultaneously to users’ Facebook profiles and within the Spotify browser in the new feed section.
The social features in the new version of Spotify are pretty nifty – I already know plenty of people that share playlists so this is a perfect enhancement to current user behaviour.
What’s far more interesting – at least from my point of view – in this update though is the ability for Spotify to play, store and manage local files. At the moment I pretty much don’t use Spotify because the large proportion of music I listen to isn’t on there (music from blogs, pre-release albums etc), so this new feature makes it a lot more attractive.
If I didn’t have to pay £10/month for the iPhone app I’d ditch iTunes…
Visit ➔M.I.A. - Born Free
Director : Romain Gavras
This is one of the best videos I’ve ever had the fortune of working with (although please note, it’s very NSFW and not for the faint hearted):
This is what happens when you make videos for the internet, not for the TV – it doesn’t need to be lo-fi, cheap and easy. If anything, it can be better.
Visit ➔British recorded music sales rise for the first time in six years
Record labels, which have faced a slump in CD sales and a long-running battle against internet piracy, experienced a rise in income from music sales from £916 million to £929 million in 2009, the British Phonographic Industry said.
The surprise increase marks the first time that the growth in income from digital services such as iTunes has outweighed the decline from sales of CDs. Income from digital singles and albums leapt by 53 per cent, to £154 million, while physical formats dropped 6 per cent to £740 million.
Yep, sure looks like the recorded music industry is dying, doesn’t it?
In a slightly less flippant way, what this article really shows is the pointlessness of looking at overall industry figures like this; acts like Susan Boyle and Lady Gaga skew the figures massively and hence obscure how the majority of the industry is doing. And a lot of it is doing alright, and has been doing alright throughout the ‘downturn’.
Visit ➔Why All Those Records (Gaslight Anthem, Crystal Castles, Hole, Etc.) Leaked On Monday
Because PlayMPE--"one of a handful of technologies that record labels use to distribute advance, watermarked albums, to blogs, magazines, and a variety of other publications," reports AbsolutePunk.net--was hacked last week. PlayMPE is the preferred industry vehicle these days as far getting records to critics ahead of the official release date. But all it took was one clever teenager to get himself on the company's distribution list, and the rest was RapidShare history.
Ouch.
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem - Drunk Girls
"Drunk Girls" - taken from the new album "This is Happening" directed by Spike Lee
I never trusted pandas:
Visit ➔Fun with social APIs: a pair of mini-apps
I’m very happy to say that we’ve recently released two free mini-apps meant to let artists do some fancy social network building on their own sites. They’re both simple PHP/Javascript apps that work with native APIs. One offers tweet-for-track capabilities for Twitter. The other encourages people to become fans on Facebook by offering a free download for all fans using Facebook Connect.
First off, let me just say I really admire what the guys over at CASH Music are doing; it’s great that there’s room on the internet for the intersection of Open Source and music, and that someone’s doing it.
However, am I the only one that has a great distaste with the whole ‘Tweet for a Track’ model? The premise is simple – to get a free MP3 download (or any other content, really) you have to let them post a promotional tweet using your twitter account.
The short term promotional benefits are obvious (lots of people tweeting about you or your content), and it seems like an easy shortcut to “viral” success but that’s just the problem; it’s a shortcut, not the real thing. A real viral success is something that people want to post to their twitter and tell all their friends about, and hence contains the authenticity of a genuine recommendation.
However, forcing someone to tweet (and often with a predefined message) just isn’t going to carry that same authenticity; it’s just going to feel like marketing to anyone reading it (and no one likes to think they’re affected by marketing). Not only that, the person you’ve forced to tweet isn’t going to feel great about inflicting it upon their friends either.
It turns something that should be exciting (getting a bit of content for free) into something that feels, well, icky.
Visit ➔Under Great White Northern Lights Box Set Pitchfork Review
In the final scene of the White Stripes tour documentary Under Great White Northern Lights, Jack and Meg sit on a bench in front of 88 black-and-white keys. Jack starts to play the piano and sing his ballad "White Moon". Meg starts to cry. It's a heartbreaking, out-of-nowhere surge of intimacy that briefly lifts the curtain on one of the most fascinatingly private bands to ever reach arena-rock ubiquity. It's also one of those revealing moments that raises more questions than it answers.
I don’t think this documentary has really received the fanfare it deserves; while obviously I’m a big massive White Stripes fan so slightly biased, it’s one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen. Incredibly compelling, and a stark reminder that while Jack White is still about and playing in band after band, it’s the White Stripes that made him famous and for good reason.
Also, this review is a lovely bit of writing (not that that’s out of the ordinary for Pitchfork album reviews, though).
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem new album reviewed track by track
So what next, when you’ve nothing left to prove? Prove it again, differently. Usually when a band tells you their latest, yet-to-be-aired effort is “the best album we’ve ever made” it’s code for “we’ve lost it completely, but at that mega-volume playback in the expensive studio it felt like we’d got away with it”. This isn’t one of those records. The third, still-untitled LCD Soundsystem album contains a run of heavyweight hits that compress the best elements of their previous work, topped and tailed by some intriguing slow-burners.
Of course as soon as I post something that says we can’t hear any new LCD Soundsystem music yet, what appears on the internet? New LCD Soundsystem music:
DRUNK GIRLS!
Visit ➔