David Emery Online

Roundtable Discussion: The Role Of The Record Label

Last week, I had the opportunity to chat — and, by chat, I mean “chat via the Internet” — with a handful of independent record labels’ owners and managers. I wanted to discuss the role of the label in a time when fewer people seem to know or care what labels their favorite musicians or bands are on. Furthermore, and perhaps this has always been true, we may not even know what exactly a label does.

Interesting stuff (although – obviously – a quite US focused view on things).

Two Door Cinema Club - I Can Talk

I really like this new video by Two Door Cinema Club (and the song’s not bad too). Obviously made for the internet (as all that strobing won’t be allowed on TV) but not in a slightly-rubbish lo-fi way:

Dynamic Design

U Got The Look - JEFF the Brotherhood

JEFF the Brotherhood are a two piece (always a good start) from Nashville, Tennessee half of which used to be in the wonderful be your own PET. Half of two does indeed equal one and that one in question is Jamin who used to do the drumming duties in byoP, and is joined by his brother Jake on guitar and vocals.

They are totally my new favourite band, at least forthisweekanyway:

Google’s Music Onebox Launches, Powered By MySpace And Lala

Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos […] The new feature is being powered by two entirely different services: Lala, the innovative music site that lets people buy ‘web songs’ for ten cents, and iLike, the popular streaming music and artist hub that was recently acquired by MySpace.

Dear Google,

Hope all is well at Google Towers – I’m sure the revenue share you’re getting from iLike & MySpace must be a nice extra bonus on top of all your adsense cash.

I was wondering though; any chance of making it so we could populate the ‘Onebox’ content ourselves, based on putting content on musicians websites? Maybe even – and stop me if I’m talking like a crazy person – we could put it in the html (maybe in a specific format to make it easier) and you could somehow read that html, on a regular basis, and use that to populate your search results pages?

Just a thought – maybe that’s too difficult for you guys to figure out.

Anyway, keep on with the good work,

- David

The New Grooveshark: Faster, Prettier And Still Phenomenal

I’ve always considered the Grooveshark web app’s UI to be quite amazing, so I was wary when I was granted preview access to the service’s new look, which the startup is presenting publicly for the first time today (at 12 AM EST). Fortunately, they somehow managed to make it even more awesome than it already was, and the makeover was more than a new lick of paint as it also included a number of performance tweaks to make it run smoother.

You know what? The new version of Grooveshark is pretty slick; it looks very nice. However, while I was sitting through the (inevitable) loading screen and spinning beachball cursor that a flash-based app brings I was wondering: are there any popular all flash sites? Sure, you get plenty of places who use it as the way of delivering content (YouTube, MySpace etc etc) but I can’t think of any that are solely flash-based. Not one…

iTunesLP.net

At this moment these iTunes LPs are available for a select list of new releases on the iTunes store. However we think it would be nice to have many older, out-of-print, obscure albums or albums on indie-labels to get the same experience; and with that in mind we started working on finding out exactly how this new format works, in order to share our results with the community.

I thought about doing this, but low and behold someone has beaten me to it (and done a much better job, of course). Thanks internet! The iTunes LP format is quite intriguing really – we’ve now got a extremely modern web renderer built into the most popular music software, and they can interact together nicely (using a dab of Javascript) – there’s got to be some interesting things you can do with that…

Spotify’s new music purchasing features

From today, every track on Spotify that’s also in 7digital’s catalogue will have a clear Buy button next to the track name (see pic above – click to make it larger). Albums will also have a Buy Album button below the cover artwork. […] clicking on the new Buy buttons doesn’t take you to a website any more: it pops up a window within the Spotify application itself.

This instantly makes Spotify that much more interesting – it’s already the second most prominent music playing software after iTunes, and now it’s got its very own store. I wonder, though, whether the people that use Spotify are that interested in buying music through it (really, why would you bother?).

the internet (by LCD Soundsystem)

Anyway, i’m making a record, as previously blathered about, and this means that my horrible, useless website is getting redone by my friend sonya. i mean, it sucks, which was my choice. i was like “can this look more horrible?” i wish i was kidding, but i happen to like crap. i just do. but she’s promised to work with me to make sure it’s still unwieldy and awkward, which is good preparation for everything else lcdish, and i promise to be less grumpy about things actually being “useful”. it’s just that things that are too “useful”… well, i don’t entirely trust them. i kind of like useless things. for instance—and this is a pretty facile and simplified metaphor here—art is useless, and nazis made lots of useful things. i like dumb meandering things that make me happy and confused, and don’t particularly like “effective marketing tools designed for maximum accurate data capture” blah blah blah. it all sounds so sad and functional. i don’t like the idea of people sitting in a room talking about the best way to word things to get the right reaction from a base of “users” etc. i don’t like thinking that those people used to love to do something, or wanted to be something, and would [ed: I assume he means wound] up measuring the best way to manipulate other people. i honestly don’t judge them, but i feel weird, and sort of sad—not FOR them, in a pitying way, as i have no idea how they fell, for fuck’s sake, and i’m a ridiculous person by the measure of a pretty deep cut of the population—but ABOUT them.

Emphasis mine – of course, you can make things useful and useless all at the same time (just in different ways), although it’s easy sometimes to focus on the useful; start with the science, but don’t forget the art.

Vampire Weekend - Horchata

Yesterday we released the first track from the new Vampire Weekend album, and jolly good it is too:

I’m superhappy (that’s a word, right?) with the way the download page turned out; it just looks right – hopefully you think so too. As per normal (for me, seemingly) it’s using all kinds of javascript-based magic to scale everything to your browser window size, including automatically spreading out the different lines of text to fit the height correctly. Also, look out for the lyrics booklet we bundled with the download as well – as close as I’ll probably get to designing a record sleeve…