David Emery OnlineSpotify’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?).
Visit ➔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.
Visit ➔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…
Visit ➔LCD Soundsystem Twitter
[…] warning: this twitter thing will hardly be filled with real insights. it’ll be crap.
facebook will be slightly less crap. myspace will be mostly ignored crap. website will be more “designed” crap. but i think record: good.
Two things: 1) I’m getting very excited by the prospect of a new LCD record and 2) this is a pretty nice summation of the different roles twitter/facebook/myspace/websites play in music…
Visit ➔Whole New Way - The Horrors
Not quite on probably-best-album-of-the-year-or-at-least-close-to-the-top ‘Primary Colours’, and you can sort-of see why – not because it’s not good, because it is (very), but because it just wouldn’t fit:
Visit ➔New Julian Casablancas - "11th Dimension"
It’s a lot better then I thought it would be – Strokes + electronica + Ratatat + pop = goodness:
Visit ➔Vampire Weekend - Contra
File under “what I did today”. Also, check out what happens when you resize…
Visit ➔Girls - Album
You can now listen to one of the best debut albums for quite a while via this handy SoundCloud-based player:
Visit ➔Gil Scott-Heron
In early 2010 Gil Scott-Heron will release a brand new album entitled ‘I’m New Here’ […] Here are four excerpts from his first album of new material since 1997; ‘A.M.’, ‘I’m New Here’, ‘Me And The Devil’ and ‘I’ll Take Care Of You’.
We’ve just launched this little site and I’m really happy with the way it turned out; nothing too crazy, just trying to sweat the details and make it right.
Visit ➔