David Emery OnlinePhil Spector convicted of murder
US music producer Phil Spector has been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, after a five-month retrial. The 68-year-old, famous for the “Wall of Sound” recording technique, faces between 18 years and life in prison.
So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, Glitter-style? Or is murder, you know, not as bad?
Visit ➔iTunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings
Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price.
While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs.
It’s no real surprise to me that for chart ‘hits’ a higher price leads to lower sales – a chart-based purchase is more likely to be an impulse purchase, so it follows that that impulse is more likely to be quashed by a higher purchase price (especially when placed next to lots of other cheaper chart tracks).
Visit ➔UMG and YouTube officially announce Vevo
The rumours were right. Universal Music Group and Google have announced their joint venture, Vevo – a video site offering UMG’s music videos, with advertising revenues shared between the two.
Isn’t this just the same as what should be at universalmusic.com/videos? Such a pointless piece of band-engineering and marketing rubbish.
Also, while you’ve got a moment check out umusic.com (which is the groups site, as opposed to just music – or something…) – it’s stunningly awful.
Visit ➔Now That's What I Call Unrecouped
Common wisdom has it that the artists who get record deals then go straight to the bargain bins are by definition not very good. But this is myopic. Quite often they aren’t very good, it’s true, but some of them are there due to bad timing, bad luck, wrong single choice or simply that Jo Whiley’s producer decided they didn’t like the record.
Brilliant stuff. There are quite a few bands that I’ve worked with over the years that I’d add to this list, but I’m not going to name names as I think for some it might be a bit soon (the wounds are still fresh…).
Visit ➔No Rock And Roll Fun: 25,000
Music. It’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?
No Rock And Roll Fun is one of my favourite music blogs, and one of the few UK based ones at that. Well worth reading if you’re not already.
Visit ➔Girls - Lust For Life
One of the best things I've heard come out of SXSW - more please! Via abeano.com
Visit ➔God Help The Girl
The new project from Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, which we launched yesterday. Contains my first use of the new CSS 3 ‘column-count’ property to have multiple columns of text, which was so crazy easy (and degrades nicely to one column in IE) that I’m probably going to use it all over the place now…
Visit ➔Celebration Electric Tarot
We as Celebration, have felt the continual growth of web culture’s need for barrier-free exchange. We also feel that the traditional methods of releasing music have put too much distance between us. As we see it, the current music business model is crumbling. The birth of the MP3 has dreampt the death of the CD, and so all across the board Cd sales have dropped. What has given way is something so magical and evolutionary, that we have only begun to understand the cultural impact of this sharing. So, past the piles of broken CD cases and badly scratched, polycarbonate, rainbow discs, there lies a fantastic world of freedom—freedom to share instantly with little or no impact on the evironment, in a seemingly infinite, eternal and virtually cost free universe of the World Wide Web. This is our emancipation. Without the need for manufacturing CDs and the danse macabre of the promotional corporate machine, we can be free to release our music when and how we want—no waiting. we know nothing of the marketing world and don’t care about the vampires anymore.
Our plan and experiment is to post new songs monthly, as we create and record them. Under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license, all of our new music will be free to download on our new website. When we have enough music for an album, we will release it on vinyl for those who want to have something to hold. As artists we can only stand for our music, our art, our creation. So here it is—laid bare.
Good luck to them – I’m a big fan. If you have the means, making your music free like this could have some interesting repercussions artistically (free of the shackles of the album format, ‘hit singles’ and the like).
Visit ➔Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You
A simply lovely video for one of the best tracks of last year.
I particularly like the singing ghosts:
Visit ➔