David Emery OnlineLily Allen Shows Off Newish Song, EMI Shows Off Newish YouTube Strategy
Usually when a new track makes its way to the Web, YouTube fills up with unauthorized rips of the track, featuring visuals that are promo pics (sometimes stitched together with your Windows Media Maker wipes, often static) and maybe the lyrics on the side. They’re also embeddable, so people (cough cough) can stick them on their blogs, or what-have-you. Parlophone decided to beat the YouTubers at their own game, though, creating an embeddable video that not only streams the song, it gives details on how to preorder the album.
You know what, this actually is a pretty good idea. I’ve been championing for a while the idea of having an easily embedable song player – I’m looking at you, Last.fm and Hype Machine – and this is a pretty good pass at it using the already existing YouTube architecture. Would be nice if the audio was nicer quality though.
What makes this doubly interesting is that EMI are almost certainly a YouTube partner, so will be receiving ad revenue from these YouTube plays…
Visit ➔Last.fm Best Of 2008
Really nicely done – love the design, especially the font choices and the little graphs (some of which are powered by the Google Chart API, which I always forget about). However, the content isn’t exactly interesting – the singles chart particularly; I guess that what’s popular in this context isn’t actually a metric that contains much insight.
Visit ➔Idlewild's next album
Idlewild are pleased to announce plans for our forthcoming new studio album with an opportunity for our fans to be involved from an early stage.
This exact idea – pre-order the album direct from the artist, then get it well upfront of the traditional release – has been banded around for a while now, so it’s interesting to see someone make a proper go of it.
The whole industry is watching with interest, no doubt.
Visit ➔Leona was robbed
LEONA LEWIS has been robbed of a No1 single by a blunder which has left the singer’s team and fans furious.
The superstar was due to release her version of Run for download this week after she performed it on her return to The X Factor on Saturday.
But due to a bungle at Sony, the song has not been available online and this week’s planned internet release has been shelved.
A nice story – I think we can all enjoy the idea of Sony screwing up such a thing – but sadly from what I hear, untrue. Sony have purposefully kept the song off digital retailers to push people to the new deluxe edition of her album instead. And it looks like this sacrifice of single sales is going to work as well – the album is set to to be #1 this week.
It’s bad enough to block consumer choice and up-sell a whole album to people who probably have it already, but to then try and claim that it’s a screw up is quite deliciously evil.
Visit ➔MySpace Launches Profile 2.0. No, You Don’t Have to Switch
…today MySpace is introducing Profile 2.0. Unlike Facebook’s recent redesign, MySpace’s redesign is fully optional and will remain so for a long period of time – MySpace’s official blog mentions years. Facebook’s gradual rollout of the redesign was carefully handled, but there were still a lot of angry users who wanted the look and feel of their old profiles back. As a result, MySpace isn’t taking any chances here.
Two things: 1) The whole ‘new’ Facebook fiasco should be ignored, but is a good reminder of how much people fear change. MySpace could have never done the same thing, as people have spent a lot of time customising their profiles already. 2) Obviously this looks a bit better, but it’s still not exactly great, is it? Also, does anyone know if you can upgrade a music/band account?
Visit ➔Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened
I've been listening to this track, and the whole album 'Microcastle' that it's from, on repeat at the moment. It's very, very good.
From http://thedailygrowl.blogspot.com/2008/10/deerhunter-microcastle-weird-era-cont.html
Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened
Visit ➔Ian Rogers' Digital Music Manifesto
On the connection between artists and fans: “Think about perspectives that matter. The artist, and the fan. I was on a panel last week in London at Musexpo and I listened to my friend Rob Wells from Universal Music Group talk to a gentleman from Nokia about Nokia’s Comes With Music for half an hour, and I was just sitting there thinking, these guys could talk for an hour and not mention music, an artist or a fan.
I bumped into Ian when he was in town last week – he’s a really nice guy and up to some very interesting things. Well worth a read.
Visit ➔iPhone Apps Could Be the New MySpace Page
Recording artist Pink is the latest to make waves in this area with a free iPhone app called “P!nk’s Funhouse” (iTunes link), according to Billboard, which includes 30-second previews from her upcoming album, news, photos and other “essentials to connect you to Pink’s music.” Others rumored to be working on similar applications include Fall Out Boy and Snow Patrol, while Nine Inch Nails plans to release a special version of the iPhone app Tap Tap Revenge that will let players tap along with various NIN songs.
I’ve been having a good look at music iPhone apps for a while – understandably, I guess, as my background is originally in Mac development and now in the music industry. However, I haven’t really hit on the right use of the technology yet – sure, we could do silly little apps like this Pink one (which is basically a song preview-er + RSS feed + biog) but I don’t think they add any value for the consumer.
All of what’s in that app could be (and probably is) on the artists website, which you should be able to get at on the iPhone (assuming they haven’t used any Flash…). Maybe if you could listen to full tracks this would be more interesting, but as it is this sector of the market is just people spending money to look like they’re doing something.
Visit ➔plasticbagUK: Books are indulgent...
Books are indulgent, wasteful, bad for the environment, burdens, are bought for display and have nothing to do with a love of reading.
Quoted for truth.
Reading does not mean reading books.
Listening to music does not mean playing a CD or record.
If you associate the two together so be it, but they’re not one and the same thing.
Visit ➔