David Emery OnlineRockstar and Amazon bring digital music distribution to GTA4
I think video games are becoming an ever more relevant resource for promoting and selling music, although this system sounds a little clumsy. What we be much more interesting would be if you could buy direct in-game and have the track downloaded to your PC automatically. That would probably be a little tricky with Amazon, but Apple handle a pretty similar thing with the iTunes store on the iPhone…
Also, instead of getting an email with a playlist in it would be much better to have Last.fm scrobbling support in game – that would be a very welcome development.
Visit ➔Why do people buy records?
Well worth a read, especially the points highlighting the self fulfilling prophecy that is the ‘record sales are going down’ meme. However, like many people I’ve seen write about ‘collecting’ music and the rise of vinyl Patrick does miss out on a new trend I’m seeing in younger music fans: they still collect music, but they collect digital music.
They’ve grown up with music being something you play via an iPod, but that doesn’t mean the collecting bug has gone away; they’re just trying to complete their iTunes library, not their record shelf.
Visit ➔Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet.
It’s obviously going to get shut down at some point fairly soon, but until then Muxtape is a beautiful piece of work. All it does is let you share a ‘mixtape’, or collection of MP3s you’ve uploaded, but it does it perfectly. A very good example of ‘less is more’.
Visit ➔The Raconteurs - Salute Your Solution
I really quite like the new video for The Raconteurs – it’s not filmed in the traditional sense but actually a composition of hundreds of still photos:
Visit ➔Rock Band meets iTunes, opens built-in music store
They’ve already sold over 6 million songs on the Rock Band store, which I think is a pretty amazing figure. I would also hazard a guess that these sales are much more biased towards catalogue sales then a traditional retailer would be.
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Sleevage: Editors: The End Has a Start
Very interesting article on the cover for the Editors latest album. I’m not particularly a fan of theirs, but the cover and the other bits of photography used are really quite nice.
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