David Emery OnlineHow does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?
Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.
Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.
In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!
Visit ➔The Wired.co.uk Podcast 52
We'll cover the week in Wired news as normal, including stories about the first lab-grown hamburgers, airmiles for cyclists, batteries that charge in 15 minutes, wine bottles made from paper and Mongolia's plan to cool itself with giant blocks of ice.
And we'll also look back at the last year of trends we've covered on the show. Nate, Duncan, Katie and Liv each pick their favourite topic and we bring a whole host of special expert guests onto the show to discuss how those trends will evolve over the next year.
At about 31mins in you can hear me talk a little bit about music apps (and it turns out I don’t at all sound like I think I do).
Visit ➔Sting’s iPad app cost “in the low seven figures” to develop
Earlier this week, we reported on the launch of Sting 25, an iPad app celebrating Sting’s solo career. But how much did it cost to make? More than one million dollars. This is according to the Wall Street Journal.
The app itself – if you’re a Sting fan – is pretty nice, but over $1million to develop is just plain ridiculous. A quick glance at the credits – which is several pages long – tells you why: when you involve big agencies, they’re very good at spending your money.
I find it interesting that Chevrolet and AmEx feel they are getting enough value from having their logos slapped on the splash page to finance such an endevour (assuming that is that they’re together stumping the cost). By then, sponsorship is the only way to go if you’re spending that much money on an app like this as you sure as hell aren’t going to sell 100,000 copies at $9.99.
Visit ➔St. Vincent 4AD Session
Recording these songs live for the first time, St Vincent has performed four tracks from Strange Mercy for the tenth visual installment in the 4AD Session series.
This is super awesome (click through for the full 4 track session):
Visit ➔Thom Yorke at the Boiler Room
More on Flickr here.
Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification
One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.
I’m loath to speculate on rumoured products like this – who knows what it’ll actually be – but this sounds like it could be massive. Facebook is already the biggest single driver to artist websites, and this will just make it even more powerful.
It also – sorry to say – sounds like it could be the final blow for Last.fm; why have a social network just for music when the biggest social network has most of the features (that mainstream users want, at least).
Visit ➔Apple's iTunes Match beta doesn't technically stream music
Despite evidence that appears to show streaming playback through iTunes Match, an Apple spokesperson confirmed to Peter Kafka of All Things D that content played from the service must first be "stored" on an iPhone or iPad. The service appears to be streaming because it begins playback instantly, but instead of true streaming it is downloading and storing the file while beginning simultaneous playback.
"Apple's system, as it's currently constructed, still requires users to keep stuff on their machine in order to play with it," the report said. Kafka speculated that files that are not "downloaded" through iCloud but still played will sit in a "temporary cache" on the machine.
The semantics of this are pretty ridiculous – every major streaming service works in the same way, using a local cache. iTunes Match is streaming just as much as Spotify is.
And it’s also not very surprising that iTunes Match does supports streaming – it’ll be interesting to see what other features it gains before it launches (my bet: a web based version of iTunes, alongside a whole new version on the desktop).
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