David Emery OnlineBritish Sea Power plans Kinect-augmented webcast
Post-punk naturalists British Sea Power will be commandeering the Roundhouse in London at the end of the month to record a webcast enhanced by augmented reality, provided by a hacked Kinect sensor.
Something we’ve put together at work which should be pretty interesting – you can tune in here on Monday night at 9pm.
Visit ➔The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
10 years ago the average American spent almost 3 times as much on recorded music products as they do today.
26 years ago they spent almost twice as much as they do today.
An interesting article with lots of lovely graphs, but makes the mistake of lumping the whole of the industry together as one. Sales of certain types of albums are dropping massively, but that’s certainly not true for everything (and there’s plenty of money to made from recorded music, you just have to be smart about it).
Visit ➔experimenting with a second screen
I've had a rare weekend of telly. And instead of just lounging on the sofa (well, as well as just lounging on the sofa) I thought I'd see how the experience is changed by a slightly different sort of second screen. Not the usual twitter on iPad fiddling, but a little pico projector beaming Dextr next to the telly.
This is interesting. Not fully formed yet, but there’s something in this whole ‘second screen’ thing.
Visit ➔Foo Fighters - White Limo
I’d given up a while ago that the Foo Fighters could do anything other than middle of the road rawk, but they’ve conclusively proven me wrong.
Visit ➔fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.
we tried calling our lawyer about the ticket scalping. “it’s legal”. no joke. it’s fucking legal. i tramped around with friends and band getting insane. i wanted to buy some expensive tickets and then track the seller down to beat him. i acted stupid. i did some classic, shakespearean vain “fist shaking”, etc. i made angry tweets. (i’m wondering now what on earth could be less effective and more of a first-world spoiled idiotic move than “angry tweets”? jesus.)
James Murphy Is Awesome (go read the whole thing, please).
Visit ➔The Strokes - Under Cover of Darkness
Turns out the new Strokes track is (surprisingly, for a band that’s been away for so long) really good. Takes about 3 listens to get into, though:
Papa Sangre – who needs graphics anyway?
This game is an impressive technical achievement. It uses a binaural sound engine to place the player in a three-dimensional sound stage when using headphones. Binaural recordings are made by placing a pair of microphones in a position which corresponds to the position of our human ears and can be extremely effective
Love the concept of this iPhone app – it recreates a 3D world without using graphics, just using sound. It’s amazingly – almost freakishly – effective.
Visit ➔Giving it away.
Kayne West' cover for Vman magazine, comes with a dollar stuffed in Yeezy's mouth, wow.
Sometimes we joke at the end of an unsuccessful campaign that we might as well have just stapled £10 notes to the CD and it would have been just as profitable…
Visit ➔Spotify should give indies a fair deal on royalties
Last year, major labels Universal and Sony received more revenue from Spotify than any other Swedish music service or digital and physical record store, according to local newspaper reports.
The news came as a surprise to many independent labels and to Swedish songwriters, as their royalty statements tell a very different story. It appears that not only do the majors own shares in Spotify, they – and their artists – also get much better streaming rates than the indies. Some of the indies threatened in early December to withdraw their music from Spotify in response.
An interesting look into the ridiculously complex and convoluted world of music licensing and monetization; should give you a grasp on some of the reasons why new music services struggle to get legal (in short: it’s really complicated to do).
Also, from where I’m sitting all this talk about Spotify not making labels/artists money is rubbish – would any label be signed up if that were true?
Visit ➔