David Emery Online

Open Letter From OK Go

I love the ridiculous situations this industry gets itself into sometimes, where it seemingly makes more sense to let people embed a video from other sites like Vimeo (who don’t even like having commercial videos on their platform, and hence have some slightly horrific clauses in their T&Cs that let them do far to much with your videos) rather then focus everyone on YouTube.

Anyone's Guess

I love the frankly ridiculous level of authoritative punditry you get before an Apple announcement. It seems to permeate the internet in its entirety, like a snowstorm of bullshit covering practically every website you can find in a dirty sludge of rumour and conjecture.

What we know for sure is coming is… actually, nothing. Their has been no solid facts leak out; in fact, all that there has been is lots of completely contradictory musings. What we all think is coming is some form of tablet computer that will completely revolutionise the world somehow, just like all those other tablet computers did a few years back.

Of course, Apple have a distinct knack of taking something that already exists, sprinkling pixel dust on it and making us all want one and no doubt they’re about to do it again. For the record, my money is on what is essentially a beefed up iPhone with a bigger screen and processor. Same OS as the iPhone, same app-store, even the same apps (once recompiled to work on both bigger and smaller screens) – why on earth would they launch another computer platform when they already have two already?

So, taking that as the platform what...

Jay Reatard

R.I.P.

Vampire Weekend - Contra

As part of the ongoing series of ‘things’ we’ve done for Vampire Weekend that I’ve written about previously we’ve just put up the album to stream on their website (and in handily embedable form below).

Luckily for all concerned it’s really rather good – I would say that though so have a listen and make you mind up for yourself:

2009 Top 20

Happy New Year, then. I always thought 2010 sounded particularly futuristic, but I guess we all have to get used to it now and we still don’t have any damn flying cars. I thought I’d ring in the new year by doing the obligatory and traditional countdown of the last 12 months best music. In previous years its taken the obvious form of a ‘Best Albums’ list but this year is a bit different.

I started off compiling the best albums list as per normal but it quickly became obvious that 2009 was simply not an albums year. Sure, their were a few really good ones, and coming up with a list of 20 was pretty easy (and left a fair few by the wayside) but when it came to the top 5 it became really hard to pick something ahead of everything else. Lots of great albums, but certainly nothing perfect.

In contrast, there’s been a lot of practically perfect songs so that’s what I’m going to focus on instead: the top 20 tracks of the year. I think this may also reflect the general trends of the industry as well; while obviously the focus on single tracks has...

Clever Mini promotion litters streets with giant packaging

I like this a lot – super simple but very effective.

Antacid Tablet

[…] It will most likely be based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format. Best case (but also the least likely), it’ll be a slightly incompatible extension of the ePub standard. Worst case (and most likely), it’ll be an entirely new format. Either way, like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there’ll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually.

I do hope that the (if it happens) format Apple uses for ebooks and emagazines (yuck – can’t think of what else to call them though) is HTML based. It does beg the question though of what the difference between a emagazine and a website is though – why would anyone buy one? I’m interested to see what Apple’s answer to that one is…

Going Deaf

Last week – after several stolen weekends beavering away hunched over my laptop – I launched a site that’s one of the favourite ones I’ve worked on for a while; the new Steve Lamacq site ‘Going Deaf For A Living’:

goingdeafforaliving.com

Unlike in the US, oddly on this side of the pond we seem to be a little lacking in decent music blogs. Sure, there are a few but none that really elevate themselves above the pack and even fewer that focus on writing as opposed to the traditional “cool photo, paragraph of text, MP3 download link” style that seems to be prevalent.

Hopefully GDFAL can counter some of that, even in a small way – more opinions and less ‘just listen to it, yeah?’. Journalism. That kind of thing.

From a technical point of view there’s a couple of things I’d like to highlight. First up is the liberal usage of the lovely League Gothic, which is a great free alternative to Trade Gothic and can be used in all current browsers via the excellent @font-face kits that Font Squirrel provide.

While we’re on type, I also had a go at using the currently WebKit only -webkit-background-clip: text; CSS...

Hiring for a Web Developer

We are looking for a talented and enthusiastic designer/developer to join our in-house web development team, to design, code and build artist, label and promotional web sites.

Required skills:

• Strong Semantic HTML
• Strong CSS
• Great design skills

At work we’re hiring for a web developer / designer (front end stuff, basically). So, if you’re interested (or someone you know is) in working with artists like Radiohead, The Strokes, The National, Sonic Youth and many, many more drop me a line.

Music Hackday Boston

Hack-wise I was most impressed by Dan Kantor’s playdarTunes. An iTunes like web-interface that you populate by upload your iTunes library file and then play tracks through Playdar (as it’s all local content, in theory). It’s similar in principle to the Playlick player (James introduced me to Dan, in fact) and I can’t help but get excited about this idea of portable music collections. Where not only is the audio portable, but the library itself could come from different sources and is sharable. What I really want is a slick web-based iTunes which lets me select which of my libraries (or friends libraries) I want to browse and listen to.

That’s what I’d like as well – I guess it’s a similar sort of thing to what Spotify is doing, just more so. Could someone make it please? Ta…