David Emery OnlinePhil Spector convicted of murder
US music producer Phil Spector has been convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson, after a five-month retrial. The 68-year-old, famous for the “Wall of Sound” recording technique, faces between 18 years and life in prison.
So does that mean we have to expunge his existence from musical history, Glitter-style? Or is murder, you know, not as bad?
Visit ➔iTunes Price Changes Hurt Some Rankings
Two days after the Apple iTunes Music Store raised prices on some individual tracks, there was evidence the increases have hurt the sales rankings of songs given the higher $1.29 price.
While it is difficult to say with certainty whether a price increase had resulted in less revenue, rough estimates reveal slight, negative changes in chart position would result in a positive change in revenue. The changes in chart position between Tuesday and Thursday, however, clearly show that higher prices had forced many songs to cede chart position to lower-priced songs.
It’s no real surprise to me that for chart ‘hits’ a higher price leads to lower sales – a chart-based purchase is more likely to be an impulse purchase, so it follows that that impulse is more likely to be quashed by a higher purchase price (especially when placed next to lots of other cheaper chart tracks).
Visit ➔UMG and YouTube officially announce Vevo
The rumours were right. Universal Music Group and Google have announced their joint venture, Vevo – a video site offering UMG’s music videos, with advertising revenues shared between the two.
Isn’t this just the same as what should be at universalmusic.com/videos? Such a pointless piece of band-engineering and marketing rubbish.
Also, while you’ve got a moment check out umusic.com (which is the groups site, as opposed to just music – or something…) – it’s stunningly awful.
Visit ➔Combining Cufon and @font-face
Everyone wants @font-face to work everywhere, but as it stands, it only works in Safari and the upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera. In this article I’ll show you how to use Cufón only if we can’t load the font through other, faster methods.
This looks like a very good solution, and could probably be adapted to work with sIFR as well if you so wished.
Visit ➔Now That's What I Call Unrecouped
Common wisdom has it that the artists who get record deals then go straight to the bargain bins are by definition not very good. But this is myopic. Quite often they aren’t very good, it’s true, but some of them are there due to bad timing, bad luck, wrong single choice or simply that Jo Whiley’s producer decided they didn’t like the record.
Brilliant stuff. There are quite a few bands that I’ve worked with over the years that I’d add to this list, but I’m not going to name names as I think for some it might be a bit soon (the wounds are still fresh…).
Visit ➔Posterous
Posterous – The place to post everything. Just email us. Dead simple blog by email.
I’d checked out Posterous a while back but forgotten about it for being maybe a bit to simple (I forget exactly why, to be honest) but they seem to be rocking a pretty good service at the moment. You just email them at post@posterous.com and they take care of the rest – setting up a blog, hosting the images/audio/video attachments you send, the works basically.
The key for me is that they also let that data be sucked out again as well, either via RSS or direct via the MetaWebLog API which means they’re a perfect (free) backend service to power post-via-email onto pretty much any site. Incredibly handy if – like me – you look after 50+ Textpattern sites that need to be maintained by a bunch of people that can’t necessarily be inclined to deal with logging into a CMS on a regular basis.
Visit ➔No Rock And Roll Fun: 25,000
Music. It’s bloody brilliant, isn’t it?
No Rock And Roll Fun is one of my favourite music blogs, and one of the few UK based ones at that. Well worth reading if you’re not already.
Visit ➔Girls - Lust For Life
One of the best things I've heard come out of SXSW - more please! Via abeano.com
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