David Emery Online

Save The Music Fan

The music market is down not due to P2P “piracy,” but for four simple reasons: a) stiff competition for the entertainment dollar with formats like video games and movies, both have much larger marketing spends; b) the replacement cycle is over-digital music does not scratch or wear out like past formats; c) one now has the ability to purchase and listen only to the great songs without filler; and d) mass-merchant retailers today carry only the current hits, with little to no catalog.

I often disagree with Terry McBride – he focuses far to much on self promotion for my liking – but I think he’s dead on here.

Via Faßcinated

Super Furry Animals

We’ve just launched the new site for the Super Furry Animals. It’s not a full blown, all singing-all-dancing affair with lots of sections – instead, it’s a very focused site to promote their forthcoming album which is available on March 16th. Every day there’s going to be a new bit of video shot by them on 4 cameras from their studio – they’ve shot over 4 hours of footage that we’re going to put up one episode a day over the next few weeks.

And of course, on the web-dev tip, try resizing your window (finally figured out how to maxmise the size of the video without cropping)…

Lightness

After the perennial January drought there seems to finally be some new music about that’s worth talking about. Pretty much the only things of note in said drought were the new Franz Ferdinand album which I would say was a massive disappointment had I been expecting something decent, and the Antony and the Johnsons album which is good but not as good as his previous.

I’ve talked about Dark Was The Night before but it is absolutely worth highlighting again in a little more depth. Dark Was The Night is a charity compilation (for the Red Hot AIDS charity) curated by the Dessner brothers from The National, and features a veritable who’s who of the North American indie scene including Bon Iver, Beirut, Arcade Fire, The National, Sufjan Stevens and many more.

If it was a single disk it would probably be the best compilation album ever released, as it is it’s still a must listen as I suspect that disk...

U2: New album preview – exclusively on Spotify

If you choose to listen to the U2 album exclusive listening party on Spotify, your email we will be shared with the Universal Music Group and U2’s management. UMG may then contact you to invite you to join the U2 Official Mailing List.

I don’t think this is a smart move on Spotify’s part. Sure, Universal will have made this mandatory for Spotify to get the exclusive but it now means that I don’t trust them with my details. It’s a very good way of pissing off your existing early-adopter user base.

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?

No:

Hi from Last.fm, I’m one of the founders (and the original founder of audioscrobbler, the music tracking plugin).

I’m not going to write much right now because i’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue.

As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a “tip” from one person and decided to make a story out of it. Techcrunch is full of shit, film at 11.

Don’t believe anything you read on TechCrunch.

Looks Like Facebook Just Took The Top Spot Among Social Media Sites

This past December we reported on how Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide… Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it.

Facebook being big is hardly news. No, what’s interesting about this is if you take a look at the graph you’ll see that Flickr is pretty much even-stevens with Geocities.

Yes: Geocities.

iPhonetastic

I’ve been looking to do something like this for ages now, which will come as no surprise to anyone that reads this blog, but after a couple of false starts and a whole bunch of waiting it’s finally done.

We’ve made an iPhone app:

Titus Andronicus: Loadin’ (iTunes Link)

It’s for the rather lovely band Titus Andronicus and the concept was all their idea – the conversation pretty much went like this:

Them: Oh yeah, one more thing – we’ve got this crazy idea: we seemingly spend half our time loading up our van after shows, wouldn’t it be cool to do a game about that, a bit like Tetris?

Me: That sounds pretty cool!

They were thinking of it as a extra bit of their website (which we also put together) but I had a hunch that it would work best as an iPhone app. I’m not really a big fan of flash games on bands websites as they always feel so disconnected – why would you come to a bands site to play games? They always reek of tick-box marketing of 5 years ago, when everything seemingly needed to be flashy and slick.

On an iPhone, however, pretty much the reverse is true....

The Wrong Kind of Breathtaking

This is just brilliant. The utter bollocks that traditionally comes hand in hand with professional design and art school is the reason why I originally decided not to go down that route (instead opting for this whole computer/internet malarky). I just can’t stand it.

The gravitational pull of Pepsi

I kind-of hope this is actually either a wind up or some misjudged marketing stunt.

CSS Animation

WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS.

Yet more nice improvements in WebKit, although I think they’re butting right up against the boundaries of what should be in CSS and what should be in javascript (not that there are elegant ways of doing this natively in javascript anyway).

What’s most impressive is that this is already supported on the iPhone, and the performance is exceptional – the leaves demo (which will only work in a recently nightly or on an iPhone) runs as smoothly on the iPhone as it does on my MacBook, but my MacBook uses 50% of its CPU while doing it…

Tips for a transformed twitter

I am wrong to lament what Twitter once was and should embrace it as a tool I can use. Nevertheless like everybody, I need to be careful how I use it. I do not believe Twitter users will allow the tool to be reduced to a broadcast mechanism for pimping the latest blog post or special offer.

Good to see I’m not the only person thinking along these lines.