David Emery OnlineArtists, Bands and Musicians on Twitter
As a timely companion to my last post, here’s a Google Spreadsheet full of all the bands and labels that are on Twitter.
Visit ➔Twitter Music
I’d like to start today by relaying a snippet of a conversation on twitter:
richtlobf: So: FatCatRecords have signed up today What other indies do we need on here? 4AD, Bella Union, Jagjag and Secretly Canadian would be sweet
me: @richtlobf I’m not sure labels should really be on twitter – isn’t it better that artists are, as opposed to companies with product to sell?
Twitter has seen a massive surge in the last few months – particularly in the UK thanks to @stephenfry no doubt. I’ve seen my followers surge to 334, which is faintly ridiculous – more people follow me on twitter then subscribe to the RSS feed for this site (about 200-ish, for anyone who’s curious).
It’s not just me that’s seen a noticeable uptake. We set up – after many conversations along the lines of “trust us, it’s the next big thing” – a twitter account for Jack Peñate 2 years ago. It worked for a time – we were really using it to enable him to txt to his site, which worked great – but as with all these things if you’re not using these things for yourself, but being coerced to by someone...
Read more ➔Despite iTunes Accord, Music Labels Still Fret
…Disagreements over the timing of the changes also resulted in a particularly tense conversation on Christmas Eve between Steven P. Jobs, the chairman and chief executive of Apple, and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz, the chairman of Sony Music.
A spokesman for Apple declined to comment, as did a representative for Sony Music. But chatter about Mr. Jobs’s combative tone on the call ricocheted around the music industry, and it was regarded as another display of his tough bargaining tactics, made possible by Apple’s position as the dominant seller of music.
When Steve Jobs finally leaves Apple – whether it’s soon or not for a while – I don’t see their being major changes in the kind of products they make or the way they do business. What they will lose, however, is Steve Jobs the negotiator. And from what I’ve heard from people that have dealt with him that will be quite some loss.
Visit ➔Sky Larkin on Dopplr
God darn it, why didn’t I think of putting a band on Dopplr? Considering we already generate iCals for most of our bands this should be a doddle…
Visit ➔Web Design+
Welcome to Web Design+. This is, in no particular order, an amalgamation of web-standards solutions for common web development issues and problems — a way to tackle development in the cleanest, most accessible and semantic way possible. By using Web Design+, the aim is to standardise practices throughout an organisation; from accessibility to hacks, Web Design+ covers the best ways to tackle a variety of dev problems.
A great idea in theory, and not massively different from a internal document I wrote a while back, but you’ve got to laugh at something like this that has a section on semantics almost directly followed by a bit on generic classes like ‘clear’, ‘left’, ‘right’ and so on being extremely handy…
Visit ➔Record labels pressure Spotify to restrict service
In a blog post yesterday the startup outlined how it will be removing a number of songs from its catalogue and adding country restrictions to some tracks, which may make them unplayable for many users. The changes are being made because record labels have slapped restrictions on Spotify’s service. It’s a bizarre situation to think of in 2009 but it means that a user could share a track with a friend in another country, but that friend wouldn’t be able to play the track.
It irks me somewhat that people don’t seem to grasp how complicated territory rights are for music. Basically, most releases are dealt with by different labels in different territories, so there’s no way to simply use a track or release worldwide – you have to get agreements with all the appropriate labels involved.
It would be great – and solve so many headaches – if most recorded music was licensed for distribution globally, but it’s just not the case.
Visit ➔2009 NME Awards Shortlist
And while it’s nice to see a ‘best website’ award, isn’t the shortlist an indication of the weakness of the category? Bebo versus Facebook? If you’re going to throw it open to such wide consideration, shouldn’t Google at least be in the line-up?
The lack of a best DJ (as in radio) award seems to be a bit of an oversight, as well: who cares if NME readers like the Mighty Boosh; isn’t the person who slips them fresh music into their ears more, you know, significant?
The best website category is pretty laughable – seriously, who cares which is better out of sites like Facebook and MySpace? Of course, it’s not ‘Best Band Website’ as their are hardly any good ones but that’s a post for another day…
Visit ➔Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 RC1
Microsoft today announced the first (and probably only) release candidate of Internet Explorer 8. In terms of its look and feel, IE8 feels a lot like IE7, though Microsoft has made a lot of changes under the hood. IE8 features a new rendering engine, support for CSS 2.1, and a ‘smart address bar’ that is very similar to Firefox’s ‘awesome bar.’ IE8 has also taken a page from Chrome’s playbook and now opens a separate process for every tab.
Anyone else slightly fed up with all the browsers we have to test in now? We’re pretty much now in the lovely situation of having three versions of IE to test in, each rendering differently to each other and each not rendering in the same way either Firefox or Safari do.
The new version of this site isn’t tested in any form of IE yet, by the way – I guess I’ll test in 7 at some point but there’s no way I’m testing in 6 for anything of mine every again… sadly on the public sites I maintain IE6 is still hovering around 10% which is still a little high to abandon quite yet (although well low enough to feed a more lo-fi experience).
Visit ➔Version 12
So, the years change, the weather gets colder; time moves on. That means it’s inevitably time for a redesign, no?
Welcome, then, to version 12 of de-online.co.uk!
As you may have noticed by now I’ve gone for a dark background this time round, which I’ve never done round these parts before; I thought it was high time for a bit of a change. I’ve also gone for a bit more of a ‘designed’ look – most previous version have stuck to various combinations of nicely styled boxes but this time I wanted to add a bit of texture (from here) and some slight embellishments (like the ‘curl’ on the end of link-post headers).
With the last version I was always a bit disappointed with the way the type ended up, as it turns out less people had Avenir then I thought so most ended up with italic Helvetica, so this time I’ve liberally used sIFR to make sure everyone sees Trade Gothic where they should be seeing Trade Gothic. What would be good (as maybe a future addition to sIFR) is to be able to detect whether someone has a font already installed, and hence only use sIFR if we really...
Read more ➔