David Emery OnlineLily Allen Shows Off Newish Song, EMI Shows Off Newish YouTube Strategy
Usually when a new track makes its way to the Web, YouTube fills up with unauthorized rips of the track, featuring visuals that are promo pics (sometimes stitched together with your Windows Media Maker wipes, often static) and maybe the lyrics on the side. They’re also embeddable, so people (cough cough) can stick them on their blogs, or what-have-you. Parlophone decided to beat the YouTubers at their own game, though, creating an embeddable video that not only streams the song, it gives details on how to preorder the album.
You know what, this actually is a pretty good idea. I’ve been championing for a while the idea of having an easily embedable song player – I’m looking at you, Last.fm and Hype Machine – and this is a pretty good pass at it using the already existing YouTube architecture. Would be nice if the audio was nicer quality though.
What makes this doubly interesting is that EMI are almost certainly a YouTube partner, so will be receiving ad revenue from these YouTube plays…
Visit ➔Last.fm Best Of 2008
Really nicely done – love the design, especially the font choices and the little graphs (some of which are powered by the Google Chart API, which I always forget about). However, the content isn’t exactly interesting – the singles chart particularly; I guess that what’s popular in this context isn’t actually a metric that contains much insight.
Visit ➔Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage: Textpattern 4.0.7!
We are happy to announce that Textpattern 4.0.7 is finally ready for public consumption.
During long and – sometimes – laborious months since the last release in February, we added new features and enhanced existing capabilities, but nevertheless we expect upgrades from any previous version to be seamless and smooth.
Lots of good new features here, especially the tag related ones which make Textpattern even more flexible – well worth an upgrade.
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Making Iron Man
Beautiful set of behind the scenes photos from the set of Iron Man, taken by Jeff Bridges (who played the villain in said film).
Visit ➔My Game Face
Brilliant photography series of children concentrating whilst playing computer games. Interestingly enough, they’re actually stills from video captured via a RED ONE camera – the line between video and photography is getting ever more blurred…
Visit ➔Idlewild's next album
Idlewild are pleased to announce plans for our forthcoming new studio album with an opportunity for our fans to be involved from an early stage.
This exact idea – pre-order the album direct from the artist, then get it well upfront of the traditional release – has been banded around for a while now, so it’s interesting to see someone make a proper go of it.
The whole industry is watching with interest, no doubt.
Visit ➔Leona was robbed
LEONA LEWIS has been robbed of a No1 single by a blunder which has left the singer’s team and fans furious.
The superstar was due to release her version of Run for download this week after she performed it on her return to The X Factor on Saturday.
But due to a bungle at Sony, the song has not been available online and this week’s planned internet release has been shelved.
A nice story – I think we can all enjoy the idea of Sony screwing up such a thing – but sadly from what I hear, untrue. Sony have purposefully kept the song off digital retailers to push people to the new deluxe edition of her album instead. And it looks like this sacrifice of single sales is going to work as well – the album is set to to be #1 this week.
It’s bad enough to block consumer choice and up-sell a whole album to people who probably have it already, but to then try and claim that it’s a screw up is quite deliciously evil.
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