David Emery OnlineWhen the fall is all that’s left
I couldn’t agree more; Mozilla’s attitude stinks, and has for a long time.
Visit ➔Albert Hammond Jr
Lovely little site we’ve just launched for Albert Hammond Jr – it’s just a mailing list signup for the time being but we thought we’d spice that up by letting you upload a photo at the same time, which we using million dollar homepage style to make the background of the site.
Visit ➔The Slip
Today Nine Inch Nails have taken the next obvious step and released their next album ‘proper’ (as Ghosts I-IV wasn’t really a proper NIN album) for free:
Is this clever or is this defeatist?
The previous experiments (worth noting) all contained some element of commerce about them; Radiohead with the pay-what-you-want and NIN with the ‘get 1/4 free, but pay for the rest’ model with Ghosts (Raconteurs I think just miss this list as their release was a manipulation of the traditional retail model, not something completely different). With The Slip however, Nine Inch Nails have given no option for people to compensate them or reward them for producing this music.
Not even a PayPal donate button.
What kind of statement does that put out? ‘We don’t think this music is worth paying for’? ‘We don’t think music is worth paying for’? Or is it just a practical recognition that their audience would probably go and download it anyway, and they will hopefully generate enough promotional value from it to drive sales of the forthcoming traditional release?
Is the statement ‘We think this music is only worth promotional value to us’?
I think it will be quite interesting to see what kind of...
Read more ➔Monotone Wordpress Theme
I really like the idea of automatically sampling colours from an uploaded photo to theme a web page. Obviously the hat tip has to go to Mezzoblue, but making it automatic opens up some interesting possibilities.
Visit ➔Adobe’s Open Screen Project: Write Once, Flash Everywhere
Well, at least Silverlight has been useful for something – Adobe has opened up the Flash specification, paving the way for much greater Flash support almost everywhere. What I’d really like to see is for Apple to write their own Flash plugin – much like they have with PDF – that isn’t quite so rubbish (and runs on iPhones as well).
Visit ➔Singles
The headline seen across the web yesterday:
Coldplay single downloaded by 600,000 people
Obviously the concept of giving away music for free is hardly a new one – Radiohead blah blah blah… – but I think this is an interesting spin on it. The role of the traditional single is to basically act as a loss leader for the album, getting the band played on the radio and generating publicity.
Giving it away for free in this manner seems to achieve pretty similar goals, without having to mess around with all that tiresome selling.
600,000 is a pretty big figure, and if you managed to sell that many you’d be laughing (although not necessarily in profit) – it’s a pretty huge promotion for the forthcoming album (as good on online promotion as you’d ever hope for, really). It also comes at a point when the physical single is all but dying out; digital download sales are where it’s at and CD singles are becoming an ever rarer sight on the shelves – it’s pretty hard to sell something if it’s not in the shops.
The net result of this is that – other then maybe the top twenty – the singles chart is...
Read more ➔Record Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG
Universal is really investing in the music orientated social network space, which makes a lot of sense – they must spend a very significant amount of money on both advertising on social networks and effort in trying to get good promotional placement on them. It’s pretty unnerving though – you don’t want the market leader (with about 33% total market share) controlling – what is essentially – the presses.
Visit ➔Last.Fm personal wallpaper generator
Generates a desktop picture collage of albums you’ve listened to on Last.fm. Read: totally awesome.
Visit ➔An Ephemeral Site: Denna Jones
Lovely work (both the site design and its content), and it’s interesting to see another site that uses CakePHP and SimplePie to pull in content from outside sources (which is what we do on xlrecordings.com).
Visit ➔