David Emery OnlineNext to Last.fm
I’d love an interface for Last.fm that works for tracks I just ‘hear’ (not play) – using Twitter sounds like a good way of making it work.
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Radiohead Remix
I can finally reveal what I’ve been working on for the last few weeks (and no, it’s not an April fools):
It has obviously been a huge privilege to get to work on something for Radiohead, and I’m really happy with the way the site has turned out. From a technical perspective there isn’t really anything too clever going on; it uses sIFR all over the place for text, which wasn’t quite as hard as it normally is to get running.
The code to power the remixes is all custom PHP (luckily not written by me, but adapted from another project) so there isn’t anything I can point you towards on that front – hopefully it will hold up ok with the battering it will probably get today! I couldn’t see many opportunities for Microformats – I guess it could have used some hCards for remix authors and maybe hAtom for the remixes but they seemed slightly superfluous considering we only publish peoples names and no other contact details. It does, however, have an RSS feed so you can keep track of new mixes as they get uploaded.
Obviously you should all go out and have a go...
Read more ➔Teenage Skin
I assume that most of you are familiar with the Channel 4 program ‘Skins’; it’s a slightly edgy portrayal of modern teenage life based in Bristol and features copious amounts of sex, drug use and debauchery. It’s highly stylised and you can’t help but assume that it’s widely inaccurate – being a teenager was nothing like that when I was one (which wasn’t that long ago) so it can’t have changed that much.
It has.
On Friday I attended a ‘prom’ for The Teenagers and it was like walking into an episode of Skins. The kids were crazy and all of them had dressed up to the ’80s prom’ theme; they were smoking in the halls, they were sneaking in booze and they were generally going nuts. It was actually pretty scary – the amount of energy they had was just amazing, and not exactly helped by the free Red Bull that was being given out…
Now without wanting to sound old it really wasn’t like that ‘in my day’ (sigh) and I can’t help but wonder if the internet – and social networks in particular – are to blame for this shift in teenager behaviour. Sure, we used to go out...
Read more ➔Interscope Joins $25M Buzznet Investment Round
This is quite interesting, especially when you consider that Buzznet bought Stereogum recently.
Visit ➔Rockstar and Amazon bring digital music distribution to GTA4
I think video games are becoming an ever more relevant resource for promoting and selling music, although this system sounds a little clumsy. What we be much more interesting would be if you could buy direct in-game and have the track downloaded to your PC automatically. That would probably be a little tricky with Amazon, but Apple handle a pretty similar thing with the iTunes store on the iPhone…
Also, instead of getting an email with a playlist in it would be much better to have Last.fm scrobbling support in game – that would be a very welcome development.
Visit ➔Why do people buy records?
Well worth a read, especially the points highlighting the self fulfilling prophecy that is the ‘record sales are going down’ meme. However, like many people I’ve seen write about ‘collecting’ music and the rise of vinyl Patrick does miss out on a new trend I’m seeing in younger music fans: they still collect music, but they collect digital music.
They’ve grown up with music being something you play via an iPod, but that doesn’t mean the collecting bug has gone away; they’re just trying to complete their iTunes library, not their record shelf.
Visit ➔Mail.appetizer
It’s finally available for Leopard – hooray! For those that don’t know it provides a little popup notification window when you get mail in Mail.app and is utterly indispensable (along with MailTags).
Visit ➔Me me me
Time for a quick ‘me’ update – I know how you all like to keep track with what I’m doing…
Most excitingly, I’m going to be talking on a panel at this years Great Escape Festival in May. Held in sunny Brighton and featuring all sorts of bands like Vampire Weekend, Friendly Fires, The Futureheads and many more it should be good fun. I’m going to be rambling on about MP3 blogs and promo MP3s, which should be quite interesting – if any of you reading come along to the conference bit stop by and say hello.
In quite-small-but-just-about-worth-mentioning other news if any of you UK readers bought the new Raconteurs album from the Raconteurs web site you’ll have seen a bit of my work as I designed the thing. Luckily I didn’t have to build it (some lovely people based in Reading did a wonderful job of making it work) but it was still all a bit of a tight squeeze getting it all together in time.
On the photography front it’s gone a little quiet, mostly due to my utter rubbish-ness at going to gigs of late which makes it a little difficult to take photos at them....
Read more ➔Muxtape. The Simplest Mixtape Service Yet.
It’s obviously going to get shut down at some point fairly soon, but until then Muxtape is a beautiful piece of work. All it does is let you share a ‘mixtape’, or collection of MP3s you’ve uploaded, but it does it perfectly. A very good example of ‘less is more’.
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