David Emery Onlinefuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.
we tried calling our lawyer about the ticket scalping. “it’s legal”. no joke. it’s fucking legal. i tramped around with friends and band getting insane. i wanted to buy some expensive tickets and then track the seller down to beat him. i acted stupid. i did some classic, shakespearean vain “fist shaking”, etc. i made angry tweets. (i’m wondering now what on earth could be less effective and more of a first-world spoiled idiotic move than “angry tweets”? jesus.)
James Murphy Is Awesome (go read the whole thing, please).
Visit ➔The Strokes - Under Cover of Darkness
Turns out the new Strokes track is (surprisingly, for a band that’s been away for so long) really good. Takes about 3 listens to get into, though:
Mobile Music
As a general rule I try to avoid linking to work things on here; I’m well aware that simply by exposure I’m inherently biased, so I try and leave it to spread by itself. However, once in a while we do something that I’m really proud of that’s worth drawing attention to. This is one of those things:
The elevator pitch is simple: to listen to a stream of the new Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie xx record, you need to take your smartphone within range of a number of ‘transmitters’ dotted around the world. If you’re within 250 meters or so you get to hear the album; any further away and you can’t.
The concept comes out of two things that have been floating around in my head for a while: how to tie music into location in some way, and how to represent the value that an album stream has.
Location is obviously a fairly hot topic at the moment, thanks to the rise of smart phones with built in GPS. I’d originally been circling the idea of making people go to a specific location to get a free mp3 but what we ended up with is far more interesting...
Read more ➔Papa Sangre – who needs graphics anyway?
This game is an impressive technical achievement. It uses a binaural sound engine to place the player in a three-dimensional sound stage when using headphones. Binaural recordings are made by placing a pair of microphones in a position which corresponds to the position of our human ears and can be extremely effective
Love the concept of this iPhone app – it recreates a 3D world without using graphics, just using sound. It’s amazingly – almost freakishly – effective.
Visit ➔Giving it away.
Kayne West' cover for Vman magazine, comes with a dollar stuffed in Yeezy's mouth, wow.
Sometimes we joke at the end of an unsuccessful campaign that we might as well have just stapled £10 notes to the CD and it would have been just as profitable…
Visit ➔Spotify should give indies a fair deal on royalties
Last year, major labels Universal and Sony received more revenue from Spotify than any other Swedish music service or digital and physical record store, according to local newspaper reports.
The news came as a surprise to many independent labels and to Swedish songwriters, as their royalty statements tell a very different story. It appears that not only do the majors own shares in Spotify, they – and their artists – also get much better streaming rates than the indies. Some of the indies threatened in early December to withdraw their music from Spotify in response.
An interesting look into the ridiculously complex and convoluted world of music licensing and monetization; should give you a grasp on some of the reasons why new music services struggle to get legal (in short: it’s really complicated to do).
Also, from where I’m sitting all this talk about Spotify not making labels/artists money is rubbish – would any label be signed up if that were true?
Visit ➔MTA.me
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.
Lovely stuff, and a great example of what you can do these days without using Flash. I’d love a London Underground version as a screensaver…
Visit ➔It's better to have loved and lost...
It was inevitable, really.
The White Stripes are one of my all time favourite bands. For me, they embodied a perfect representation of what a band should be; uncomplicated, inventive, dynamic. The mystique they built up around them was perfect – the ‘are they brother and sister’ story, the red and white, the constraints they enforced upon themselves.
There’s a bit in the Under Great White Northern Lights film that came out last year where Jack talk about purposely keeping his keyboard a little bit out of reach when he’s singing into the mic; the physical stretch and the added difficulty adds an edge to the performance which otherwise wouldn’t be there. It’s the White Stripes through and through.
I think that’s why I feel far more sadness then I thought I would at the news that they’ve split up. The White Stripes have always been up there for me, but nothing Jack White has done outside it has really come close. Sure, there are elements – brief flashes of genius – within both The Raconteurs and the Dead Weather (to pick the most prominent of a long list of White side projects) that remind why you’ve made the effort to listen to...
Read more ➔Uni' Lever Downloads
Sony and Universal’s announcement last week that new music will be released to the public as soon as its played on the radio has really put the cat among the pigeons.
Have they thought this one through?
Very interesting article by Steve Lamacq about this whole “put singles on sale digitally at the same time as you go to radio” issue. Interestingly this is the way the US market has worked for a while now, although radio works quite differently over there.
My take: I think it would be great if we move to this model, as if you hear something on the radio it’s a little silly you can’t buy it but probably can download it for free; however, I’m not sure if it will necessarily get wholly embraced by the industry.
Visit ➔Soundcloud and How Major Labels are Spoiling Things…Again
Towards the end of December I started receiving emails telling me that Soundcloud had taken down certain tracks at the request of the rights holder. Ever since they started, the emails have been trickling through a few every week or so. Three days ago I had twenty-two in one go. All of these tracks have been deleted from my account.
Now, my beef is not so much with the legality and official policy of Soundcloud, rather it is with the principle and backward nature of the major labels attempting to regain control in somewhat tyrannical and damaging ways (to Soundcloud and their own artists).
This is a complicated issue (and I’m writing from the position of someone who has asked SoundCloud to take down tracks before). I think the ideal would be the setup mentioned at the end of the article; YouTube style attribution to the label if you upload a track you don’t hold the copyright on.
However this would be very complicated the was SoundCloud is set up at the moment, as – to my knowledge – they don’t have any revenue sharing deals with labels at this time, which is what the YouTube setup hinges on. I guess the key thing to remember is that – just like a download – a streaming track has a value. Sure, it might be a lot smaller then the 79p you pay for a track download but it still exists nevertheless – it’s just that the consumer doesn’t pay it, the hosting site or service (think: YouTube, Spotify, MySpace et al) does.
Don’t get me wrong – I think there’s definitely a promotional benefit for embeding songs but it needs to be coming from a source sanctioned by the label or artist; sometimes that might be a SoundCloud player, sometimes that might be a player direct from the artist or label site (which is what we do) and sometimes that might just be a YouTube embed.
Just like uploading any MP3 you like to your blog isn’t cool, neither is uploading someone else’s track to somewhere like SoundCloud.
Visit ➔