David Emery OnlineJack White at the Forum
More photos on Flickr here.
Alabama Shakes at the Boston Arms
More photos on Flickr.
Music apps – beyond the hype
‘Music apps – beyond the hype’ takes an in-depth look at the business realities of producing, marketing and monetising music related apps. The event features an overview of the music apps market, practical advice on how best to market your apps, instructive lessons from a variety of artist apps case studies, and a variety of speakers from across the music apps value chain.
I’ll be talking about the Adele mobile app at this tonight – hopefully should be a pretty interesting event.
Visit ➔Grimes at White Heat
More photos here on Flickr, and if you haven’t heard of Grimes listen to/download ‘Genesis’ below, as she’s awesome:
Jack White - Love Interruption
"Love Interruption" is the first taste of Jack White's debut album, Blunderbuss, out April 23 on Third Man Records/XL Recordings.
Firstly: new Jack White solo record! I am a massive White Stripes fan, so this is a Very Good Thing. Also, we made a widget for it that spins at 45rpm:
I’m not sure if I’ve really mentioned the widgets we’ve developed and have been using since last August – they’re quite nifty, if I do say so myself. They’re HTML5-based and work on iPhones, iPads and other mobile devices; they get detected by the lovely HypeMachine so they show up when bloggers post about them; they’re completely fluid (using both media queries and a dab of JS) so they should work at any size; and lastly you can use them as little iOS web apps (if you have a data connection) – try saving this page to your home screen for example.
Visit ➔Willis Earl Beal - Evening's Kiss
Taken from the album Acousmatic Sorcery out in 2012 on Hot Charity/XL Recordings.
I love this really quite a lot. Reminds me in a strange way of early White Stripes; obviously not in terms of the music, but in terms of atmosphere.
Visit ➔2011
So, I think we can all agree that 2011 was quite the year, right?
A lot, err, happened.
From a personal perspective it was pretty good. Being part of the whole Adele thing was undeniably fun (if not a little bit surreal at several points), as was working another Radiohead record (although the record itself was really only a component in a larger whole). It’s fair to say work dominated 2011 for me, which is both good and bad. More non-work things in 2012 would be sensible, although I think I think that every year.
It seemed as though 2011 in general was less good for albums, and much better for single tracks. There was no great album of 2012, in my opinion. A good year for music, then, but not a great year for the long player format. I don’t think that’s any result of a grand “the world is changing” shift away from albums, more just that by pure coincidence and bad luck no one happened to make a collection of tracks that was “right” this year.
So, to that end rather then do a best albums of 2011 list that probably shouldn’t have a #1, I’ve compiled a list of my...
Read more ➔How does a Pitchfork review affect an album's popularity?
Pitchfork is a popular-as-hell indie music blog. It's got a hipster-snobby reputation and the reviews are best summarised as "When Adjectives Attack," but their recommendations tend to be on the money and I've found a lot of good music thanks to their Best New Music category.
Pitchfork's also got a reputation of being a real tastemaker, anointing new albums & artists to the big leagues. But is this backed up by the data? I decided to find out.
In short: they don’t (although you need more data for a less flippant conclusion). Also: yay for graphs!
Visit ➔Defending Facebook
This is cross posted from the Music Ally blog, which has a new strand focused on industry opinions and analysis. It’s also a response to this post, also on the Music Ally blog by Darren Hemmings, so you might want to read that first for a slightly different take.
I feel like something of an rebel at this point as – unlike seemingly the rest of the tech community – I quite like Facebook. They’re a developer powerhouse, and with their recent acquisitions becoming increasingly a design powerhouse as well (the new timeline is a lovely piece of work, for example). They don’t always get things right, but they try lots of things and that’s far more interesting then being cautious – just look at the amount of development and change of Facebook in the last couple of years versus Twitter, for example.
The new ticker, and associated “Frictionless” sharing is a great example of them taking a chance on a concept, and to me it makes a lot of sense but could do with a bit of refining. The idea of sharing more things to Facebook opens up all sorts of possibilities (and not just for advertisers)...
Read more ➔The Wired.co.uk Podcast 52
We'll cover the week in Wired news as normal, including stories about the first lab-grown hamburgers, airmiles for cyclists, batteries that charge in 15 minutes, wine bottles made from paper and Mongolia's plan to cool itself with giant blocks of ice.
And we'll also look back at the last year of trends we've covered on the show. Nate, Duncan, Katie and Liv each pick their favourite topic and we bring a whole host of special expert guests onto the show to discuss how those trends will evolve over the next year.
At about 31mins in you can hear me talk a little bit about music apps (and it turns out I don’t at all sound like I think I do).
Visit ➔