David Emery Online

New Jack White - Fly Farm Blues

As reported, this Tuesday was a busy release day for Jack White and his Third Man Records: the label put out singles by Dan Sartain (“Bohemian Groove”) and Transit (“C’mon And Ride”) — both produced by the Third Man main man — as well as the track that made the three-pack singles release day a press event in the first place, “Fly Farm Blues.” It’s Jack unaccompanied in fuzzbucket slide-guitar mode

Quite frankly, this is the best thing Jack has done in years, even if it does sound rather a lot like ‘Ball and a Biscuit’. Jack, could you stop dicking around with side projects and make a whole album that sounds like this? It’s why we liked you in the first place…

It’s on iTunes if you want to listen to it a bit more (interesting to note Stereogum’s use of YouTube as an audio player, while we’re on the topic of listening…).

thehorrors.co.uk

We’ve just launched the new site for The Horrors – we’d been quite happy with the way that the previous video-focused site had gone but it was (finally) time to get something with a bit more content up there.

All textpattern based, as ever, it runs with the ‘activity stream’ format so everything gets fed into the same feed on the home page, whether it’s blog posts, photos from the flickr group, polaroids posted by the band, videos or whatever else. Also watch out for the natural extension of the fading colour trick featured on version 5 of this site, but instead changing the whole background image…

Harry Patch (In Memory Of)

Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111.
I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4.
The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me.
It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death.
It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny.
I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor.

A stunning beautiful song, which falls in the Radiohead canon alongside album closers like ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and ‘Videotape’. Haunting but with an important message – go and buy it and see for yourself.

iLike launches iPhone apps for Jeff Buckley, The Cribs, Sonic Youth…

Back in May, music service iLike announced plans for a new B2B service that would create and launch iPhone applications for artists. More than 250 of them have gone live on the App Store in the last few days.

And they’re all rubbish. I really don’t see the point in such generic, assembly line production of mediocre apps – is anyone going to care? Wow, you can download an app to listen to 30s clips of an album (err, like you can in the iTunes app), see twitter updates from the band and see upcoming tour dates (insert ticket affiliate link here).

Doubly stupid considering the only way to get decent volume on the iTunes store is to get some promotion backing it up, either on the store/top 10 charts os somewhere else – how exactly are you going to promote an app when there are 249 near identical other versions?

I’m wondering whether it’s already too late to bother with music related iPhone app development – there’s just too much noise and rubbish to get lost in.

The Pope Signs To Geffen

Geffen Records, owned by Universal Music, is producing an album that will feature Pope Benedict’s voice accompanied by the Choir of the Philharmonic Academy of Rome. According to the company, he will sing and recite verses including prayers to the Virgin Mary.

I love the fact that Lada Gaga and the Pope can be on the same label; it’s obviously all about the music for those guys. I guess that when the A&R guys put ‘flowers’ on their expenses in this case they might actually mean it…

In defence of the 2012 logo, 2 years on

It’s just over 2 years since the London 2012 Olympic logo was launched to such derision. Being a prominent design blogger I wrote about it back then. I’ve just reread that post and I agree with everything I said. Which is reassuring.

Actually I think I agree even more. I like the logo even more.

I liked the logo when it was announced, and I still like the logo. It’s far better then this one, at the very least:

Hands-On with the Spotify iPhone App

We’ve been testing Spotify’s iPhone app since last week for this U.S. exclusive. Based on that, our prediction that it could generate big profits for Spotify — and for an ailing music industry — appears to be on the money. This slick app grants instant access to over six million on-demand tracks and your customized Spotify playlists, and it sounds great even on planes, subways, and other places where you can’t get a decent cell signal thanks to an offline playback feature.

Nothing unexpected here, but it looks like it works and works well, although the offline caching stuff looks a little over complicated. Also, I still don’t believe that they haven’t added a way of browsing the catalogue yet – you can still only search, and I can never think of the right thing to search for…

Update: There’s a video of it in action up now as well:

The Big Pink - Dominos

We’ve just put up the forthcoming single by the Big Pink up as a free download on their website – also below for your listening pleasure:

I think I’ve gone on about them enough, now.

Blur - T in the Park 2009 by Danny North

I heard the bands security telling all the togs he was going to run in to the crowd 2nd song, so I set the fisheye to manual focus, focused on infinity (everything in focus from 2.5 feet) and gauged an approximate exposure – which ended up being bang on…

Not only is this a great photo (although I’m not a massive fan of the fisheye look), but click through and have a read of the description of how he took it – inspiring stuff. Must work on that manual focus lark…

Photo by Danny North

A Ruby Retort [not a report] from 15 year old Chantelle...

On music:
I never buy CDs, I have a CD collection from when I was younger, but I can’t even remember the last time I bought a CD, it was from ages ago. I don’t use Spotify, I don’t know what it is at all, never heard of it. I use Limewire, to download all my music , though I have sometimes got music off of iTunes, though that’s just when I had the vouchers. I don’t do music streaming, what is it? It sounds interesting especially if it’s free, and it would be interesting… It has to go on my iPod though, if not then no! Actually I dunno, I’d probably use both… Actually no I wouldn’t use Spotify if it didn’t go on my iPod.

It’s going to be very interesting when Spotify gets its mobile app out the door (although I’m sure the kids will bulk at the monthly subscription it’ll need), as there’s a whole generation now that not only hasn’t really ever bought CDs, they’re not too interested in music ownership full stop.

40 Years

Web fonts — where are we?

With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.

A very useful writeup of the current state of using embedded fonts in web pages. The webfont proposal sounds interesting to me, although I don’t really see what it’s adding on a practical note as it looks straight forward enough to tamper with the metadata. On a pragmatic note though; if that’s what the foundries want we should give it to them, so hopefully we can start making some progress.

I wonder if they’ve considered watermarking as an alternate solution – I imagine that with the kind of data that makes up a OpenType font file it would be fairly easy to embed enough information – without visibly altering the font – to make tracing who has a licence for that particular file (and what sites it’s licensed for) simple. Most of the benefits of .webfont, without having to implement a new format.

Also, it’s interesting they mention that EOT is as good as dead, while simultaneously hyping up TypeKit – I’m fairly sure that they feed IE EOT versions of their fonts…

Finally, A New Face For Topspin

(From the comments): “Are we supposed to believe that a sales widget with data capture is somehow ground-breaking? Granted, this is a great tool for indie musicians, but what TopSpin doesn’t talk much about is the high distribution fee they take when they don’t handle any physical fulfillment like Music Today et al, and there are plenty of other great solutions out there to sell your music digitally and direct market to fans. The data they capture isn’t leaps and bounds beyond what other great e-commerce innovators are doing, and as anyone who has dealt with widgets before knows, there is no viral magic that happens unless the act is great and is doing a decidedly low-tech activity of personally being in front of their fans performing their art. The problem I have with TopSpin supporters is that they’re heralding this company as the future when it’s really just following best practices other industries are familiar with. Until the music business catches up with others in its knowledge of how to leverage technology, companies like this can come in and sell a bill of goods to a lot of people.”

Quoted for truth. Nice response by Ian from Topspin further down as well.

Rock Band to Get its Own Music Marketplace

Rock Band Network, currently in closed beta, should launch to the public in August (with in-game sales later in the year), and allow for any wanne-be or tried-and-true beat master, music mixer, or soulful singer to add their music to the Rock Band catalogue for user purchase and game play.

It’s easy to forget, but the Rock Band and Guitar Hero track stores do a staggering amount of business so it’s great that they’re opening up. Also very useful, considering they may become chart eligible soon.

Location Now Built-In To Google Maps — In Chrome And Firefox

If you are using either Google Chrome 2.0+ or Mozilla FireFox 3.5+, you’ll now notice a little dot in the upper left-hand corner of Maps, just above the Street View guy. If you click that dot, Google Maps will show you your location on the map. It does this using the W3C Geolocation API standard

Very nifty – it works exactly like the location finder on the iPhone Google Maps app, and seemed to find me pretty accurately. Here’s hoping that it gets adopted in Safari fairly sharpish…

Prowl

Prowl is a Growl client for the iPhone. Notifications from your Mac can be sent to your iPhone over push, with a full range of customization and grace you expect.

This is pretty darn cool – an easy solution for twitter direct message notifications on your phone (if your client supports it) amongst many, many other things. It also has a perl script for passing it direct notifications without using Growl, which means you can do server side notifications to your phone which is superawesome. Very tempted to whip up a Textpattern plugin to do comment notifications…

From Moby

How’s it going?
The album just came out and it would be #1 euro charts if not for michael jackson re-releases.
So that’s good.
But here’s something funny: the best selling itunes track is ’shot in the back of the head’.
Why is that funny?
Because its the track we’ve been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we’re still givng away for free.
Odd.
How are you?
Moby

We’ve had many similar experiences – giving away a track can lead to higher sales; for example, at exactly the same time we were giving away The Horrors ‘Sea Within A Sea’ from their website we were seeing great sales of the track on iTunes (and it’s still the second most popular track from the album on there, even though we’re still giving it away).

Nearest Tube Augmented Reality App for iPhone 3GS

It looks a bit shaky, but as a working proof of concept it’s startling – we are living in the future (how exciting!):

Social Media Icons

A set of standardised icons for popular social networking services and tools.

Having had to make a couple of these only a week ago this is very timely – lovely work and very useful…

Modernizr

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.

How handy – I’m using assorted CSS3 features all over the place these days so this goes straight into the toolkit. Although, I’m not too keen on the HTML5 enabler functionality – it’s not really good enough to require JS to be able to style certain tags, is it?