David Emery OnlineThe labels that turned the tables
Once upon a time, the major labels were king. They swept up sales in their velvety cloaks, showered money from the heavens, and defined the way you and I bought music. Now they’re shedding staff, dropping bands and losing their star names. Now the drivers of the record industry are small, maverick labels that define trends and launch careers. Some of them even sell records by the lorryload. And this autumn sees a spate of anniversaries in which these powerhouses of British music are celebrating their achievements.
Nice article on our little corner of the industry…
Visit ➔EA Announces SimCity and The Sims 3 for the iPhone
EA has announced that nine new titles are currently in development for the iPhone: Yahtzee Adventures, EA Mini Golf, Lemonade Tycoon, Mahjong, Monopoly: Here & Now The World Edition, SimCity, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 09, Need for Speed Undercover, and The Sims 3.
I am very excited by the prospect of SimCity for the iPhone – if they get it right it could be the perfect iPhone app.
Visit ➔First Look at Cappuccino and Objective-J
The executive summary is that Cappuccino is re-implementation of many of the basic parts of Cocoa, and Objective-J is a language which looks nearly identical to Objective-C and “compiles down” into JavaScript. You can also use JavaScript right inline with Objective-J, similar to how you can use C in Objective-C.
This looks very impressive, and can certainly make interesting looking apps but I’m really not comfortable working so abstracted away from the real code. Coding javascript, html and css well in a cross-browser way is hard and I’m not convinced that 280 North will have solved every problem and bug inherent in the medium.
What do you if your code is right but it doesn’t work? You’re so far away from the actual code you’ve got no chance.
I’m also still not convinced by web sites pretending to be desktop applications – they’re not, and the most successful ones (like Flickr and Gmail) don’t pretend to be.
Visit ➔So, how has the 'no iTunes' policy worked, then?
Inspired by Kid Rock’s success, his label decided – bemusingly – to pull Estelle’s six month old album from Apple, too.
How did that work out, then?
Estelle’s single plunged 26 places on the Billboard chart.
But the album – did that benefit?
Not really – that tanked over 100 places down the album chart.
Another smart move by the music industry, then. Well done, guys.
Well done indeed. I thought we were past this kind of rubbish?
Visit ➔O2 UK sets pay-as-you-go iPhone 3G prices, launch info
The official pricing for the unsubsidized phones is now much higher than for the devices on contract and will require £350 ($631) for an 8GB iPhone 3G and £400 ($721) for the 16GB version.
They’re going to sell shed-loads of these over Christmas at this price – for comparison the 8GB Nokia N95 currently sells for £449.95 on O2 Pay-As-You-Go.
Very impressive that you get a year’s free data as well…
Visit ➔Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project
Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
I don’t see anything here that excites me in any way – I have no faith that Google can design a better application UI then Apple can (in Safari), and I don’t see what new features this brings to the table. Also, I hope no one with a Mac gets too interested in this – Google have yet to ship a Mac app with a decent interface.
However, anything that broadens the usage of WebKit has got to be a good thing – I dream for the day when most people are using it…
Visit ➔Interfacing With Habari
This looks so much better then pretty much any other blog engine interface I’ve seen – I still need to be convinced that it’ll have both the simplicity and flexibility Textpattern allows though.
Visit ➔Tastes Like Selling Out? Mountain Dew Launches Singles-Only Label
We’re going to see big brand after big brand trying their hand at music over the next few years I think, until people realise that putting out singles doesn’t sell more soda.
That’s the problem here, of course – not the potential conflict between music and ‘selling out’ which has never been a real issue (they’ve never had a problem getting musicians to pimp Pepsi, have they?).
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Like your hair is on fire
In the US, the next two weeks are traditionally the slowest of the year. Plenty of vacations, half-day Fridays, casual Mondays, martini Tuesdays… you get the idea.
What if you and your team went against type? What if you spend the two weeks while your competition (and the forces for the status quo) are snoozing—and turn it into a completed project?
Or, how about you don’t do that and take some time off, which is far more important then yet another project and exactly what I’m doing right now.
Visit ➔Legal P2P Music Service Doomed to Fail
The number one rule for BitTorrent users is: Share. If you don’t share – upload files to others – your download speeds will reduce dramatically. This means that it could take hours instead of minutes to download an album from your favorite BitTorrent site. What Playlouder will offer is a highly degraded version of BitTorrent, and subscribers will not be able to get the great download speeds they are so accustomed to.
I wondered the exact same thing when I first heard of Playlouder’s plans. They offer a ‘legal p2p’ model, where for a flat fee to your ISP you get to download as much music of p2p sites as you can, legally. The catch is it won’t actually work – the p2p traffic is restricted to within their closed network, so for any sharing to work the original uploader must be on the closed network as well, which is extremely unlikely.
Legal p2p actually manages to be no p2p, in this case – a fairly novel way of removing the illegal downloading problem…
Visit ➔Designer Peter Saville: 'The Album Cover Is Dead'
Peter Saville, who was responsible for the cover art on albums by New Order and Roxy Music, has declared the artistic medium dead.
Saville blamed technological advances, such as iPods, for the decline in popularity of cover art.
I noticed the other day that with the way I have iTunes configured – using coverflow view – I actually get album artwork larger then a CD, so I hardly think the medium is dying. Also, I think the possibilities of things like individual artwork for each track and websites-as-album-booklets (like minotaurshock.com) mean there’s scope for a lot more innovation now in this medium.
Visit ➔Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Really interesting stuff – I particularly like the object removal demo (fast forward to 5:58 to see it):
Visit ➔Changes for Some SMS Users - Good and Bad News
Let’s start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.
Twitter needs a business model, stat.
In fact, I’m surprised they didn’t take this opportunity to roll out a similar ‘pro’ scheme to Flickr, where you can get SMS updates and maybe no API rate limits for $29.99/year. I think for twitter it could really work, especially considering that – due to the high API usage amongst the userbase – traditional banner/adwords based advertising models may well not work that well. It still mystifies me that they haven’t tried that yet though – surely it wouldn’t hurt?
Visit ➔Minotaur Shock - Amateur Dramatics
We’ve just launched a new site for Minotaur Shock which has a bit of a different twist – he’s rated and priced each track differently, based on criteria like ‘Musical Difficulty’ and ‘Computer Crash rating’:
The record company that releases my music, whilst steeped in history and home to a lot of my favourite records, spunks a lot of money on lavish felt-lined gilded box-sets made by nimble-fingered faerie folk who live in the woods. This means that artistes such as Minotaur Shock who will only ever sell a limited amount of records (because discerning listeners like yourselves are few and far between), do not command the same kind of influence over the Powers That Be and their kingdom of jewel-case goblins.
Consequently, this release, the third album proper I have created as Minotaur Shock, is no longer an album in the physical sense, it is content. Not content as in satisfied, but content as in digital bits and binary bobs. Now, you may think that I am less than enthusiastic about this, but you’d be mistaken. After initially being a bit miffed (I’m being honest; we’re all friends here), I started to think about the nature of an album, and how the way people listen and use it is changing.
The site also features some beautiful illustrations for each track, and utterly gratuitous slidey javascript stuff – well worth a look.
Visit ➔The Twitting Point. Or An Ode to Saturdays.
We sit dehydrating in front of the computer screen after hours in the gym trying to reduce years of beer gut cultivation. The sitting got boring and geeking out became our last bastion of escapism, to have all the knowledge and therefore, all the power. Some thing has happened to me and a whole generation of the tech-related fads: I don’t need nor want the power/knowledge, it seems like i just wanna digest it and get it away from me.
Knowledge digestion is my favourite hobby. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not.
Visit ➔Becky by Be Your Own Pet
Great video for the best song off their last (and sadly final) album:
Visit ➔Olympus / Panasonic announce Micro Four Thirds
Olympus and Panasonic have just announced a new type of sensor for digital cameras, which is probably the biggest innovation in this space we’ve seen in a very long time. It means that they can now make interchangeable lens cameras without the bulky mirror box, meaning (hopefully) we will get much smaller cameras that retain the image quality (and lens swap-ability) of an DSLR.
Visit ➔‘Why Free Software Has Poor Usability, and How to Improve It’
Put another way, if you have to ask for better design, you will lose. You need to be in a position to demand it.
Very true, in my experience.
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