Music Meme Alert

So, Laura tagged me with a music meme going around the scribosphere:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

These are the songs that got me through writing and re-writing and re-writing my Sharps script, so that’s probably as near as I get to having my spring shaped. And isn’t it summer now? (Not that you’d know from the weather.)

If I Was Your Girlfriend as covered by Eels. This is a live track, taken from the Useless Trinkets CD. It’s flipping wonderful.

If She Wants Me by Belle & Sebastian (from Dear Catastrophe Waitress).

Mermaids by Flight of the Conchords. If you have not watched this show, I command you to do so. This is about the only thing I’ve ever been able to sing note for note (give or take).

Elephant Gun by Beirut (from Lon Gisland EP). I know I posted this before, but I still love it. “Mustachioed debauchery” indeed.

Adagio for Strings. I tend to listen to this with my eyes closed.

The Pretender by Foo Fighters (from Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace). A bit of rock release compared to the other songs here. As an aside, the “official” video on YouTube from RCA (the record company) doesn’t allow embedding, but then the Foo Fighters themselves uploaded the video too and they do allow embedding. That amused me.

Remember Me As A Time Of Day by Explosions In The Sky (from How Strange, Innocence). I think I’m right in saying that this is used in the opening scenes of the pilot episode of Friday Night Lights, another show I would urge you to watch. This isn’t the official video, incidentally, but rather a short film someone made. Seemed apt, somehow.

Now I’m supposed to tag 7 people. Problem being that all the writers I know with blogs have already been tagged (c’mon people I’ve been on courses with this year – get blogging!). I’m going to tag anyone who’s not already been tagged, or anyone who wants to be tagged. Let me know in the comments!

My New Favourite Band

I’m perhaps late to the show with this, but the band is Beirut, and the song in this beautifully shot video is called Elephant Gun from the Lon Gisland EP.

Tom Vek

Last night saw my brother and I head to the Tom Vek gig, held at The Venue. The show ran from about 7 to 10, with two support acts. I did try and blog live from the event (via Flickr), but it didn’t work, sadly.

Beerjacket was one man and his guitar – not something I’d listen to out of choice, but he was not bad. He had a few more upbeat songs which helped his cause and which I really liked; they weren’t just all monotonous ballads, thankfully.

The Fallout Trust were on next – woah! These guys (6-piece band) are good. They were giving out free CD-ROMs with some of their stuff too, which was nice of them – very very impressive live; the recordings don’t translate that quality across though, but they still sound pretty good to me.

Finally, the man himself appeared, and played most (if not all) the songs from his album We Have Sound, plus a couple of new tracks, with the bass set to maximum. Awesome stuff, and again, even better than the CD itself, I think.

In terms of value for money, probably the best ever: £7.50 for 3 hours and 3 acts. Nice.

Ain't Nuttin' But A Playlist Meme Thang

Here are the instructions:

1. Open up the music player on your computer.
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the “shuffle” command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That’s right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It’s time for total musical honesty. Write it up in your blog or journal and link back to at least a couple of the other sites where you saw this.
5. If you get the same artist twice, you may skip the second (or third, or etc.) occurances. You don’t have to, but since randomness could mean you end up with a list of ten song with five artists, you can if you’d like.

Here’s my list:

1. Thunder – Prince
2. 19-2000 – Gorillaz
3. Quality Control – Jurassic 5
4. Freddie’s Dead – Curtis Mayfield
5. Breathe (Remix) – Blu Cantrell feat. Sean Paul
6. When I Grow Up – Snoop Doggy Dogg
7. Sing For Absolution – Muse
8. Change Clothes – Jay-Z + Danger Mouse
9. Golden Age of Life – 4hero
10. Check Yo Self – Ice Cube

See also: Diego, Erik, Jim, Ewan, Gustaf and Martin.

Piracy Is Completely Ruining The Music Industry

Oh wait, no it isn’t:

UK record companies are celebrating their best ever year for album sales, with a record 237 million sold in the 12 months to September.

TradTunes Launches, Needs Fixed

Celtic music enters digital age:

Two enterprising musicians are using the new technologies of the internet to promote traditional Celtic tunes.

Yet another music download site, TradTunes.com, has launched, and this one is Scottish. About 10 months ago, Martin and I discussed doing something like this, but actually more akin to Magnatune. In other words, a new record label to cover the niche rather than a download site; probably plugging into iTunes and Napster to gain coverage rather than trying to compete with them.

And therein lies the problem, as Brad Hill at The Digital Music Weblog points a few reasons as to why TradTunes is underwhelming:

• Slim catalogue;
• Low bitrates (and bizarre statement about 128Kbps being CD quality);
• 64Kbps 30-second song previews;
• Pricing issues ($12.90 for most albums);
• Pre-pay account system, with no benefit for doing so;

Brad closes with:

To its credit, TradTunes sells unwrapped music in plain MP3 or WMA (labelís choice) format. But the store is competing with iTMS, which has better download prices, and Rhapsody, which has better streaming. My advice to participating artists and labels is to dump TradTunes and get into the bigtime services, because TradTunes isnít going to draw many customers.

Ouch. Guys for the love of whatever motivates you, you need to address these points as soon as possible. On the other hand of course, there is always the opportunity to create the record label as described above.

There are download sites, but if you take the obvious one, iTunes, which has a million downloads a month, there is very little in the way of niche music.

Umm, isn’t iTunes’ runrate about 16 million downloads a month?

New Tunes

Another couple of new CDs, this time from The Postal Service (Give Up) and Razorlight’s Up All Night. I’m loving The Postal Service (recommended by Martin’s friend Lindsay, who I met earlier this year), but remain to be entirely convinced by Razorlight. I need to give that another couple of listens first, I think.

Also, I discovered Musicnotes.com, which sells sheet music in digital format. “Pretty cool”, I thought, until I realised that you need to download a special viewer plugin for it. WTF?

Latest Arrivals

None of this really qualifies as “new” music, as such, but here’s what arrived courtesy of the lovely folks over at CD Wow this morning:

• The Doors – The Best of The Doors
• James Brown – The Godfather – The Very Best Of
• Tracy Chapmen – Collection
• Sarah McLachlan – Afterglow
• Carole King – Tapestry ;-)

Evidently, I’m on something of a greatest hits/female singer kick at the moment.

Oh, and I’m onto a new book now too; actually, two new books. I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves, and am now reading Sir David Attenborough’s Life on Air memoirs, and The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.

Listening To...

Lightening up after my last post, I have my mum to thank for my love and appreciation of music. I can listen to pretty much anything, except the things that I can’t ;-) If you exclude 90% of mainstream pop music, hardcore rap/metal, and maybe about 50% of country, everything else is valid material for my ears.

So what am I listening to? Here’s a run-down:

• Mylo – Destroy Rock & Roll : truly excellent electronica
• Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand : Ich heisse superphantastisch! Although overplayed and overhyped (at least in the UK)
• Katy Rose – Because I Can : Several orders of magnitude better than Avril Lavigne
• OutKast – The Love Below/Speakerboxxx : Waaaaay behind the times here, but (finally) loving it
• The Beta Band – Heroes To Zeroes : Another work of genius, another self-deprecating title

Rhapsody Real Music Service will launch in Europe

From The Digital Music Weblog, comes the following:

According to RealNetworks CEO ROb Glaser, a Rhapsody music service from Real will launch in Europe within the next six months to one year. Interestingly, in portions quoted from a FInancial Times Deutschland by News.com, the launch of the music service has been conditional on the following: "Actions against file-sharing sites should intensify in Europe in the coming months. We are already seeing the first signs of this,'' Glaser told the paper. He added "European customers are still too much of the opinion that music is to be had for free." Mr Glaser also commented that the margins on Rhapsody's unlimited music service are greater than those on per-track download sales.

So let me get this straight: rather than getting paid for services to market quickly, the record companies and associations have decided to sue all their potential customers? Combine this with the two separate news stories that they want to increase the cost of digital music (even though it’s already far more expensive in Europe than it is in the US) and that CD sales are down for the fourth year in a row, and I wonder if the record companies actually want to destroy themselves.

From my point of view, that’s nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with price: I’ve bought a lot more music in the last couple of years thanks to being able to check things out before hand (and that’s mostly through those forward thinking bands and smaller record companies that allow you to do so), but I’ve bought most of it for less than GBP 9 per CD via Amazon, Fopp or CD-Wow, as opposed to the average high-street price of GBP 13.

HMV Digital

There was an advert in the Sunday Times (28 March edition) from HMV, who are looking for a new Head of Digital to spearhead their music download service, which will apparently be “the best downloading service the web has ever seen.” They already seem to have one, however, but it’s powered by OD2 as all these things seem to be in the UK. Sadly.

I’m just going to jot down some thoughts (in no particular order) about how I’d approach the job:

• First question: should the site be standalone from HMV’s current e-commerce system, or should there be greater integration? The end-user is looking for music by specific artists—why should it be powered by a disparate system on a different server? So my answer is that they should go for greater integration. The results page should then just give me the options available for purchasing a track or album—order a CD, or pay to download it.
• As far as possible, support as many formats as possible, and offer users a choice (if they want, and a sensible default if they don’t want to make a choice). Not quite everyone in the world uses Windows, and Macs are pretty popular with musicians, so why lock them out?
• Why is there no user participation on the website? No user reviews, ratings or seemingly any kind of personalisation, other than a wishlist. How do you expect to keep people coming back to you online if they don’t have any kind of investment in the site?
• Discovery of new music: this is such an important aspect of online shopping, yet so many sites continue to overlook it. Bizarre, when you consider that “People who liked this, also liked…” is one of the reasons behind Amazon’s tremendous success, and that the serendipitous finding of an obscure old album or a cool new band is one of the main reasons people actually still shop in physical stores. User created content is also a big part of this (witness Amazon’s Listmania lists).
• I don’t mean to be twee, but how about an HMV branded music player that has links into the store? Stop me if you’ve heard it before, but no traditional music retailer has done anything like this.
• Embrace mobile music (beyond iPod and MuVo devices). It’s coming, so you might as well start preparing now and get ready for it.

Having read through the above, there’s nothing that anyone else couldn’t have thought of, but I have to wonder why “the UK’s premier retailer of music”, who have a “reputation as one of the world’s most innovative music retailers”, hasn’t yet taken any kind of initiative in this space.

It needs to get far more aggressive in terms of making people aware of its download services, as I didn’t even know they had one until I looked out of curiosity. And if they really want “the best downloading service the web has ever seen”, they’re going to have to do far, far more than just relying on OD2 to do all the hard work which leaves their service looking and feeling identical to all their competitors who also use OD2.

And fix the pricing. Why on earth does it cost nigh on three times as much for a single track on HMV’s site compared to iTunes Music Store (£1.49 versus $0.99, at the current exchange rates that’s $2.71 vs $0.99, or £1.49 vs £0.55)? Rip off Britain indeed.

MyCokeMusic.com

In contrast to this claim in today’s The Scotsman newspaper, MyCokeMusic.com did indeed launch yesterday. If the reporter had bothered to check after he had retired to the pub, he would have realised that it was available from the evening. However, I’ve still not received an email notification that the site is live. Weird.

The system is powered by OD2, the company backed by Peter Gabriel. As such, it relies on Windows Media.

Now, I’d love to be able to report that it all works like a dream, but sadly, I can’t.

Windows Media Player on my machine thinks that it is permanently offline. It can check to see if there are newer versions available (there aren’t), but don’t bother trying to listen or watch anything in it… So, I can’t even listen to previews.

The interface is OK, but there doesn’t even seem to be recommendations or ‘people who bought this also bought…’ lists—surely a given when it comes to digital retail? No Consumer Contentment Gene here.

If Napster and Apple can get their act together and launch in Europe, they’ll make an absolute killing. What are you waiting for guys?

The Consumer Contentment Gene

Om Malik points to a Washington Post story about Real Player 10 and writes:

I think most of these other music stores competing with iTunes will stumble because they are being pushed by companies that are too geeky or enterprise focused. Consumer contentment is not part of their DNA.

And that’s why none of the wireless digital audio players that I’ve seen to date do the job for me: some have their good points, but there are far too many bad points on each and every one of them. As much as I’d love too, I simply don’t have the time to start-up a consumer electronics company to design and build the digital audio device of my dreams. Maybe next year, though…

Think I may write some more on this later on.

Digital Audio Round-up

Some links which you might be interested in:

Napster hire European Executive: So I guess that we can look forward to seeing the new Napster launch in Europe sometime this year. Leanne Sharman was formerly VP of Sales & Marketing for MP3.com. Good news, I guess, but I’ll be much happier when they actually announce availability.

My Coke Music: Coke’s digital music site is due to go live today (as of time of writing, it was not yet live, however). I’ll report back here later with my initial thoughts. The site claims that it will have the first track from Tears for Fears for 13 years. <sarcasm>Great</sarcasm>

Postneo.com]

Java in Your Stereo?: Ben Galbraith writes about being able to adjust the interface of his HomePod to his own liking. It runs Gloo Labs’ “open platform digital convergence technology” which is 100% Java, apparently (aside from device drivers and codecs). Kind of a fugly device, though.

Elgato Systems’ EyeHome: A Mac only digital media player (the first such device, apparently).

Actiontec’s Wireless Digital Media Player: Again, somewhat misses the point by requiring to be plugged in to the TV, but it does have broad file format support, including even Ogg Vorbis!

[Thanks to Martin for the heads up on the last two.]

I also noticed that the Netgear MP101 which I wrote about recently has dropped in price to less than 100 GBP.

MTV Download Service

So MTV are planning to launch a download service. They’ll need to offer something pretty special in order to compete with iTunes and Napster. Hey, how about music video downloads, as I suggested the other day? That would make perfect sense for MTV, right?

iTunes Added Goodness

Ian Fogg, an analyst over at Jupiter, writes about iTunes Harmony, and a couple of features he’d like to see added.

• Liner Notes – if I buy an album via the iTunes store, there should be some nifty way of managing and presenting the liner notes from said album. I know these are rarer today than they were in bygone years, but where they are available, I want to have them. For the record, my favourite recent liner notes come from The Proclaimers Greatest Hits album.
• Music Videos – I would pay, say, $1.49 to own a copy of 50 Cent’s P.I.M.P. video and many, many others. How cool would it be to hook up my media server to my hifi and TV at a party to have the perfect visual complement to the music? So long, MTV! As a happy side effect, the music companies would create a new revenue stream from something which has long been a money sink for them. How about it, Apple?

Napster Bits

In case you haven’t already picked up on this, head on over to Napster Bits to check out some neat animations of Napster’s demise and comeback (scheduled for Christmas).

Roxio are becoming a pretty interesting company…

Into the Dragon

Hurrah! I finally managed to obtain a CD version of the classic Bomb the Bass album, Into the Dragon, thanks to that profitable wonder of the Interweb, eBay.

Happy happy joy joy!

Good for them

Reuters: EMI Unveils Major European Online Music Push

The Beatles and Rolling Stones haven’t joined in, but hey – if they don’t want the money…