Music
Three good things and one bad one
Good: The new Christopher Brookmyre, James Lee Burke and Ian Rankin novels.
Bad: The new Girls Aloud single.
Metallica: too loud, and not in a good way
Here we go again. Metallica appear to be following in the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ footsteps, releasing an album that’s so compressed it’s painful to listen to. And that’s painful in a “shit sound” way, not a “woo! Scary metal!” way.
the released CD version is - to coin a technical phrase - smashed to f**k.
According to the mastering engineer, responding to Metallica fans:
I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else.
Fan hits the shit
You might think I’m only linking to the YouTube clip of Noel Gallagher being attacked on stage so I can use that headline.
You’re right.
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I’m thinking about iPods
Later today the boffins at CERN will switch on the Large Hadron Collider, which will - depending on who you believe - usher in a brave new era in physics, turn the planet into Swiss cheese, or open a portal for Satan to come and enslave us all. Which may well overshadow the latest iPod.
It’s a really nice upgrade, I reckon, but I do wonder where the iPod can possibly go from here. Pico-projectors that enable you to show video on nearby walls or bald people’s heads? Integrated kazoos?
Tangent: during the keynote Steve Jobs made it clear that he wasn’t too happy with third-party accessory firms leaking supposedly secret products, as happened with the nano. I wonder if pre-release access to Apple’s plans is going to be more restricted now. Why help add-on manufacturers get to market quickly if they’re going to blow your big reveal?
What your taste in music says about you
Pointless but amusing survey via the BBC:
Indie: Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle
Chart pop: High self-esteem, not creative, hardworking, outgoing, gentle, not at ease
Jazz: appalling taste in music, ugly shoes
I may have made one of those up.
The futility of flogging music (and the despair when you can’t even give it away)
An excellent article about selling records, file sharing and trying to flog MP3s via Word Magazine:
web technology lets us see exactly how many people are listening to our music. We can see the MySpace hit counters spin round, with the total number of listeners for each track. Our stats pages on our blogs show us how people arrived at our page, which country they’re from, even which web browser they’re using. We’ve got information about the reach of our music that we couldn’t have dreamed of 10 years ago, and it tells us that thousands upon thousands of people have their ears open, and they’re listening. But, by and large, and with a few exceptions, we can’t fucking sell music to them.
So long, Glaswegian indie rock radio
XFM Scotland, the radio station formerly known as Beat 106, is to become part of the Galaxy dance music network.
The switch, which will be made in the autumn, is likely to see a radical overhaul of the station’s music output.
Maybe I should have waited before shaving my legs
Despite reports, Girls Aloud are not planning to recruit a new member - at least, not according to the official site:
Over the weekend the papers have been filled with false stories on the girls. But instead of the tired old ’split’ stories, they have invented rumours of a brand new Girls Aloud reality show. These reports could not be more wrong and the Girls are far too busy putting the finishing touches to their brand new album to be filming a new show, let alone bringing on board a new member.
Could shutting down Pandora open Pandora’s box?
An interesting post on Broadstuff about Pandora, the web-radio service whose extremely high royalty payments may force it out of business:
it’s clear that Pandora and its ilk will live - it’s far too good to lose - [so] it will just go to the P2P freenet if this practice continues, thus hurting the Industry even more in the medium term. If ever there is a case study of a short sighted tactic to shoot yourself in the foot strategically, this is it.
The problem is that Pandora doesn’t pay the same royalties as other forms of radio, as the Washington Post reports:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.
Cory Doctorow on the file sharing crackdown
An interesting and typically inflammatory piece from Mr Doctorow in the Guardian:
The original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter… The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead… [here is] the tried-and-true answer to the problem of copyright-disrupting technology:
* acknowledge that it’s going to happen;
* find a place to collect a toll;
* charge a fee that’s low enough to get buy-in from the majority;
* ignore the penny-ante fee evaders;
* sue the blistering crap out of the big-time fee-evaders.