Category: Music

  • Comes with music. And stupidly large bills

    Is Nokia’s Comes With Music deal one of the dumbest digital music deals ever struck? Could be! The deal, which enables the phone firm to give users unlimited music downloads, could cost Nokia a fortune. The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling – believed…

  • Morrissey, racism and the NME

    No, not that story. This one. It seems that Morrissey has stepped in to save the Rock Against Racism event after the NME, which was sponsoring the gig, pulled out. So Moz is saving anti-racists from the NME. Blimey. Elsewhere, Metallica appear to be considering “doing a Radiohead” and embracing downloaders rather than suing them.…

  • Hey, musicians – it’s time for the machines to take over

    If you thought Autotune was clever, this will blow your mind. Direct Note Access is a technology that makes the impossible possible: for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material. The unique access that Melodyne affords to pitch, timing, note lengths and other parameters…

  • Insanely expensive speaker cable isn’t any better than a coat hanger

    There’s a nice post on Consumerist about those expensive high-end speaker cables that will apparently transform your stereo’s sound: Seven different songs were played, each time heard with the speaker hooked up to Monster Cables, and the other time, hooked up to coat hanger wire. Nobody could determine which was the Monster Cable and which…

  • Eels: where’s the bass?

    We went to see Eels in Glasgow last night, and while the gig itself was great there were two big problems for me. The first was the “support”, and the second was the giant bass-shaped hole in the loud stuff. Support first. Like any self-respecting Eels fan I watched the BBC documentary “Parallel Worlds, Parallel…

  • E from Eels writes a letter to The Queen

    Her Majesty The Queen Buckingham Palace London SW1A 1AA January 31st 2008 Your Majesty, My name is Mark Oliver Everett. My friends call me “E”. I am the singer in an American rock band called Eels. We will be playing a show at your Royal Festival Hall on the evening of February 25th and I…

  • DVD Jon strikes again

    Fed up with DRM and file format compatibility hassles? The entertainment industry’s favourite chap, DVD Jon, may have the answer: DoubleTwist. As CNet reports, DoubleTwist is “a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based…

  • PopJustice on Heidi Montag: good point, well made

    Reality TV star Heidi Montag was a bit upset when those nasty internet people slagged off her video: “I just started sobbing uncontrollably. I cried myself to sleep that first night after my video came out. I just couldn’t understand [how people] I didn’t even know felt the need to be so cruel and hurtful…

  • Radiohead: the rap remixes

    Here’s something different for a Friday: Radiohead’s In Rainbows remixed, with appearances by the likes of Del Tha Funky Homosapien. Like all remix projects it’s an – ahem – mixed bag, but 15 Stepz and Video Tapez are great.

  • REM are doing a European tour this year

    Might be an idea to join the fanclub at REMhq.com if you’re interested: dates announced Monday, fan club tickets go on sale Wednesday.