Category: Music

  • Speed kills perfect pop (and medleys make it worse)

    Here’s a wee mental experiment for you: think of the main riff from Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fantastic, swaggering, loping thing, isn’t it? Now, slow it down in your head. Not much – just a little bit. Hear how it drags? Okay. Take it back up again and the swagger should be restored. Now,…

  • In defence of DRM

    As I posted yesterday, I think EMI’s plan to drop DRM is a brilliant one, and I think come May iTunes shoppers can send the rest of the industry a very clear message by avoiding all DRMed tracks and going for the better quality, DRM-free ones instead. And don’t forget, EMI’s announcement applies to all…

  • EMI and Apple: brilliant

    From May, EMI artists will have a new kind of iTunes offering: double bitrate, DRM-free tracks for an extra 30 cents per track. Excellent, and about bloody time too. The really smart thing for iTunes users to do now would be to boycott *all* DRMed music on iTunes and fill yer boots with EMI’s DRM-free…

  • Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

    You can just hear the windmilling chords, can’t you? Anyway. Mark Mulligan at Jupiter Research has posted something interesting this morning about Lily Allen’s iTunes experience. She said that iTunes was: “bullying people into corners by making sure they have extra, you know, extra songs so they can put them on the front page. And…

  • Making music: an itch you can’t quite scratch

    I don’t usually hang around message boards – when you spend all day on the internet the last thing you want to do when you finish work is spend all night on the internet – but I’ve been intrigued by a conversation on jockrock.org about music. In a rare, non-sweary thread people are talking about…

  • Quick album review: Idlewild, Make Another World

    Patchy as hell and really derivative in places (REM’s New Adventures In Hi-Fi is an obvious touchstone) but my god, when Idlewild get it right… the title track and the final two tracks, Once In Your Life and Finished It Remains, are mighty. Finished… in particular is utter, utter genius.

  • iTunes: where your money goes

    There’s a fascinating article in today’s Guardian (by musician Tom Robinson) that shows how digital downloads aren’t as lucrative for musicians as the music business might have you believe. Out of that 79p, the person who actually wrote the song gets just 6p to share with their publisher. Even the credit card company sees 7p…

  • Is Napster heading for the knacker’s yard?

    It’s certainly difficult to put a positive spin on this Marketing Week story: Napster UK vice-president and general manager Leanne Sharman is leaving the digital music download company following a restructure. It is centralising its European management and will scale back its UK office as part of the changes. [Via No Rock’n’Roll Fun]

  • At last the RIAA does something useful

    Good news for anyone in the US who can’t decide what educational establishment to go to: the RIAA has published a chart detailing the 25 universities who are best for Bittorrent. Isn’t that nice of them?

  • The dangers of decorating

    I’m painting walls this weekend, which gives me an opportunity to catch up with the various tunes on my iPod I haven’t really got round to. However, I think paint fumes do something to my brain: while I’m not particularly surprised to discover that I love Tom Petty’s Highway Companion, that I like roughly half…