Category: Music

  • Doing my bit for charidee

    As part of fundraising for Comic Relief, Girls Aloud have posed for photographs while wearing school uniforms. In that spirit, I’m posting one of the promo pics here, because I think it’s important to raise awareness of such an important charity. The fact that it’s quite possibly THE GREATEST PHOTO EVER is purely coincidental.

  • Steve Jobs: “dump the DRM”

    Here’s a turn-up for the books: Steve Jobs has published an open letter to, well, everybody. He’s talking about music and in particular, the calls for Apple to licence FairPlay so iTunes music works on anything. As you’d expect he’s not a fan of that idea, on the grounds that the more people licence FairPlay,…

  • Hollyrood regulates rock

    Well, not quite. But amid some fanfare this month, the Cross Party Group for Scotland’s Contemporary Music Industry (Live Music Section) will launch a code of conduct for promoters, venues, musicians, artists and performers. Politics and the performing arts have a fairly uneasy relationship, whether it’s the Scottish Arts Council’s often-controversial funding decisions or the…

  • Zune: welcome to the stupid

    Remember Zune’s DRM-crippled wireless sharing system? Apparently the record labels have crippled it further. According to Engadget: It appears Sony Music and Universal Music Group are marking certain artists of theirs as “prohibited” for sharing, meaning that just because you’ve paid for a song, and even managed to find another Zune user on the planet…

  • “Let’s shoot the messenger!” say record labels

    It’s not exactly a shock, but in the next few weeks the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is going to change the focus of its anti-piracy activities. Instead of suing the people who actually trade songs illegally, the IFPI wants to sue ISPs. It’s a bit like suing the Royal Mail over chain…

  • Sony spanked over DRM “deception”, Apple’s next

    Blimey: SONY has been convicted of misleading the French public and told to pay damages to a consumer watchdog for selling downloadable songs that only run on its own music players. France’s Union Federale des Consommateurs (UFC) took Sony’s French and British subsidiaries to court in February 2005 over the music download site Sony Connect.…

  • The new UK singles chart: good news and bad news

    The spanking new UK chart is out, and it’s a bit of a non-starter really: there’s good news (two Girls Aloud tracks in the chart! Yay!) and bad news (Snow Patrol! Boo!) but the inclusion of downloads is hardly earth-shattering – for now, at least. The changes to the chart rules are important, though. As…

  • Too old, too ugly, too far away

    Bah. From the Girls Aloud mailing list (of course I’m on it): Want to take part in the next Comic Relief view with Girls Aloud and Sugababes? We are looking for guys and girls of every ethnicity to take part in a Girls Aloud vs. Sugababes music video! You need to be over 16 –…

  • eBay: Dianaballs

    With crushing inevitability, eBay’s pulling auctions of tickets for the Diana concert. eBay says it’s out of respect for the dead Di, but of course it’s out of respect for eBay’s corporate image: if the usual rentagobs hadn’t caused a blizzard of publicity – “eBay’s profiting from cloth-eared sentimentalists!” – they’d have left the auctions…

  • Yikes!

    I’m always amused by tribute bands’ names – take a bow, Gwen Ste-phoney! – but I’m even more amused by their promo pics. This particularly scary one is from the same site as Ste-phoney, and it’s the cleverly named Girls R Aloud: [photopress:girls_aloud.jpg,full,pp_image] I mean, bloody hell, if you put me in waders, flippers and…