Anyone else finding it hard to get excited about music at the moment? For every decent track out there, there’s a moment of utter dirge. For every American Boy, there’s a Heartbeat.
One song I’m loving at the moment is Daddy-O by Wideboys and Shaznay Lewis. It’s a frantic dance track with Shaznay at her most annoyingly catchy - she really was the best thing in All Saints.
As for this week’s chart, it’s a hit and miss affair, so let’s get it started:
Well, it looks like Mrs Fielder-Civil - otherwise known as Amy Winehouse - has been getting busy while Blakey’s been ‘incarcerated’. The Sun is reporting that Amy’s been involved with two blokes recently - an American photographer called Blake Wood, and her manager’s assistant, Alex Haines.
Allegedly the relationship with Blake Wood only lasted a couple of weeks, but from what I’m reading, Amy and Alex Haines are currently an item.
I can’t keep up with this guy! No sooner that being kicked out of Velvet Revolver and rejoining Stone Temple Pilots for a reunion tour, Scott Weiland has plans in the pipeline to release a new solo album.
Apparently alt-rock producer Steve Albini is signed on to twiddle the knobs for the project and No Doubt drummer Adrian Young (fed up with waiting for Stefani to get her act together) is said to be collaborating on the album as well.
I read via The Consumerist that EMI is trying to block music lovers from backing up their music to an online storage service at MP3Tunes. Now, from what I’m reading, the service MP3Tunes provides isn’t a fanciful view of file sharing - it’s actually a secure file storage service.
However, EMI are mounting a legal challenge because the service allegedly breaches copyright laws.
Right, we don’t give a stuff about EMI. That’s a given. As a consumer, you want music in a format that’s convenient to you. And with the rise of the MP3 and a generation of iPod users, listeners prefer digital.
Now, anyone who’s had a bad experience with a computer can tell you that they’re fragile. Viruses, hard drive failures and idiots can all conspire to delete an entire library of MP3s that have taken years to accumulate. A backup plan is essential if you want to keep your data safe.
There’s a great quote in Exchange Magazine about this:
Content owners have rights, but those should not extend to shutting down music storage websites that are not abetting copyright infringement. And nothing is stopping EMI from developing its own digital locker service. That a Web startup dreamt up an innovative business model to complement consumers’ busy lifestyles is no cause for judicial intervention.
MP3Tunes is neither facilitating piracy nor discouraging people from buying music in any way. In fact, by making music collections more accessible and therefore more valuable, MP3Tunes might actually cause people to buy more music.
OK, from another perspective, I can see how an account on MP3Tunes could allow people to share logins and therefore share files over the service. However, if EMI were to work with MP3Tunes, they could easily detect abuse of an account. Simultaneous logons from different locations, IP addresses, etc. Not a problem.
Unfortunately in the context of the recording industry’s long-running feud with the Internet, this latest case looks like yet another reason to see the major labels as a draconian money machine looking to protect it’s own interests as opposed to those of the customer.
Another voice in this issue is the man behind MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson. He writes clearly about the situation and questions the right of the record labels to invade their customers’ privacy:
Files are not MP3tunes’ possessions any more than the contents of a safety deposit box are owned by the bank that houses them. The storage provided by MP3tunes is the user’s own space. A Locker is empty when someone opens an account and that customer decides what files are placed into their Locker.
It certainly raises questions about the rights of the consumer when dealing with music they’ve bought. If you’ve had a hard drive failure, does the record company expect you to buy every MP3 again? That’s simply not realistic. If I’ve purchased the music, then surely I’ve got the right to insure against losing it?
The problem is, record companies are so busy trying to protect their precious copyrights these days that there’s virtually no legal way to listen to music unless it’s on the original CD. Customers like me are confused and concerned by the attitude of record companies to customers. I think it’s high time they stopped suing us and started listening to us!
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You’d never know Internet music phenom, Sandi Thom, was about to release a new album, would you? Over the last few weeks, there’s been a trickle of pathetic news stories about what a rocker she is and how ‘wasted’ she’s been since she became famous.
Blah blah blah.
I’ve made no secret of it before, but I hate it when musicians resort to making dumb statements to stay in the public eye. Especially when they have something to sell.
OK, let’s get up to speed on these Shadow Puppets people. The Last Shadow Puppets are Arctic Monkey Alex Turner and Miles Kane from The Rascals.
I trusted Alex Turner not to simply rehash Arctic Monkey’s type material and pass it off under a different name. Boy, does he deliver. This is good stuff.
The Age Of The Understatement has all the ingredients of an epic tune. Big drums, a galloping rhythm, Kane and Turner sharing vocal duties with a sense of suspense during the verses.
Praise be to Ronson! It wasn’t hard to spot the influence of Mark Ronson in Adele’s latest single, was it?
There’s all of Adele’s atmospheric moodiness in this track, but this time it’s married to an ambitious quasi-military snare drum, soaring strings and punctuated by clean sharp guitar lines.
The arrangement brings out the best in Adele’s voice as well. She’s on top form here, letting us see the full power of her voice.
You can’t keep Kanye out of the charts these days, can you? His latest, Flashing Lights, isn’t getting quite as much attention as his collaboration with Estelle, but it’s doing pretty well all the same.
Flashing Lights tackles the thorny issue of how famous folks manage to have affairs while they’re in the limelight. Basically, they can’t. And those flashing lights belong to the paparazzi that follow Kanye and his peers around everywhere.
BBC Radio 1 announced today (Monday 21 April) that the station will kick off the 2008 festival season with the biggest female artist on the planet headlining Radio 1’s Big Weekend – Madonna.
The event takes place at Mote Park in Maidstone, Kent, on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 May. Chris Moyles announced the big news and the full main stage line-up on his show this morning. The line-ups for the rest of the stages will be announced throughout the day on Radio 1. Read More »
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