Category: Music
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The Agonising Death of the Physical Soundtrack Album
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the issues surrounding getting hold of physical copies of the Dune soundtrack albums in physical form. In summary, two of the three (!) are available as CDs, but at surprisingly high prices, and seemingly not mass produced at traditional CD pressing plants. A Digression Into Producing CDs…
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Dune Soundtrack
I’m looking forward to seeing Denis Villeneuve’s take on Dune this weekend, when it finally gets its UK release (technically Thursday). I came to Frank Herbert’s novel in my early teens around the time that David Lynch’s version of the film was released. But more about all of that when I’ve seen the film. In…
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YouTube Music and Missing Songs
This weekend Promising Young Woman finally arrived in the UK, courtesy of Sky Movies. Coming laden with awards and award nominations, and written and directed by Emerald Fennell, who previously took over season two of Killing Eve, I’d been looking forward to it ever since I first saw a clip several months ago. Anyway, the…
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Music Listening
I’m a little bit concerned that the way I listen to music is about to fundamentally change, and I’m not sure how it’s going to work. Both Google Play Music and iTunes are thought to be making major changes in the coming months, and those changes will fundamentally affect how I listen to music. My…
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HMV
A few thoughts on the new difficulties faced by HMV. In part this is response to some utter nonsense I’ve read online, and some of the news reports surrounding HMV heading into administration for the second time in five years. There are undoubtedly structural problems with how music is sold in 2019, but I think there are multiple…
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The Singles Charts
It may seem unlikely that I’m writing about the UK singles charts, on the basis that I’m not sure that I could name a single song released this year that may have troubled the chart compilers. Except that it turns out I’m wrong. I know quite a lot of the songs in the current chart.…
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Best-Selling Folk Music… According to Amazon
I have fairly broad musical tastes – it’s why I struggle when people ask me what kind of music I’m into. A couple of weekends ago, for example, you could have found me watching the Pet Shop Boys at the Royal Opera House on Saturday night, and the next day in a field in Hertfordshire…
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The End of Digital Downloads?
That’ll teach me for writing this too quickly. I based this on a Digital Music News report which was published Wednesday evening UK time. A few hours later, and ReCode was reporting that Apple is planning no such thing. Of course plans change all the time, and record labels can get angry. So who knows…
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Sell Me Personal Use Music Rights
I like making the odd video, and invariable, I prefer to use music on the soundtrack. Given that I’m not about to commission my own music for my little projects, I have two choices. I can either use a music track I already know, or I can go to a music library and for a…
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Amazon Prime Music – Filling A Hole
Back over the summer, Amazon launched its Prime Music offering in the UK. Anybody who pays Amazon £79 a year, for it’s free next day delivery service, and video streaming service, now also has access to more than a million tracks and hundreds of playlists to stream via the web, Fire TV or a mobile…
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Not Predicting the Mercury Music Prize
Here’s an oddity. Music Week has published a list of albums that Google Play Music says represent the volume of streams that albums eligible for the Mercury Music Prize have achieved. So they’ve looked at acts that released albums between September, 9 2014 and September 25, 2015. The official shortlist is published in a couple…
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A Curious Case of Google Play Music
Note: See multiple updates on this story at the end. I use Google Play Music as my primary music service. That is, Google Play Music hosts my audio files allowing me to play them back via my phone, the Chrome browser or a Chromecast. I’ve never felt the need to subscribe to a music service…