Category: Music
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Celebrities Inappropriate Advertising
Last Friday was the last in Clive James’ current run of A Point of View (Harold Evans takes over this Friday). You have about 24 hours to download the podcast, otherwise you’ll just have to read his words. James got on to the habit of Hollywood actors promoting products that once they’d never have been…
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Copyright Extension
In just four days, we could begin to see the first of Cliff Richard’s singles re-released without Richard himself either profiting or having any say over what’s released. That could happen, although as I write, I can’t see any forthcoming releases at Amazon. Indeed he’s recently released a celebratory 50 years anthology, and gave away…
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Southbank
Two a couple of great concerts in the Southbank Centre over the weekend. On Saturday it was John McCusker’s Under One Sky. McCusker has put together a fascinating group of performers of Scottish and English origin who together make some wonderful music. So on stage, alongside McCusker we had Julie Fowlis (who I saw a…
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Amazon’s MP3 Store
So the long awaited Amazon MP3 store is finally here – with just days to go until the end of the year deadline. They’ve got quite a lot of music on it with a claimed 3.5m tracks on there at the moment (so they’ve been busy). Tracks are recorded as 256 kbps MP3 files –…
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Election Viewing
As America votes, there were a couple of fascinating films on TV recently which had well-timed screenings. On Friday there was a cracking film on BBC Four which isn’t available to watch on the iPlayer, so I can only recommend picking up the DVD instead. CSNY Deja Vu followed Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on…
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Julie Fowlis Live at Union Chapel
A great little gig at the wonderful Union Chapel in Islington with Julie Fowlis singing and playing some superb music in Gaelic. It was real toe-tapping stuff. And the support from Emily Smith was excellent too. I picked up her most recent album at the back of the hall on the way out. More photos…
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Sorting Out Your Music
It’s come to my attention that over the last couple of years, although I still buy and listen to a lot of music, too much of it is through my iPod. Although I’ve got some half-decent Sennheiser earphones (i.e. not the ones that came with the device which are embarrassingly bad), that’s not really the…
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Musical Tastes and Personality
A friend of mine pointed me towards this story based on some research that suggests that your musical tastes are linked to your personality. I think she took exception to the idea that “heavy metal fans are gentle.” Obviously, making broad genearlisations like that is nonsense, but I wanted to learn a little more about…
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Cliq
UBC today announced that it was closing down the phone service Cliq while it continues to look towards “connected” radios which will become available later in the year for its future business model. Cliq worked by installing a JAVA app on your mobile that used the data network. The service monitored the output of 28…
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Feist
The FX channel has rather smartly just started showing the very excellent Colbert Report. It’d be great if they showed it at 9.00pm just after More 4 has shown its sister The Daily Show. But anything’s better than nothing. This week, both shows are off, but we get repeats, which are welcome since in this…
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When is Free Really Free?
In some respects, this is a continuation of my last entry about Qtrax. While the final position of Qtrax has yet to be established, it’s interesting to look at another high profile example that got plenty of coverage last year – Nokia’s Comes With Music package. As you may or may not recall, Nokia announced…
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Qtrax
So what’s the deal with Qtrax? On Saturday, Channel 4 News carried a report highlighting the launch of a new music service. Qtrax, they reported, had signed deals with the big four record companies and would be launching their free music service on Sunday. Details were a little sketchy, but it was clear that the…