Tag: music

  • Crossfading in Music Streaming Apps

    Crossfading in Music Streaming Apps

    I think it’s fair to say that based on functionality and widespread adoption, Spotify has the best music streaming app. If somebody interesting has a shared playlist – it’s on Spotify. If you want to connect some hardware to a streaming app – it’ll probably work easiest on Spotify. And because it’s the biggest, it…

  • The Agonising Death of the Physical Soundtrack Album

    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…

  • Dune Soundtrack

    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…

  • YouTube Music and Missing Songs

    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…

  • The Pros and Cons of YouTube Music – September 2020 Edition

    The Pros and Cons of YouTube Music – September 2020 Edition

    I’ve been a user of Google Play Music for quite some time now – almost exclusively because they uniquely allow you to upload your own music (or other audio) to their servers. You could upload 50,000 tracks to the site. Why is this important? Maybe you have music that hasn’t been commercially released? Your friend’s…

  • Eye Level

    This Sunday sees ITV launch a reboot of one of their most famous detectives – Van Der Valk. Based on a series of novels by Nicolas Freeling, which were mostly published in the 1960s, the TV series began life in 1972 with Barry Foster starring as Commisaris Van Der Walk of the Amsterdam police. Produced…

  • Music Listening

    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…

  • 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…

  • Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

    Have you ever wondered what life was like in a band in seventies? Then this is the novel for you.  I am something of a sucker for books, films and TV series set in the music industry. From Almost Famous (which perhaps is closest in vibe to this novel), to Vinyl and the little seen Roadies, I’m fascinated by a life that…

  • The Music Industry As Depicted in TV Dramas

    We may currently being experiencing peak TV, but even that doesn’t really explain the recent glut of TV series set around the music industry. A couple of weeks ago, Netflix’s new magnum opus was released – The Get Down from Baz Luhrmann. The series is rumoured to have cost a record amount, at least on…

  • 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…

  • 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…