Anyone who likes the band Evenescence should do themselves a favor and obtain their Origin album, it’s honestly much more interesting than their later work, and shows much more creative wisdom than their later over-produced albums.
In the same album that Peter Gabriel has one of the greatest songs ever written, Solsbury Hill, he also has this weird song called Moribund the Burgermeister (lyrics). Apparently the song is about a disease called chorea, which caused involuntary motions akin to a weird dance, during which people would pray to St Vitus for aid because it was believed the sufferers were possessed, thus it became known as St Vitus’ Dance. Yowzers.
Trent Resnor, creative genius and lead behind Nine Inch Nails, has decided that the best way of giving his fans what he wants is by making his music available for free online, with optional purchases available for those who really want them. He also fired his publishers. Thanks to this you can download part of the Ghosts I-IV album for free (9 of the full 36 tracks) and just this past week their latest The Slip has also been launched as a completely free download. In addition to this, if you have the requisite creative juices and equipment, you can download project files for many of his songs for use with different music creation software, so you can create your own remixes of his music without the usual headaches.
Ireland is setting itself up for a great rubbishing in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest with what has to be one of the stupidest songs ever sent to the once lauded competition, right up there with Britain’s “Ooh aah just a little bit” in the mid 90’s. Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself.
Why don’t they just ask Glen and Marketa to write something? Jeez.
Huge congratulations to Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová for rightly winning the Oscar for Best Original Song for Falling Slowly from the movie Once. Beautiful song, wonderful movie, and rightfully deserving. Their performance on the night was great, and their acceptance speeches demonstrated their honesty as people and integrity as artists - I loved it how Glen’s first action was to turn around to hug his mum :-) Again, congrats to both.
One of Microsoft’s most touted features for their latest “iPod killer”, the Zune, was to be able to let someone else borrow your song for three day, through a process nicknamed “squirting”, before it would automatically expire. Well, it seems that two of the largest record companies in the world, Sony and Universal Music, didn’t like that idea and through the options they set on songs you buy from Microsoft’s Zune music store are denying you the right to do this with their music, upwards of 40-50% by some counts. The best part is that there’s no promotion of this little factoid, the only way to find out if the music you paid for the right to squirt is to try it and see if it works! Ooppsie! I guess it goes back to Steve Jobs’ idea of just letting the person you wish to hear the song to just listen to one of the earpieces on your iPod. Duh!
In 2005 (IIRC) Microsoft released a media initiative called Plays For Sure along with a number of both device manufacturers and online music stores. The idea was that you would be able to buy any number of devices from different companies, then buy music from different stores and be sure the music would work with the player. Well, it seems Microsoft has had enough of this idealistic “partnership” or “play nice for the consumers” thing and is going back to their old practice of locking everyone out: their new Zune players are incompatible with music bought for the old stores and the old players will not be compatible with music from the new Zune store. Yeah, that’s why people still buy Microsoft products / services, they like having to re-buy everything every two years. Good on you, MSFT!
Now, lets compare that to Apple’s iPod and iTunes Store: every single iPod sold since the beginning is still able to play music from the store today, and every new iPod is still able to play music bought from the store on day 1. Yes, it is vendor lock-in, but at least they tend not to give their customers the shaft quite as often. And they have BSG ;-)