Yeah, thanks Sony
silverchair split with Sony, and to 'give the band a golden handshake' Sony has released a 22 Track best of as a way of saying thank-you to the band. I'm very cynical (as I'm sure you've seen) and I can only see this as a way for Sony to screw the last little bit of money out of 'chairs music while they still own it.
And on a quick check of their official page, I see that silverchair do NOT endorse the latest best of release. What a surprise.
But 'chair will get lots of money from this I'm sure, especially given the release is two CDs with CD two being 11 rare tracks. Releasing rare/b-sides is a good thing.
Chair are now on a label called 'Eleven' (EMI), read an interview with their manager from Rolling Stone.
Reading the interview I can guess that silverchair quit because they wanted more control of the copyright of their music. And they're looking at releasing music on the net, something Sony is very against (see the stick they threw up over Offspring).
I had always not liked silverchair on principle. I loved the Tomorrow EP, but I was young, I got over alternative music. I learned to hate them because it was cool to hate them. But I'm someone who loves The Sharp and doesn't mind telling people so. Why did I hate silverchair?
Neon Ballroom came out and I liked 'Emotion Sickness' but that was about it. I thought (and still do) that Anthem for the Year 2000 was a load of crap. Dave convinced me to listen to it. He rants continuously about it's production values. I downloaded it in MP3, and wasn't impressed, but that's MP3. Finally I borrowed the CD and it's growing on me. It really is. Damn.
Portable Broadband Streaming Device
"Imagine a Walkman that had broadband wireless connectivity to the Net, could access the entire world's catalog of recorded music and played back that music with impeccable sound quality."
This is an idea I had about 'the future of music' about three years ago, I wrote out a plan but never wrote the story, as I thought the dates were a bit far in the future and it was wanky to predict this sort of stuff anyway.
Imagine paying $X for this device and $X a month to access all the music in the world? Sound sweat doesn't it? Especially if each play is logged and the artist is payed accordingly. If such a device was available who would bother pirating music?
The poor would lose all access to music though... if music became something you had to pay a monthly fee for (like the net) it would be lost to much of the population. We would assume we'd still have radio? Obviously there would still be live music. Ah, the future.
Meanwhile check this out
I wasn't going to post this until I checked out the page and saw the 'required details for download page'. They ask for you email, a friends email, their friends email, your mums email, your milkmans email. It's frightening that people might actually do this as a joke, handing over valuable emails to Virgin to use for marketing. I thought it amusing enough to mention.
Still, RadioFreeVirgin is a stand alone ap (big big big no no) using streaming technology that is 'far superior quality to MP3 or even FM' *snort, or even*. They show song info, artist details and buy links for each track played. I've always wanted to be able to know this stuff while a track is playing on the radio.... except this isn't radio. And by 'buy' I always wanted to just download to the player to play whenever, or pay for the right to play it on demand instead of waiting for it to be played. Why couldn't this have been a webpage by the way? A stand alone player is pretty darn stupid if you ask me.
Get RadioFreeVirgin here, put in your mums email address only if you're stupid.
They Might Be Giants
They pioneered 'pay per listen' with their Dial-A-Song service with demos, live material etc available to fans via a 1800 number. Now they need an upgrade, giving up their 1983 piece of crud for a nice new computer version. Read the slashdot rant about it. Or just visit the They Might Be Giants website.
Napster..
My usage of Napster has increased. It takes a while for the average user to really click that if they want to hear a song, there is somewhere they're likely to find it. But when you get down to it, Napster is crap. The quality of files is usually bad (badly encoded), they're incomplete a lot of the time, and rarely do people share much. I use it only for the purposes of hearing something I can't get my hands on, I don't source my music from there. Why would you?
BMG buys Liquid Audio
MP3.com reports that BMG may be buying Liquid Audio. Napster + Liquid Audio? Not hard to figure out what they're thinking. A sharing service full of 'protected' Liquid Audio BMG licensed songs that you can listen to a few times, then must buy.
Has anyone ever purchased a Liquid Audio digital track? Ever?
ID that MP3
I've always wanted a service that could tell me what an MP3 was, who played it etc. Apparently MusicDNA by Cantametrix can do it, assuming that the MP3 is not cut off at the end, and encoded exactly as expected.... so it's useless really.
APRA's prices for web streaming
APRA, the Australia RIAA (well no, they're much nicer and less likely to screw you over but they provide a similar service, of collecting and distributing artist revenue), has a nice big page explaining how they see music on the internet, and includes pricing for licensing music for web streaming.