Bill on FNM touring outside of EU:

In answer to your questions of shows outside the EU, especially from Brazil and Australia, yes, we are thinking of coming there.

The band have also been looking at the Faith No More Fantasy Setlist blog and enjoying it.

I've been trying to think of one, but this one comes close (from the guy who conducted the Chuck Mosley interview linked in my previous post), although I'd drop Underwater Love (why do people like that song?) and replace with Another Body Murdered.

I came US$2.50 away from spending US$201 on two songs.

I'm 50/50 happy/sad that I missed out.

That's a LOT of money.

Douglas Esper interviews Chuck Mosley.

Excellent interview covering many topics including Chuck's new album, the writing process, Bad Brains, Cement, the possibility of singing with Faith No More, Faith No More's reunion.

ARIA 2008 Music Sales Figures.

In January this year I said of the expected ARIA 2008 music sales figures:

I expect to see a huge increase in digital sales, and physical CD album unit sales about even on last year.

The reality for 2008 was physical sales down 12% and digital sales up 35.60%. I suppose 35.60% increase in one year is "huge", but I was wrong about CD sales being even. Even if you just look at CD albums, they're down 10.57%.

The figures do have some surprises though.

First, unsurprising:

• CD Singles halved again, how much longer can they last?
• Vinyl albums up again: 59.21% units, 97.01% dollar value.
• Cassettes down 65.22% and almost 85% dollar value.
• Digital single sales up 32.97% units, 43% on dollar value.

Surprises:

1. Digital album sales up 261.92% (99.21% dollar value).
2. Ringtones ("master ringtones"?) down 15.56%
3. Music video (DVD/VHS) down 16.20%
4. "Digital other" up 319.70% but only 26.34% dollar value.

1. I always assumed that consumers would reject digital albums, going more for singles, but I'm being proved wrong. It could be price. A digital album is $12-$16 while the physical CD is usually $18-$25. Maybe that's enough of a saving?

Another possibility is the reporting quirk that counts 10 single songs bought at once as a "album". I don't know what ARIA does with it's numbers.

2. I'm surprised ringtones are down, although last year multimedia phones really became the norm and buying MP3s directly either online or via a special phone-based store became more common. This would I expect kill most ringtone sales.

3. When DVD music videos. including DVD singles, became more common I thought they'd be the saviour of the music industry. Wrong again. I have noticed that even heavily discounted DVD music videos just don't seem to be selling.

4. "Digital Other" includes "digital music video, mobile ringback tunes, streams and subscriptions". With unit sales of 97,481,460 (four times that of digital track sales) I think they should have expanded on those numbers. How many digital videos? What counts as a unit when you're looking at subscriptions? I suspect phone based music subscriptions covers most of these sales.