Lily Allen planned 'rubbish remix' for iTunes
Lily Allen declared in a recent radio interview that she planned to give Apple a ‘rubbish remix’ for iTunes, because they allegedly demanded exclusive content from her. Yeah, yeah, how would we tell…
“They won’t advertise your album unless you give them extra material,” she grumbled, saying that she’d release a better version for free on her MySpace page.
Elsewhere, some music executives are concerned that iTunes’ expansion into other media, such as film and TV, is leaving fewer spaces for promoting artists on the front page and via the “New Music Tuesdays” newsletter.
“The way MTV used to be the place where you had to have a video playing as one of the key legs of the stool, iTunes is now one of the key legs of the stool,” says Chris Douridas, an influential deejay at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, Calif., and a former consultant to iTunes.
Exclusive material greatly increases the likelihood that iTunes will turn up its promotion machine. In some cases, that involves getting artists such as Sting or Willie Nelson to record interviews and performances that Apple sells as a package. The company recently struck up a relationship with the Las Vegas casino the Palms to record live concerts by artists such as John Legend, for which it pays production costs.
Though iTunes is immensely popular, and influential, there are still many notable omissions from the catalogue, including The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Radiohead.
Perhaps Allen had spent too much time recording the Simlish version of “Smile” that she had nothing left for Apple.
