Category: Digital Music
eBay Nutcase of the Week: DJ/The Shamen man Mr C flogging his entire record collection for £75k
DJ Mr C, AKA the bleach-haired proto-Eminem out of early-90s dancey/ravey band The Shamen, is flogging his entire remaining record collection – with a starting price of £75,000.
Here’s what your £75k gets you, along with an interesting look into the personal life of Mr C himself…
Ion gear turns you into a podcast king, DJ star, and converts your old records too
Ion has announced three pieces of kit that could help turn you into a broadcast hit, as well as bringing your old record collection firmly into the 21st century.
The Ion UCAST lets you record professional podcasts with a high-quality microphone and stand, headphones, USB cable, and Windows/OS X software.
The kit costs £59.99, with a subscription to Alesis Podcast that lets you host your podcast and have it listed on iTunes and Podcast Alley…
Last.fm mashup maps every artist ever
This beautiful cloud represents the entirety of music. Every single artist tracked by Last.fm is marked as a point on the map, and ‘similar’ artists are connected by a grey line. The size of each point reflects the popularity of the artist, and different colours represent different genres.
It’s the creation of Budapest University PhD candidate Nepusz Tamas, who hammered Last.FM’s servers for over a week with a request every five seconds. Unfortunately, the only way to interact with the map is to pinpoint your favourite bands, and you can’t zoom in, but it’s still a beautiful representation of the world’s listening habits.
Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with Last.fm (via Listening Post)
Related posts: Last.fm gets a makeover – and a few new features | Viacom wins right to sift through YouTube user data, all four terabytes of it
Musebin looking to Twitter-ise the world of music reviews
Newly launched Musebin seems to fancy itself as a Twitter rival, targeting the music-blogging scene with its angle of one-line music reviews.
As well as the idea of a limited 140-word verbal workspace, Musebin rips-off another popular internet thing – voting. The community can give every post a Yay or Nay, ensuring that spam and nonsense is swiftly voted…
Final of Intel Studio fast approaching
For the past six months or so, Intel, in conjunction with record label KIDS, has been running an unsigned bands competition. The site, at www.intel.co.uk/studio, allows bands to upload their songs, and people to rate the music that bands have already uploaded.
The top bands each month have been be invited to play live in Camden at the (lovely but expensive for drinks) Proud Galleries. The winning band each month is entered into the final, which takes place at Proud Galleries on the 3rd December. The prize is a record deal with KIDS.
Pure launches its EVOKE Mio DAB & FM radio, a coloured-in update of the EVOKE-1S
The Pure EVOKE Mio comes in six “striking” colours – chilli (red?), chocolate (brown?), moss (green?), nicotine (yellow?), candy (pink?) and midnight (black?) – with the leather-esque front of each unit colour-coded so it’s as much fun to look at as listen to. Almost.
One of those colours is fictional, by the way. Can you guess which? That’s today’s FUN QUIZ! The Mio is rechargeable, apparently…
Bang & Olufsen unveil shiny new digital media player
Mr Bang and Mr Olufsen have come up with a new high-quality audio device that you probably can’t afford. The BeoSound 5 is a fancy looking digital music player comes with an on-board 500GB HDD so you can listen to your tunes at lossless quality on your no-doubt expensive Bang & Olufsen speakers.
NOISE GATE: 6 Tenets for a New Music Industry, Part Two
Last week, I discussed the first of my six things that I consider to be crucial to a successful music company in the digital age – being able to freely share music, and passion for music between people without let or hindrance, as my passport would say. This week, we’re down to more business-focused principles:
- Music must be sharable – word of mouth is more important than ever
- Revenue must come from multiple sources – if one bit of the industry becomes obsolete, it shouldn’t sink the whole ship
- New technologies are to be welcomed and understood, not feared and litigated against
- A&R can be crowdsourced, but remember the long tail
- “Added value” is key – give people a reason not to pirate things – carrots, not sticks
- Your artists are your most important spokespeople
Click over the jump for my thoughts on the second one, and stay tuned over the next few weeks for the finishing chapters.
iPod headphones a possible KISS OF DEATH for users with pacemakers
Dr William Maisel, a cardiologist at the Boston-based Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, caused heart-murmurs across the internet this weekend thanks to his claim that music player headphones could break pacemakers – and stop defibrillators restarting dodgy hearts.
It’s all because of the magnets in headphones, which could, possibly, if held very close to them, make pacemakers and other “embedded” medical devices stop working. After testing eight models of headphones on 60 patients with pacemakers, the doctor found that nearly a quarter of patients’ heart devices suffered some sort of interference…
RUMOUR: iTunes to add DRM-free Sony music
SonyBMG, soon to be Sony Music Entertainment Inc, is one of the four major music labels, and features bands and artists like the Ting Tings, AC/DC and Dido. If rumours are correct, then music from those bands and many others will soon be available on the iTunes store DRM-free.
Currently, EMI are the only major label to offer MP3 files on iTunes Plus – Apple’s name for their DRM-free, slightly higher quality, offering that costs 25% more per track than DRMed files. If Sony’s music is added, it will be a plus for Apple, but they still lag far far behind services like 7digital, who are 100% DRM-free, and remain my a la carte MP3 download provider of choice.
While we’re at it, do you know what the most downloaded catalogue song ever on iTunes is? Soundscan, over the weekend, determined that it’s the epic “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey. Classic. I’ve embedded a video of them playing it live just after the jump. Power Ballads first thing on a Monday morning are just what everyone needs.
