Tag: Music
Video Games Live returns to London, hurrah!
Keep October the 22nd clear in your diaries, London-based people, as Video Games Live is swinging our way once again.
Hosted by co-creators Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall, it’s an amazing night featuring members of the Philharmonia Orchestra playing tunes from game soundtracks such as Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy, Warcraft, and Halo…
Liveblog: Nokia's Go Play music launch in London
Nokia is hosting an event today called Go Play, which looks set to see the debut of the company’s rumoured digital music store, which would be a direct iTunes competitor. Its new N-Gage mobile games platform (as opposed to the old N-Gage games phones) is also set to feature.
I’m liveblogging the event in full: see below for the latest couple of entries, and click on the link below for the full liveblog in chronological order.
Nokia unveils Nokia Music Store, its iTunes rivalling digital music store
As predicted, Nokia announced its digital music store this morning, at its Go Play event in London. The new store is called Nokia Music Store, and it will launch by Christmas in Europe. Nokia claimed that it's the first…
MySpaceMP3 promises music downloads from MySpace profiles… then disappears
If you’ve used MySpace, you’ll be aware that there are millions of bands hosting music on their profiles, which you can listen to using the embedded MySpace player, but only download if they allow you to.
Opinion: Kids use age-old excuse — "everyone's doing it" — to justify media piracy. So what's new?
Andy Merrett writes…
I’m sure it’s the classic excuse for why kids and teenagers do pretty much anything their parents (or indeed, The Law) don’t want them to.
“But everyone else is doing it.”
Passing over the classic teacher retort “Well, if everyone else was jumping off a cliff [auditioning for a part in “Lemmings the Movie, perhaps?], would you” (oops), that seems to be the reasoning for kids who copy and distribute music, videos, or software over the Internet.
It has to be a lot less dangerous – at least physically – than jumping off that metaphorical cliff.
A study from the European Commission — which is seriously official and, therefore, must be true — found that a large number of kids knew that what they were doing was illegal, but still did it because they saw both their peers and their parents doing it.
The EC calls this an “implicit form of authorisation”.
I just call it kids wanting the latest music and being too poor to buy it. It could be laziness. Or the possibility that most albums contain mainly crap music and they want to make a mix tape of decent tracks.
Ditch your drummer and replace him with a robot – that's what Jay Vance did, with Captured!
Quick, someone send this video to the other bandmates in Babyshambles, the apparently nameless ones which could live next door to us and we wouldn’t know the difference! A new musical direction for the band if ever I saw one – if musician Jay Vance can replace his drug-addled bandmates with robots, then surely a ‘bot could replace Pete Doherty? They’ve already got the vacant expressions down pat, after all…
More Nokia rumours: N81 8GB music phone to accompany music download service?
The anticipation is building in the run-up to Nokia’s London event on 29th August, which has already been fingered as the launch of its Will Nokia launch an iTunes-rivalling online music service?“>iTunes-rivalling music download service.
Opinion: Elton, how much digital music will you sell before you try to "shut down the whole Internet"?
Andy Merrett writes…
Despite his rants and raves, I’ve got a fair amount of time for Elton John, but his latest idea is just plain crazy.
According to an interview in The Sun, he’d “shut down the entire Internet for five years” in order to “see what sort of art is produced over that span”. He’s concerned that too many people are sitting at home using the Internet to blog rather than getting stuck in to good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.
That, apparently, has led to the death of long-term artistic vision.
Yours, perhaps, Elton, but c’mon – are you serious?
Opinion: Nokia's iTunes rival has to be more than a me-too music service
Stuart Dredge writes…
So, it seems Nokia is about to take the wrappers off its ‘proper’ music download service, according to the well-sourced article in Fortune Magazine that we wrote about earlier. It’s not even a secret that Nokia’s been planning to launch a rival to iTunes: last August, Nokia bought mobile music firm Loudeye, and said at the time that one reason was its intention to launch “a comprehensive music experience to Nokia device owners during 2007”.
Music is worthless
Gary Cutlack Writes…
Now hang on. I don’t mean the last Muse album was rubbish, so don’t go slagging me off just yet. This column’s actually going to be about how the internet has devalued music, making it a boring, worthless, pointless investment.
