Spotified!

I've always loved music. It's what kept me going through my teenage years, and for a while there I was spending upwards of £100 a week in Berwick Street on the latest and greatest promos and CDs. Now my addiction has a new master and it's a lot cheaper than £100. I call him Spotify.

There have been LOADS of online music sites that have tried to sate a person's appetite for all things rhythmic, but most of the ones I've used have always had that little thing lacking. The other option has always been wholesale "piracy" which is always a double edged sword as it gets my goat that we have to pay over and over again for the same song (moving from vinyl to CD or buying a best of album).

Anyway, in the last few years I've been using Last.FM as my port of call for online music. Their player allows you to play tag radio. So if you want to listen to 80s music, you enter 80s as a tag, or ambient or synth pop. As long as there's enough material tagged accordingly you'll get a decent radio listen. If there's not, you can tag artists, songs and albums.

Spotify, however allows you to go one step further and listen to albums and singles by bands with seemingly no restrictions, apart from an audio ad every 20 minutes. The service is still in beta, so there's all sorts of things they could add, but what they have in place right now is amazing. The audio quality is pretty decent, the songs start right away and they have a playlist feature that allows you to collaborate with other Spotifiers to create "Now That's What I call a Playlist" (or similar).

Don't get me wrong, I still use Last.FM as it's been storing my music habits since 2003. Spotify even taps into that by allowing you to track or "scrobble" the tracks you listen to on Last.FM.

There's rumour an API will surface when the service is out of beta, and you can be rest assured that it'll explode just like Twitter did. My only concern is how the hell are they making money? I can't imagine one audio ad every 20 minutes is cutting it. They do have a paid service, but the only benefit seems to be cutting out the audio ad.

Since using Spotify, I've seriously begun questioning the need for a CD collection, something I never thought I'd contemplate. It's a decent piece of software that can make you do a complete 180 of your beliefs and perceptions. Good on ya Spotify!

Record company rip offs

I mosied down to Fopp today at lunch to have a gander at all and sundry in the way of books, DVDs and CDs.

I was dismayed and a little horrified to discover a few things. For some reason Warner haven't been content to issue yet ANOTHER Smiths best of in two formats. They've now reissued the original singles on 7" format at £4 each!! For that price, you can pretty much buy the actual albums. Most of the b-side material is on one of the many many compilations (think "The World Won't Listen" or "Louder Than Bombs"). You need to either be stupid, a diehard Smithie or someone who can't handle listening to more than 3 minutes of music at one time to wanna buy these.

The other shocker I saw was yet ANOTHER reissue of Echo & The Bunnymen's "Ocean Rain". I bought the last reissue with four or five bonus tracks. Now they've tacked on a CD recorded live somewhere or other and jacked the price up from around a fiver to £18. That's around £13 for a throw-away live disc people - much like the Joy Division reissues.

The last disc I saw was "iSelect" by David Bowie. This was the CD that was free with the Times in the summer. The price on this throw away collection of tracks EVERYONE has? £19. That's right - £19. It's 12 tracks. You could buy "Best of Bowie" and a couple other albums and still have change from £19.

I had to leave the shop at this point. Why oh why does the music industry STILL think they can get away with these types of practices?

Rudderless or just growing up?

A lot of the things in my life I took for granted or kept me grounded, seem to have evaporated in the last couple of years. It's almost like I've had to redefine who I am. I realise when you become a husband or a father you get redefined anyway, but I'm talking more from a physcological point of view.

One of the many reasons I moved back to the UK all those years ago was to do with music - music was always a massive part of my life - from cataloguing, playing, collecting, etc. The UK was the hub of all things from wonderful used record shops, a vibrant CD singles industry, a close knit collection of amazing venues and all the music I loved was UK based.

Move on 8 years later and I no longer drop £100 every Saturday down Berwick Street on CDs.

It may seem lame and materialistic, but I don't really feel I'm the same person I was, and I guess as you lose one tether or hobby you should replace it with another. I guess it would have been a good time to do something outdoors, like take up cycling, etc. Instead, I seem to have rediscovered my love of videogaming.

Oh well. That, coupled with being a father and a husband means I don't really have much time for hobbies at the moment anyway, so losing one is probably not a bad thing.

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Now playing: Simple Minds - Speed Your Love to Me
via FoxyTunes

Oink RIP

Ok ok, I know the news is about a month old, but I do miss the old piggy. That's not really the point of this post though. Since the demise of the pink palace (or actually, slightly before I think), I'd started getting into the phenomenon known as the mp3blog. This is basically where people offer tunes to download to backup a bit of editorial copy they've written.

So, for instance, if I was waxing poetic about a new remix of Duran Duran's latest single "Falling Down", to punctuate my musings I'd post a link to the mp3. Some of the new versions of music players actually allow you to subscribe to these blogs and scrape the tunes from them (ok, I mean Winamp 5.5).

Now my forte is currently 80s remixes that are harder to find than duck's teeth. Most of the collections around take the popular stuff, sure, but no hits collection will give you 9 mixes of a track, or the b-side or the b-side remix or the promo only remixes. This used to be where Oink excelled and now I'm happy to say that apart from the stuff I'm looking for, I've actually discovered a few new mixes of tracks I didn't know about and am actively searching out new artists when I pop into HMV.

Getting it out there!

I've found this amazing web site called Music Nerds.com where you can write reviews of album with track by track commentaries and they'll actually pay you for you contributions! The amount is not much, but if ads on your page are clicked on, you get more.

Anyway, I've written two so far - one for Weird Al's "UHF" and one for Pet Shop Boys' "Actually". I posted the Weird Al one to Digg and just got an email from Music Nerds that it also appeared on Fark, which is just awesome.

So I'm going to write a few more, submit a few more and hopefully have a fun time talking about the music I love. If I make a few bob in the process, well that's just dandy!

Can't stop the Fopp!

Walking through Covent Garden today, I was over the moon when I discovered Fopp has reopened. Rumours of HMV having difficulty with landlords, etc. have proven to be unfounded and the best record shop in town is back in business.

Can't wait to devote a nice lunch time to perusing the DVDs, books and CDs and coming away with a few winners.

Radiohead's new pay what you want album

I know you need a fan base before you can go it alone, but I'm really enjoying Radiohead's new attitude, now they're free of the shackles of EMI (so would argue it was those shackles that allowed them to get the place they are today).

Their new album In Rainbows is getting set for release either on 2x12" vinyl/2xCD or download. The vinyl/CD box is quite pricey, but comes with LOADS of stuff. The intriguing option though is the download.

As the band are basically label free, they can do what they want and what they want is to offer the album for download on a pay what you want basis. Essentially, you can get the new album, DRM-free for free (if you want to be really mean).

Canadian musician Jane Sibbery did this a couple of years ago and found that given the option of setting your own price, people actually did.

I have to say that 99p/c/whatever a track is a bit steep, and I enjoy picking up the odd CD at Virgin or HMV for £4.99, and would be comfortable paying that. Why CDs were ever £15 is way beyond me.

I'm intruged enough by the new Radiohead proposition that come 10 October, I'll be over their site downloading it and giving them what I deem a proper amount of coin for an album.

Link: RadioheadLP7.com

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Now playing: Depeche Mode - Flexible (Remixed Extended)
via FoxyTunes

Hockey Night In ... England??

When I moved back to the UK in 2000, I wanted to re-embrace my heritage and discard all that was North American. How foolish. Britain in the naughties is more American that probably even Canada now.

Having shed that idea, I decided not to turn my back on several decades of Canadian upbringing and actually relish the things that I held dear to myself over the years. This went from music - like Platinum Blonde, Pursuit of Happiness, Chalk Circle, etc. to Tim Horton's coffee and even hockey. I used to be a mad hockey fan, watching Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday on a small 10" black and white telly in the family room.

It was a colliding of lives when the NHL announced that for the first time ever, two of their teams would play regular season games outside of North America. Where oh where would they go? To a hockey loving, NHL feeding country like Sweden or Germany or even Russia? No. They're playing in England, the country where the word hockey evokes images of girls in skirts and curly sticks. To be more precise, they're playing at what used to be called the Millennium Dome.

The two teams involved are both West Coasters - the LA Kings and the Anaheim Ducks (nee Mighty Ducks). The Ducks just won the Stanley Cup in June, so we get to arguably see the best hockey team in North America.

I'm pretty psyched, a lot more so than I would have been in 2000.

Goes to show time doesn't just heal all wounds, it also makes you grow up.
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Now playing: The Pursuit Of Happiness - I'm An Adult Now
via FoxyTunes

Morosey

Sometimes when the demons aren't taking up all my thoughts, I wonder why we are here and what the point of it all is.

Bear with me.

Everyone know that global warming, climate change and an incredibly dumbfounded apathy on most people's behalf is going to turn this planet into Venus' SLIGHTLY cooler neighbour sooner than later. The fact is I feel my hands are tied and any changes I try to make are a drop in the bucket when colleagues leave PCs on for extended periods, the rubbish bins in parks are full or recyclables and supermarkets just over package like crazy. Still I plod on.

Also entering my consciousness is a worry that the economy is eating itself from the inside. In another generation or so, people will wonder why there was ever a high street or shopping precinct when everything is either downloadable or purchasable off the internet. This came roaring home during a rather limp walk around Virgin Megastore today. There's nothing inspiring there, no "wow! gotta have it". There's used to be. All the time. Now everything's moving to the internet and these shops on life support limp on, blissfully unaware that their time is almost up.

The thing that got in a funky mood today was an article in the The Ecologist magazine about soft drinks and bottled water. Basically, whatever goes in my mouth is going to kill me. From sweeteners like Aspartame (which breaks down into some amazingly carcinogenic ooze) and Sucralose (which is better, just) to the fact that reusing plastic water bottles (you know, recycling the home way) is liable to get you ingesting all sorts of evil chemicals that were present in the making of the plastic bottles.

Here I thought the do not reuse warning was a sly attempt at bottled water people to just get you to buy more bottles. I wonder, as I reuse the same bottle about 4 times a day at work, what the option is. I guess pint glasses.

Stopping to wonder why I get out of bed sometimes, I guess the only solace is that as much as I try to better myself, I am slowly killing myself.

Another Fopp Bites the Dust

It's with sadness and dismay that I read today that Fopp, the cool funky CD, DVD and book retailer has bitten the dust.

I was only shopping their earlier this week and actually have that CD in my CD player.

Having scoured the web for info about the chain's demise (supermarkets and the Internet, as every other CD retailer is claiming), I came across an article that brought a nostalgic tear to my eye.

Once upon a time there was a magical land called Berwick Street, Soho. It was here that a music nerd like myself could spend (waste) and entire day scouring racks of CDs, singles, promos, rarities, 12"ers, etc. in the hopes of finding that elusive release you were after, or better yet - something you didn't know existed.

As the road was a mecca for muso geek, it was lined, not with gold but with used record shops. From Mr CD to Reckless, Sister Ray to Selectadisc - these were names to be admired, names which drew Pavlovian responses from the people they wanted as customers.

Sadly, as with many other music retailers, the buyers have stopped coming, and more importantly, the interesting, the promo and the rare are all drying up as well. Why pay £40 for one exclusive remix or b-side that was only released on a green vinyl 7" in Latvia, when you can pay 79p for the track at iTunes?

The collectability and rarity was part and parcel of spending hours and hours in these treasure troves.

Not only have the physical stores closed, the quality staff, all knowledgeable, many tattooed and even more in need a decent meal or bath will all be gone as well. No longer can you shoot the breeze discussing an elusive 12" single you're after or the amazing gig at the Rainbow or Marquee club that was only available on CD in a limited number, and thus demands the £300 price tag.

There may not be a whole way of live that's become extinct, but it's close. The lifestyle and geeky nature captured so eloquently by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity is a pleasure the kids of today will never now.

It saddens me deeply.