We’ve gotten used to artists debuting new albums on sites like Imeem a week or so before their official release, in online listening parties. But Kanye West has taken the idea a step further, by releasing a new remix compilation on the site.
It’s called Sky High, and is a mixture of old Kanye songs and newer tracks, all remixed by DJ Benzi and Plain Pat (we’ve not made those names up). The album will also be streaming on hip-hop blogs later this week, apparently.
It’s an interesting promotional tactic - remix albums used to come out around the end of a campaign around an artist’s album, but for West it’s serving as a warm-up for his new platter. If we still call them platters. Anyway, it’s an interesting move - get it here.
We’ve been banging on about iPhone applications for a while ago, and in last week’s issue of the Music Ally Report, we covered some of the ways iPhone apps are coming onto the music industry’s radar. But which apps are we actually using on our iPhones, hmm?
We thought we should tell you. So, here’s a dozen of the best iPhone music apps, complete with links to buy them.
1. Guitar Rock Tour (£4.99 - right)
A music game that pretty much swipes the Guitar Hero formula and runs off with it cackling. You have to tap the frets at the bottom of the screen as notes travel down a guitar, with an array of proper songs including Beat It, Smoke On The Water, Heart-Shaped Box and - yes! - Rock You Like A Hurricane. Get it
Tickets are going fast for next week’s Mobile Music In The Dock event, which we’re holding at the Deloitte Auditorium in London on Tuesday 25 November.
Here’s some more info on the plan for the night. Mobile music is charged with promising more than it can actually deliver, with Jeremy Silver from Sibelius Software making the case for the prosecution, and Ralph Simon from the Mobile Entertainment Forum making the case for the defence.
There’s a stellar line-up of expert witnesses too, including:
Paul Kenny, Global Head of Music, Vodafone
Tim Grimsditch, Global Product Marketing, Nokia Music
Mark Mulligan, Senior Analyst, Jupiter Research
Scott Cohen, Founder, The Orchard
James Bates, Media Director, Deloitte
Who’s the jury? Everyone in the audience, that’s who! We’re looking forward to a great night full of debate and discussion, before a final verdict. With booze and nibbles, obviously. It all kicks off at 6pm next Tuesday, and tickets are £60, or £40 if you’re a Music Ally subscriber. For more details and to buy tickets, click here.
US media giant CBS has quietly launched something called Play.it - a music streaming service that lets users create their own personalised stations, listen to artist-themed stations, or tap into 340 existing channels from CBS and AOL Radio.
It’s got a nifty interface for creating your own stations, where you drag and drop artists, songs, stations, albums or genres into a bulls-eye, and depending how close they are to the centre, that affects your station.
It draws on a catalogue of around 1.3 million songs. It should provide competition for the likes of Last.fm, and… hang on! CBS paid $280 million for Last.fm last year, yet Play.it sounds like a direct competitor. Wasn’t the company planning a big marketing push for Last.fm in North America? It all seems a bit rum.
Three senior EMI execs, including CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti, have given an in-depth interview to Billboard talking about the label’s strategy. Among the interesting points are their comments about selling DRM-free songs on iTunes, and whether it boosted online piracy.
“We didn’t see the needle move at all,” says worldwide president of digital Douglas Merrill, referring to the amount of online piracy. “But what we did see is consumers loved the product.”
But perhaps most intriguing is the label’s intention to place more of a focus on artist-fan relationships. “What you’ll see is less of a focus on sales of individual tracks or the conceptual equivalent of little round shiny disks, and more about helping artists learn things about their fan group that they can’t directly see.” There’s plenty more in the article.
Polydor subsidiary Fascination Records released the official Britannia High soundtrack album today in the UK. For those of you who aren’t Brits (and for those of you who are but are mercifully unaware), the show is Blighty’s attempt to ‘do a High School Musical’, complete with songs written by the likes of Gary Barlow, Guy Chambers and Mark Owen.
Anyway, it’s the digital promotion stuff we’re interested in. On each of the four Saturdays leading up to today’s album release, a different digital single from the album was made available as a free download on the official Britannia High website, as well as through iTunes and Bebo.
Polydor parent Universal Music Group is also involved with the show’s website, with an online radio station presented by the two school DJs, and featuring music from various UMG artists. The news follows UMG’s involvement with Bebo on a separate project, online TV show The Secret World of Sam King.
We happened upon ComesWithMusic.org the other day, browsing through incoming links to the Music Ally blog. As the name suggests, it’s a blog entirely devoted to Nokia’s new Comes With Music initiative.
Created using the Blogger.com service, it looks like the work of a keen fan - although conspiracy theorists might suggest that’s how it’s meant to look. Check the lengthy strapline at the top of the blog:
NOKIA COMES WITH MUSIC IS A REVOLUTIONARY NEW WAY TO BUY, DISCOVER AND CONSUME MUSIC. IT BREAKS DOWN ALL THE BARRIERS TO CONSUMPTION AND LEADS YOU TO MUSIC PARADISE. IN ADDITION TO REVEALING THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT COMES WITH MUSIC, WE WILL AIM TO SHARE HINTS, TIPS, AND EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT OPTIMISING YOUR EXPERIENCE OF USING THE SERVICE.
We find it hard to believe Nokia would be trying to do this as a supposedly independent thing - a Whois lookup indicates that the domain name ComesWithMusic.org is registered to UK firm Falcon Internet Limited. Whoever’s behind it, it takes the prize for the most niche digital music blog yet.
Our Datz Music Lounge box was delivered this morning, just too late to be reviewed in our feature on the new UK-based unlimited MP3 service in yesterday’s Music Ally Report. So we’re writing about it on here instead.
To quickly recap, it’s not your average online music subscription service for several reasons. Firstly, it’s sold as a boxed product, including a USB dongle that has to be plugged into your PC for the service to work.
It costs £100, and lets you download as many MP3 tracks from participating labels as you want for a year - one of the first examples of an all-you-can-eat service with participation from major labels (EMI and Warner Music Group so far).
Below, we’re going to walk you through our first experience with the service - and then we’ll follow up with a more considered verdict next week. You can click on the images to make them larger.
At the recent Resonancia Colombia conference in Bogota, co-organised by Music Ally and the British Council, REM manager Bertis Downs gave a keynote interview, questioned by our own Paul Brindley. Watch the video above to see what he had to say on digital music and emerging business models. “One of the first things I’ll say is nobody knows anything…”
We’ve gotten used to artists debuting new albums on sites like Imeem a week or so before their official release, in online listening parties. But Kanye West has taken the idea a step further, by releasing a new remix compilation on the site.
