Music Ally

Lily Allen certainly knows how to start an online dust-up. If it’s not Perez Hilton, it’s the Featured Artists Coalition, who she tore into in a recent blog post. And now Lily has managed to stoke up the ire of geeks around the world by launching a dedicated anti-piracy blog.

She doesn’t understand the issues! She’s misquoting what FAC said about piracy! She’s pirated someone else’s blog post! Why does she think she has the right to pontificate about file-sharing being wrong?! And so on, often spiced up with an unhealthy dash of misogyny concerning her intelligence, looks and/or talent. How dare a 24-year-old woman tell people what to do with their internets?

Actually, though, it’s quite simple. Lily Allen makes music. She’s got every right to sound off about file-sharing, just like other artists (Matt Bellamy, Elton John, Ed O’Brien, 50 Cent or whoever). She’s part of this whole debate, as are the fans, the record labels, the ISPs, the politicians and the torrent tracker types.

(more…)

UK broadcaster the BBC has announced that Lady GaGa’s set was the most popular on its Glastonbury Festival website, attracting 1.3 million requests from users. Which at least means those 67 costume changes didn’t go unrewarded.

Lily Allen was second with 762,000 requests, followed by Blur with 538,000. During last year’s festival, the top artist Jay-Z only got 119,000 requests, so the Beeb has stepped things up this time round.

The website peaked at 229,000 daily unique users on 27 June this year, but the real hit was on digital TV, where more than 6.1 million people used red-button functionality to watch Glasto on-demand. The festival has become a key annual interactive event for the BBC, as high-profile as Wimbledon.

It seems Amazon UK’s £0.29 price tag on a slew of MP3 albums today was a cock-up rather than a special offer. The company has swiftly changed their prices back, indicating that the reduced pricing was a mistake.

Earlier today, we discovered that Lily Allen’s latest album was selling for 29p on the site, and further investigation revealed the latest platters by Coldplay, Metallica, Jason Mraz and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were selling at the same price point, as well as a 24-track Led Zeppelin remasters album.

We bought several, so they were working (see screenshot above – click on it for a larger version). But checking back on Amazon now, and the prices have been changed. Lily Allen is back to £7.99, Coldplay is £9.29, Led Zeppelin is £8.98, and so on.

Amazon has brought its aggressive promotional pricing to its UK MP3 Store, judging by the way it’s selling the latest Lily Allen album for £0.29 today.

The store has been offering super-cheap one-day discounts on big albums for some time in the US, using its Twitter feed to publicise them. 550,000 people follow that feed, making it a powerful promotional mechanism.

Having paid full whack for the album from Amazon when it came out, we’re a tad cheesed off, but that’s what you get for being eager, we guess. Ah well. UPDATE: also on sale at the £0.29 price point are albums from Kings of Leon, MGMT, Metallica and, best of all, a 24-track remastered Led Zeppelin best-of.

The Official Charts Company has revealed its first Official Mobile Downloads Chart, based on sales of full-track downloads to mobile phones in the UK. And it’s good news for Lily Allen, whose The Fear single is sitting proudly at top spot in the first weekly chart.

Eminem is second with Crack A Bottle, Lady GaGa is third with Just Dance, and the Top Ten is rounded out by tracks from The Prodigy, Pussycat Dolls, Kings of Leon, Alesha Dixon, U2, Beyonce and Kid Cudi Vs Crookers.

OCC says the chart has launched to coincide with its recently-unveiled iPhone application. “This new chart reflects the changing ways in which consumers are accessing a consuming music and underlines the Official Charts Company’s commitment to offering data on all types of music consumption,” says MD Martin Talbot.

EMI is ramping up the campaign for the new Lily Allen album by releasing an “album mini mix MP3″ through its website. Naturally, fans are being asked for their contact details and to sign up to receive updates on Lily’s doings.

It follows the earlier launch of an online game based on Lily, which we played once and then never ever felt the urge to return to again. We like these MP3 mixes though – Little Boots did a free DJ set one earlier in the year, and we half-remember that Kylie did a similar thing too before her last album came out.

The digital campaign is well and truly kicking in for Lily Allen’s new album, due out in February. Her label, Parlophone, has launched an online game called Escape The Fear.

It sees an animated Lily character negotiating her way through ten platform levels avoiding paparazzi, bankers, alcohol and “rabid handbag dogs”. The game uses Lily’s new game as its soundtrack, and was produced by Matmi.

We’re very much enjoying it – and her cover of Britney Spears’ Womanizer is growing on us too, since you ask. It’s certainly better than the original.

You may have heard Lily Allen’s cover of Womanizer by Britney Spears – it’s doing the internet rounds this week. If you haven’t, check the YouTube embed above, which has the song in full.

But here’s the weird thing: Allen says she’s in big trouble with her label EMI, because the track wasn’t meant to leak. Here’s what she said:

“It wasn’t my intention for it to have whizzed round the world like it has. Mark Ronson asked me for something no one had heard to play on his radio show, and ‘Womanizer’ was the only song I had as an attachment on my Blackberry, and I couldn’t get home to send him anything else in time. I had asked him to talk all over it so it wouldn’t get ripped, but he didn’t,” explained the singer. “Thanks Mark – for getting me in serious trouble with my record company.”

Which is fair enough. Except that YouTube embed above? It’s been uploaded to YouTube by EMI subsidiary Parlophone. It’s official, complete with links to pre-order Lily’s new album. So rather than being in serious trouble with her record company, Allen is merely in a serious viral marketing campaign with them, while claiming on her blog that she’s not.

Strange…