Music Ally

Ralph Watson isn’t just Music Ally’s go-to guy for everything technical. He’s also a musician in his own right, who’s getting his hands mucky with all the DIY technologies we talk about on the blog and in the report. Having just revamped his website and launched an iPhone app, we got him to tell us in his own words about what he’s doing.

“I was doing music around 2004, and managed to amass a very small but loyal following, mainly in America. This was through forums and emailing MP3s, stuff like that. I was known as Geist then and released a couple of singles. I’m now coming back under my real name, and have been dripfeeding my new song out, ‘Londinium’. I posted it on one forum that I used to frequent all those years ago and the response has been amazing, so it’s started from there.

There’s a video for my first song done by a guy I met, Richard Peretti, who’s a short film-maker. He did it in his bedroom on a PC running Premiere and After Effects; he knows the programs inside out, so people who see it think it’s worth fifty grand. There’s a bloody big robot at the end! A process indicative of how I’ve approached everything.

(more…)

There’s a news event that we’re embargoed from writing about until 12.01am – which we’re sticking to. But in yet another sign of how Twitter is blasting big holes through traditional journalistic practices (like, well, embargoes), lots of people have been tweeting about a launch party they’re attending tonight (for example here, here and here.

Meanwhile, the event director of the launch party is also tweeting about what’s being launched, and MySpace’s own web developer is tweeting people to “check it out and let us know what you think!”.

You can’t ban people from tweeting at launch parties, but it is striking that Twitter users are effectively getting the scoop on the launch of a major new music service hours before journalists’ stories will go live.

Anyway, check back here at 12.01, eh?

Island Def Jam Records exec James Roppo was arrested this weekend, for the crime of NOT tweeting. Well, sort of. It all sprang from a shopping mall appearance by teenpop singer Justin Bieber, which turned hairy after the 3,000-strong crowd got a little too pushy, and the ropes holding them back collapsed.

Roppo’s crime? “We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message,” says a local police spokesperson. “By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

The exec has been charged with misdemeanours including endangering the welfare of children and obstructing governmental administration.

Britney Spears’ 3.7 million Twitter followers might have worried she’d gone off the deep end again yesterday. “I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!” she tweeted, quickly followed by “I hope that the new world order will arrive as soon as possible!”.

But no, Britney hasn’t turned to a religion even more esoteric than Kabbalah or Scientology – her Twitter account was hacked. It’s since been rectified – the latest tweet apologises for any offence caused.

We’d imagine Britney’s management will have some hard questions for Twitter to answer though, as this is the second time the account has been hacked – earlier this year, surprised fans were informed by tweet that Britney possessed a vagina with teeth.

US teen star Miley Cyrus has followed in the footsteps of Trent Reznor – and that’s not a sentence we ever thought we’d write. No, she hasn’t covered Nine Inch Nails’ Closer: she’s deleted her Twitter account.

Understandably, her 1.1 million followers are up in arms, and several online campaigns are already being mounted to get the Hannah Montana star micro-blogging again. However, Miley hasn’t abandoned Twitter for the same reasons as Reznor, who blamed ‘haters’ when he logged off in June this year.

Instead, Cyrus says her boyfriend is responsible for her decision. “FYI Liam doesn”t have a Twitter and he wants me to delete mine with good reason”. That’s young love for you…

Take a look at this site. Remind you of anything? Yep, us too.

Birddi is the work of a 19-year-old Argentinian coder, who decided that not many Spanish speakers were using Twitter, so decided to create his own version. Except he’s gone a bit too far and copied the exact homepage, design and logo from Twitter.

“Birddi is simple – people are impatient and want to connect simply and quickly with friends,” says creator Martin De Lío. We suspect that Twitter’s lawyers will be connecting simply and quickly with him in the coming days to suggest a different look and feel. Although as Aliado Digital points out, Russian social network Vkontakte did a similar thing to Facebook, and has done pretty well out of it.

We’re paraphrasing heavily there, in a doubtless irresponsible media manner. Scottish academic Dr Tracy Alloway has revealed research into the effect on your “working memory” of using social media.

Apparently, Facebook is good for it, improving your ability to temporarily store and manipulate information in your short-term memory. Twitter is not so good though: its endless stream of information that doesn’t need to be processed reduces your attention span.

Which reminds us… Oh no, sorry, it’s gone. What were we talking about again?

Forget the rumours about Spotify and Facebook for a minute: how about Spotify and Twitter? No, there’s no merger on the cards, but the streaming music service is introducing a Twitter sharing feature in the new version of its desktop client.

Right-clicking on any song, then selecting the Share to option will now offer a choice of publishing details about that track to Twitter, as well as Delicious and Facebook. Presumably in the form of a Spotify link so your followers/friends can open it up.

It’s a simple feature, but this kind of sharing is increasingly popular for any service looking to build word-of-mouth buzz, so it’s good to see it in there. Plenty of our Twitter contacts are already manually tweeting links to Spotify songs, so this just makes the process a bit quicker.

A new feature on Facebook allows people (e.g. artists) updating their Fan Pages to automatically update their Twitter feed with the same information.

“Many people have asked us to make Facebook and Twitter work better together for those times when they want to share their content as widely as possible,” says the blog post announcing the change. However, we think bands should think hard before simply pumping out the same status updates on every social network on which they have a presence.

Meanwhile, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company will introduce a new commercial service later this year, aimed at brands – and potentially bands. Rather than try to charge anyone using Twitter for professional purposes, it will be more about adding extra services that people may pay for.

“We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know – ”How am I doing on Twitter?” he explains. In other news, Twitter has been rebuffed in its efforts to trademark the term ”tweet”. A good thing, especially if you’re a budgie.

Music Tweets is an iPhone and iPod touch app that allows users to get the latest updates from their favourite musicians and bands.

The application features a directory of artists representing genres from pop to classical, although while the list is supposedly continuously updated, it must be said that the number of even remotely famous artists who are dedicated Twitter users is fairly small.

Our verdict? Perfect for superfans…and stalkers. If only this could integrate with the location-sensing feature on your favourite musician’’s iPhone, Music Tweets could be the perfect means to track where Jon Secada or Paula Abdul is at any one time.