Thursday 24 February 2005

End of an Era

News comes today that Andrew Collins, that happy slap-stick reason to listen to BBC's digital radio 6Music is being shunted out of his wonderful drivetime slot.

His replacement, Steve Lamacq has been shunted from pillar to post since the demise of his Radio 1 evening program The Evening Sequence. Collins, whose profile is getting bigger than ever with a TV column in venerable magazine Word will be hosting a new show on Sundays from 2-5pm as well as taking over the 6Music Chart Show.

Both massive changes are set to happen in early April, so listen to the last month of Collins' afternoon show while you can, and hold back the tears - he not leaving us yet!

Link: Collins' 6Music Show

Tuesday 8 February 2005

Crap filtered into charts

So, this week sees the American Billboard singles chart being infiltrated by downloads for the first time. The Hot 100, up until this point, was comprised of 80% airplay and 20% sales. Of course, hardly any of the Hot 100 was available commercially, so most of it was airplay.

For those who don't listen to the radio, the Hot 100 became less and less relevant to their everyday lives, myself included (having not lived near an American station in 10 years).

People who want low quality, DRM infected files for 99c a shot can now have their say in how the Hot 100 is comprised. Of course, the details haven't been made all that clear.

I'm just wondering, for instance, that if I buy 15,000 copies of "Wild Boys" by Duran Duran whether they can have it finally go to Number One or is there some sort of release stipulation about what can appear in the charts.

Btw, if it IS possible... let's do it!

Link: Hot 50

With the BBC reporting misleading claims, it would seem the CD single is even more doomed than ever. They're stating that "The last week of December 2004 saw download sales of 312,000 compared with 282,000 physical singles, according to the British Phonographic Industry."

Now when you consider that the average single has between 2 and 3 tracks, and a few have 4 or 5, those figured become a little less download-favourable, with download singles actually tallying around 156,000 2-trackers, or 104,000 3-trackers actually bought.

You can always find yourself lucky as well and buy a CD single that'll be worth a fortune in a few years time (just look for The Bravery's first single on Ebay. Wow! You won't find downloads going for $50 anytime soon).

Link: BBC News