Roxy Reuniting

I guess the news of a new Roxy Music reunion tour a couple of years was sorta big news, apart from the fact that it was a skeleton Roxy crew. Only Phil, Andy and Bryan had returned to the fold, accompanied by non-Roxy musicians.
Word out now is that not only are the full-on Roxy Music touring this summer, but they're also going into the studio. And when they say reunion, they mean it literally.
Founding member Brian Eno, who left after the band's second album is due to rejoin with the band almost 32 years after leaving. His involvement will apparently include touring and working on the band's new album, their first since 1982's brilliant "Avalon".
As Eno has divided the last three decades creating ambient music and producing albums for the likes of David Bowie and U2 (the latter with partner in crime, Canadian Daniel Lanois) it'll be interesting what influence his attendence will have on the band's new output.

Technology comes to the masses

Running on Wired's news site is a great article detailing how one of the internet's newest technologies is being used to promote new music.

For the South By South West (SXSE) music conference in Austin, Texas, organisers have managed to secure free tracks from around 750 bands to offer to the public. These tracks, in mp3 format, have been zipped up into one big 2.6GB BitTorrent file to be shared on P2P networks.

This allows massive downloads without the organisers having to run up massive bandwidth charges. Excellent.

The event also has several key applications that allow attendees to navigate the conference via their iPod.

Now before a showcase gig, you can see where the show will be as well as listen to a sample of the band to see if it's worth bothering in the first place.

It'll be interesting to see what the organisers for June's NXNE in Toronto have up their sleeves.

Comment: You have to had it to conferences like this and the indie labels who seem to be embracing new technologies and ideas, instead of trying to sue them out existence.

The promotion these bands will get is invaluable, but if the RIAA had their way, BitTorrent, MP3 and P2P in general would be as dead as Johnny Carson. Forward thinking? Not really.

Link: SXSE
Link: Wired news story

Pricing oddities and stuff

Upon hearing the news that Woolie's online shop has dropped the price of their downloads to 67p, I thought I'd go over to their website and take a looksie.

All in all, everything seems to be in order. Although, they purport to sell "singles" for 67p. What they actually mean is single tracks. You're not getting videos and b-sides and remixes for your sub-pound purchase.

Most albums are also priced at the more favourable £6.80, which - for a 10 track album - actually works out to 68p per tracks, but we won't bitch about a penny.

Funnily enough, checking out the new Lemon Jelly album, the site is still charging £9.35 for the downloadable version, even though you can buy each track seperately for 67p... and if you do, I'd suggest leaving off the first intro track, it's only 24 seconds and doesn't really do anything... that way too, you get the album for £6.03, saving a whopping £3.32 off the lazy "click one button to order the whole download album" price.

Link: Lemon Jelly and the price discrepancy