Vinny Vero's Pet Shop Boys Christmas gift

NYC DJ and remixer Vinny Vero was recently commissioned by EMI to do some remixes for Pet Shop Boys' "Beautiful People." As he mentions on his blog, due to time constraints it was never going to happen.

With it looking less and less likely that EMI are going to release his efforts commercially, Mr Vero has decided to post the three mixes he's done on his blog, as a Christmas present for his fans.

These tracks are top quality. In his blog he discusses his idea of Pet Shop Boys remixes that stand the test of time, the ones that retain a majority of the song. The single and club mixes he's created thus stick to that ethos. The third mix is a mash up between "Beautiful people" and A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray". Aptly titled "Beautiful voodoo" it works remarkably well.

On top of the Christmas present download, Vero's also written a passionate entry about Pet Shop Boys in general, touching on his work with them in the 90s, remixing the US only single "To Step Aside", and touching on the incredibly inept way EMI marketed the Boys' latest album "Yes," including the decision to not release "Did you see me coming?" as a summer single, and have third single "Beautiful people" be German only.

It's a great post if you're looking for top quality free music, and it's a great post if you're looking for a good read.

iTunes friendly download (30MB)
FLAC (110MB)

Lily Allen proves she has no clue

Lily Allen via last.fm

The argument against P2P and file sharing of music is the people who need to get paid don't... or something akin to that (any further into this line of thinking and it's an artist vs record label discussion instead).

Lily Allen, the RIAA's poster girl for non-illegal downloading activities has done a complete howler. According to the NME, it's not piracy or illegal downloads she actually cares about - it's someone placing a value on her music.

In what has to be one of the biggest gaffs in recent history, Allen has gone on record saying, "If someone comes up with a burnt copy of my CD and offers it to you for £4 I haven't a problem with that as long as the person buying it places some kind of value on my music."

So don't pirate songs for free, charge your mates for the privilege and Lily will back you all the way. I wondered at the outset of her crusade whether she actually "got it" and this really just confirms she didn't.

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30 second royalties

The latest entry in the "most asinine way the music industry can prove it's not got a clue" was unveiled today.

Complaining that royalties from downloads aren't high enough the usual group of idiotic Americans are now pushing for a royalty payment on 30 second samples. Yeah, the same 30 second samples that might actually get you to want to part with money - i.e. the marketing tool musicians have to sway your interest from the sea of other music out there.

So, ASCAP, BMI, etc. want to charge royalties on these, and the likes of Amazon and iTunes are just going to close up the sample shop and go home. All of a sudden, the long tail buyers who aren't swayed are still going to stay unswayed and more music doesn't get purchased.... or a person turns to bittorrent or other p2p to be able to sample the wares before they buy.

Hell, in the old world model the buying of music was based around sampling the goods. All the old record shops had listening booths where you could listen before you buy. When CDs became the norm, you'd routinely find banks of CD players down your local HMV where you could skim through a disc before buying it.

Did royalties ever get paid on these? Of course not, as the purchase you made would negate that.

As Mashable rightly point out, this is nothing more than sheer greed!

As they point out, "since when did it become smart business to spend time and money actively preventing your potential customers from finding out if they want to give you money or not? It’s unfortunate that in the shift to a digital media ecosystem licensing agencies are getting squeezed, but some of these tactics reek of desperation."

At least it's not the record labels proving they're idiots this time, merely the royalty collecting agencies trying to justify their existence in a world of ever slimming royalty payments.

It's all a moot point anyway, as the smaller acts - the ones these agencies are there to protect - are usually the first to get shafted anyway. This way you sample some Madonna track before you buy and she gets a double payday. Nice for the small guy.

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New Order's recycled labour of love

Image via Wikipedia

New Order's manager Rob Gretton (RIP) had a wonderful idea a couple of years back - release all the Factory-era new order singles on CD in a whopping great boxset. Call it "Recycle" and it'll be awesome. The powers that be instead released a boxset called "Retro" and it was just ok (especially if you got the limited edition 5th disc!)

Fast forward a few years and Warner re-issue the New Order Factory-era albums on CD with bonus discs full of "great stuff". However, a few fans in the know, audio technology-wise, realised how badly Warner screwed up yet another batch of releases by their favourite band and decided to take action.

Thus, the fan-led Recycle project was born. Basically it's an mp3 blog featuring the original idea of Gretton's "Recycle" project - the 22 Factory released singles in all their glory. There's also a Flickr photostream of sleeves you can print off and fold correctly to give you the entire experience that Warner has denied you.

Popping over to the blog, you get a real understanding of how much blood, sweat, and tears can go into a project if you really really care - something no record label does much of these days any more. Reading the liner notes for each of the releases on the blog, you get an understanding that this isn't just a case of copying tracks from a 12" or CD, the guys putting this project together are METICULOUS to a fault. The latest "hiccup" related to not being able to find the correct mix of Bizarre Love Triangle. This put the whole project on hold while VINYL copies flung themselves around the world, ready to be ripped, cleaned up and edited by the guys putting the project together.

If you're a New Order fan, you owe it to yourself to check out what these guys are doing. It's awesome when you find people who know what they're doing and put it to good use.

My hat is off to them.

Apple's cocktail to resurrect the album

Simon Le Bon via last.fm

Having decimated the concept of the album with a la carte song downloads, Apple has now apparently seen the error of its ways (i.e. 79p versus £7.99 in revenue) and is teaming up with the remaining four "majors" to take back the music.

Dubbed "Project Cocktail" (yeah, this sounds as hip as the Tom Cruise flick of the same name), the idea is "It's all about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music," according to a report in the FT.

Right now with some releases on iTunes, if you buy the whole album, you get a digital booklet (read PDF) that includes cover art and liner notes. Project Cocktail will apparently be an evolution of this., with the "killer app" being that you'll be able to launch the songs from within the booklet. Whether or not you need iTunes running is to be seen. I doubt Apple would miss this trick though.

Wired take the discussion further ruminating on the future of the album cover. When I interviewed Simon LeBon in 1997 we discussed the decimation of the album cover from that decade's perspective - shrinking a 12" square to 5" was tantamount to blasphemy, with LeBon lamenting, "I like record shops. I actually like walking away with a lump of plastic under your arm." With the evolution to digital it's got even worse - from 5" to mere pixels, depending on playback device.

My concern for Project Cocktail is that most of today's music isn't really worth listening to, thanks mainly to a record industry in perpetual free fall, choosing music that fits the "now" instead of something that's got longevity. It's a rarity if most acts actually get to the point of releasing an album, let along the number of releases that warrant the greatest hits hallmark.

Having said that, most of today's music fans (read: the young) have no real concept of an "album" anyway, and this could just be seen as yet another attempt for the labels to try and maintain the "living in the past" stance that's served them so well up until this point.

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Price war and access vs ownership

Image by Lee Bennett via Flickr

With the announcement of variable pricing on iTunes, TechDigest ran a wonderful article on the whole idea of ownership in the new millenia.

The basic argument stems from the arrival of Spotify. If you have millions of tracks at your fingertips with instant access, why bother downloading - legally or illegally - mp3s?

The argument of mp3 vs CD has been raging for the last few years, with legal downloads quickly making some major headway, but it's interesting to read an article about the abandoning of purchase altogether.

I, for one, seem to spent more time than not on Spotify. True, they're missing a lot of material (mainly indie stuff and IDM stuff) and they're quite slow to fix bugs (there's a sequencing issue in a Tina Turner album I raised weeks ago that's unresolved), but it's still the best piece of software I've downloaded in ages and the best music listening experience I've had since I discovered burning MP3s to CD.

Will I continue to buy CDs? Occasionally. Will I continue to download illegal MP3s? Probably not. Will I continue to question access over ownership? Definitely.

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

How much is too much?

There's a couple of articles making the rounds that question a number of things to do with music downloads. Firstly, there's the price issue.

An article from Always Online contends that basically to stop people downloading illegal music, legal downloads should cost around $1 each. It does seem ludicrously low and risks devaluing music, but the author makes some interesting arguments that are worth reading and debating.

The second article is from Wired. It's all about the Long Tail and is incredibly interesting. Basically put, the Long Tail is the end of the retail chain that still has fans, but isn't cost effective enough for bricks and mortar shops to stock. For instance, a CD needs to sell 100,000 units for Wal-Mart to even think about stocking it. What about a CD that sells 90,000 copies then? The Internet and the Long Tail, argues the article, go together like PB and J.

Like the former article, the Wired article harkened back to the question of music download price and comes up with a slightly more reasonable (in the minds of the labels) amount.

Do yo'delf a favour and have a good read today.

Yankee doodle download

This week's Online section in the Guardian has an article about the P2P study that was recently conducted in the States.

The outcome? That P2P and downloading has no effect on CD sales. Of course, the RIAA are up in arms about corrupt data, and all that... basically anything to legitimise suing their bread and butter out of every penny they earn from McDonald's, an action deemed "one of the stupidest things in the world to do".

Interestingly, it seems the recording industry still won't acknowledge the ACTUAL reason for loss of sales - increase in spending on DVDs (according to the article, spending on DVDs is up $500m compared to the $200m downturn on CD spend... no corrolation there, then) and video games, coupled with a decrease in quality output. People are sick to death of manu-pop and there's only so many times you can buy the same remastered album.