A small selection of songs (mostly inspired by the fact that Weezer have a new album out and ‘Hash Pipe’ was an awesome track for this sort of thing), that probably show the average age of the people in the RouteNote office, but should none the less help you rock the last few hours of your week. Happy head-nodding…
Spotify currently boasts 7 million users, all of them in Europe. Not bad for a product that was only released in October 2008 – this figure does only relate to the number of people on their free service, but their £10 a month premium service is also gaining traffic at a remarkable rate; they had “more than 250,000″ premium users on 23rd Jan ‘10, and are now boasting 320,000 paid subscribers, (as of the 17th March ‘10), and increase of 28% in under 3 months, and an extra £8,400,000 a year into the coffers. Spotify still needs to up their percentages though, according to UMG’s [Universal Music Group's] SVP [Senior Vice President] Rob Wells [and they would know, because they've taken shares in the business], they need to have around 10%-12% of their users as premium subscribers [they're currently at about 5%] to have a viable business in the long term. This might change as more and more advertising dollars go online though – as both Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek and industry analysts Kantar Media are saying:
[Table via TechCrunch's article on the same]. Other interesting facts are that 15% to 18% of the Swedish population use Spotify – and the Swedish music industry’s revenues are up, and that Spotify’s p2p based system is actually using more interwebs than the whole nation of Sweden. There are rumours of a Spotify set-top box and/or home stereo system, a bit like that Sonos thing, but running off your Spotify premium account.
Other signs of Spotify’s ambition came from comments about Apple – Ek described them as having a freemium model like Spotify’s, as everyone (in his opinion) downloads a lot of free stuff and then buys the stuff they really like on iTunes:
“The vast majority of people’s libraries are free from Limewire or trading through friends. And then there’s a small portion of tracks that they’ve bought… I really believe that if music could be legally available on any device that you wanted… I think the music industry would be radically bigger than what it is today”.
He also thinks that Apple will change the way that iTunes works, to allow remote access from anywhere to your iTunes music account on a cloud: “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.”
40 year old demi-billionaire rapper, business man and jet owning loon Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs has set his sights on buying Championship team Crystal Palace, who were recently put into administration [and RN Simon points out lost to his team Reading 1-3 last month] and are flirting with relegation to the UK’s Division 1. The egocentric star recently spent the evening drinking in London nightclub Runway, and insisted on having the DJ play half an hour of his music to announce his arrival, and on having his ‘fragrance’ Sean John sprayed into the room at intervals, although whether this was to dampen the stench of the proles, or to scent-mark the club like a tom-cat is unclear – more in this article from Music-News.com
You’ll need your 3-D specs to properly appreciate this amazing view of the surface of an LP, magnified x390 
by an electron microscope, photographed by Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester, who has also taken pictures of a load of other interesting stuff, including the pits on a CD, ladybird claws, and the surface of a fly’s eye… Makes you appreciate the wonder of the commonplace! Click on the pic to go to Chris’s project page, where you can find the rest of his images, or here to go to an amazing and totally non-music-related zoomable image of an ant under an electron microscope. 1950’s monster movie anyone?
Poor old Myspace – everyone loves to hate them these days. Even before it was assimilated into Newscorp’s Dark Empire, it was beset with a hideous, clunky user interface, a messaging system only slightly less cumbrous than training a carrier pigeon to take your messages, some of the slowest load times on the internet and that’s all without mentioning the millions upon millions of scene-teens that infested the site like so many gnats, their sparkly, buggy, eye-scorching profiles and six-figure friend counts repulsing the mind at every click. What it did have going for it was content. You could click over to a band’s profile and see a neat summary of news and information about them and maybe listen to a song or two. Then came Facebook, and Grooveshark, and Last.FM, and Spotify, and suddenly Myspace was wondering where all the traffic had gone. Then it’s spiritual heart got cut out when Tom got bought out and booted, its got decapitated twice [DeWolfe, Van Natta], and now it looks set for an implosion of hideous proportions, as when all of its management staff and key programmers get their bonus paycheques in June, a lot of them are going to abandon ship.
With an owner that’s rooted in old media, and known for his rapacious treatment of his conquests, is there any hope for Myspace?
For a chap whose music is reknowned for being stripped down, basic, bluesy rock (you know, apart from the orchestral stuff and the bits with marimba in), Jack White is remarkably versatile, or at least, always prepared to try new things. After soft-pedalling the White Stripes, he’s been in two bands that have had massive chart and live success, worked with stars of Country [Loretta Lynn], Folk [Bob Dylan], Pop [Alicia Keys], and Rock [The Rolling Stones], and now he’s teamed up with multi million selling rapper Jay-Z to release a track. He revealed the collab in an interview with GQ:
“I just did a record with Jay-Z,” said White. “We did a song together a few weeks ago. It was incredible. I played him something that I’ve been kicking around for a while and he immediately came out with words for it. It’s unbelievable-sounding.”
Remember Peter Serafinowicz? Yeah you do… that guy who did the voice for Darth Maul… the ****head housemate from Sean of the Dead… looks a bit like a cross between Tony Slattery and Marcus Mumford. Well, after his short lived run with the imaginitively titled ‘The Peter Serafinowicz’ show on the BBC, he has been allowed to run amok with Hot Chip’s new video for their track ‘I Feel Better’, taken from their latest album, ‘One Life Stand’. What can you expect?How about good old INRI [or maybe V'ger] firin’ his lazer and melting some boy bands.
The king of pop’s estate has signed a deal with Sony to release 10 albums of Jackson’s material – as many as he released solo albums while he was alive. The price tag on the deal is truly staggering; £132 million, even without hitting any sales targets. The concert film ‘This Is It’ was also a big earner, grossing £171 million at the box office, and the two between them clear the massive debts that the estate owed, estimated at around £263 million, with a £40 million overspill to be divvied up between the beneficiaries. Quite how MJ managed to run up such a phenomenal overdraft in the first place is another question – obviously owning a personal zoo doesn’t come cheap.
The much-debated Digital Economy Bill was yesterday ratified by the House Of Lords, to squeals of dissaproval from those worst hit by the bill’s contents. The “3 strikes” proposal at the centre of the bill will mean that repeated copyright infringers will have their internet connection disabled or slowed down, but other sections, such as Clause 17, which would have given ministers power to tear up current UK copyright law, have had their range diminished by the Lords.
ISP TalkTalk were among those to protest the ratification of the bill; their Director of Strategy and Regulation, Andrew Heaney said in the Guardian:
“The digital economy bill proposals create a new and unfair duty on broadband customers… It asks them to implement complex and expensive security measures on their connections to make it more difficult for their neighbours and others to use their connection for copyright infringement. The bill reverses the core principles of natural justice by requiring customers to prove their innocence.”
The bill will not pass into UK law until it has been passed by both the House Of Commons [who will doubtless chew it up a bit more before it hits the real world] and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth – whose approval is usually a matter of protocol, but who knows; she might be a big fan of bit torrent sites… Her Navy is bigger than any pirate’s.
TechCrunch reports an offer from Dimensional to buy all outstanding stock of our digital music distribution competitor The Orchard, whose operation currently has offices in 25 countries, and is losing $17.5 million dollars a year. The purchase offer is for $2.05 per share of common stock, valuing the company at $12.8 million, about 28% of their annual revenue of $45 million. Rumours also abound of a merger between The Orchard and eMusic, which would see the vertical value chain completed, from artist to store – seemingly a simple and sensible synergy, but since eMusic is also rumoured to be for sale predicting where the chips will fall may be difficult. Private owners of The Orchard will have a lot of cost cutting to do whatever the case, so look to see a lot of those international offices closed down, and a consolidation of revenue streams and staffing before long.
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