According to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”
The Ikee in question is a worm that affects a jail-broken phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.
“The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,” wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.
“This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”
Bad things. Far, far worse than any Rick Astley song!
Currently the worm has only been found in Australia, where the hacker, Ashley Towns, who wrote the program lives. The 21-year-old said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.
The blending of Rick Astley into Towns’ security awareness project is downright genius; what says be careful with your hand-held device better than Rick Astley?
Australian blogger Andrew McMillen recently hosted a panel on the digital music industry in Perth, on which sat Simon Wheeler – director of digital at Beggar’s Group, an amalgamation of some big indie labels here in the UK [they're on the same road as my old primary school ]. Mr. Wheeler has some pretty progressive and pragmatic attitudes to online promotion, and some forward thinking methods that it might be useful for artists to replicate in their own spheres.
“…we know that fans are passionate about an artist, and they’re very excited about a new album. So to be able to give them something to satiate that demand somewhat has been quite effective. There’s also the purpose of giving people a piece of music to ‘try before they buy’, if you like. We get a lot of love and a lot of coverage in the blog world, because I think our artists are very suited to that world.
We don’t give music blogs free reign, because you’d find that each blog would post a different track from the album, and so ten minutes after you’d publicised the album, people could just go and download the whole album (laughs).
So by making available one chosen, one focus track from a new album – much as you take a track to radio – there’s kind of an unwritten dialogue between us and the bloggers. We don’t tell them to post it, we don’t say they can’t post it; if people post the whole album, we’ll definitely say they can’t do that, and we’ll get it taken down. But they understand that if we post an mp3 to one of our label sites or blogs, then they won’t get any grief from us at all [if they repost it to their blog].
This really helps focus the campaign around a lead track, much as you do when taking a track to radio. There’s no new science here; this is just what the record industry has been doing for decades. We’re just applying that to the digital age.”
Making a few tracks available for streaming or download online is a great hook for pulling people into an album or gig ticket purchase – that’s one of the major reasons myspace was such a success, bands need to connect with fans these days. Blink 182′s Tom Delonge is of the same opinion: [via Hypebot, via Techdirt, via The Guitar Center]
The self-titled debut album from rock supergroup Them Crooked Vultures is being streamed online – all 13 tracks.
The new album doesn’t actually arrive in stores until early next week, but its nice of Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones to provide everyone with this awesome preview.
Click below to listen to the new Them Crooked Vultures album! +Continue Reading
The first-ever Billboard Japan Music Awards will be held January 31 in Tokyo and broadcast live on Next Fuji, a cable channel of Fuji Television.
The inaugural event will honor the top artists in Japan for 2009 based on the Billboard Japan charts and votes from music fans. The charts include the Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart, which ranks songs based on retail and airplay data. The chart was launched by Japan-based Hanshin Contents Link (HCL) and Billboard in 2008.
The Billboard Japan Music Awards and the Billboard Japan charts are part of a master licensing agreement that was entered into by Billboard publisher, Nielsen Business Media and HCL in 2006.
In the aftermath of the MORI poll about music piracy, consumer advice site Moneysupermarket have commissioned their own piece of research, conducted by Opinium research in an online poll of 2,319 British adults between Friday 5th June and Tuesday 9th June 2009. The full resutls aren’t available online, but here’s MS’s take on the results:
Napster and LimeWire have been havens for illegal downloaders in the past, but the introduction of Spotify*, a free music download site, is curbing the habits of illegal downloaders.
* 30 per cent of under twenties admit to illegal downloading
* Spotify encourages two in three Brits to curb their illegal downloading habits
Almost two thirds (62 per cent) of those who admit to illegally downloading, say using Spotify has encouraged them to reduce the amount they download illegally or kick the habit altogether.
The survey** from the leading price comparison website moneysupermarket.com on downloading and streaming also showed that one in eight Brits (12 per cent) admit to download illegally in the past six months.
Illegal downloading is worst amongst men (16 per cent compared to 9 per cent of women) and the younger generation, with 30 per cent of those under 20 admitting to illegal downloading.
James Parker, broadband manager at moneysupermarket.com, said: “The number of people looking for unlimited broadband packages is rising, which is an indicator that downloading and streaming are becoming a bigger part of online behavior.
“Downloading music used to be mainly associated with illegal sites such as the old Napster, but now over a quarter (27 per cent) of people say they go to a digital source as first port of call; usually iTunes or Amazon.
“With Spotify joining the ranks of legal music sites, illegal downloading seems set to become much less popular. With the new Spotify iPhone application and the new ‘Monkey’ tariff from Orange, which allows users to stream music from the orange site as part of the tariff, it will be interesting to see how these new mobile music services take-off. Streaming music for free or for a reasonable fee whilst on the move could spell the end for illegal downloading and could even send the CD the way of the mini-disc and cassette tape.”
In an adjunct to my vociferous defence of Twitter and it’s web 2.0 cousins in that John Taylor post, I thought readers might be interested in a Twitter contact list that Bruce Houghton of Hypebot (a music industry news site) is putting together. Keep yourself informed, and pester decision makers in the industry to help you out. You can do this even more easily by downloading Tweetdeck, a little program that lets you find out who’s talking about certain search terms (your band’s name for instance), and different groups of people that you’re following.
“One Life Stand” will be the band’s 4th full studio album for release on the 8th of February : they made the announcement on their Facebook page today, and will be streaming a new track shortly. Check up with them ‘soon’ for a tracklisting.
‘One Life Stand’ is a full-blooded leap into the unknown, an album that is awash with Hot Chip’s trademark creative bravery and a searing emotional intensity from first track to last. Indeed, ‘One Life Stand’ is by far and away Hot Chip’s most complete body of work to date, an album that is more cohesive and more soulful than 2007’s ambidextrous ‘Made In The Dark’ and more ambitious than 2005’s Mercury nominated and Grammy award nominated ’The Warning’, ‘One Life Stand’ is an album that establishes Hot Chip as one of the most relevant and creative bands of our era.
Harmonix who are the makers of The Beatles: Rock Band and of course the original Rock Band are soon be releasing the new Rock Band 3. So far there has been a lot of talk that users are slowly getting a little bit bored of the games, because they cant see how Harmonix can beat The Beatles Rock Band game.
Dhani Harrison, son of Beatles‘ George Harrison has let a little secret slip out as most musicians do during interviews, whether it’s on purpose or not.
According to an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Harrison (who also helped develop The Beatles: Rock Band) shared the fact that Rock Band 3 may be more than just a game to scratch the surface of the brain. Rock Band 3 may actually teach non-musicians how to play real instruments!
We’ve all played Guitar Hero before. They’re just a bunch of buttons you have to click in synchronization with what you see on the screen. Rock Band 3 will somehow go beyond that since Harrison states:
“I’m workin on [...] making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game. [...] Give me a couple years, it’s going to happen.”
This may also explain why Scott Guthrie told IGN that the Rock Band empire was in for some drastic changes:
“We aren’t standing still – we will keep moving into new areas and look at new technologies that our platform holder partners are also developing, such as Project Natal from Microsoft.”
Don’t expect a new tracklist to be your final news for Rock Band 3. If they actually pull this off, it might take a lot longer and be a lot harder.
In a glorious tautology, glitzy stadium rock heroes Europe are currently blowing minds and moistening female undergarments in a tour around their home continent. Unfortunately my rock-radar didn’t inform me of their London gig in time, but you might be able to catch them at one of the dates listed on their Myspace page… Superb review of their London performance here at Music News dot Com – I’ve not been to the Garage, but I hope it’s suitably grimy and rock-infested.
If you’re not sure who Europe are (shame on you) here’s a video of their big track ‘The Final Countdown’
YouScrobble is an interesting little offering that allows you to build playlists, watch video and download tracks, using the Last.FM and YouTube catalogues. I’m not wholly convinced that they asked permission to use these resources in the building of their site, but it does make for a convenient music search and discovery engine… Of course, there’s no reason you couldn’t flick between Last.FM and YouTube building playlists for yourself, but this is a quick and nice way of doing it in one place and of sharing it with friends and/or potential fans.
From their “about” page:
Enjoy YouScrobble and discover a new experience of searching, listening and downloading music of any kind and genre! Sign up for free and get to know all great features of YouScrobble.
Discover the biggest music library on the web.
Listen to and download your favourite music for free.
Get personal statistics of all listened and downloaded tracks.
Share your music favours with your family and friends.
Stay up to date with the latest changes and improvements.
Buy premium tracks and download faster and even if your daily download limit is reached! Check out the YouScrobble Premium membership soon.
Of course – that premium fee will be going to pay the licensing fees on the tracks that are listened to and downloaded, right YouScrobble?
According to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”
]. Mr. Wheeler has some pretty progressive and pragmatic attitudes to online promotion, and some forward thinking methods that it might be useful for artists to replicate in their own spheres.
