I came across a great artist yesterday and I thought I would drop you their music and see what you thought. The artist is SergioLoops and he is a DJ/Producer from Spain. Take a look at his Myspace or official site.
The track below is called Darien and I really like the style.
Only days after Spotify had a major upgrade which included a lot of social and sharing features, We7 has now announced some new sharing features of their own.
We7 is still yet to make an official announcement, but it seems that users can now connect to their Facebook account to post details while also scrobbling tracks to Last.fm.
Shouty UK based provocateur MIA has made her controversial politica views very clearly known, both in her music and in the media, and her new video for the track ‘Born Free’ is a Swiftian satire (or perhaps that should be Morrisian), seeming to single out America for very strong criticism on foreign policy, but decrying racism more generally.
It’s impossible to disagree with the sentiment – prejudice and racism are universally execrable – but to what extent is the rapper using the ‘shocking’ content of her video to transmit a message, and how much is for the purposes of increasing her own notoriety? Whatever the case, the idea in the video is unoriginal: British comedienne Catherine Tate has already covered this issue in a somewhat less ultraviolent manner – see the vid below.
Brit Award winners Florence and The Machine have released a new video for their track ‘Dog Days Are Over’, which is available for your viewing pleasure on their website. A strange mix of Barbarella and Jane Austen, seasoned with Monty Python animation and Ziggy Stardust makeup. The track is bearing up pretty well under the usual vampiric draining by pop radio stations that a Brit win usually entails – by the way, did anyone ever hear from that Speech Debelle girl again? I guess not all music awards are created equal… shame that talent needs so much money to swim against the tide of marketing.
The new Gorillaz album, plastic beach is out next week, and the video for ‘Stylo’, the first single to be drawn from was posted on YouTube yesterday – featuring an El Camino driving, sunglass toting, Bruce Willis. Bruce proceeds to chase the 3D animated crew across the California desert in a Mad Max style chase ending in true Hollywood style. We can’t embed the video, but you can watch it here, and check out the intro to their Plastic Beach concept below:
We posted a while back about Gil Scott-Heron’s forthcoming album, and it’s proven to be a very interesting piece of work. Utterly heartfelt and honest, you can hear the age and frailty in his voice as he recounts deeply personal experiences. His sense of meter and rhythm are unfaded, and the quality of his writing has lost some of its agression, but none of its fire. Strongly reccomend pouring a long drink and sitting down to listen to this one.
You can listen to the album it right here thanks to the wonders of the internet:
It’s been literally decades since the progenitor of hip-hop released anything, so we’re interested to see how this new work is received.
Classics, 
Nanos, Shuffles, Touches – Apple have made so many different shapes of iPod that you need adaptors for practically every accessory you can buy. Apple likes things to look sleek and neat, so having fiddly bits of plastic to swap over for each of the many iPods they would like you to buy (you couldn’t possibly take your 60GB classic jogging with you!) is not acceptable, and so for all the neat freaks and must-have-it Apple fans, they’re developing a universal dock to accommodate all different shapes and sizes. They’ve filed a patent for, as they phrase it:
A dock for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices, the dock comprising: a housing; a connector coupled to the housing; and a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about the connector, wherein at least a portion of the compressible support layer compresses to the shape of at least a portion of an electronic device that is attached to the connector.
featuring:
A method for supporting a plurality of differently-shaped electronic devices in a dock that includes a compressible support layer positioned at least partially about a connector, the method comprising:attaching an electronic device to the connector of the dock; compressing at least a first portion of the compressible support layer with at least a portion of the bottom of the electronic device when the electronic device is attached to the connector; and supporting at least a portion of a side of the electronic device with at least a second portion of the compressible support layer when the electronic device is attached to the connector.
Which translates to a standard iPod connector in the middle of a squashy or springy surround, which you compress part of by pushing your iPod into, the uncompressed part supporting the sides of the device, perhaps a bit like one of those pin-art pads that were fashionable around when the Lawnmower Man came out. I’m a little unclear as to why you’d need one, my iPod sits on my hat on top of my computer, but then I use a PC and have been known to eat cereal at my desk – hardly the action of a stylish Mac user. Perhaps it makes your music sound better.
A few days ago it was reported that eMusic has come to a deal with Sony to add their catalogue. However, there has been a lot of reaction from this new deal for eMusic, because this is the first major record label eMusic has added. Hypebot has a great preview of the service and then some interesting reactions that have been voiced on the eMusic message boards.
Jellybones: Thank you eMusic. Its been a good run here for me. I love emusic, been here over 5 years. But I can’t afford my tracks to be cut by 2/3 for the same price.
90 downloads will become 35. Sorry, not worth it for the selection. I can go buy a couple albums (maybe only 2 instead of 3) but I can get exactly what I want.
Kez RE: I feel sold out. It seems eMusic is enraptured with the dazzle of their future customer-trolls and have cast aside their loyal member base.
From the UK xtrev: As noted down in the bowels of the ‘Major label…’ thread, the new more expensive price plans have appeared on site today. Including Booster prices. Damn.
Don’t think I’ll be buying many more 50 track boosters at 20.99 UK pounds. That’s a HUGE increase over the previous 14.99. If this is an example of what it means to have major label content here, then frankly they can shove it.
btx: Except for very rare circumstances, I’m not particularly interested in giving my cash to the major labels, that’s why I come here. If it is going to cost me more for their presence [even if I should choose not to download their stuff], that may be the end for me.
d.w.: “Effective Jul 6, 2009, your plan will change to the new eMusic Plus plan which gives you 37 downloads for $14.99 every 30 days.
We’re sorry that we’ve had to retire your current plan, but we’re confident that you’ll find even more music to love among the many new additions to the music catalog. And of course, you can always choose a different plan by visiting the Plan Options page within Your Account.”
My current plan is (grandfathered) 65 tracks per month for $14.99. This means that your Sony deal results in a 100% per track price increase over what I’m paying currently.
I appreciate(?) that you’ll be adding a lot of music from major labels that I could frankly not give a crap about (Alicia Keys — really?), but literally halving the amount of tracks I get on my current plan is a bit much to take. I’ve been a subscriber since 2000, but I am seriously considering canceling at this point.
eMusic is one of our great partners here at RouteNote and I would have rather seen the service stay with the indie industry and not attach themselves to the major labels, but now it seems like there is a new opportunity in the market for another indie service.
Coke first previewed a new album during Midem in January which collaborates members from Gnarls Barkley, Fall Out Boy, Panic At The Disco and Gym Class Heroes. Now Coke has properly debuted tracks in TV ads, while also being heavily promoted online and sold through iTunes.
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
