A few weeks ago, I advocated the creation of ‘imaginary’ celebrity playlists, which could become an interesting form of musical essay on both the celebrity and the acts in his/her playlist. I’m working on one for Neil Young, which so far may include tracks from The Shadows, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding’s cover of Satisfaction, Bobby […]
Month: April 2005
Downloading from the radio
Last week’s MusicWeek had a article about UBC Media preparing to offer listeners to some of its digital (DAB) radio stations the opportunity to download the songs they broadcast. I can’t find the exact story on the web, but here’s a feature on similar developments in radio, which details the lower data bandwidth available with […]
Time and Timelessness: Laurie Anderson, Doris Lessing, Jem Finer
Alongside her performances at the Barbican next month, Laurie Anderson is participating in a public conversation with Doris Lessing on the theme of Time and Timelessness (26 May, at the Royal Institution). The blurb for the event proffers: Since the year 2000, the lighthouse on Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s Docklands has been home to […]
BBC Online Music Library tender
The BBC has a Request for Information from potential suppliers of an Online Music Library. These suppliers are invited to provide details, within the next month, of the type of music content they can supply, the metadata that goes with it, the available audio formats, and any agreements with music industry publishers and licensing bodies. […]
Creative Archive launches licence; where’s the pilot?
The ‘Creative Archive Licence Group’ is launched today at creativearchive.bbc.co.uk. While the identity politics of URLs seem to have the BBC still in the lead on this development, the lack of BBC branding suggests they are not going to have exclusive ‘ownership’ of it. The British Film Institute, Channel 4 and the Open University are […]
How many CDs are there in the world? Gracenote and metadata
At the end of last year, I tentatively made the prediction that “the catalogue of music recordings readily available in the northern hemisphere will continue to increase by 50% every five years until 02025 when it may start to plateau or saturate”. But I can’t test this prediction until I have some reliable measure of […]
Radio David Byrne and Celebrity Playlists
Following the thread of my last-but-one posting, about sharing music in an office, it’s interesting to see how David Byrne introduces his Radio DavidByrne.com: A friend who relocated to California from NY said she missed hearing all the odd variety of music that was played around the office here. “I miss hearing what you all […]
Happy Birthday Frukt!
From today’s Five Eight daily email: It’s our birthday today. We are four. To celebrate, we ask that your gift to us is that you let any colleagues/friends/contacts or clients know about us. It isn’t always easy being the little guy, so please know that your support of FRUKT/Five Eight is very much appreciated. They’re […]
Researching how communities share music via iTunes
This research paper on patterns of sharing iTunes music in an office, presented at the CHI (originally Computer-Human Interaction) conference yesterday, is the other side of the coin from the personal-stereo research I reviewed in my last posting. Where that research was about using music to reclaim public space as private space, this paper is […]
Researching use of personal stereos: Sounding out the City
A year ago, I said that, in order to anticipate models of listening to music in the future, “We need long term and longitudinal ethnographic studies that chart how [music listening] habits change in response to changes in format and economics”. In 02000, Michael Bull, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, published a […]