Here are a couple of pictures taken this afternoon at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse. It was six years ago today that Jem Finer’s Longplayer composition started playing continuously, and it’s planned to keep playing until 31 December 02999, when it will start to repeat from the beginning. I wrote more about Longplayer after my […]
Month: December 2005
Great gigs in London for a tenner or less
This is normally a quiet time of year for gigs in London (as for on-topic blog posts) but one of the highlights of the first week in January is the Winter Sprinter series of gigs organised by Track and Field at the Water Rats Theatre (which claims to be the venue of Bob Dylan’s first […]
Research on playlists and sharing as means of recommending music
The transition to online music distribution is occurring at the same time that consumers have an exploding number of sources of information about music, from established media sources to Internet-connected friends and strangers. As a result, getting the word out about new material, new bands or back catalogs is made more difficult for music marketers […]
MusicStrands: playlist sharing and music discovery
Last week MusicStrands launched a major upgrade that extends its scope by adding new ways to tag, discuss, and discover music — see the overview of the new features. This is moving in the direction of the MySpace music community — technically I think it’s a step ahead of MySpace, but clearly lacks the latter’s […]
Resonance FM — five more years
Congratulations to Resonance FM on being awarded a five-year licence to continue its broadcasts. Resonance is a ‘radio art’ station catering for minority interests (I like Peter Cusack’s environmental recordings series and my friend Eric Namour’s [no.signal] shows of ambient, improv and electronica music, for example), and it started broadcasting three and half years ago. […]
Musical Battleground — article in The Spectator
My article under the title Musical Battleground is in the arts section of the Christmas issue of The Spectator, out today. It covers the remixing potential of digital media, using the BBC Creative Archive and The Grey Album as examples. Here’s an excerpt: But are the products of this ‘remix culture’ any good? Though technology […]
E-learning 2.0, whatever that is
What is E-learning 2.0? Well first of all it’s a rhetorical manoeuvre by e-learning suppliers and consultants to distance themselves from the failures of the first wave of e-learning. Secondly it appears to be the bastard neologism offspring of e-learning and Web 2.0 technologies. I only came across the term yesterday when I did some […]
Will Internet music radio have no competition?
“When given a choice between listening to music over the Internet or traditional radio stations, 54% prefer the Internet while 30% prefer radio,” according to this research from Bridge Ratings. Is this a simple trade-off between the two, or, if it is that simple in the US, might it be different elsewhere? I was reading […]
Why birds, and neanderthals, sing
The ‘music instinct’ is far more ancient than previously suspected, and neanderthals and birds may have been jamming before they were talking. But why do humans and birds converge on the same acoustic and aesthetic choices and why do babies respond to musical sound? … quoted from the blurb for the Play on: a journey […]