Here’s another Web-2.0-style tool for aggregating information and links. It’s the idea of Seth Godin, who has made his name from a series of books on innovative approaches to marketing in the age of the web. He sees this service, called Squidoo as a means for others to make their names in their areas of […]
Curatorial
A cure for messy music metadata?
Gracenote has added over 650,000 CDs to its database in the seven and a half months since I last checked. That’s quite a lot, and unfortunately it seems likely that there a significant number of duplicate records among them — cases where the same CD appears with the title or artist name written in a […]
How niche radio combines broadcast and on-demand formats
A whole radio station dedicated exclusively to one artist? That’s what US satellite radio broadcaster Sirius is offering from next week in the shape of E Street Radio, promising “round-the-clock Springsteen music” — at least until the end of next January. As well as the standard album tracks, there will be musical exclusives and interviews. […]
Sharing book recommendations
Based on my reading this year, I’ve added some more book recommendations to the Stuff We Like web site. This community site shares the tag-based ‘folksonomy‘ approach of flickr and del.icio.us. It also shares the links to online retailers of some music playlisting services like Soundflavor or UpTo11.net — though Stuff We Like is not-for-profit […]
Record labels make their own documentaries
Bob Dylan album sales have registered a tenfold increase in the wake of the Dylan documentary produced by PBS and the BBC. With windfalls like that, it’s not surprising that major and independent record labels are getting into the business of making their own documentaries and features. Mute is among the early UK labels starting […]
In-depth music documentary sources
While I was working through all the pages on this site I listened to the last six or seven episodes of The Story of Atlantic on the BBC Radio Player. They were broadcast on 6 Music Plays It Again, and you can still catch some episodes if you’re quick. This was a 14-hour series made […]
An American ballad collection: Playlist #3
A few weeks ago, I started reading the collection of essays The Rose and the Briar, which re-imagines America through the lens of its ballads — mostly from the twentieth century, though the origins of some go back much further (and to parts of the British Isles). As soon as I started reading, I realised […]
Licensing of BBC music audio and video
For those of us trying to read the tea leaves concerning how different parts of the enormous BBC archive may be licensed in the future, this Guardian article on a Universal-BBC deal makes interesting reading. “Anything ever recorded or filmed by the BBC by Universal artists since the 1920s to the present day could be […]
Incense and Playlist #2
An anecdote from yesterday evening’s Twisted Folk gig. Arriving a few minutes early, and alone, I went straight to my seat rather than hang around in the bar. There were only four or five people in the stalls when Devendra Banhart jumped down off the stage, and criss-crossed the rows of seats carrying a smoking […]
Playlist #1: Neil Young celebrity playlist
I’d lay a large bet that Neil Young doesn’t have an iPod. He’s been waging a war on digital compression since the early days of CDs, and is on record as saying that MP3s are even worse than CDs: “MP3 is a dog; the quality sucks. It’s all compressed and the data compression — it’s […]