Everyday looping

I have a copy of this app, and I’d love to be able to get it to make sounds like this. I need to practise. And watch some more basic tutorials.

What’s the difference between Spotify and last.fm?

Practical differences:

• last.fm limits the number of times you can listen to a song for free
• Spotify inserts adverts between songs
• last.fm generates a radio station based on an artist or a tag; so you won’t just get songs from the artist you named, you’ll also get songs from other artists. Spotify lets you play specific artists only, or just specific albums
• last.fm automatically “scrobbles” your music and lets you re-find things you’ve played before
• last.fm puts a lot of focus on the social elements, on sharing what you’ve scrobbled, on scrobbling in groups. It’s just as much social network as it is music service
• Spotify does the reverse, it puts the focus on music. There are social aspects to it, but you have to hunt them down (they’re not obvious to start with)

Right now, I prefer Spotify, but that’s because I usually prefer to listen to a specific album. That’s partly down to my age – I grew up listening to albums and still prefer either that, or listening to my entire music collection on shuffle mode when I want some variety. I’m using Spotify to listen to many of the albums that I feel I should have heard by now, but never have. In recent days that means a lot of 60s and 70s rock by Cream, The Byrds and so on. But the week before that, I was on a world music and hiphop kick and listened to a lot of 90s rap.

Another good thing about Spotify: I can listen to the albums I used to own on LP or cassette, but either gave away, sold, lost, or scratched to the point where they were no longer playable.

The advertising is bearable. It’s only one ad every five or six songs. That’s much less than commercial radio, and I can cope with it without feeling the need to throw the laptop through the window.

gilest.muxtape

I finally got round to making a Muxtape of my own: gilest.muxtape.com. Listen, and enjoy!

Is this band dead?

Like any diligent father, I take my parental responsibilities seriously. I must teach my son to read, to cross the road safely, to behave politely at the dining table, and to appreciate pop music.

I started on that last one early, as early as I could. When he was just a few weeks old, we discovered that Bob Marley was a good way to calm him down. As years went by, I made sure he was introduced to plenty of music, and introduced to it often.

And he never took much notice, until one day when The Beatles were blaring out from the stereo and he asked me: “Who is singing?”

I explained about The Beatles. I explained that there were four of them, that they wrote many wonderful songs, and that sadly two of them had since died.

Barney was listening well that day, because ever since then, he always asks: “Is this band dead?”

Blondie? No, they’re still alive.

Madness? No, still alive.

Erasure? Still churning out the bleepy stuff.

Kirsty MacColl? Ah, well, no. Sadly, she’s dead.

“Why?” he asks as he nibbles another teatime food face.

Well, because she was swimming in the sea and she got hit by a boat. It was very sad.

He digests this information stoically, with a blink, and says:

“It was probably a big barge, cos if a big barge hit you while you were swimming it would push you under the water and you’d drown.”

Although I’m a little alarmed that my son has such a good grasp of the concept of drowning at such a young age, I nod reflectively and change the subject.

Whistle while you rate

Like a lot of people, I often stick iTunes on random and let it play anything it likes (unless I have to concentrate on some work, in which case only silence will do). I also like to rate songs, so that on the rare occasions when I’m devising playlists or transferring things to an iPod, I can ensure my favourites are easy to find.

The problem is that I don’t want to keep flipping in and out of iTunes to edit the rating. Pre-Leopard I used Quicksilver’s iTunes plugins to change ratings (just invoke Quicksilver and typing “rating 3″ or “rating 5″). But post-Leopard I don’t run Quicksilver anymore, relying happily on Spotlight instead. So I’ve been on the lookout for a little app that would bring back simple access to the ratings.

There are dozens of iTunes controller apps, Docklings and Menu Bar widgets, but most of them are overkill for my needs. All I want to do is see, and change, a song’s rating.

Here’s the solution: Star, a Menu Bar app that does what you’d expect it to. Changing ratings is a simple swipe-click away and I’m happy with that.

Tape of the week: In No Sense? Nonsense!, by Art Of Noise

I think I bought this one in the Folkestone branch of Our Price. I say I think, because it would either have been Our Price or Hummingbird Records, or possibly downstairs in Debenhams in the days when Debenhams still had a music department. But I think it was Our Price.

I don’t know why I wanted to buy this album, but I remember being very pleased that I did. As you’d expect from the Art of Noise, it’s not exactly at the “popular” end of the pop music slider. There was a single released, Dragnet, but it didn’t do very well in the chart and frankly is one of the weakest tracks.

Almost every other track, though, tingles your ears with sounds and effects. The rattling of keys, the beauty of a choir, a series of doors being closed. One song will hammer rhythm down your throat, the next is an adventure in quasi-ambient experimentation. There are moments of astonishing delight, and silly schoolboy humour (especially the use of sampled fart noises on one of the closing tracks). In bits, it’s daft. But listen to the whole thing, in one go: it drips genius.

I remember playing it to my dad in his car. He hated it, especially the song with the fart noises. He also said I’d been ripped off, because the whole album was repeated on both sides of the cassette. I pointed out that it wasn’t a rip-off; you still got the same 45-odd minutes of music that purchasers of the vinyl or CD version got. It just saved you the bother of turning the tape over. Dad wasn’t convinced, and tutted his way through to the end.

In CRAM

Issue 6 of CRAM magazine is out now, and it includes a couple of things I wrote: Breakfast with the White Stripes and What Radiohead gets.

Elsewhere in the pages of this free PDF mag you’ll find articles about high quality beer, healthy breakfast cereals, and an amusing and informative infographic about coffee. Go grab it.

Tape of the week: In Gorbachev we Trust, by The Shamen

So many of my musical discoveries over the years came from listening to the radio, and this, The Shamen’s finest moment, was one of them.

I heard “Jesus Loves Amerika” on the radio and loved it. Hard, brutal rhythms, but a vocal track you could hum along to as you cycled through the bitter Cambridgeshire winter. House music you could dance to, but you could also listen to. Techno that challenged the mind as well as the body. I wanted it.

This was The Shamen’s transition from guitar rock to dance music, and you could feel the tension in every track. The drum tracks pulsated while the guitars riffed and cranked in the background. It was completely different to everything else around at the time. I played my cassette copy of “In Gorbachev we trust” over and over again, but miraculously it survived and is still playable today. (Good job too, because finding a new CD copy of the album is difficult.)

(Someone’s got some electric copies, though.)

I got a free copy of The Shamen’s follow-up album, “En-Tact”, because our college magazine had been sent it to review, and I was the lucky journalist-wannabe told to write the review. I was disappointed, though – it didn’t seem to have the energy or innovation of “Gorbachev”. Subsequent releases, and the transformation (via Mr C) into cheeky synth-pop chart act, didn’t encourage me to buy any more Shamen albums. I did get to spend some time bragging about how “I was into them when they were cool.” People hate people who brag like that.

But “In Gorbachev we trust” remains an unsung classic of the 80s; too clever and too politically-charged for the pop charts, but nevertheless a perfect example of pop music’s endless mutation into new sounds. Raptweare indeed, we shine tonight.

What Radiohead gets

By letting people choose how much they wish to pay for their new album, Radiohead are sacrificing a certain amount of guaranteed income. But to offset that loss, the band gathers a great deal of extremely useful data.

For a start, everyone who buys “In Rainbows” (either the download or the diskbox) has to register as a user. Registration requires you to enter your personal details, including email address and mobile phone number. Purchasing requires you to enter your credit or debit card details.

And everyone who chooses the digital download gets to choose their price. From Radiohead’s point of view, everyone who signs up with their contact and credit card details spells out clearly exactly how keen a fan they are.

Radiohead ends up with a database of fans, neatly divided up by the amount of money they were willing to shell out, up front, for the album.

The purchasers of the diskbox are the premium customers. Now that Radiohead knows who they are, they can be plied with special offers, invites to gigs, special releases – with the band fairly sure that most of the people in this category will pay whatever they’re asked to pay, within reason. These are the ultimate fans, willing to spend their money to ensure the music continues to be made. They must be looked after carefully, and they will be.

Below them come many strata of fans; those who spent about a tenner; those who spent the same, even though they are in the USA and would be effectively charged double thanks to exchange rates; those who paid just a few pounds; those who got away with as little as they could.

Every single category can be exploited in different ways. Some will be lured into spending more; others will be dangled cheap baubles of content, perhaps asked to pay 20p for a snippet of studio out-take (which of course the premium fans will have been given, for free, a week previously via SMS invitation to download).

This is Customer Relationship Management. Radiohead is a premium brand, striking out on its own and with this initial release, simultaneously testing the waters and building the most valuable database it can.

And the most striking thing of all?

So far, no-one has heard a note of any of the songs.

UPDATE: Some people took the above comments as cynical and critical of Radiohead. That’s not my intented aim at all. I applaud what they’ve done and think it’s a brilliant move. The record labels as we know them are doomed; I’m just thinking aloud about what the music marketplace will look like once they’re gone.

Tapes options

I have 80-ish albums on cassette, purchased in my younger days when my only means of playing music was on a hugely expensive dual-tape stereo system that my mum bought me as a birthday present.

I’m very fond of most of these albums, which is why 80-ish of them have lurked in drawers or cupboards ever since. They take up a lot of space, though, which bugs me.

My options:

1. Continue to use the tapes.
   • Pros: cheap
   • Cons: uses up space for storing tapes and the huge tape deck I play them on
2. Replace all the tapes with CDs
   • Pros: better sound quality
   • Cons: expensive, still uses up space
3. Buy a USB tape-to-MP3 converter gadget from Firebox for 100 squids
   • Pros: might just work
   • Cons: time consuming, might not work, MP3 meh