In case you read this elsewhere...

I think this comment about Domino Records is worth a quick promote above the line.

Domino Records becomes Domino Radio

Yes, that's Domino Records plotting a week of FM-based radio excitement in London and online.

And you can have a bit of it. Oh, yes:

Then listen up now everybody because Domino Radio invites you all to submit a fine hour of music to us. A great playlist gets an hour slot on Domino Radio. It's that simple.

Of course, if no listener coughs up an hour, they've got some mates in as fallbacks:

Featuring shows by Animal Collective, Hot Chip, The Kills, Franz Ferdinand, No Pain In Pop, Bobby Gillespie, Optimo, Dirty Projectors, Frieze Arts, Robert Wyatt and many others.

It should be an interesting week. Kick off is June 6th.

eMusic waves goodbye to several indies

eMusic's unique selling point used to be that it offered a download home to the less corporate end of the label high street - a good first stopping-off point for what used to be known as indie.

Not any more. For even as eMusic adds a quarter of a million Universal tracks to its database, it's telling subscribers to grab indie stuff while they can:

As we prepare for the largest catalog addition ever to eMusic in the US - 250,000 new tracks! - and make it possible for similar additions in the UK, Europe and Canada, we want to be up front with our loyal indie fans and provide advance notice that music from Domino, Merge and the Beggars Group family of labels will no longer be available on eMusic as of Nov. 18, 2010 pending further discussion. Many of you who have downloaded or music or saved for later from these labels will be receiving an email shortly with these same details.

This is as heartbreaking to us as it is to you. Please know we have done everything we could to keep them from leaving. Forging deals with our label partners can be pretty complex. As many of you know, labels have come and gone over the years, and we hope to see these labels back soon. You can add your voice here to help us bring them back. For more info, see our FAQs.

In the meantime, we encourage you to get the music you love from these labels at a great price before November 18 - music from artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, The National, Vampire Weekend, The xx, She & Him, Caribou, Titus Andronicus, and Deerhunter, to name a few.

We understand that you may not have enough downloads before your next refresh date to get everything you want. In that case, we invite you to get a booster pack.

Yes, you did read that right - eMusic are boldly trying to make extra sales off the back of dumping a lot of its core content. That shows they have chutzpah. Even if they don't have 4AD any more.

But does losing the sort of stuff that defined eMusic mean that it has somehow lost it's soul?

Do you know, eMusic are glad we asked that:

For those of you wondering if this means eMusic is losing its focus, rest assured, we're still the place you go to find the records that hover under the radar, records that represent clear artistic vision - and the records that we find inspiring on both major and indie labels, regardless of how many albums were sold. Let us prove it to you!

It's like listening to a paunchy fortysomething pretending to still be the guy he was in college - "nothing's changed, I still support social change; it's just sometimes I have to deny protesters' applications to march in Parliament Square from time to time."

Guns N Roses sued in copyright case

Reuters is reporting the launch of a lawsuit by two indie labels against Guns N Roses:

Two independent record labels sued U.S. rock band Guns N' Roses for $1 million, claiming the group used portions of two songs by a German musician on their last album "Chinese Democracy."

Guns N' Roses and Universal Music Group's Interscope-Geffen A&M label were sued by British label Independiente and the U.S. arm of Domino Recording Company, who own the licensing rights to songs by German electronic musician Ulrich Schnauss.

We'd normally mumble about this sort of thing, but - just in abstract - if there was a million dollars you could give to either Domino and Independiente or to Axl Rose, there's no question who would do more good with the money.

Rumours that Rose intends to counter-sue Schnauss for taking too long to produce the work for him to plagiarise cannot be confirmed at time of publishing.

Final Fantasy sign to Domino

More good news: Final Fantasy - near enough to an Arcade Fire spin-off as to make not much difference for our purposes here - have signed to Domino. Owen Pallett is promising an album early next year as a result.