Pink and pushing

What really caught our eye in the report of Pink turning up to sing for the people filming a T-Mobile advert in Trafalgar Square was the intro:

PINK thrilled thousands of volunteers filming a commercial in London on Thursday (30Apr09) when she made a surprise visit to sing for the crowd.
More than 13,000 members of the public converged in the British capital's Trafalgar Square to participate in a mass singalong for phone company T-Mobile's new TV ad.

"Volunteers"? For a television advert for a mobile phone company?

"Unpaid extras", surely? You volunteer for a charity; if you turn up to appear for nothing in an advert for a company with a £115million annual advertising budget that would make you a schmuck, rather than a volunteer, surely?

The Android makes music

Amongst the frilly giggling of tech-headed types as Google's first phone, the G1, gets announced, there's a an announcement from Amazon that - for punters in the US, at least - the Android phone will have Amazon's DRM-free mp3 store "preloaded" into it. (In other words, there's a shortcut on the phone desktop which will simplify the purchase process.)

The announcement is careful to stress that the store is preloaded as part of the phone, not as part of the operating system; it'd surely be in Google's interests to stitch this as a deal across all Android phones regardless of operator. The other odd aspect of the deal is that you can only download music over wi-fi - not over, you know, the telephone service. Presumably T-Mobile is worried about customers actually consuming bandwidth if they could suck music down on 3G.

T-Mobile cause fans cow at Udderbelly

Trouble at the Udderbelly Festival tent in Brighton (we've been flicking through The Argus, can you tell?). Fans who'd called up the T-Mobile site for tickets to the taping of Channel 4's Transmission with The Gossip and the Scissor Sisters and had been told to turn up didn't realise they were only being invited to hang about outside the tent with an air of disappointment.

One upset reveller told The Argus: "I had a ticket and all these other girls had tickets as well. Everyone was told to get there at 6.30pm, all dressed up for it, only for us to be let down."

We're not entirely sure how far up one must dress to stand in the crowd at an indie gig being taped for late night Channel 4, but even so, there's little worse than the feeling of being closed out of a gig you'd believed you'd got into.

Corporate promotion never sleeps

How fortunate that - despite being so tired she can't be expected to play for people who've bought their tickets, Lady Sovereign was able to drag herself up to Leeds to play for an event sponsored by T-Mobile.