People want to own, not rent, says retailer

Some interesting research from eMusic, which reckons it proves that people still want to own records - or at least mp3s - rather than stream:

Top line stats from the eMusic research, which questioned 1000 music fans (some eMusic users, some not), include that 91% said they preferred to own tracks because there were no limitations on listening, while 86% said they felt ownership offered more security, ie tracks aren’t likely to randomly disappear. 76% said they used streaming services to discover and sample music that they might then buy, and, presumably as a result of that fact, 74% said they wouldn’t pay to access streaming platforms.

What eMusic don't reveal is how far the desire to earnown dwindles as you head towards younger respondents - the assumption has always been that the so-called 'digital natives' have seldom bought physical product and, thus, would be more comfortable with the idea of not having a digital collection. You suspect if the findings had overturned this conventional assumption, eMusic would be making a bit more of it.

[UPDATE: Typo "earn" for "own" corrected]

eMusic waits for a surge

eMusic is not exactly growing, having had the same number of users subscribing for the last four years.

On the bright side, the company is now making a fifth more from each of those members. Partly this is down to having major labels fully on board, although surely they'd have been hoping that they'd have tempted new sign-ups rather than just persuading their existing user base to spend more.

The company is now "hoping" it's cloud service will be in place by Christmas, although they've been promising this since last summer. Christmas seems too late, given that Amazon, Google and Apple are already taking names and credit card details.

EMI, eMusic come to an agreement

It turns out that having a bank in charge is working out a bit better for EMI. Now the dead wood of Terra Firma are no longer running negotiations, EMI's back catalogue is coming to eMusic.

Bankers might lack shadows, but at least they seem to understand that if you want to sell your music, it's a good idea to have it available where there are customers.

eMusic try to recast themselves "irreverent" outsiders

How better to mark a massive skewing of your catalogue towards the major labels than launching a counter-intuitive campaign stressing how non-mainstream you are.

Sure, there's nothing in itself wrong with The Roadshow, which films some bands playing live.

It's just the way they're talking about it, as Hypebot records:

Today [eMusic] launched a major branding and ad campaign designed to differentiate itself from iTunes by (take a deep breath...) "delivering irreverent and engaging experiences that capture the essence of music discovery".

Developed by flavor of the moment creative agency Sarkissian Mason and hot media firm TargetcastTCM, the campaign uses "humor, passion and knowledge" to appeal to "serious music fans".

Filming Best Coast doing a gig isn't especially irreverent, nor humorous. And it's not really a "discovery", as surely all right-thinking people already are a little bit in love with Best Coast?

It's a solid-enough campaign. 'We've got some artists who are well-liked but still early enough in their career to appreciate a few quid from our marketing budget, and we hope people will like to come and look at them'. Why pretend that this is somehow cocking a snook at convention?

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."

eMusic doesn't want to look desperate or anything

Everything's great at eMusic. Oh, yes. Everything is top-hole, A1, no clouds in the sky.

I mean, obviously, , they'd sell given the chance. But, hey, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong:

EMusic CEO Daniel Stein didn't deny that the company would consider a sale.

"We're opportunistic stewards of capital," Stein said in an interview with The Post. "If an offer was made that created value for our shareholders, we'd listen to it."

He then continued "how about you? Would you like to buy us? We'd knock something off for cash. We could do a deal. I'll throw in new tyres... come back... please..."

Actually, eMusic is doing alright, but it seems to have reached a point where it won't grow much more without something extra to offer. It's thinking that extra might be a streaming service for its members, although why you'd go from not wanting eMusic stuff to own to wanting it to stream, and not going somewhere else isn't clear.

eMusic hikes prices, blames everyone else

With the price of online music rapidly approaching zero, it's something of a surprise to discover eMusic raising its prices. Apparently, it's everyone else's fault:

Danny Stein, eMusic CEO: Our existing labels, for the most part, have been asking us to raise prices for a long time. What I told the New York Times is that we were looking for a “catalyzing event” to do it. And really, the catalyzing event is adding catalog, adding more content. We used this as an opportunity to do it, but we didn’t do it because of Sony. We did it because in order to sustain the economics for our label suppliers and their artists, we needed to do it.

So it's the indie labels' fault, and Sony provided a "catalysing event" - which seems to be weasel words meaning 'a smokescreen to cover our asses'.

The thinking seems to be that users would go 'oh, we've now got access to Sony's catalogue, that's worth a few extra bucks'. Although, presumably, current eMusic subscribers have chosen eMusic quite happily without access to Sony's stuff. It's a bit like adding photos of dogs to the kitten library and trying to charge more from cat fans.

But, hey, Sony isn't all Billy Joel:

Stein: Definitely. The reality is that eMusic’s customers love music of all flavors and genres, and there are a lot of less mainstream names [artists with albums soon to be sold on eMusic as part of the deal include Captain Beefheart, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Kate Bush, Miles Davis, The Clash, Miles Davis, Franz Ferdinand, Robert Johnson, Kings of Leon, Modest Mouse, Psychedelic Furs, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Spiritualized and the Stone Roses], and this catalog is rich in jazz and classical. In addition, there are more mainstream artists who will benefit the less mainstream artists dramatically by allowing us to use our editorial expertise to compare and contextualize the lesser-known artists with the better-known artists so that the lesser-known artists have more exposure. We have a feature called “Six Degrees”…

I think the list of bands was inserted by Wired, rather than eMusic, but anyone who thinks Kings Of Leon, Kate Bush and The Clash are operating beyond the mainstream must have a pretty narrow view of what counts as mainstream.

Cathy Halgas Nevins, vice president of eMusic corporate communications: Yes, that’s going to be a new editorial feature where we’re going to take an album that might be really well known and show you some independent artists that were influenced by that record who you should know about

Hmm. I'm not sure if I had subscribed to an indie music library I'd be that excited at being told I was going to pay more for a service because it can tell you that if you like Bruce Springsteen, you might like Woody Guthrie. It's a nice feature for new subscribers, tempted in by the Sony stuff (if there are any) but I can't see existing subscribers thinking they're getting something worth the money.

And couldn't eMusic do this without the Sony catalogue? You don't actually need to have Nebraska on the site to say "if you enjoyed this record, here are some that might have been an inspiration on it."

There's also some confusion about the new 'album-download' rates:

Stein: We’ve never had album pricing before and at times that has hurt the service and the user experience. We’ve heard from our customers that for albums that may have 20 tracks, you get charged for 20 tracks. Our new pricing is simple. It’s 12 credits per album, and that’s if the album has 11 12 songs or more [Stein apparently misspoke]. Below that, it’s by track, so an album with eight regular tracks will cost eight credits [each credit costs 42, 45, or 50 cents depending on which plan you have; credits expire after 30 days]. We’ll eventually roll out some other price points for albums to give our labels more options.

Yes. That sounds like a situation that needs some more price points rather than fewer. Interesting, though, to see eMusic effectively admit that they see their role as facilitating the needs of labels rather than providing a service for their subscribers.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Mother's Day

Today isn't mothering Sunday, but Americans are pretending it is, and so eMusic have invited some mothers to review their kids' music by choosing a favourite track:

Frances Hannigan, mother of Lisa Hannigan

*Sea Sew

Obviously being Lisa's mother, and a very proud one at that, it is difficult to pick just one; a little like Sophie's choice. Probably because we, as a family, were all involved in the making of the videos for "Lille" and "I Don't Know," I would have to pick one of these. What turns out to be a few minutes on YouTube in fact represents days and days of hard effort — but it was also a great deal of fun. During filming, the songs had to be repeated over and over again, and while some people would say that familiarity breeds contempt, I feel it is more like a comfy pair of slippers! So I will have to choose "Lille." But, then again, I don't know.

Easter track smackdown: So, what have we learned?

Four days. Twelve tracks. A bunch of points. But what have we discovered?

Amazon, it turns out, would have been the victor had their management decided to throw away any claims to a moral victory.

As someone pointed out in the comments, 'grey' material thrives on user-generated services - although even with this advantage, Imeem didn't do particularly well.

YouTube could probably save a fortune (and crush Imeem, actually) if it offered an option for people to upload just audio. Seriously, how much bandwidth and storage space are Google paying for to hold and transfer images of record labels and sleeves that people are only making in the first place because there needs to be something for the visual part of the video. Make an mp3 YouTube, Google. You'll save yourself a bundle.

The PRS' doomy claims that music is being switched off from YouTube is a little bit overstating the case - some good stuff is missing, but it's nowhere near as silent as you might think.

iTunes has pretty good coverage for a legal service.

Spotify might just have been unlucky, but to only hit one track out of twelve suggests that it might have more gaps in its memory than Sam Beckett that time he jumped into the hospital and got electroshock therapy.

We7 haven't ever claimed to be a home for obscure stuff, which is quite wise, but their people are lovely.

Bernard Cribbins' back catalogue has survived more successfully than most 1980s-90s indie.

It might be a good idea - we7, you can have this for free - if searches which turn up empty had a box saying "sorry we don't have what you're looking for, can you tell us about the song and we'll see if we can get it for you"?

Some people will do anything to fill their blogs over a bank holiday weekend.

And that, then, concludes the first ever Easter Track Smackdown, with Amazon hiding children from the gays; YouTube punching the air in triumph while humming Eye Of The Tiger, videoing itself doing so and then pulling its own video after complaints from Survivor's record label; iTunes trying to somehow create a Genius playlist out of the events of the last four days and hanging forever; and Spotify looking a little bit like the smart kid from sixth form who's just done his first university seminar and realised that things have just got a little harder.

Easter track smackdown: Final round - Hurrah!

Yes, the end is now in sight. And how better to greet the end of a four-day experiment than by calling for Hurrahs? More precisely, Hurrah's If Love Could Kill - "you had a boyfriend, hundreds of miles away/ I had a girl, away for a day". A tale of a quick shag unraveling four lives, a big favourite with the supposedly virginal Are You Scared To Get Happy fanzine and, sadly, Hurrah's passport to a major deal which quickly beat the attention to detail out of them.

Can it be found digitally?

For this final round - to build an air of tension or something - we're bringing on the competitors based on their positions on the leaderboard, lowest to highest. First to go then is:

Spotify:
It's not even the exclamation point confusing Spotify, which ends its campaign by muttering something about Hurrah! Another Year soundtracks.

Zero points, giving a total of 9.

we7:
"Gallant and Gay, we'll march away" is amongst the bemusing and wrong responses to a search for Hurrah. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. We7 marches away.

Zero points, giving a final score of 14

eMusic:
Again, this is yer basic indie, and the sort of thing that eMusic should be good at - especially as it calls for a subscription. But, no. Bip Bip Hurrah is not going to satisfy us, sirs.

Zero points, giving a final score of 19

Last FM:
Oh, no: disaster for Last FM just moments from the finish line. Having been very good at knowing bands, even if not having much of the music, it leaps to the conclusion that we're interested in a post rock band from Orlando. We are, actually, but not right now.

After a diversion into emo, the song title comes up trumps, but still mute.

One point off for jumping to conclusions, but one point returned for treating the exclamation mark in the band name as important, for a final score of 27.

Imeem:
Like it's suffering from time lag, or hasn't quite got over the last search, looking for the song title on this one brings up Psycho Mike by KillingxLove. Perhaps this is meant to be an semi-intelligent search, learning as we go. Or maybe it can't get over the word "kill". Like a Daily Mail search engine, it's all got to be about killing.

No marks for Imeem, bringing its final tally to 33.

iTunes:
145 search results for Hurrah!, and not one of them our Hurrah! It's nice to discover a Young Marble Giants album called Live At The Hurrah, but I'm not convinced that's going to get me singing along with a catch in my voice.

iTunes has added nothing to its total, and so winds up with 37

YouTube:
Nobody is doing especially well on the final round, as even YouTube tries to palm me off with Heart's If Looks Could Kill. There's not even a sniff of the band's 1987 Tube appearance, either.

No further points for YouTube, then, but they can wave their 41 points at the PRS in some sort of second-placed victory dance.

Amazon:
Nothing from Amazon, either, so they get no extra points.

However, since we started out on this experiment, the news has broken that Amazon has started to strip sales rank data from "adult" books, and throwing its adult net a little wide, to include stuff like Sexing The Cherry, self-help books for gay men and, erm, the hardcover version of John Barrowman's autobiography; because these sales ranks drive some of the searches and Best Sellers lists, effectively Amazon is making some books invisible. Because it's thinking of the children, apparently:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

"Adult materials" - books, in other words, books with gay characters in just as a given. Some editions of Oranges Not The Only Fruit have had their rankings pulled; The Beautiful Room Is Empty is now bereft of its sales ranking. So, since Amazon are happy to apply capricious and idiotic rulings, so too shall we: fifty points off, with Amazon ending on minus three.

Join us for the final round-up in a couple of minutes.

Easter track smackdown: Round ten - Stop The Violence Movement

Welcome, as the sun rises on the fourth and final day of the Easter Track Smackdown as we attempt to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, what your best bet for finding tracks on the internet is.

Before we move onto the first of our final three slightly obscure tracks, some correspondence which has been entered into: We7's John Taysom popped up to offer a spirited defence of his company's USP - no need to download anything, free to stream stuff before you buy - and asks if he can have their point back.

To be fair, We7 might not have the tracks we've been seeking, but they're pretty usable. And given that they're not doing very well on points, but still happy to actually take the time over a bank holiday weekend to write a proper comment that - unlike QTrax and their nasty astroturf - is polite and measured, yes: you get a point back.

So, then, to today's first tussle, and we're looking for Self Destruction by the Stop The Violence Movement. A Band Aid style project pulled together by KRS-One in the wake of the murder of Scott La Rock, the 1989 record attempted to persuade rappers to put down their guns.

It wasn't, you'd have to say, a major success, and perhaps was doomed to fail when you consider Miss Melody's line that "you ain't guarding a door, so what you got a gun for?", which seemed to just open a loophole when zero-tolerance was probably what was needed. Also, given the way violence was about to spill out into war, only having East Coast artists might not have been the best move.

But it was a well-intentioned effort, and it sounded a lot better than Ferry Aid. (Is it wrong to compare charity singles like that? Have I had three points taken off my mortal soul score somewhere?) The question, though: does it exist online?

Spotify:
Ask Spotify for Self Destruction, and it throws up goth, not rap. Poor show, Spotify. Zero. Again.

Last FM:
The best thing about this being the last day of this event is that I won't have to see that bloody Boat That Rocked banner ad any more. Bill Nighy, what were you thinking? Does Richard Curtis hold your soul in a small metal container, and won't let you have it back until he's stopped making romcoms? And even if he does, did you have to sign off on that photo? Seriously?

Anyway... not only does LastFM know of the track, but it's smarter than us, knowing the song was credited to the Stop The Violence All Stars. Doesn't have it to play, though, but - in the words of Fry And Laurie being Robert Robinson - an extra point for being so clever.

iTunes:
It's smart enough to suggest that Boogie Down Production's track called Stop The Violence might work, providing you scroll far enough through the results. Four points for being near enough.

we7:
Again, suggests the BDP version might fit the bill for KRS-One related anti-hiphop violence tracks, which garners four points. And a warning to all to stop copying from their neighbours.

YouTube:
At first, this looks like a fan video. Then, as you get to the scene which looks not unlike that Comic Relief PG Tips/Admiral/Meerkat/Smash boardroom set-up, you realise it's the real deal:



Ten effortless points for the Googleplex, and a surprised guffaw that they started the video making it look like the sort of thing the Chart Show would lob on if there wasn't a video to show.

Amazon:
Amazon coast to an easy four points by listing Boogie Down Productions - in about seventeen different versions. Including an instrumental. An instrumental? Isn't that like releasing Das Kapital, but only with the pictures.

Imeem:
The track? Oh, yes - neatly filed under all the names of the artists taking part. And the video. Almost tempted to give 20 points, but since that would mess with the results, Imeem can have thirteen.

eMusic:
Fifty nine songs called Self Destruction. None of them are the ones we're after. Zero points.

So, we're begging ourselves not to fight, but what has this round done to the rankings?

Amazon - 47
YouTube - 39
iTunes - 37
Imeem - 33
LastFM - 27
eMusic - 19
we7 - 14
Spotify - 09

So, YouTube sneaks ahead of iTunes, while eMusic starts to feel we7's breath coming up behind it. And Spotify discovering that, when the chips are down, you need more than a lot of favourable press coverage to satisfy the further-flung desires of the listener.

But still two tracks to go, with only LastFM's mid-table position seeming secure. Coming next, label mates of Frankie Goes To Hollywood: surely they must be easy to find?

Easter track smackdown: Round nine - The Fat Tulips

With Wired already planning its next big cover story - "Internet fails to find song by bloke who used to be in sitcom" - it's up to the DNS servers and, uh, electrical... stuff... to prove that all these years building the web hasn't all been in vain.

Apart from the drumstick-as-dildo porn, of course. We'll always have that.

So, can we discover Peterborough's The Fat Tulips Where's Clare Grogan Now somewhere in our various competitor's hard drives.

Coming from the is-it-ATV, is-it-Anglia town of Peterborough, The Fat Tulips glimmered around the end of the 1980s and recorded their tribute to everyone's favourite pop star for their own Heaven Records. It's one of our first experiences of just how stupid rights holders can be, as the seven inch came with a little slip of paper which explained how they'd asked the distributors of Gregory's Girl if they could include a clip of Clare saying "goodnight Mr Spaceman" at the end of the song, only to be told no. Seriously, the rights holders believed that a small snatch on a self-released 7" would harm ticket sales for the film. Because if you'd heard a five second piece of dialogue, you wouldn't bother going to see the whole film. "I know how it ends, she says goodnight. Not worth going, is it?"

In fact, when you see how difficult to cope the music and movies found 1990, it's not surprising they'd fallen apart totally when things got really difficult, is it?

Still, with The Fat Tulips having dealt with a potential rights nightmare, has the song found its way online?

Spotify:
Did you mean Fat Tulip? asks Spotify. Well... let's say I did. What have you got?

Waltzing Tulip Polka by Fat Louie Szykowski.

Are you 'avin a laugh? Really?

Zero point for Spotify again.

Last FM:
No Where's Clare Grogan Now, but Last FM does have a bunch of late-period Fat Tulips stuff, in a mix of pointless thirty second clips, full tracks and even free downloads. Impressive enough to wrestle four marks from the panel of judges.

iTunes:
iTunes is here again with the Waltzing bloody Tulip. It doesn't even have the good grace to suggest that this is anything other than Not What We Were Looking For. A point off for insolence.

we7:
If We7 can't scrape a point this time round, it's going to have an average of one point each round, so it's got a lot to prove.

Obviously, it's not got the Fat Tulips. It doesn't even have yer man Szykowski. I try to find a way to cut a deal to allow even a head-patting single point by asking about Clare Grogan, and even then there's nothing in the vaults. Some people you can't help. Zero.

YouTube:
It has Clare Grogan. It has Fat Tulip's Garden. It even has a bloke apparently smoking drugs from one of the family Liliaceae. But no jangle-pop. Two strikes in a row for Google's evil musician-crushing machine, then.

Amazon:
NO! I DON'T WANT ANY POLKA. I DON'T WANT POLKA. NO POLKA. Do you hear me? No Polka.

Imeem:
At least the weight loss advert has an aura of being related advertising here, I guess. Did I mean Fat Joe? Did I mean Fat Bastard?

It does offer a tantalising glimpse of what it claims is Wham doing Young Guns on Christmas Top Of The Pops, but with a still showing Clare Grogan on Pop Quiz. But the video isn't "available", so it's not even getting a consolation point.

eMusic:
Nothing, but it does offer a chance to search for artists like Fat Tulips. Amongst these is Ray Charles, whose C86 work was, perhaps, somewhat cruelly ignored by the critics at the time. Zero.

So, day three of our tournament closes with another track that doesn't appear to be easily found online, legally at least.

A quick look at the scoreboard as we head into the last day:

Amazon - 43
iTunes - 33
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 26
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
We7 - 09

Tomorrow, we'll start with a Band Aid style social-campaigning multi-artist effort. Don't bother uploading Hear N Aid's Starz, we7, it's not going to be that...

Easter track smackdown: Round eight - Wilfrid Brambell

Oh, yes, digital world - you might have no problem serving up a slice of Bernard Cribbins playing it straight. But what of Wilfrid Brambell's Second Hand? Can you find me that?

This is, by the way, a lovely song - Brambell clearly playing off his most famous role as Albert Steptoe, lamenting that everything he's ever owned has been found, borrowed or pre-enjoyed, before concluding that even his wife was second hand. You could write a book about what the song says about attitudes to female sexuality in the post-War era.

But not before you've heard the song, of course. Can you help, the internet?

Spotify:
It's probably not surprising, given Spotify's disappointing performance, that it can't help here. Although it does suggest Steve Winwood's Second Hand Woman might fill the gap. No points.

Last FM:
Tantalisingly, Last FM has scrabbled its scrobbles and says that, in all of recorded history, it's spotted three people playing Wilfrid Brambell but, shrugging, it doesn't even know the name of any songs he might have sung. Zero.

iTunes:
iTunes doesn't have a clue. And considering a search for Bernard Cribbins tried to palm us off with the Frenzy movie, you'd have at least hoped they would have come up with Steptoe And Son Ride Again. Apple fail. Zero.

we7:
Once we can stop it getting excited about the prospect of "advert free days", we7 unsurprisingly offers nothing by Wilf, but does bring forward a surprising number of songs called Second Hand. It's not exactly a brand new name, is it? [You may now chuckle, if you wish. No? Oh.]

YouTube:
Lots of Wilf on YouTube, of course, including his appearances on Citizen Smith, Holiday On The Buses and in the Beatles movie with Beatles. But doing Second Hand? Not a sniff. No points.

Amazon:
Even our leader Amazon can't help with this one, although it does suggest - in order - a Steptoe box set, a photo of Wilf Brambell, and an audio cassette. A tape. A point off for making a suggestion from the wrong bloody decade.

Imeem:
Imeem doesn't offer any suggestions at all - not even something from New Boots And Panties - and shows an advert which seems to suggest a weight-loss product might also perform surgeryless gender realignment. And YouTube worry they have trouble attracting quality advertising. Zero.

eMusic:
Completing another failure on the part of the Internet As A Whole, eMusic doesn't have anything, either. It does score a point for suggesting I might like to look at tracks composed by Wilfrid Brambell, and then loses it for instead listing other composers called Wilfrid.

So, as the web proves to not be quite all it's cracked up to be, no change in the rankings, then:

Amazon - 43
iTunes - 34
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 22
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
We7 - 09

Coming later today, round nine; and a band named for a Tony Robinson series, with a hymn to someone off Red Dwarf. Can the internet do better?

Easter track smackdown: Round seven - Sugar Ray Dinke

Good morning, as we pick up our Easter weekend entertainment of shaking online music services to see if they're actually any good. Yesterday, we discovered that it's easier than you might think to find Bernard Cribbins online, and - to our surprise - that there was a Charlottes greatest hits compilation. It also looks like Amazon and iTunes are better places to find slightly obscure music than Spotify or we7.

At this half-way point, we're losing Sweeping The Nation and The Internet As A Whole from the leader board, because it's a lot of typing.

Back to the tussle, then, and let's start today by seeing who can supply us with a digital copy of Cabrini Green, Sugar Ray Dinke's cry of despair at his neighbourhood. "Just don't drive a car or a bus down the street called The Vision" warns Sugar Ray, "if you do drive through, you've made a very bad decision." The risk, he says, is that you might get hit by an egg or a jar, although the song is also a tribute to his friend who got shot in the same place. Given that, you might consider needing to ask the dry cleaner to get a bit of yolk off your shirt is less of a worry.

So: one of the great lost socially aware raps of our time. But will it be available to pump directly into your iPods?

Spotify:
Spotify doesn't have Sugar Ray Dinke - although at least it doesn't insult us by suggesting we wanted Sugar Ray instead. A search on the song title brings up someone called Sir Smurf Lil' doing a track called Caprini Green, which isn't right at all. Zero.

Last FM:
Well, a couple of scrobbles show that, somewhere deep in its user matrix, Last FM has heard of the song, but it's the only evidence it has that Sugar Ray Dinke ever existed. It does try to offer us a track by Philip Glass of the same name, but Glass neglects to warn of flying missiles, so I suspect he's working from an older guide book to Chicago. Zero.

iTunes:
Apple has digitised a wide range of songs about Cabrini Green, including tracks by Glass, Mask and Dirty Sole. None are by our man, though, so zero for iTunes, too.

we7:
This is proving to be a difficult demand. We7 offers up Dirty Sole again, but that's not going to satisfy us. I'm tempted to dock them a point for an advert which keeps proclaiming that "Pink's back" for an album which came out last October, too. But for now, the ghost of Arthur Ellis won't let me.

YouTube:
Now, here's a surprise - if we'd done this over Christmas, YouTube would have failed as all its competing services have failed. But just over a month ago, someone uploaded this:



All five minutes, fifty-five seconds of the song. Ten points to YouTube, and an awkward pause from the Chicago Tourist Board.

Amazon:
Our earlier search for Bernard Cribbins has turned Amazon's head, and it's now hoping that we might want to buy a record by The Wurzels. Cool it, Amazon, we're looking for some rap.

Asked for Sugar Ray Dinke, the best they can do is offer a range of best selling tracks, including Taylor Swift. Missing the point a little. Perhaps we'll have a listen to some Wurzels instead. Zero.

Imeem:
Bloody hell, imeem can surprise you. I was already composing a putdown as I stuck Sugar Ray Dinke into the search box, when up comes the song. Only the Outro, though, so it's eight points.

eMusic:
If you ignore the stupid suggestions for artists, you can't help but be impressed by the range of albums and songs that eMusic offers up. All wrong, mind, but at least there's somethings to choose from. Zero points.

After that exciting round, here's how the placings are looking:

Amazon - 44
iTunes - 34
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 22
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
Spotify - 09
We7 - 09

We'll be back this afternoon with the next search - another actor doing some singing on the side; but it's not Billy Bob Thornton. In fact, it's a dead guy, playing off the character he hated to create something truly poignant. Genuinely, not Billy Bob Thornton.

Easter track smackdown: Round six - The Charlottes

Huntingdon's finest and, like many English indie bands of a certain vintage, more appreciated in Japan than back at home. Their drummer went on to drum for Slowdive but, the question is, did Could There Ever Be make it from the Cherry Red back catalogue onto the computers?

To the search engines, then:

Spotify:
The green circle once again struggles with the request, suggesting we perhaps meant Charlotte, and then offering a list of every Charlotte ever to make a record (that it knows of). And Good Charlotte. Zero again.

LastFM:
Similar artists to The Charlottes include the Drop Nineteens, points out Last FM, helpfully. It knows what it's talking about, but can it play us what we want to hear?

Oh, yes. Oh, sweet joy. And pretty much everything else the band formally recorded. Victory for Last FM, and ten shoegazing points.

iTunes:
Not only does iTunes have the band's sole full-length album, Things Come Apart, but also a best of that I've not come across before called Liar. Could There Ever Be is on Liar, so that's another ten points to the boys from Cupertino.

we7:
This is more familiar. We7 fail to break into double figures by hoping that a bunch of karaoke tunes drawn from Charlotte Church's back catalogue might hit the spot. Zero.

YouTube:
Close, but not quite. Caught between girls called Charlottes and what looks like it might be a different band with the same name, there's the video for Liar:



"What is the name of the singer" asks a commenter "She is pretty." She is, and she's Petra Roddis. YouTube gets one point for at least having a little something, even if it wasn't quite what we were after.

Amazon:
Another search engine having trouble with a group of people operating under a girl's name. It does find the sexy and disturbing Mad Girl's Love Song on a Cherry Red album Sex And Violence, and that allows a click through to The Charlottes entire back catalogue in mp3. One point off for usability weakness, so nine marks.

Imeem:
Even putting quote marks round "the Charlottes" doesn't actually stop Imeem offering any file with the word Charlotte in, so if it has got Could There Ever Be in there, it's impossible to find. Zero.

eMusic:
After having so many gripes about eMusic, it does manage to sort The Charlottes from the various other Charlottes, and offer the whole of Liar, so ten points for the track and a point bonus for search that works on this occasion.

So, eMusic finally having a bit of a rallym, leaping over Spotify and we7 to move up the order:

Amazon - 44
iTunes - 34
LastFM - 22
eMusic - 19
YouTube - 19
iMeem - 12
Spotify - 09
We7 - 09
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
Internet As A Whole - -10

That concludes the three rounds for today; we'll be back with the Easter bunny tomorrow morning when we switch our focus from the leafy suburbs of Cambridgeshire to the harsh streets of the Chicago Projects.

Easter track smackdown: Round four - Bernard Cribbins

Welcome back to Easter Track Smackdown, a definitive attempt to prove which online music service is the best by asking them to offer up some tracks of variegated scarcity and rarity, and awarding points on a borderline unfair basis.

We enter into the second day with Amazon's mp3 store in the lead, while much-fancied golden boy Spotify is turning into the Lewis Hamilton of the competiton, yet to score. eMusic has been punished for its poor usability and elevation of putting its sign-up page ahead of actually letting people explore its catalogue.

So, now one that will separate the Zunes from the iPods. Described by Danny Baker as "the most sublime reading of the most sublime lyric", can our competitors bring us Bernard Cribbin's version of I've Grown Accustomed To Here Face?

Spotify:
Spotify, what say you? Yesterday, you came back with nothing. Can you save your face?

Why yes, you can: thirty-two slices of Cribbage, including the very song we're looking for. Suddenly, it looks like we might have a competition on our hands. Ten well-earned points.

Which is just as well, as this would really drag if it was all going to go Amazon's way, right?

LastFM:
Oooh, so close - by virtue of listing The Very Best Of, I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face is there for the scrobbling, but the only full track on offer is Right Said Fred. No points for you, Last FM.

iTunes:
Again, The Very Best Of... turns up trumps for its digital overlords, and I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face can be yours for 79p. Only iTunes has, so far, pointed out that as well as a touching love song about the scent of perfume in the air, you can also enjoy Cribbins' role in Frenzy, but no extra points for suggesting tie-related murders. Ten points.

we7:
Whoever would have thought that this one would prove so easy? Even We7, so far resigned to sitting on the sidelines, has The Very Best Of. 88pence for the track, though, so docked one point for being greedy.

YouTube:
While stacked with various versions of the more-familiar comedy stuff, YouTube can't offer us the Cribmeister doing this particular song. Indeed, it looks like Google has no evidence at all of Bernard's straight music career - how right the PRs are to characterize them as buffoons of the highest order.

There is, though, a strange, potato-like stop-motion animation version of Right Said Fred, which I'm sure once popped up on TV as a filler item during some sort of technical or industrial relations breakdown. And scarred me for life. They're not getting points for that.

Amazon:
Amazon also have The Very Best Of loaded and ready to pump at you faster than you can say "Star Turn Challenge". And since they're ten pence cheaper than iTunes, for the sake of consistency Amazon get 11 points.

Imeem:
Only The Hole In The Ground and Right Said Fred. It's like an ITV documentary version of his work. Zero.

eMusic:
Usability meltdown nightmare time. Yes, says the search, we have Bernard Cribbins. Step this way... only to show a compilation album with 49 tracks, of which you can only see the names of 15 tracks at a time, and none of which have the names alongside. Until you leave the artist page altogether.

And then it turns out that they've got Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat. One point for having something, taken away again for being cussed.

So, four rounds in - here's the leader board:

Amazon - 25
iTunes - 15
Last FM - 12
Spotify - 10
YouTube - 10
we7 - 09
Imeem - 01
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
emusic - -04
The Internet As A Whole - -10

This afternoon, we go searching for something that originally came in a plastic bag. No, not Pete Doherty's "lunch".

Easter track smackdown: Round three - Mohobishopi

[Follow the Easter Track Smackdown tag for all the pieces to date]

With Amazon holding onto a slim lead over Last FM, we reach round three of this weekend's battle to prove, sort-of-conclusively, which of the various online music services are, by some measure, "the best".

The third challenge is MoHoBishOpi's Names For Nameless Things. Coming out of Wales in 1996, briefly the Mos - or were they the Bishes? - were forced to trade under the weight of the NME's next big thing label. Although only for a couple of weeks. They were brilliant live, but there's no way you can say that without making it sound like the faintest of praise; they managed a handful of singles and a single album before falling apart in 2002.

But: does their spirit live on online? Or has their clumsy punctuation doomed them to hide from the faithful forever? Let's see:

Spotify:
The name, punctuated or not, fails to generate a response. The song title fails to generate a response. Spotify, you were meant to be the future of music: you're looking like an empty ship right now. Zero, again.

Last FM:
Using asterisks rather than dashes, Last FM turns up the band, but Names For Nameless Things isn't part of the music on offer. There are two full tracks, though, so two bonus points for a good try.

iTunes:
Scratches its digital head faced with the band name, and suggests trying a "power search". Which fails to find Names For Nameless Things, and suggests trying another "power search". No points.

we7:
What? Don't worry about what you're looking for - we've got digital versions of Black Sabbath. And Kings Of Leon. Will that do?

No points.

YouTube:
The search engine starts off by guessing that you're looking for experts in matters Islamic before falling quiet and offering a Sweeping The Nation playlist which features the clip for Hear The Air, but more importantly has this:



The Popguns from Brighton, doing Waiting For The Winter - and, as if to crystalize the 1980s indieness of it all, it's taped from Yorkshire TV's legendary Transmission programme.

So, YouTube offers a couple of tracks by the band, but scores zero, while Sweeping The Nation gets half a point for having The Popguns. If you don't like the way the scoring is working, complain to Ben Goldacre.

Amazon:
Their search engine reveals there are no downloads on offer, but does point towards some physical records you can buy. Which is fine, and does include a second-hand copy of Names For Nameless Things for a penny, but isn't instantaneous, is it? No marks.

Imeem:
Unhelpfully, when looking for the track name, suggests that I might want to watch a video exploring if the Harry Potter books are any good. Zero.

emusic:
The rotten search engine spits back when asked for MoHoBishOpi, and suggests that 'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing' is, somehow, a match for the song title. Man, their search needs help.

So, although we had a lovely swerve into the Popguns, the actual song we were looking for is beyond the fingers of digitalisation. Ten marks off for the internet as a whole.

After three rounds:

Amazon - 14
Last FM - 12
YouTube - 10
iTunes - 05
Imeem - 01
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
We7 - 00
Spotify - 00
eMusic - -04
The Internet as a whole - -10

Three more rounds tomorrow, Sunday and Monday at roughly the same times as today's went live. Coming next: can Tim Berners Lee bring a showtune classic as rendered by the Dalek's foe into our living rooms?

Easter track smackdown: Round two - Gary Clail

So, it turns out you can browse eMusic without being logged in, but the big "SIGN UP" splash-screen doesn't give you a browse button; it's only later, when you've tried to get your password back that you find it. They do have Fire Escape, but are fined seven points for being a horrible experience. And, also, for having a glacially slow 'retrieve your password' service.

On to round two, and it's On The Wire/Snub TV favourite Gary Clail with his proto-Peta veg-pusher track Beef. Beef! How low can you go? Hear the cattle cry - death row. You know the one.

Officially credited to Gary Clail On-U Sound System featuring Bim Sherman, this made it to 64 in the charts back in 1990. And impacted on sales of sausages at the far end of student halls of residences for about a week.

You have to wonder: had the On-U Sound System ever got the success they deserved, and its component parts branched out into their own fashion ranges, would Bim Sherman constantly have had his clothes seized by trading standards, alongside Gooci belts and DYKN sunglasses?

Come on, then, competiting music services - can you give me a side of Beef?

Spotify:
After a wobbly start with Rote Kapelle, at least Spotify can point to a few Gary Clail tracks. But no Beef.

I am, of course, pondering at which point to deploy my 'where's the Beef' gag. Don't want to go too soon with it.

Last FM:
They come up with the goods - or, at least, thirty seconds of the goods. It's a minced Beef. To add insult to injury, it's a snatch of an extended version. What's the point of that, exactly?

Zero.

iTunes:
Again, iTunes offer a smattering of three Gary Clail tracks and one he's done a dub all over. But no Beef. Zero for them, too. This is turning into a rout.

we7:
"Did you mean Gary Clark?" enquires we7, suggesting, in the digital-stores-as-1980s-high-street metaphor, they're occupying the role of an assistant who's been shifted from the Book department to the WH Smiths record department, struggling with the paper catalogue but desperate to help. Zero.

YouTube:
Pushing aside the young pretenders, YouTube comes up with the goods:



Ten points. Although it's lucky we're not docking points for visual clarity.

Amazon:
Bemusingly, Amazon's mp3 store has no Gary Clail tracks, but offers three ways to search him to get no returns. Minus one for taking the piss a bit.

Imeem:
There's no Beef on Imeem, but they do have more Gary Clail stuff than anyone else bar YouTube. A point for the effort.

eMusic:
Bloody hell, I've used eMusic in the past and don't remember it being so user-hostile. A search on Gary Clail comes up with this:

Artist names matching gary clail (623 results)

* Gary Numan
* Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette
* Gary Peacock
* Gary Moore
* Gary Burton
* Gary Stadler
* Gary Jules
* Gary Versace
* Gary Hoey
* Gary Lewis and The Playboys
* Gary Cooper
* Rev. Gary Davis
* The Gary Tesca Orchestra
* Gary Bartz
* Gary Numan / Tubeway Army

more

How, exactly, does Gary Numan "match" Gary Clail? This is the Woolworths' assistant suggesting "ooh, there was a lad lived up the road called Gary; he was Elsie's eldest, went to sea, I think; his brother married a nutritionist." After a lot of pushing, eMusic eventually offers up rapidly-forgotten late-90s Dutch dub act Beef, which earns them a point for fighting obscurity with obscurity.

At the end of the second round, then:

Amazon - 14
LastFM - 10
YouTube - 10
itunes - 05
Imeem - 01
Spotify - 00
We7 - 00
eMusic - -04

We'll be back in the evening with the next round: Ready for some NME-praised mid-90s Welsh rock, anyone?

eMusic draws their price point

Given that record companies large and small have complained that eMusic is practically giving away their wares (or charging what the market will bear, in other words), nobody will be especially surprised that the company is pledging to not follow Apple above a dollar a track:

"While I am CEO, I promise that eMusic will never sell single MP3 downloads for more than 99 cents," assured company chairman and chief Danny Stein.

Although it's not clear quite what you can do if he does put the prices up - will we have the right to throw stuff at him or something?

Digital downloads pop up in local press

Trying times for local papers, challenged so much by digital media. So it's nice - and somewhat surprising - to see eMusic throwing some much needed advertising revenue at the local papers in the UK. Both the Milton Keynes Citizen and The Bucks Herald (and, presumably, other papers) are carrying adverts for eMusic this week.

Interesting approach - it'd be fascinating to see how many new subscribers this brings in.