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It might look like it's an article in which a man says he might record a record on a iPad, but really, it's an advert for a store which sells iPads. No wonder The Sun isn't behind a paywall; they should be paying us to read their advertorials.
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".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?
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".
You know you're being overexposed when even Gordon's slavish coverage starts to get waspish. JLS might want to think about taking some time off:
Speaking at yet another Nintendo Wii Mario Kart promotion in central London, Aston said: [...]Even the photo caption is yawning and saying 'you again?':
The amount of promotion the lads have done for Wii, they've got to have shares...
Yet another promo ... JLSIt might only be twelve months after everybody else, but finally The Sun is catching the general disenchantment with the slim talent-to-appearances ratio.
Brighton's Lyrebirds have split. Or, more precisely:
We're sorry to say that we have decided not to carry on as a band anymore....It's possible they might be carrying on as a crime-fighting gang, or a team running a cakeshop.
This is so awful, it's compelling. Megadeath's David Ellefson "pays tribute" to Bon Scott by wandering round his grave like it's MTV Cribs, before losing interest and yakking on about Crocodile Dundee's hat instead.
Some by-the-numbers Australian cliches? That's what Bon would have wanted, right?
The ten most popular stories so far this month:
1. Johnny Marr bars Dave Cameron from liking The Smiths
2. Jack White creates scarce releases, puts them on eBay, blames fans for his profiteering
3. The charts are all posh now
4. Heather Mills claims iTunes work as her own
5. Shaun Ryder threatens to have critic murdered and raped
6. Hucknall apologises for not being able to keep it in his pants
7. Watch: Jolt videos
8. Grammys 2011 shortlist
9. Mute goes indie again
10. Gordon Smart wins 'best journalist' poll
These were the scanty new releases worth looking at:
Joy Division singles 7" vinyl box set
Sufjan Stevens - All Delighted People
Download All Delighted People
Deadmau5 - 4x4=12
Download 4x4=12
Adam & Joe - Song Wars Volume II
Download Song Wars Volume II
Shugo Tokumaru - Port Entropy
Terrible results from HMV this week: they've managed to turn last year's first half £25m loss into £41.3m, and have taken to weakly warning that the snow might make things worse:
Shares in HMV plunged by more than a quarter this morning after it reported disappointing sales figures and warned that the icy weather was keeping customers away from its shops.Yes, the snow is the problem. People apparently even in the height of summer are avoiding HMV just in case there's lingering ice outside the shop, it looks like.
If it wasn't for the joshing reference to the protesters who nearly spared Charles and Camillia the horror of the Royal Variety Show, you'd have bet Gordon had written his Charles-meets-N-Dubz piece weeks ago:
N-DUBZ have got the royal seal of approval from PRINCE CHARLES.Naturally, Charles knew all about them (i.e. had been briefed about them seconds before):
The Camden scamps were given a thorough talking to by the Prince at the Royal Variety Performance.
He said: "What are you guys doing here. Are you hip-hopping about?" Dappy replied: "No sir, we make great music for the masses."Given that Gordon and N-Dubz are seizing on this as evidence of Charles being aware of their work, surely an opening gambit of "what are you guys doing here?" is a bit weak. Hadn't he just seen them doing their thing?
Charles then replied: "So I've heard."
Afterwards Dappy was still beaming because Charles knew all about the band.Hmm. "Are you hip-hopping about" and "that's a nice suit" hardly suggests Charles is ready to go on Mastermind with N-Dubz as a specialist subject.
He said: "It just shows how far N-Dubz have come that even the Prince knows all about our music. We are honoured."
GARY BARLOW introduced the trio on to the stage, saying: "These guys are the only urban UK act to sell any albums."Might come as a surprise to Tinchy and Dizzee, that, Gary.
From Private Eye:
NOW the Tories are in power they are receiving generous donations from some intriguing sources. According to the Electoral Commission, these include a whopping £80,000 in July from record label Universal Music, whose boss Lucian Grainge was a teenage fan of the Sex Pistols and Clash.Why would Universal be raining cash down on government? Surely not part of the plans for the long-expected bid for EMI, is it?
These days he prefers to hobnob with David Cameron instead. Grainge served on the Tories’ “Creative Industries” taskforce, which looked at weakening the BBC. He is unlikely to have consulted the artistes who bring in much of Universal’s cash – including Amy Winehouse, Elvis Costello, Annie Lennox and Tinchy Stryder – about their big Tory donation.
Why would the disappointing Ne-Yo album be struggling to find a market?
Any ideas, Ne-Yo?
He told CW50detroit.com's Gossip Girls section: "I was a little disturbed by my first week numbers, but a lot of things went into that first week number.You know, you could be on to something there, Ne-Yo - obviously, once people had heard how rotten the record is, they'd be less likely to buy it.
"The album getting leaked a month in advance definitely had something to do with it."
"ALL HACKERS DIE SLOW!! It's stealing plain and simple! There's places where they cut people's hands off for less! Y'all SUCK!!!!!"You'll notice that 'sticking a copy of NeYo's album on the torrents' is a larger crime than, you know, ordinary theft.
"I just feel like people don't have patience anymore. Where's the class and integrity that came with music back in the day?"By "class and integrity" he's talking about the days when the record companies colluded illegally to rip consumers off with artificially high prices while simultaneously ripping off the artists with horrible contracts.
"You listen to it before it's supposed to be listened to and then you don't like it but you didn't even give it a chance to get done.Ah yes - and which of us can truly say we don't dismember relatives who take a spoonful of soup from the pot while it's still on the stove. I know I do, and I don't consider that to be a hysterical overreaction on any level at all.
"That's like eating a meal before its finished cooking; of course you're not gonna like it!"
You've got to be that whatever emerges from Metronomy working with Nicola Roberts, it's going to be a whole hat-full more interesting than Will I Am churning out something with Cheryl Cole.
Everyone knows Debbie Harry's "I was picked up by Ted Bundy" story, right? Harry was telling people about it back in the 1980s, and it's right up there with 'Marianne Faithfull and half a Mars bar' and 'heart attack after eating a ham sandwich' stock half-true myths that circulate around pop music.
Amazingly, Gordon Smart is repeating it today as if it was news.
What makes it even worse is that - whoever was in the car that Harry got into - it wasn't Ted Bundy. I know Smart's habit of running stories that aren't true is well known, but surely this is the first time he's ever run a story that's been debunked by Snopes.com - Bundy never went to New York, where Harry's incident happened; the car Bundy drove was nothing like the car Harry described and Bundy hadn't started his spree at the time Harry was meant to be the first victim.
Doubtless Gordon will be clearing space tomorrow for an exclusive: 'Charles Manson auditioned for the Monkees'.
(To be fair to Gordon, The Telegraph also trots out hoary-old-anecdote-as-breaking-news.)
"I think I maybe would have entered The X Factor if I hadn't been discovered."It's a nice thing to do if you're not really famous, right?
Like Molly's baby, Mute has been dragged from the carnage of the EMI tram-crash and has slapped out a press release about a new, all-in-business.
Strictly speaking, of course, Molly's baby hasn't slapped out a press release, so don't treat that as part of the extended metaphor, okay?
Following the recent announcement that Mute has reached an agreement with EMI Music which sees the company, led by Daniel Miller, return to being independent, Mute now announces details of the new structure which sees the record label, publishing company and a new artist/producer management company brought together under the Mute name.Some artists aren't escaping, and will remain inside EMI. These musical Ashleys will still have their last rites taken care of by Daniel Miller, who is going to freelance for EMI.
Says Daniel Miller; “I am excited about this new phase in our development. The things we value most - our relationships with artists and our desire to embrace new ideas and ways of working – can now be fully realised in a structure I have been aiming towards for some time. This is the ideal time and perfect opportunity to bring three key elements together under the Mute name”.
It's not clear how sales of the Bizarre app - it's a monthly subscription - are going, but the competition to win some sort of meeting with JLS suggests a desperate bid to drive take-up.
Still, lovely to see a bit of salesmanship from Gordon:
The Bizarre application is FREE for the first 30 days of subscription and £1.19 per month after that.Does he really think people are going to be going "blimey, that sounds so good I might go and buy a three hundred quid phone just to get that app... if only I knew where I could find such a thing..."?
It is available for iPhone and Android handsets, which are sold in all good mobile phone retailers across the UK.
Interestingly, the Daily Mail seems genuinely upset that the charts are being 'dominated' by public school kids:
In 1990 the charts were full of bands espousing working class angst and northern soul.It suggests the main reason for this is the cutting of public funding for music lessons - steady on, Mail, you're starting to sound like you're pre-May Liberal Democrats or something.
But some twenty years on it seems that it is British public schools that are delivering the pop stars of the moment.
A new survey into the heritage of modern musical acts has found that 60 per cent of acts in the charts today - attended public school - compared to just one per cent two decades ago.
You might have thought that dozens of lawyers were busy working behind the scenes to make the Beatles-Apple agreement which brought the mop-topped back catalogue to the iTunes store.
You'd be wrong.
It was all Heather Mills' doing:
‘iTunes? I organised it all with Steve Jobs [the Apple boss],’ asserts Heather between signing copies of one of her vegan cookbooks at a crowded Animal Aid Christmas fair at Kensington Town Hall yesterday.How absolutely generous of her. Of course, it's possible she's not making any claims because even she doesn't believe the crap she's spouting.
‘But there’s no way I am going back to court for more money. It was all settled at the time and that’s it.’
Gordon's mysterious obsession with trying to recast Prince Harry as some sort of dancehall star continues today, with Mark Ronson 'revealing' that Harry knows something about djing:
MARK RONSON said: "He came to one of my gigs recently and he's totally clued up about my genre of music. He was requesting all these songs and he was dancing and getting into the spirit."Okay, so Mark Ronson's "genre of music" is mid-market crowd-pleasing pop, but it's good enough for Gordon to extrapolate.
PRINCE HARRY could probably do a decent job of DJing at his brother's wedding next year.Yes. Yes. Assuming he can get out of helping Princess Anne putting the cold buffet out, that is.
Sky Music, BSkyB's attempt to spin its massive user base into a subscription-based music service is being junked as, erm, nobody was interested:
A Sky spokesman said: "We've taken the difficult decision to close Sky Songs. Although we are extremely proud of the service we built and the experience it offers, we just didn't see the consumer demand we'd hoped for.The deal was one of those awkward ones where you could stream as much as you wanted, and download and own a miserly-and-randomly-chosen five tracks a month. It's not entirely clear what the Sky spokesperson believes was "innovative" about that.
"As Sky Songs demonstrates, we're a business that takes risks and innovates, but at the same time, we're pragmatic and act decisively when a new venture isn't working out."
Posh Spice has, we're told, gone to the dark side:
VICTORIA BECKHAM has road-tested many trends over the years, but her latest airport outfit will have Star Wars fans fearing she's turned to the dark side.Now, call me picky, but I can't help feeling that if you hired a Darth Vader outfit and got one without a helmet or a light saber, you'd be a bit justified in feeling you'd been short-changed.
Wearing a high-collared black cape, the former SPICE GIRL was just a helmet and light sabre shy of replicating Darth Vader's menacing appearance in the classic sci-fi trilogy.
Thin night in Glasgow tonight: Billy Bragg and Emarosa have cancelled their dates.
Good news, though - there are tickets on the door for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - but there'll be no Duke Spirit.
Ah, sweet old Shaun Ryder, eh? Accused of having ripped-off musicians during his career, his response is to threaten to have the complainant raped and murdered.
Apparently Shaun was proud that his violent anger isn't sexist and applied to men and women. He truly is the Leslie Philips of revenge rape, isn't he?
What brings people to No Rock from Twitter? Between September and November, these were the biggest bounce points:
1. The front page
2. Is it wrong to complain about the Glastonbury ticket sales?
3. Reactions to the annual Glasto ticket sales shambles
4. George Michael is virtually indistinguishable from Myra Hindley
5. The Breeders weekend
6. Jedward spend hard-earned (well, earned) money on tat
7. Chris Moyles complains about minor clerical error for half an hour
8. Spotify hire George Lamb
9. Resonance FM axes Max Tundra
10. Bono botches his miner tribute
The interesting releases this week:
Simian Mobile Disco - Delicacies
Download Delicacies
Various - Kitsune Maison Volume 10
Download Kitsune Maison
Jenny And Johnny - I'm Having Fun Now
Download I'm Having Fun Now
Lambchop - Boxset
Download Nixon
This scattered itself round the internet yesterday, and I suspect accounted for a large portion of how unwell the entire world felt by the evening.
Mick Hucknall's public apology.
Now, there is much for Mick to apologise for. The cover of the Stars album, as a starter, screams the need for the sort of penitence only hitherto exhibited by the medieval saints. But it's not that which has him saying "sorry":
'I regret the philandering," says Mick Hucknall, a man who, by his own estimation, had sex with more than 3,000 women in a three-year stretch in the mid-80s. "In fact, can I issue a public apology through the Guardian? They know who they are and I'm truly sorry."That's one of those 'sorry's that isn't really. Like "well, I'm sorry if my career earning thousands of pounds and allowing you to keep a roof over your head meant I missed the Christmas play at the school", it's much more about showing off about what you've done, and then trying to make yourself look better by 'regretting' it.
Tony Rennell's bit in this morning's Mail poses a big question:
Was John Lennon's murderer Mark Chapman a CIA hitman?No. Of course he wasn't.
And somewhere along the line his mind was infiltrated. With Chapman, the CIA could have drawn on its long experience of using mind-controlling drugs and techniques such as hypnosis to produce assassins who would eliminate trouble-makers, and ‘patsies’, the fall guys on whom such killings could be blamed.Well, let's go with this theory for a while. The CIA - and the FBI, too, of course - have gone to all the trouble of turning Mark Chapman into a cross between Cuddles The Monkey and Oddjob.
Strongman claims: ‘Catcher In The Rye was part of Chapman’s hypnotic programming, a trigger that could be “fired” at him by a few simple keywords [via] a
cassette tape message, telex or telegram or even a mere telephone call.
’It’s certainly true that conspiracy theorists have long suspected both the Americans and their communist foes of using such techniques to activate ‘sleeper’ assassins — as fictionalised in the film The Manchurian Candidate.
He had, it seems, rattled the cages of America’s powerful Right wing, first with his opposition to the Vietnam War and then with his campaign of pacifism.Even the Mail's Rennell, who is regurgitating the book more-or-less verbatim, is unable to stop himself from squirting milk out his nose at that one:
It is here that those of us who lived through the period must pause for breath. Lennon was a mad and maddening genius, a showman and a show-off. But he was a dreamer, not a doer.Irreverent? By the time the CIA was supposedly having no choice but to have Lennon killed, Lennon was pretty much irrelevant.
He wrote songs, he played the guitar, he had some funny ideas. He made us laugh. He was irreverent.
But he wasn’t about to bring down capitalism. He was doing much too well out of it himself for that.
One thing that Lennon page did point out was a moment on Nationwide when Frank Bough looked at a picture of a bearded, bed-in era Lennon and asked his guest Hunter Davies whether he still looked like that in his last days, emphasising that before he died people didn’t really know what Lennon looked like anymore, as he had been very much a recluse, enjoying life as a house husband in New York, and being well out of the public eye, especially on this side at the Atlantic.Yes, that would have had the CIA worried, wouldn't it? "Imagine if all American men stayed at home and grew beards. It would throw the economy into chaos, and destroy the chances of Project Kiam from being a success."
Last week, as we explored the back catalogue of The Senseless Things, Ginsoakedboy put in a plea for Mark Keds' Jolt project.
There's not a great deal from the band online - although it appears Jolt's greatest moment came when Mark Keds snuck a line from the single Kitten into The Libertine's Can't Stand Me Now. So Jolt sort-of had a number two hit. Kind of.
The band also featured Lenie Mets, sometime of Animals That Swim, and Martin Shaw. Shaw drummed and, I suspect, has perfected pretending it's the first time anyone has ever said "Judge John Deed" to him.
In a Q 'Where Are They Now' piece Cass described his former Thingsmate's Jolt as "not working out", which is something of understatement. There were three singles, before evreyone moved on. And not very much has made it to YouTube.
This has, though: second ep Punk Jungle Rules, and the track Love and Romance:
Can't Leave Without It:
Certain Death Estate:
And, erm, that's all I could find. If there's any evidence of the handful of other tracks flitting about online, I'd like to know.
Buy
Punk Jungle Rules - still new, unsold copies available
UPDATE: Thanks to the mighty Ginsoakedboy, there's now the first ep to enjoy as well.
Okay, so the episode of Graham Norton on which John Waters gave Justin Bieber a pencil to draw a moustache disguise hadn't aired when Gordon wrote this:
JUSTIN BIEBER is like every teenage lad - dreaming of being able to sport a bit of manly stubble.But shouldn't the king of showbiz journalists be aware of the context for the moustache? It's not like there weren't hundreds of witnesses to the gifting of the 'tache pen on Thursday night.
The little Canadian is so desperate for facial furniture he drew on a cheeky 'tache during dinner at a posh London eaterie on Thursday night.
Sadly, his efforts to fake a bushy, TOM SELLECK-style lip-warmer ended up looking more like a feeble Gio Compario from the Go Compare ads.
Gio Compario from the Go Compare adsIf it's worth using his name, wouldn't people know who he is? And if you have to explain who he is, then why bother with his name? More to the point, why crowbar in the reference at all?
Thanks to Paul W for alerting me to the Press Gazette's Showbiz Journalist poll, which asked journalists and "members of the public" who their favourite showbiz writer is.
Yes, Gordon won the poll.
Mind you, Piers Morgan came in at number six, and although the Gazette tries to make sense of this by calling him "CNN chief interviewer", he isn't, yet - that's still Larry King for a few more weeks. And everyone's so horrified at the idea of Morgan taking over even Putin's begging King not to go.
So, given that a couple of weak sessions in the ITV fawnopticon is enough to secure Morgan a place in the top ten, there's a sense that - the public side of the poll at least - is more "can you think of someone who might be a showbiz journalist" rather than "who is the best showbiz journalist". Which means that what the Press Gazette has done is find out who writes the celeb column in the most widely-read newspaper.
It'd be interesting to see the list if they'd not thrown in the public's views. You wonder if Gordon would have been on top then.
But he is. How do you account for your success, Gordon?
[H]e insisted that his brand of showbiz journalism is a lot more sensitive than that of a previous Sun era: "I feel like I’ve become the respectable face of showbiz journalism. That’s something I’m trying to do."Mmm. Outing teenage game show contestants, praising heavy drinking and calling Geri Halliwell old and ugly. That's exactly the sort of respectable approach you'd hope for - why, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between a Victorian mutual society and Bizarre, isn't it?
CHERYL Cole has asked close pal Derek Hough to find a way to get her dogs into Los Angeles without putting them in quarantine.Really? Because the way to do that is, erm, by putting them on a plane and taking them off at the other end, what with America not quarantining healthy animals.
Or possibly "johnny marr":
David Cameron, stop saying that you like The Smiths, no you don't. I forbid you to like it.
