Category: Music

I dream of iTunes

I had the most vivid dream last night that the australian iTunes store had (finally) opened, and was so wierded out when I woke up that I had to get up and check that it hadn’t actually happened.

The dream included TV advertising, print promotionals and me downloading from the store.

It really was quite reminiscent of that Futurama thing where companies beamed adds directly into your dreams…

I really am such a disturbing geek (but I also really want some legit option for acquiring music, and one that doesn’t suck arse like the existing australian ones seem to).

Seemingly unkillable

I flicked through the MTV music awards last night in time to hear something really disturbing.

Mariah Carey was performing live on the show, on the basis that she currently has the top single and album on the US charts.

I had always assumed that she was a one album wonder, but she seems to be remarkably adept at being a one album wonder again and again and again. What are we up to now? Like, the fourth incarnation or something like that..

I can only conclude that either she is either sleeping with all the right people (again and again and again) or else she must be onto like her 4th or 5th deal with the devil…

This is such a great mental image

New contender for best album title: “Blunderbusses at dawn” by an English electronic outfit called Revolvo. It really is something that would be cool to see, even if it was only firing blanks. They would of course have to do it wearing safari suits too.

In an aside, you can also download the album from their site if you want to listen to any of their stuff.

Something for Rob

A few years ago, during his heady engineering student days, my brother Rob (on the right in this pic) used to do a radio segement on the Canterbury University student radio station RDU. At the time my attempts to listen to it were confounded by my internet connection not wanting to connect, and he has subsequently stopped doing it (as far as I am aware).

Anyway, today I remembered this all, and finally managed to connect and have a little listen. It was good

RDU – Listen online here

When he was in he also liked the Vic uni radio station RadioActive.

Radioactive – Listen online here

Just something to do..

Fogbound (ridgeracer)

I left the house at 6:30 this morning to ride to the hospital for an outpatients clinic starting at 7am, and although I was far from pleased at being awake (let alone on my bike) at that hour of the morning I had to enjoy the ride there, as it was through fog the entire way. As I zipped along the ridge I ride along to get to the hospital I grinned and had the tune Fogbound by the Boom Boom Satellites (another great band I got introduced to by Phil) running through my head. It fitted the moment even more so when you know that it was also the intro theme for the racing game Ridge Racer V.

Best…

While driving around listening to the radio yesterday I heard several things worth sharing:

  1. Best new album title: “You fight like a girl”
  2. Best Hip Hop poetry (as heard on Triple J): A slightly modified version of Edgar Alan Poe’s The Raven, set to a pimpin’ hip hop tune (although I haven’t yet managed to find out what the exact song was).

Music industry incompetence

Now with the acquisition of our previously mentioned non-proxied internet conection I found myself in the position of once again being able to download music. Recently however my conscience (pushy little so and so that it is) has been troubling me on the downloading music front, and so I decided to try doing things the legal way. First I installed iTunes, only to be informed that the iTunes store was unavailable in my country (a fact that apple had prominently failed to mention anywhere on their website). Since that was the only music provider that I specifically knew anything about I went to the ARIA website.
Now my rational here was that seeing as the ARIA people were supposed to be the main advocacy group for Ausalian music artists, and were so opposed to illegal downloads, I reasoned that they would be doing everything in their power to promote existing legal alternatives, and as such would have links to online music stores operating within Australia.
How wrong I was – not that I can admit to being overly surprised. After all, it took them something like 5 years to realise that music downloading was something that they weren’t going to be able to stamp out, and was in fact something they were going to be able to make money out of. What I found was that the ARIA site contained not a single mention of how you could download music legally, or even any propoganda espousing the relative virtues of “doing the right thing”, so to speak.
As an industry advocacy group I can only conclude that ARIA are doing a singularly shithouse job of actually advocating anything, and having eventually found some music stores (off my own bat), I was left with the conclusion that even after all this time the music industry still has no concept of what the consumer actually wants, and that if they don’t provide a product that in some way atg least vaguely resembles what the consumer wants, they have next to no chance of ever attracting people away from the existing illegal alternative.