music

Death of a music legend – Isaac Hayes

August 10, 2008 By Dan Thornton

When it comes to changing the way we live, music has one of the biggest effects on our lives. Whether it’s the soundtrack to the memorable moments we encounter or a protest song that can help carry a movement for change, it’s capable of an immense amount.

I was lucky enough to get a good musical education thanks to my father, who has a huge collection of 1960’s soul music, including my favourite label, Stax Atlantic. But sadly we’ve lost quite a few of the stars of 50 years ago, and today we lost Isaac Hayes.

For those who only know him as the chef in South Park, he started out writing songs for other artists at Stax, with writing partner David Porter – songs which included ‘Soul Man’ and ‘Hold On I’m Coming’ (both recorded by Sam and Dave). As a solo artist, he released ‘Hot Buttered Soul’ for Stax, following the death of their biggest star, Otis Redding. His album helped to keep the company together and survive for a few years, until it finally fell foul of financial problems.

And obviously he’s also incredibly well known for creating the theme to Blaxploitation film ‘Shaft’ – which saw him become the first black musician to win an Academy Award.

For more on Isaac Hayes, you can read up on Wikipedia, and more importantly, listen on Last.fm.

Coldplay demonstrate the problem with the music industry

June 23, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s not a surprise that Coldplay are top of the UK singles chart (along with the album chart as well). Whatever you think of their music, they’ve got the fanbase and the following to make it as close to a sure thing as could be – despite the fact they got beaten by the Crazy Frog ringtone in 2005!

But what is very interesting is the fact that the official single to be released, Violet Hill, is only at number 11 on the charts. The song at number 1, Viva La Vida, was actually only made available as a download to fans who had pre-ordered the new album, just three days before the singles chart was compiled.

So the track available as a bonus download for pre-ordered albums beats out a physical copy costing £1.99 by the same band.

For me, this is another sure sign that the singles chart should become purely about downloaded tracks, and that increasing numbers of bands and people are understanding that downloadable music is something which can be enjoyed as an incentive, or as promotional, or a taster – and not necessarily as the end product which supports the music industry.

For a more groundbreaking example, just take a look at what Nine Inch Nails did…

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Myspace MP3 store is a huge threat – but not to Apple

April 16, 2008 By Dan Thornton

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the new Myspace Music store will pose a threat to the Itunes and Ipod Applopoly. But I’m a little surprised by Last.fm co-founder Martin Stiksel being so ready to dismiss the threat to streaming music services.

The growth and success of Itunes, added to the image of Apple products and services, gives it a fairly secure position at the moment, and it would take something pretty revolutionary to overturn that. Certainly I’ve encountered enough people who have lost music collections from Ipods yet won’t switch to an alternative to realise Apple devotion works across all their products and services. And enough alternatives exist, even including supermarkets.

However, plenty of people already use Myspace to listen to individual tracks by their favourite artists, and offering a streaming radio service without limitations would make this option extremely attractive. And would seriously threaten several services.

I recently heard a stat regarding Last.fm which is pretty believable. Apparently just 25% of Last.fm users actually visit the website, with most using the ‘scrobbling’ tracking software, and possibly the downloadable radio player. It makes sense as the Last.fm site is hobbled by 30 second clips, and limits on the amount of times you can listen to individual tracks by specific artists. And although it does a reasonable job of finding similar artists, it won’t let you play the specific inspiration before sending you round the houses, which leaves the similar artists without any context. The arrival of Myspace could push Last.fm to concentrate on scrobbling and displaying widgets, which will either lead to new and interesting revenue streams, or could put a real chokehold on the traditional display advertising on the website.

Meanwhile Pandora.com is still on a U.S only lock down. And when you’ve taken something away from users, it puts you in a far worse position than when you’re launching for the first time. There’s no news on any re-opening to non-American markets, and in the meantime, along comes a site already extremely popular, and proposing free music streaming. Suddenly the non-U.S. world forgets Pandora exists. That’s going to limit expansion!

And then you have a myriad of small rival streaming services, like Meemix, which has a plethora of great add-ons and ideas around their music service – but has a corresponding amount of niggles and flaws, as if the ideas exceeded the ability to deliver in a simple and user friendly way.

Myspace can be far from user friendly – but enough people are already familiar with it and accept the problems to mean they’ll jumping all over new music options. And various research shows that the early adopters who jumped ship to Facebook etc are likely to still have a Myspace profile and pop in occasionally, so a fair few profiles could be fired up again to explore a new music option.

At the end of the day, it could be really good news for consumers, as Myspace plans to offer DRM free downloads (possibly pressuring others to follow suit), and it could prompt some serious thoughts about giving more value to users in the streaming market, and some serious attempts to differentiate and move ahead. It’s not often I praise and support Myspace, but for once their plans have my vote.

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