Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to aaron bru,
By all reports she pulled it off at Splendour, so what went wrong here? Or is everyone expecting flawlessness already from a 16yr old?
Splendour was actually a much easier gig. The crowd was probably about the same size, but it was a far smaller stage and a shorter set and she didn’t have multiple cameras to pay attention to. I’m pretty sure they didn’t shoot the show to that standard for it to go out once on the internet, and she’ll have known it was an important show in that respect.
I actually wonder if her flat spot was a matter of physical exhaustion, given the way she remarked on how hot it was. Her fitness and strength is going to be an issue if she’s on a demanding schedule, but they’re not going to send her out on tour. Saturday night kicked off six weeks of promo travel – including an appearance soon on Later With Jools Holland: in the same show as Kings of Leon and Kanye!
So it wasn’t like anything really went wrong with the show. She wilted for a short while under the spotlight, then pulled it back. I wasn’t in the room, but most of the time we were sitting watching the stream and marvelling at the way she was pulling it off.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
“injustifiably”?
“compemsation”?
Thank you for your crowdsourced proofreading services.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
It’s even more baffling that such tests would be used in a redundancy situation when the company should clearly have plenty of information about the employees in question – how they fit into a team and how they work.
Well, you'd think.
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Interesting story in the Herald day looking at recent poll responses on cannabis legalisation.
The lead is Curia's poll for Family First, which used the extraordinary question:
"If an adult wishes to use a drug such as marijuana, they should be able to do so legally."
I guess "drug such as marijuana" includes heroin and PCP.
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UPDATE: My issues are resolved! I had installed a Chrome extension called Mediahint, which tricks the geoblocking on BBC iPlayer, which I like to look at occasionally. It's never been a problem before, but it prompted iHeart to override the redirect to the NZ regional page and prevented me playing geoblocked Lorde clips served by Brightcove to the TRN station and herald websites. Weirdly, it had no effect on Saturday night's Lorde stream. This answers a few questions for iHeart NZ too. Anthea at TRN noted that most of the problems they'd been having were with "savvy users" who knew what an IP address is. So, yeah: if you use Mediahint, or a service such as unblock.us to defeat geoblocking, you may have the same issue.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to bob daktari,
- as a older type (not the target amrket at all) I also hope I like the album as much as I enjoy the ep and they continue to allow all those remixes to pop up everywhere
That's been really smart, the remix thing. It's clearly not hard to get Lorde stems.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Alan Perrott,
what I puzzle over though is that the label has played hide and seek with her for a fair while yet are launching her without having assembled a band. or do they intend to tour her as a biggie sized karaoke act?
then again, they probably don’t have a choice, an artist’s shelf life isn’t what it was.They hadn’t planned to try and go large for another year or so, but you don’t shut down something like this. Basically, they let her put the The Love Club up on Soundcloud as a free download. They didn’t expect Jason Flom to find it and get in touch. And people all over the world just kept downloading the EP. They got to 60,000 downloads before they thought they’d better make it available for actual sale, whereupon two songs promptly became number one records in New Zealand.
Meanwhile, the US industry (which regards Flom as a seer) was starting to go nuts. Radio stations were adding ‘Royals’ left, right and centre. So they agreed to a promo/showcase tour, which saw various celebrities elbowing each other out of the way to get tickets. This is like, last month.
The reason there isn’t a band is they there simply hasn’t been time to put one together. Remember when Ladyhawke made a bedroom electronica record and toured with a crap pub-rock band?
But I don’t see any problem at all putting a band together in time – and replacing those canned backing vocals with real singers. There are plenty of acts who make studio records and can still put on convincing festival shows – M83, for example, or Bjork.
I know they see her as having more than a “shelf life”, too.
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Don Christie,
…but the youtube videos have been yanked :-(
And the original stream was geoblocked.
Still disappointing -- and it's quite odd seeing that the takedown request came from IFPI rather than any of the labels. Same deal with the the leaked Miley track a couple of weeks ago.
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Update: I've been discussing this with someone from iHeart, and there's something odd going on with my IP address -- there's a regional redirect that doesn't work for me, even after I've cleared my cache and cookies. Also explains why I never got an email -- because I registered on the US site. It may not be an isolated problem.
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iHeartRadio NZ has just tweeted the link to this post, which is jolly sporting of them. I wonder when they'll get a landing page posted at the address they're still sending people to.