Posts by Russell Brown
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It appears the Spotify rumours are true. There will be music that's only available to paying subscribers:
Hits Magazine: “What’s your sense of the streaming landscape right now?”
Lucian Grainge: “When you cut through all the noise, the potential is enormous, and obviously I remain incredibly optimistic. A lot of the press coverage and industry chatter has been dominated by the ‘freemium’ debate, which has degraded the conversation to the point where you’re cast as either ‘for’ or ‘against’ ad-supported on-demand music consumption. Clearly, it’s not that simplistic.
As I’ve said before, while ad-supported on-demand music definitely has a place, whether that’s as part of discovery or trials of new products and offerings, freemium alone is inadequate to support our critical ecosystem of artists, labels and the platforms themselves.
What that means is that we must seek the proper balance between ad-supported and paid subscription. It’s not one or the other.
With the two approaches in proper relationship, we can continue the level of investment we make in artists who then, in turn, can be fairly compensated for their work. If we get that right, everyone wins. That’s what we’re working towards.” -
Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
BTW, for those worried that New Zealand music isn’t selling (or whatever), the No.2 album this week is the brilliantly titled Give Up Your Dreams by the Phoenix Foundation, only kept from No.1 by Dr Dre. And there are seven other albums by New Zealand artists in the top 40, which is brilliant.
That is good! Still pretty small in absolute numbers, no doubt, but good.
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In other news, another iTunes update popped up, I installed it and Apple Music is kind of working as advertised – as in, I even turned iCloud Music Library back on on my iMac.
Part of it is actually learning to do do it Apple’s way, rather than the way I’ve been doing using iTunes for years, and there are still some confusing things (the relationship between iTunes Match and Apple Music, still). But I’m cautiously optimistic …
UPDATE: How the hell do you organise Apple Music albums? The obvious thing to do would be to put them in folders, but I can’t find any way of doing that. Thought: if Apple was determined to merge Apple Music and local files in iTunes, it would have helped a lot if you could handle them the same way.
UPDATE 2: It appears I'm not alone in wanting a playlist of "liked" songs and albums in Apple Music. But this is not possible. You can only add them to My Music where there's no way of organising them beyond manually making playlists and adding them to those. It's like they're trying to break the user experience.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to Doug Hood,
me and chris, the brains that wouldn’t die..well at least not just yet
Excellent :-)
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Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols apparently played with a stolen guitar.
He basically stole all their gear. Which meant they had good gear!
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Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Corben Simpson lived in the house before Chris and Barbara bought it.
I remember the discovery of a lot of empty medicine bottles in the garden.
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Incoming!
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Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to Alfie,
Hey!!! I had the impression Chris was a bit buggered after his stroke so it's great to see him performing again.
He's constrained by seizures (and the medication that curbs them) but is as creative as ever. Did you see Jess McAllen's gutsy story for the Sunday Star Times?
A small group of us 'borrowed' TVNZ film gear back in the day to make the first Enemy clips which played on Radio with Pix. Damn we were proud of those!
Nice! I love our readers.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Criminal Life, in reply to bob daktari,
It was the fifth most downloaded app on the US iTunes store the week of apple music’s launch – which suggests they benefitted from all the added publicity (good and bad) they received courtesy of Apple
Yeah, that's my guess too.
Digital Music News suggests spotify is set to dramatically change the free use terms to severely limit what people can do, all but rendering it useless to those who use it a lot… I wonder if this is due to rights holders demands? Sorry, can’t find the link to the story, it seems to have vanished from the site, still shows in google search.
Apple leaned on the music companies to force that on Spotify, so it could be true. But Digital Music News posts a lot of crazy, unverified stuff, which could be why the story has gone.
I guess 11 million checking out apple music is a big number, but given the tens of millions more who have a device and iTunes account its seems like an abject failure – much like using the damn thing, like yourself I am buggered if I can get it to work in a manner that makes it the joy I know it could be… which si frustrating cause like you when you find some part of it that works and is good its great
It just seems like an utter lack of focus on the real user experience. Releasing a service that actually materially harms the most intensive users of your existing music software ...
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Whoops! Forgot this ...
Neil Finn does his first ever remix, for The Phoenix Foundation's 'Give Up Your Dreams'. And it's ace.
Free download too!
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