While it’s good to see that the European Commission cares about consumer rights, I don’t understand why they worry so much about entertainment industry (cf. Times). As if there weren’t other problems in the EU than varying music prices. Besides, I doubt Apple came up with the idea of separate iTMS for each European country by itself.
What’s next? Cars are in UK more expensive than in Spain too, and they even have the steering-wheel on the wrong side!
…and get the latest The Beautiful Kantine Band album!
Reminds me of our last “we definitely need a Vespa Primavera for summer months” office chat this week. Those Liverpool-greyish dressed Burgenländers came up with some excellent sixties tunes – 8 out of 10 Vespas if you ask me!
[youtube ClD_zhJlKw8]
If someday the lead singer of German rock band MIA., Ms Mieze Katz, decides to leave music business, she could easily open up her own motivation camp. I can’t remember seeing a person spreading so much positivity over thousands of people like she did last night at their concert here in Vienna.
Certainly one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen!
One highlight of their show, both tour and album are called “Zirkus” btw, was her artistic trapeze act. Nice to watch and considering that she’s no acrobat and learned it only for the show it was quite impressive. See yourself…
[youtube aPjDCbdlK_U]
Just found this nice Dashboard widget: (unofficial) FM4 widget.
Runs in the background, occupies less CPU-power than Quicktime and integrates FM4 Trackservice.
FM4, if you don’t know it, is an excellent *alternative* Austrian radio station. All morning shows (until 1pm CET) are in English language and there is also an official stream on their website available if you’d like to give it a try.
I’ve never been a big Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. Well, I liked their music and used to listen to them in the early nineties, but never too much and at some point I completely lost their track. The new songs I only know from the radio. They’re not bad, but they didn’t made me buy any newer album either.
However, we went to the concert here in Vienna, to one of the two sold out (20k people each!) concerts. A good concert, I really enjoyed it. The audience was great, the atmosphere was great, the band, well, the band are 4 men in their mid-forties behaving a bit like a teenage surf band, which was sometimes kind of strange to watch. But in the end it was a good show and I thought they’d do a great job being the ambassadors of California. Listening to their songs and watching them live on stage they somehow reminded me of this wonderful place on earth.
[googlevideo -6989585264928642782]
At the moment Interpol is one of my favorite bands, Antics is such a fantastic album. But what I don’t get or what is kind of irritating, is the NAZI-like outfit of Carlos D. Even if it’s just a fashion detail, but it should be considered that many have suffered and were murdered by people wearing very similar accessories. It’s a bit more than just fashion.
[youtube FktYzdDJdqQ]
The growth of Last.fm events is pretty impressing. Within 2 weeks they’ve created an amazing collection of local music events.
I wonder if it’s all user generated content or if they just pull out the information of some other event sites. Upcoming.org for instance is by 100% based on user data, exists much longer but never had so many events listed for Vienna as Last.fm has after only 2 weeks.
Besides the quantity, Last.fm recommends events based on their profiling engine. Meaning they tell you when bands you like are coming to town or if another concert matches your music taste.
Next step could be listing DJ events too. But therefore Last.fm would need the information about what music are DJs playing. They should probably have a look at the DJ database maintained by the Vienna based project PLAY.FM (or vice versa).
For the last few days I tried to buy an album at the iTunes Store. Usually before I purchase music I want to preview it. iTunes offers therefore 30 seconds song previews. The problem during the last days was, that the preview wasn’t working. It started playing, after 3 seconds the stream started rebuffering for about 15 seconds followed by another 3 seconds music and so on. Ok, so I thought I’ll preview it somewhere else, and recalled the online music shop Bleep. The last time I purchased something there, Bleep was a small business and had only a few indies listed.
Boy, has this shop grown! I found the album I was looking for immediatly at Bleep, and still better, yes, SO MUCH BETTER: for the same price I (legally) bought 320kbps clean mp3s WITHOUT that crappy FairPlay DRM!!!
So what do we learn: without the technical problems at iTunes I hardly would have found out that there is still music business online who trusts in their customers and sells music that plays everywhere, for sure.
Bleep is now my personal first choice for purchasing music online. I already saw some other albums there which I had an eye on at iTunes but waited with my purchase because the preview wasn’t working.
Update:
Seems that I’m not the only one having streaming problems in iTunes. According to this thread my ISP Chello is the one to blame, not the iTunes Store. If I were Apple I wouldn’t be happy about an ISP who is blocking a few hundred or maybe thousand potential customers…
Sofa Surfers are certainly this year’s best live act in Vienna. It’s just amazing how they perform their new album live. Must be something like the band-factor. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but I got the impression that they are still enjoying playing music together, at least it sounds like this.
Last night I had the camera in my pocket and grabbed a few scenes from the concert, well, the visuals, mainly:
[googlevideo 8905595815819637625]
The music sharing site Last.fm got a few new features today: a Flash player, an event system and a so called taste-o-meter which gives you quick feedback on whether you like the music taste of the user profile you are viewing or not. It’s kind of scary when machines start matching people based on whatsoever profiling information.
However, well worth mentioning is the new event section. I guess this means some heavy competition for event sites like Upcoming.org. It’s quite clever to integrate music events in a music recommendation service like Last.fm. Needless to say that users can add event descriptions, pictures, videos and tell if they are attending.
Last.fm offers a great service, if you love music you’ll love Last.fm.
