July 27, 2005

"Now it's touched, it's broken, the taste just slips away." - Ride.

If you don't read Magnet, then you didn't read the little feature [.pdf] they did in the latest issue regarding the A-Sides. Our favorite part is the discussion of the closer of the band's supertastic debut, Hello, Hello, a song called "Here or There" [links to .mp3 at band's site]. Turns out the tune doesn't just sound like Ride by accident -- producer extraordinaire Brian McTear made an effort to bring the vibe to the song. The good news is, according to the interview, this is a direction the band intends to continue pursuing. So awesome.

In related Magnet news, the more-often-than-not worthless comp CD they send along with the glossy came with the Mobius Band cut "Starts Off With A Bang," Say Hi To Your Mom's "The Twenty-Second Century" and a new Brian Eno cut on it. Not bad. All the good cuts are still offset by some pretty lowly material, but not bad.

DigitalMediaWire brought this morning's installment of news related to the ITunes/indie parity thing. Apparently the newly announced indie label group American Association of Independent Music has secured an agreement with Apple that will let indie labels get the same wholesale price, or cut, for its music as the major labels do. Prior to the agreement indie labels only got $.65 of ITunes' $.99 retail price for the song. Now they get the same $.70 that those jokers Sony BMG, Universal, Warner and EMI get. Apparently MSN Music, which we suspect no one uses anyway, still has a similar disparity in rates that A2IM hopes to correct. A2IM claims indie music accounts for 28% of the music market, although it doesn't qualify what market exactly they are talking about.

Our time may be growing shorter. There is more movement afoot over at Junkmedia with regards to its redesign. The redesign, which we discussed earlier this summer, will include a blog called World of Sound that will be written and edited by yours truly. We saw the template for the blog earlier today and it looks sweeeeeeeeeet. Once that blog goes live things will get really slow here. But we hope you'll join us over at World of Sound.

That is all.

No comments: