Mainly Rock

I very much agree with Nick Hodgson from the Kaiser Chiefs, but I still believe they could provide a (legal) free download with the 2LP vinyl edition of their latest album…

I saw the vinyl edition of our new album in the dressing room yesterday. Many people have written in the past about the beauty of vinyl and the feeling you get when holding the sleeve and removing the record. I am a vinyl fan already, but just then I realised that this is what I want people to experience when we make an album. I don’t want people to download it three weeks before it’s supposed to be out because an unknown person somewhere in the world has uploaded it. I don’t want people to click on ‘Play’ and hear it through laptop speakers, skip through it and then get on the internet and comment about it.

Source: Drowned In Sound, P2P: Kaiser Chiefs have their say

Photo credit: Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Seen on nyt.com, via Gizmodo

Greg Kot, not only has written a great book about Wilco, but has also written a recent series of articles about the vinyl “revival” (Vinyl revival: How a dead format came back for another spin).

On top of all the reasons for buying vinyls mentioned in the article, such as the attractiveness of the physical object and the potentially superior sound quality, I would add that my personal listening habits are better matched with the two (or more) sided LP than with a single 60+ minutes CD.

I often find it hard to actually sit down on the sofa and listen to a whole CD in one go, but one side of an LP is just the right amount of time for a nice glass of wine or a bottle of beer. It maybe just be a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder, but there are many CDs on which I know the first couple of songs so much better than the second half for exactly this reason.

via: Largehearted Boy

The combination of Wilco and legal mp3 downloads is probably as close to an ideal subject for this blog as it gets.

W I L C O have put up an “audio postcard of sorts from a summer’s night in Oregon with our friends the Fleet Foxes & a lovely Bob Dylan tune”. It’s a free download, if you “pledge to vote in the 2008 Election”.

This brings up the question, if it’s morally acceptable to download the song, if you’re not a US citizen…

They do give you the opportunity to download the song without providing any information, so at least it’s not a legal problem.

If you bought DRM protected music from WallMart you’re screwed…

WalMart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection — only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans – Boing Boing.

People might not be attached to physical objects anymore and they might not care about sound quality, but this must be the number one reason why DRM-protected downloads is not a good idea.

Last week I bought Beck’s Modern Guilt, which is, by the way, the best album he has made in a while. At Ground Zero it was available in vinyl with a free mp3 download voucher, so how could I resist?

Using the download voucher was a total failure, because the downloads were only available in the US. It’s perfectly fine to buy an import LP in France, but you don’t get the free download… 

This has never happened to my with an Indie label, but clearly the majors still need some time to catch up with consumer expectations.

Muxtape has been shut down, but now we can all be DJ’s at blip.fm.

For some people this is more important than the line-up, and it is true that Carling really isn’t all that great…

Reading & Leeds get Tuborg Lager – Music-News.com

This and lots of more stuff can be found in this pdf: THE GREATEST ROCK N ROLL SHOW ON EARTH RETURNS

The latest music-sensation on the Internet is muxtape.

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