Music In The Cloud – The Music Industry’s New Internet Problem

Lots of good questions, but few real answers. My guess is the further we go down this road, the more important live performance will become. It remains to be seen if online streaming music services can make a go of it.

Schiller – “I Feel You”

This track off of Buddha-Bar VIII has been in constant rotation on my iPod. The composition and arrangement of this remix by Sam Popat are outstanding, but it’s the vocal by Peter Heppner that puts the tune over the top for me.

You can check out the original version of this track here.

Jeff Beck – “What Mama Said”

I just saw this 1999 video of the Jeff Beck Group live… Wow! What a terrific tune played by an amazing band! I grew up listening to Beck, but I’ve never had the chance to see him play live. Hopefully, he’ll come to Toronto (or near by) soon.

No Doubt

I realize that for many “name” artists it’s now all about the show, but No Doubt’s latest tour has truly hammered home the point. To help promote their upcoming tour, No Doubt is giving away their entire recorded catalogue with every ticket over $42.50! This is a pretty gutsy move. I wonder how this will affect the rest of the industry.

Bandcamp

I just uploaded all of my albums to Bandcamp. I absolutely love this site — very clearly laid out and extremely artist and consumer friendly. Basically, Bandcamp let’s artists upload their tracks and then sell downloads directly (via PayPal) to their audience. Artists can also set whatever price (all the way down to zero) they’d like for their downloads. At this point, Bandcamp isn’t taking any sort of cut of the download, which I hope they change in the future. They need to make money to stay in business (they acknowledge this). One striking plus to Bandcamp’s downloads is that they come in a very wide variety of formats — MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Apple Lossless. And they are completely DRM-free. So head on over to the Bandcamp site!