This is MP3Monster's blog. The blog covers music, technology, photography and anything else Monster considers worthy of blogging about.Lorry fuel tax protest hits roads
Posted by monster in economy
Protests over fuel prices are starting to kick in again, with a number of convoys around the country on a go slow impacting traffic. More details at BBC NEWS. According to the BBC …
Treasury spokesman said the government understood business and families were “feeling the pressure from high fuel prices”.
But they said the “immediate priority” was to encourage oil-producing countries to increase output, that a 2p-per-litre fuel duty increase had been put back from April to October and fuel duty was “still 11% below its 1999 level, in real terms”.
The fact that the prices are 11% less in real terms, is misses the most crucial the point, which is the rate of change that is the problem, and that if fuel prices are to rapidly correct based on that real terms figures is going to really hit inflation.
Record results for music royalties in 2007
Posted by monster in Music
The UK organisations responsible for collecting music royalties have reported here that they have had a record year in collected royalties. Although royalties from physical media sales have dropped by 10% everything else (e.g. public performance, downloads and so on) have been increasing in or near double digit rates giving an overall growth of 3%. The report says …
For the first time, income from broadcasting and online out-performed that of recorded physical product. Online royalties, although still a small proportion of the overall whole (at £10m), grew significantly by 54% year-on-year, largely due to the growth in the legal online music market led by iTunes.
A picture that isn’t too gloomy given the current global economic down turn, although this is only really good news for the artists and composers rather than the record labels themselves.
Hotel Chelsea NYC, Rock’s Vortex Of ‘Death and Destruction’
Posted by monster in Books, Music, Photography
Wired.com have got a neat little article here about the Hotel Chelsea in NYC. This notorious venue perhaps most famous as the location where Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, but also the home for a raft of other sordid stories (and a few less sordid such as Arthur C Clarke’s writing of 2001). The hotel is now the subject to a documentary film and photo essay book.
Jesse Malin - another live album
Posted by monster in Music
Having only recently released his covers album - “On Your Sleeve“, Jesse Malin is now putting out another live album on June 3rd called “Mercury Retrograde“. The album is getting a limited CD release, and will be generally available through iTunes. The album has 16 tracks recorded Christmas last year at New York’s Mercury Lounge.
Telegraph to get a ‘Fair Deal for Drivers’ - postpone October 2p fuel price rise
Posted by monster in economy
The Telegraph a running a campaign with a petition to get the 2p price rise scheduled for October on fuels stopped, and to take actions to slow the rate that fuel prices are increasing. As you’ll have seen by my previous posts fuel costs are increasing at whole percentage points per month (rather than per year) at the moment. PetrolPrices.com have a range of figures reporting fuel prices as high as £1.37 per litre in parts of the country. Although the principal to slowly increase taxation on fuel to help fund public transport and encourage green activity maybe fun, the current rate of change is starting to make a notable impact on inflation, sufficiently so that it has the Mervyn King the head of the Bank of England has identified it as a factor on any number of occasions now.
The campaign includes a petition here which you may wish to sign.
del.icio.us tags: fuel, petrolPrices.com, deisel, prices, inflation, petrol, Telegraph, petition
Peter Gabriel supports Bowers & Wilkins music club
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
Peter Gabriel is a busy man, quietly helping music in the world of technology, with his work with OD2 (On Demand 2), We7 and now Bowers & Wilkins music club. Bowers & Wilkins are a audiophile speaker manufacturer and wither Peter have indicated that sharing music using MP3s results in a loss of quality. So they have set up a music club through which you can buy high quality music recordings (in the Apple’s loss less audio file format as used in the recording studio) recorded at Peter’s state of the art Real World recording studios. Although not explicitly stated, the indications are from the website’s information is that the music is DRM free. The club costs £33.95 per year for which you get a free album to download every month. You don’t get to choose the artist or album, but initial indications that the artists involved so far are both interesting and diverse in styles so within a year you should get to hear a couple of albums that will appeal to your musical palate, unless you’re exclusively a Spice Girls and Sugababes fan. So far albums have been recorded with blues artist Little Axe (aka Skip MacDonald), Grindhouse and Gwyneth Herbert.
next Peter Gabriel album
Posted by monster in Music
The next Peter Gabriel release isn’t looking like it will be a new solo album as hoped, but the compilation of a ‘recording week’ sessions over the last 15 years at his Real World recording studios in Box, Wiltshire, England. The album Big Blue Ball (so called because of who the Earth appears from space) gas got some teaser material here.
The recording weeks at the Realworld studios have been like super charged jam sessions with lots of Real World artists past and present such as Peter along with Joseph Arthur, Karl Wallinger and a host of other famous, and not so famous names.
Although we’d hope for a follow on to Up, Big Blue Ball should still prove to be very interesting listening given the names that will appear on the album. But like all Gabriel fans we’re wondering when he’ll get onto the next solo outing.
Delays - Southampton Guildhall 17-05-08
Posted by monster in Music
Delays - Southampton Guildhall 17-05-08
We managed to catch the Delays performing their home town gig on Saturday. Some photos of taken with my camera phone are available on our flickr site - http://photos.mp3monster.org
Thea Gilmore - Liejacker
Posted by monster in Music
Thea Gilmore’s new album, Liejacker is available from today, and is getting good reviews with five stars from the Guardian yesterday. Thea’s website gives some background to the inspiration to the album here. This is an album I’ll be checking out.
Eels Live Album
Posted by monster in Music
The EELS LIVE AND IN PERSON! London 2006 live CD & DVD package previously only available at the Eel’s 2008 concerts is now available exclusively at the band’s online store (here). It’s a limited edition two disc package containing a CD and a DVD priced at £12.
Nick Hornby - The New Yorker
Posted by monster in Books
If you’re a music fan then you’ll probably have at least a passing familiarity with the author Nick Hornby who wrote Hi Fidelity (and for the real fans 31 Songs among others). Whilst writing his books he has also written some music articles for the New Yorker magazine, some of these articles can be found on the The New Yorker Archive.
Google Reader - Offline
Posted by monster in Technology
Google Reader has become my preferred RSS aggregator with its Outlookish and AJAX based interface is very nice to use. The only problem is when on the road, I can’t catch up with checking which feeds are worth further reading when I get online access. Until now that is, Google Code have released ReadAir using Adobe’s Air rich Internet access platform. Although the first release (0.1) doesn’t have all the shortcuts of the proper reader, ReadAir does have a nice clean (Macish) interface that is brilliantly responsive, and whilst online rapidly syncs with your google account.
Data Protection, getting a handle on it for a global company
Posted by monster in Technology
Reading an article in the trade journal Computing prompted me to double check that our Data Protection policies, particularly now that the company I work for is rapidly expanding into a global operation. Reviewing legislation for one country is heavy going, and I’m pleased to say that for UK our policies are still more than satisfactory. However looking at the dealing with cross boarder issues, things get a lot trickier. With the requirements laid down by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which includes the UK, national legislation for other EU countries and OECD members. Plus the fact that the US has a different approach to data protection compared to other OECD members as a result they’ve setup something called Safe Harbour to address the OECD restrictions. Upstanding all this differing positions is enough to make someone’s brain ache. Fortunately we don’t yet have to contend with specific requirements such as Sarbanes Oxley.
Chilirec - Your Free Internet Recorder
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
I cam across a new free service called Chilirec. It allows your to select and record Internet radio stations for later playback. Currently there are 300 or so stations although none of the major names appear for example BBC, KCRW and so on. As a solution it has some exciting potential, and could if it takes off have some interesting affects on podcasting (i.e. you record your favourite programmes for time shifted listening without first having to download or accept any download quality restrictions.
It does however raise all sorts of interesting copyright issues, which probably explains why the major stations are absent from the available list as it would attract the big money lawyers.
Some suggested Listening …
Posted by monster in Music
April Fuel Prices
Posted by monster in economy
A new graph showing April’s fuel prices is here …
The figures show that in the last month prices have jumped %1.3 on average for petrol and 3.5% on a month on month calculation this is on top of last month’s 2.9% and 5.4% respectively. If fuel prices are to climb in step with inflation (suggested to be 2.5% p.a.) we should be seeing monthly changes in the order of 0.2%. The question is, how long before this kind of fuel price acceleration is going to trigger inflation in the cost of necessary products such as food.
del.icio.us tags: fuel, prices, inflation, statistics
Elvis Costello - Momofuku will be on CD
Posted by monster in Music
Initial announcements about Elvis Costello’s latest album Momofuku was that it would only available as vinyl or download - no CD. As I blogged here, it seemed a strange decision given Elvis’ fanbase. Either this was a marketing ploy, which is based on column inches generated was successful, or Lost Highway have had a change of heart as the album will be made available on CD, as can be seen by the Amazon listing here.
More free tunes from Nine Inch Nails
Posted by monster in Music
Following Nine Inch Nails Ghosts album earlier in the year with it would seem that Trent Reznor can’t give away his music quick enough with another free album download, (in MP3, Flac or M4A formats) called The Slip. According to Filter Magazine (here) there will be a CD release of the album later in the year.
Follow on about MSN Music service (Why DRM is so Evil)
Posted by monster in Music, Technology
Following my recent post (here) about MSN Music discontinuing the ability to move DRM’d music, it would appear that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have the same view that I have and have written to Microsoft outlining what they believe Microsoft must to make good the service discontinuation - see EFF’s statement here.
del.icio.us tags: DRM free, EFF, MSN Music
Lester Bangs
Posted by monster in Books, Music
As a celebration of the anniversary of the death of gonzo music critic Lester Bangs Glorious Noise have pulled together a set of links to some of his writings Lester Bangs in Creem. Although if you want read a good collection of his writings then I can recommend the book Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung which was compiled by Greil Marcus.
For those who haven’t made a connection as the who Bangs is - perhaps you may remember Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous (a fine presentation of Bangs). For a brief bio of Lester Bangs try wikipedia.
