How have you listened to music this year? DON’T say “through my ears”, smart-arse. Me, I’ve used Deezer, Finetune, Hype Machine, Elbo.ws and Spotify, among others.
If you’re a web-enabled music-obsessed nerdlinger, 2008 has been a year of bounty. And however many new digital music start-ups you think you can name, chances are Music Ally has got you beat.
They’ve just published a list of such sites/applications, and it runs to no fewer than two bloody hundred. Of course the chances are you won’t have heard of most of them, which gives you some idea of how competitive the marketplace is.
It’s quite fun just to go through some of the names. Nappy Boy Digital? That’s T-Pain’s digital label, so if you mention it aloud you should probably have autotune on. Metalseek? A search engine just for heavy metal. Jogli? A database of, apparently, 500 million tracks. Have that many songs even been written?
Head over to Music Ally to see the exhaustive list. It includes a section for “Sites With Lots Of Cowbell”.

Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday December 17th, 2008 at 10:43 am

That Little Boots person is really “on point” when it comes to using thinternet to promote her music. Why, now she (or her lackey, if she has acquired one yet) has gone and posted a load of her tracks - originals, remixes, acoustic versions - on Fairtilizer, enabling free streaming joyfulness.
However, why go to a whole other site when you can listen to it right here? No why! Continue reading and you shall have your ears filled with fizzy pop upandcomingness before you know it.
Quick, do it now before everyone else likes her and you lose the right to sneer at them!

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday December 10th, 2008 at 12:25 pm

I saw Roots Manuva perform live in the summer, at V Festival. I’m not going to beat around the bush - he was shit. He looked knackered and/or fried, and his hype man did most of the work. You know how you double up, with your hands on your knees, when you’re out of breath? Mr Manuva did a fair amount of that on that particular day.
So I was interested to see that Grand Crew, a splendid site which streams full-length concerts, had chosen Roots Manuva as their latest gig. Filmed on November 17th in Paris, he looks in slightly better shape than he did in August, but if you just want to hear his marvellous recent-ish tune “Let The Spirit” maybe just go to the promo video.
Having said all that, Grand Crew allow you to embed their full-length concerts, so if you’d like to see Roots’ full set you can do so after the jump. Other gigs on the site include Gang Gang Dance, Carl Craig and the marvellously-monikered My Girlfriend Is Better Than Yours.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Friday December 5th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

If you haven’t purchased an advent calendar yet - perhaps you’re avoiding chocolate, or HAVE DECIDED TO ACT LIKE A GROWN-UP - I am pleased to be able to direct you to a couple of online places which might fill that gap nicely.
Firstly the website of The Word, the magazine which started out as a nice alternative to all those magazines aimed at fifty quid man, and then decided to just become one itself.
That is by-the-by hereandnow though, because the nice uncles at the publication have gone and done an advent calender which will link to a different Christmas-themed YouTube viddything every day of December.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Tuesday December 2nd, 2008 at 12:10 pm

A new music website by the name of ShockHound has been launched.

ShockHound is a one-stop, genre-spanning music site loaded with millions of MP3s, a vast selection of band merchandise, the latest music videos, unique programming, and exclusive and compelling editorial content.
Very interesting. However I am quite literally eleven times more interested in its name and logo than what the site actually does. Poor-kwah? Because:

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday November 19th, 2008 at 9:00 am

It’s an interesting discipline, this writing-about-music lark. In an age when forming your own opinion about a song requires little more than a broadband connection, it arguably has less relevance than ever. Why read a lengthy synopsis about a piece of music when there are numerous ways to seek it out for yourself and make your own mind up?
This approach has even extended beyond single tracks - sites like Deezer and We7 will allow you to stream whole albums before deciding to fork out money for them.
Nevertheless, you’re never going to go short of wordage once you delve into the music blogosphere. The time and effort that goes into detailing writers’ passion for the music they cover is considerable, and provides a more subjective alternative to the traditional music press.
On My Chemical Toilet we don’t really do album reviews, since you can find plenty of them elsewhere. However I have used the site’s Twitter as a supplementary digest of music I’ve been listening to, alongside snippets of opinion - while I’m not going to do a “proper” review of Keane’s or The Saturdays’ new albums, I might tweet what I think about them.
That approach has now been ripped off adopted by a site called Musebin, which Wired recently took a look at.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Monday November 17th, 2008 at 1:45 pm

As Music Ally puts it, doing the marketing for G N’ R must have been a pretty quiet affair for a long while: “Presumably they’ve spent the last 15 years having long lunches, playing office cricket, and developing RSI from playing too many web games.”
But now G N’ R’s marketing folk are BACK BACK BACK, and this time around they’ve developed Web 2.0 powers! Basically if you’re able to move your arms and hands around, you have a chance of being among the first people in the UK to receive a copy of Chinese Democracy.
For more deets, click over to watch the promo vid.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday November 12th, 2008 at 9:55 am

It’s all about comebacks this week, innit? You can now legally listen to new Guns N’ Roses material, folks. “Chinese Democracy”, the lead single from the-apparently-now-not-apocryphal-at-all album of the same name, is available for streaming here.
The initial reactions from the Twittersphere weren’t particularly positive, but you know what occurred to me? It’s been so long since anything was heard from Axl and whoever he’s playing with these days, I’d forgotten to form any expectations whatsoever of their new stuff.
And let’s face it, the first single from Chinese Democracy could just have been the sound of Axl sitting down to some chow mein and it would still have been the biggest musical happening to occur on the internet on that particular day.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Thursday October 23rd, 2008 at 8:30 am

Global Radio, apparently not put off by the fact that astrology is quite literally made-up bullshit, have teamed up with veteran moonfaced motormouth Russell Grant (left, click image to enlarge) in order to spread his crap all over 40 radio station websites.
Grant, who has been recycling utter fucking flim-flam for the benefit of feeble-minded females for over 20 years, will provide content of an interactive, video-based nature to The One Network’s radio station websites courtesy of his nonsense-based website, Russell Grant Astrology. Like every other proponent of astrology, the site purports to give advice and guidance based on the positioning of stars, some of which - being millions of miles away - quite possibly do not actually exist at the time said advice and guidance is given and acted upon.
Apparently disregarding the possibility that people might be happy just visiting radio station websites to enter competitions or check out playlists, Myles Anderson, Head of Interactive Partnerships from Global Radio, said something impenetrable about online content and brands and so on.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Wednesday October 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am

Isabelle, editor of Brandish, has a dream. That dream is this: that Spiral (henceforth “Spoiral” - pictured right doing everything to some bord, click image to enlarge) from Big Brother 7 will give her his autograph. That’s it. She doesn’t want to put his head on her mantlepiece, or obtain any of his bodily fluids. She just wants a wee scribble.
Thus far, despite conversing with him through MySpace, and eliciting from him a promise that he would post his autograph to her work address, the aspiring rapper has failed to deliver. And frankly it’s becoming painful seeing her moping about the office, wailing and crying, emitting weepy snot bubbles every time the postman fails to deliver Spoiral’s autograph.

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Posted by Stuart Waterman on Tuesday August 26th, 2008 at 10:00 am