G5
- Big Boi’s “You Ain’t No DJ” video with Yelawolf
- Pour out your St. Ides, folks, Paste Magazine is dead
- Treme is getting a proper soundtrack release, featuring loads of New Orleans classics. The show served as something of an introduction to the New Orleans jazz scene for many young viewers. Friend of the blog Jerome just started grad school down there and his reports have sounded every bit as fantastic as the show’s depiction of the city. Part of me hopes that the second season branches out into the hip-hop and bounce scenes, and another part of me worries about the verisimilitude factor of something like that for a TV show. We’ll see next spring…
- From the annals of “Huh?” - Shabazz Palaces has signed with Sub Pop. I guess it’s not a total stretch, both are based in Seattle after all
- Apple made its latest big announcement yesterday… I’ll leave the iPods alone, but here are three thoughts on iTunes 10 and Ping:
- iTunes 10 still has all the problems iTunes 9 had, just with a different facade that’s currently making it harder to navigate. Thanks, Apple.
- I don’t like Ping… like most actual music fans, I don’t follow many musicians on Twitter or Facebook. Instead I follow the writers, radio/podcast people and blogs whose opinions I enjoy and respect. Most musicians, like athletes, use the social network to post ridiculous pictures and messages about room service… there’s nothing social or interactive about the way most musicians use these services. I suppose I can just follow the same people on Ping that I follow on Twitter, but then, what’s it really accomplishing? That there is no way, other than leaving comments on people’s activity, to interact, strikes me as quite un-social as well.
- It appears that Apple is censoring certain artists’ posts to Ping, including those related to Prop 8 from Lady Gaga. This is bad business. More over, it demonstrates Apple’s line of thinking about its users: ‘We want you to buy all of our crap, and use our software to buy the crappy sound quality music files we’re selling you, and in exchange for all that customer loyalty, we reserve the right to delete stuff we don’t like from your account on our social network.’
- Finally, this isn’t about iTunes or Ping, but the change from downloading to streaming of TV shows and movies on Apple TV should absolutely be read as a precursor to a streaming music service coming sometime soon. Here’s to hoping that Spotify beats them to the punch and opens operations in the US and Latin America soon.
Any thoughts on the new iTunes? Leave them in the comments
