No More Heroes Any More - Requiem pt 2

Part two of all the deaths in 2016, the worse year for musicians in a long while - not to mention all the actors and comedians as well.

No More Heroes Any More - Requiem pt 1

2016 has been a tough year in many respects; Brexit, Trump, Syria, terrorist bombings, Snooper's Charter. The same has been true for celebrities, with a large number of musicians in particular having been sent to the great gig in the sky this year. This post is not meant to state the obvious but to highlight some of the artists who perhaps didn't get as much screen time  as others and to remind us all of the losses of these cultural icons.

Alternatives to Soundcloud

A recent announcement heralded the news that after a supposed 5 years of negotiations, the PRS for Music in the UK (Performing Rights Society, collect revenues and royalties for artists) are to open legal action against Soundcloud for lack of paid revenues and licenses. Initially I was incredulous at the entire news, especially that Soundcloud had stuck to a single defence for over five years and my first thoughts contemplated the death of the service as it buckles under the weight of a lawsuit - something made more poignant as I have only just paid for another year's subscription. 

NB: Apparently PRS' official name is "PRS for Music", but it is rarely referred to as this in the news. In this article, PRS and PRS for Music refer to the same organisation.

Yamaha ReFace - thoughts

Unfortunately this wasn't mine, but I think it works in this case. For a bit of background information, Yamaha have recently dropped the ball on their recent new range of ReFace synthesiser, piano and organ keyboards and announced them early by accident. Based on the in depth reviews from outlets like Sonic State and Doctor Mix, there have been some really strong reactions and this more or less sums up the popular opinion. I'm going to take a more measured approach and talk about them once I have listened to them all!

NAMM 2015: Teenage Engineering - Pocket Operators

It's been a while since Swedish music technologists Teenage Engineering had produced a new hardware unit since their OP-1 machine (a very swish all-in-one digital machine that can now be found for around £450-£600 second hand), however their recent releases at NAMM have been causing a stir at the lower end of the market.

RIP: Winamp

Ars Technica is running a lovely story on the rise and subsequent fall of Winamp in the wake of news that AOL (who own Nullsoft) are pulling the plug past 20th December this year. This is truly a sad day given the rich history that Winamp has had and that it is on its last legs.

Hand in hand with Gnutella and other peer to peer sites around the turn of the millennium, Winamp was one of the more widespread .mp3 players that most in the fledgeling music downloading scene would use. East to use, skin-able, built in codecs for loads of audio and video formats, great plugin support, Shoutcast Internet radio, sweet visualisers (Geiss was my favourite), media library functions and more, Winamp was very much a media Swiss army knife for the masses while its competition floundered. Real Player was only truly good for its own streaming formats and DivX had plugins for Winamp that rendered its own program useless. Let's not even mention Windows Media Player, with its clunky interface, dreadful codec support and media licencing setup for anything you played on it.

For me, the one thing that killed Winamp was iTunes. Suddenly, the iPod was everywhere and needed iTunes to run, so people migrated over to it. Sure, you can get third-party support for iPods on Winamp, but people want something that just works without messing around. Nullsoft's purchase by AOL and subsequent firing of its founder Justin Frankel (founder of the Reaper DAW) probably didn't help, but then again, I don't think AOL really knew what they were doing with Winamp either. 

Nowadays, VideoLan Client (VLC) has taken over the role of Winamp, with an emphasis on functionality and compatibility rather than interface tweaks. Foobar2K also deserves a mention if you are looking for a simple and elegant .mp3 player for low-power netbooks. Ultimately I haven't been back to Winamp in years but it still holds a place in my heart as my first .mp3 player in the early days of file sharing.

RIP Winamp

Arstechnica story:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/06/winamp-how-greatest-mp3-player-undid-itself/

RIP Lou Reed - 71

According to a Rolling Stone article, Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed has died with the cause of death unknown/unreleased as yet. A pioneer in the New York art scene, his work with Velvet Underground and plentiful solo work earned him recognition and fame - his album Transformer being the most accessible and popular.

RIP George Duke 1946 - 2013

More bad news on the airwaves, however this time around it's someone pretty close to my musical tastes. After suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, legendary keyboardist and Zappa player George Duke passed away on Monday this week, just one month after his last album was released to the world. It's a stroke of irony that this album was dedicated to his late wife who died last year (nearly a whole year ago), but it serves as a fond farewell to his fans.

DV247 in dire straits?

Music shop DV247 has announced the closure of all of their UK stores bar the distribution centre in Romford; Essex following their parent company White Rabbit Records going in to administration. In another sad day for the high street, which seems to be shrinking by the day and leaving behind Poundland and Fried Chicken shops, this leaves people unable to demo gear in their regional outlets, though at least for me I will be able to get my fix via a short train journey.

It's a shame to hear, as DV247 keep a wide variety of products available and are perhaps one of the last big names in the UK retail sector for music (I'm thinking of West End DJ now) who still have actual bricks and mortar shops to browse or pick up orders from. Here's to hoping there will be a turnaround for them!

Link to the press release here:
http://www.dv247.com/news/DV247%20Is%20Not%20In%20Administration/133450

Fopp is saved!

Well, some good news and some bad news comes this week in the form the Hilco buyout of HMV, who have inked the contract and released the details of what shops are going to be kept running. In amongst all of these stores is the great nugget of news that all the Fopp stores are to be saved, heralding what I hope to be a new era in the brand's success. With any luck, the new owners will decide to keep the shop running as it has always been run: buying some new old stock and selling it for cheap, be it movies, music or books. 

Happily for some towns (most notably those in the South of England it seems), their HMV stores and the jobs of its staff are saved, but there are plenty of stores closing, including the HMV in Croydon's Centrale shopping centre that used to be my regular haunt as a student. With this gone, hopefully the other independent record shops still left in Croydon like 101 Records will suffer a bit of a resurgence.

Original Guardian report with full store closure details:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/apr/05/hmv-sold-hilco-saves-jobs-shops

The Great Ticket Scandal

Concerts, gigs, festivals, sports matches, theater tickets, it doesn't matter: with the festival season and summer holidays coming up, it's important not to get shafted by touts, resellers and ticket websites and this video goes some way to providing a bit of a cautionary tale.

In a way, I do have some sympathy for those people who are shelling out hundreds (and thousands!) of pounds for gig tickets to see their favourite artists. However, I can see why Viagogo and Seatwave operate these ticket websites if desperate fans are willing to pay these prices and if they do so, they really shouldn't complain as long as they get what they want to pay for. Quite simply, if they are too expensive, then why do the fans feel honour-bound to buy them?

As someone who does a bit of gig reviewing, it has been a little while since I have had to buy a music ticket, but I would certainly get fed up if I had to pay so much for an evening's entertainment. Having said that, the last ticket I bought was from a tout in Brixton for a drum and bass gig, for which I only got shafted an extra tenner for a ticket that was originally an early-bird ticket with a slightly lower price. 

If you can't get tickets, it just wasn't meant to be and if the band is popular, console yourself with the fact that there will be other opportunities to see them. Otherwise, you are only a fool to yourself if you want to pay hundreds of pounds for one off shows and then complain about it afterwards.

HMV is dead - part 1

This week has seen quite a lot of turmoil in the high street. Following a number of traditional retailers who have unfortunately bowed out of Britain's shopping centers  venerable music and media giant HMV group have thrown in the towel and filed for bankruptcy. And of course I have an opinion on it.