Releases and Announcements: Apple Music
Last week Apple Music went finally live and like always when Apple does something, everybody has to say something about it. Probably the most talked about feature is Beats 1, a 24 hours, global radio station poised to make listening to radio cool again. Many love it, including me: there’s something to the idea that everybody all over the world can listen to the same music at the same time.
As Christina Warren writes for Mashable, the idea came from Nine Inch Nail’s Trent Reznor:
When Reznor was thinking about the ways we listen to music, he was struck that he still found himself tuning into satellite radio. “I started to think, ‘why is that?’ and I realized it was because there was a person behind the station. There wasn’t a skip button.”
I with Trent here, but there are big fans of the skip button out there.
Also, AC/DC announced that their music is finally available on streaming services, including Apple Music and Spotify. Good for headlines, but it doesn’t really matter for the bottom like, The Guardian says:
And this hits on a bigger point. While it generates a lot of headlines when big acts like Swift, Dr Dre and AC/DC go on streaming services, possibly on highly favourable terms, it does not necessarily create a halo effect for the services themselves. There are more than 30m tracks on most of the major streaming services. Adding one or two mega-acts is not going to take them into the stratosphere. It is merely a drop in the digital ocean.
So it probably doesn’t matter so much that Prince has begun to pull his music from some or all streamin services. Some may be even surprised that he was on there in the first place.
New albums
Oliver: L.A. alternative rock band Failure released the first record after their 2013 reunion. (Apple Music, Spotify). We saw them actually live at the old Knitting Factory when they played together with Charlotte Martin, who is married to Failure frontman Ken Andrews.
Elke: Love Amongst Ruin released their second album Loose Your Way on June 30th on Ancient B Records, and the so far released title song Lose Your Way immediately sets off some nostalgia, reminiscent of the best hits of INXS. This comes as no surprise since Steve Hewitt is behind the Love Amongst Ruin project, who used to be the drummer of the UK trio Placebo from 94/96 throughout 2007. Love Amongst Ruin’s album as a whole is a fine melange of modern wave and shoegaze. (Apple Music,, Spotify)
Album Annoucements
With every new week I become more excited about Georgia. Her album will be out on Domino on August 7th and I hope she’ll bring some copies to her show at Elvis Guesthouse four days earlier. (Apple Music, Spotify)
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