Ray Davies revealed today (October 12) that he is to give away his new solo album ‘Working Man’s Cafe’ with the Sunday Times later this month.
In addition to the album’s release as a giveaway on October 21, the singer is also making an additional track ‘Vietnam Cowboys’ available as a free download from this Sunday (October 14) as a taster.

The album will be available to purchase as well from October 29th.

Keane are releasing a single to help raise money for War Child.  The single is ‘The Night Sky’ and will be available exclusively from warchildmusic.com from October 22nd, then digitally from iTunes etc from October 26th, and finally hitting the shops in three different formats on October 29th.

Radiohead have responded to the criticism of the bit rate quality (something I’ve previously blogged about) of the new album’s download according to the NME.  Jonny Greenwood said that the bit rate was better than that offered by iTunes, but not going to be CD quality as that quality is what CDs are for.  Which means if you want In Rainbows at a normal quality then you’ve got to fork out £40! An expectation that I would suggest as somewhat outrageous.

I came across a rather pretty and nicely presented website to music and film fans called liveplasma which provides a rather graphically rich network of associations and style related information (I believe it is exploiting the amazon API for this information).  For an example see the network for Moby on LivePlasma.

I received my Radiohead download instructions in preparation for tomorrows release. I have to say that I’m gutted that the MP3’s will only 160bpm – not the greatest quality in the world. I hope the quality of the music is greater than that of the MP3s.

Catching up with my reading and come across a useful site – iheard, which is a specialized search engine for web based radio stations. Although can find your radio stations using the likes of Google and Yahoo – you do have to then filter out the noise. This does all of that for you.

The Charlatans have announced that they will make their next album a free download from the UK radio station XFM. Initially it will be just be a single released on Monday October 22 followed by the album early next year.

I would imagine that XFM have parted with a big pot of cash for the privilege, much in the same way as the Sunday Mail earlier in the year paid for the rights to give away the latest Prince album.

More information can be found at the XFM site here.

 Radiohead as previously blogged only recently allowed their albums to be purchased online as downloads. But now they’re free of a recording contract with EMI the next album (to be called In Rainbows) will be available almost on a donation basis.  You pay what you think the album is worth and they add a delivery(read download) cost on.  More about this – Digital Music News and at InRainbows.com.

TheIn Rainbows  website allows the pre-ordering of the album in both physical and digital formats.

With this innovation comes a price, the UK official charts company doubts whether the album will qualify for the album charts because of the way Radiohead have priced the album.