There seems to be a lot of news coming from the remaining original members of Led Zeppelin at the moment with Jimmy Page suggesting that last years O2 gig performed to commemorate Ahmet Ertghun could see a DVD release. John Paul Jones has reportedly suggested that the band may even return to the studio to record a new album. Robert Plant has su8ggested that they may perform live again, although there has been a lot of speculation and rumour about this for some months now.  If we’re lucky then perhaps all three suggestions may come to occur in 2008.

The never ending debate over whether vinyl is better than CD or digital encoding is covered bi Idolator in their article Format Wars: Why Buy Digitally Recorded Albums On Vinyl?.  To be honest I think this is a debate that will never end.  But in the arguments that rage I’ve never heard any consideration that when listening to vinyl it requires a lot more effort and commitment from the listener (got to care for vinyl and handle it with care compared to CD, then you have to swap sides after twenty or so minutes) and as result it is less likely to be just slapped on in the background which is so easy with CD and mp3 etc.  When you invest more effort to playing the music you’re probably going to listen more carefully and therefore pick up the nuances more easily.

The other consideration in the debate is the fact that vinyl has gone through faces of production quality changes. Back in the time when CD started coming in the vinyl was lighter (therefore more susceptible to warping and distortion) had more grooves crammed onto a surface.  Now with the re-emergence of vinyl the discs are a lot better quality – to the point you’ll see the vinyl weight included in the advertising.  With it is also the willingness to split albums across more surfaces meaning that the grooves aren’t jammed together tightly.

Regardless of what is done to settle the argument scientific analysis, blind tests the entire subject will continue to be seen in a incredibly subjective light and never be settled one way or another.

Crawdaddy! has managed to release another interesting article about the quirks of internet radio and the application of the Music Genome Project – check out the article here.  The article does close with a statement I’d like to quote:

I’ll take one David Gilmour note over 38 Malmsteem notes played over the same number of beats.

Dolly Parton isn’t the sort of artists I’d usually blog about.  However, one of country’s legends has gone it alone with her latest record rather than working through a record company. In part this has been because she had been dropped by her record label (as recorded here).  

If Dolly has been dropped by her label, you’d think that her record sales are pretty trivial, far from it this latest album has clocked up over 50,000 sales (details here) in the first couple of weeks of release and a top twenty sales ranking. 

This isn’t the first time such a decision has been made – just look at what happened to Wilco around the time of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. This begs the questions how do record companies determine which artists to drop and are record labels so burdened with costs or inability that they deem a 50,000 sales as not being sufficiently profitable enough?

  A story(here) that has been showing up on the web over the last couple of days is the surprising indication that the next Elvis Costello album to be released through Lost Highway wont be available on CD.  Given that I’ve yet to see a correction to this story, can only suggest that there is some truth in it, although the decision is certainly surprising.  I would have put Elvis Costello’s fanbase demographic (horrid music-business expression, but no other easy to express) in the area of those people who would still rather have something tangible in their hands and fall into the vinyl or CD generations.

It leaves me in a puzzling situation of how to get the album as someone who likes to have something tangible in my hands.  My local music shops have abandoned vinyl, and ordering vinyl over the ‘net has not been the best experience for me with a number of occasions of the sleeve being damaged and in one case they vinyl actually having been warped.

A change from All Music’s seemingly frequent blogging of American Idol they’ve actually written a brief artist spot light blog on Matthew Ryan here.  With Matthew’s new album coming out this can only help.