The Guardian newspaper have a a good tribute to the late John Martyn – John Martyn: A music legend remembered. A wonderful musician and singer songwriter who’s number was called far too soon.

It is tragic that the high profile news coverage of John’s death has sent is wonderful album Solid air shooting up to number 4 of Amazon’s downloads – see here.

Paul Westerberg has posted three more songs on TuneCore for a mere $0.74, although I’ve not yet heard them, so cant comment on the quality of the material.  The tracks are the Christmas traditional Away In A Manger, Streets of Laredo and D.G.T. This does continue with Paul’s approach of putting the material out there for silly small prices.

Much has been made of Amazon MP3’s arrival to the UK. But Play.com have also got a MP3 download service now here in the UK with some competitive pricing – check out things here.

On UK’s Radio 4 this morning was an interesting discussion about the application of censorship.  Wikipedia, has been subjected to a degree of censorship for having included some album art work by the band The Scorpions which was released back in 1976.  The first version of the cover to Virgin Killer is a poor image of a naked young girl (but can be found on the internet if you want to form your own opinion), and the band where told that at the time, so made an alternative cover available.   I understand that it is possible to purchase a copy of the album with the first verion of the artwork, and tha art work has never been withdrawn.

It is worth noting now that the image concerned is no more explicit than Nirvana’s Nevermind, or Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy. The only difference is that these two alternative’s are in my opinion artistically far better, but that is only an opnion.

However as wikipedia included the image and information about the  group and included the artwork the Internet Watch Foundation have been directing ISPs to block the page. There is more information here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpions_(band)#Controversy. The crazy thing about the situation is both the uneven application of the guidance and the fact that it has only taken until now for the foundation to determine that the artwork breaches a 1978 act, and that other sites do not appear to be subject to the restrictions yet.

According to Digital Music News a legal battle between one of Harvard Law’s top professors Charles Nesson has be ducked by the RIAA but has resulted in the professor contributing to another case that the RIAA have against an individual. The contribution to the case is a counter claim that says the RIAA have abused processes across state and federal jurisdictions.

It would appear that sooner or later Nesson and the RIAA will end up in court, and given the RIAA’s history and current appeals against them relating to how they identified and proved file sharing the prospects dont look too pleasant for the organisation.

 Engadget have picked up on this lovely limited edition box set of Beatles music. which comes with specially logo’d iPod. The irony is that the Beatles catalog isn’t available on iTunes so you’ll probably have to rip all the CDs in the set yourself.

Popjustice have a neat little article about the fact that most high street retailers have now abandoned stocking singles (that is of the CD variety for old readers).  This situation has been brought on my both technological progress i.e. web, downloads, MP3 etc but as I’ve said the the past also the likes of the BMI who limited the number of tracks for it to qualify in the charts, the cheap option of getting remixes or simply instrumental versions to fill the space and son on.  All very sad, although such a thought according to Popjustice now puts me in the category as vinyl elitists – I suppose my musical snobbery was going to get called out eventually.

So what constitutes a single now?  As popjustice asks, can it be any track on any official download site, how about songs released virally? Should illegal downloads count,?

Will we see seens like this in another 5 years?