As the Counting Crows hit the road to promote their latest album, they’ve have decided to follow what is starting to become a well warn path of official live concert releases.  The are are available from livecountingcrows.com. The concerts can be downloaded in MP3 or FLAC formats, or purchased as CDs with prices at $9.95, $12.95 and $21.00 respectively.  It is intended that the site will make all future shows available via the site.

main site – http://www.countingcrows.com/

A series of music videos have been animated with Lego including Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody!  Complete with the Lego version of some of the famous visual effects.

It is certainly worth taking a look at.  Must have taken IrishVixen2008 hours of effort to animate. A mass of other videos in Lego can be found here.

According to the BBC News the largest ISPs have agreed to start clamping down file sharers with people being warned and then potentially having their either slowed down or cut off.  This includes Carphone Warehouse who originally had declined to tow the line as far as the BPI was concerned. 

The concerning thing is that there appears to be no means to dispute an accusation of file sharing. For example, if they pickup on a transfer of music that I legitimately own from my home PC to my work machine over the Internet how I can defend myself?

It will also be interesting to see if people start to migrate their Internet access away from the major players to smaller ISPs who are not currently party to the agreement.

 XFm the British Radio station have got a page of free downloads ranging from Unkle’s remix of their song that has been included on the new X Files film soundtrack, through a new live Verve track along with a lot of other music in between.  To find more go to A Whole Load Of Free Downloads – Xfm

Paul Westerberg (solo artists and former key member of The Replacements) has released a new album with with a price tag of forty nine cents (twenty six pence).  Although iTunes has not cooperated with this pricing other online vendors such as amazon.com have.  To help with the licensing the album – all 43 minutes & 55 seconds is a single track.  This strategy has generated a fair bit of activity on the web for Paul with  lots of sites large and small blogging about it.  The initial release was US only, but today the track has become available to the rest of the world via Tunecore.com.  The fun things was that once I’d downloaded the track, I got an email on behalf of Paul that included the statement:

*A note from Paul:*
“WARNING: DO NOT LISTEN WHILE OPERATING A MOTOR VEHICLE. THIS PRODUCT  IS NOT FAULTY – ALL SOUNDS ARE INTENTIONAL AND VALID AS A WORK OF ART.”

PaulWesterberg.net also has details of the track listing here.

The official bootleg series originally only available through one of Tori Amos’ site (http://toribootlegs.com/) that had been recorded over recent tours have gone main stream with the bootlegs being available through iTunes (UK and US) and other download stores over the next few weeks.  This does mean that the bootlegs aren’t likely to be cheap to download.

In addition to this Tori has continued to plunder her live recordings catalogue with the release of live recordings from Montreux festival in 1991 and 1992. These recordings will reflect Tori around the time of the release of the amazing Little Earthquakes album.  The release will be both as CD and DVD on September 22nd in the UK and Europe and a week later in the US.  Spinner (part of AOL) also has information about this release here.

• Amazon Link here
• Tori Amos official site here.

With Paul Weller having participated in the iTunes festival in London this year, there has inevitably been an iTunes exclusive EP announced that was released on Monday.  The EP features six tracks:

1. Peacock Suit
2. From the Floorboards Up
3. All I Wanna Do (is Be With You)
4. Out of the sinking
5. Invisible
6. Sea Spray

Initial comments on iTunes don’t look too promising though – the suggestion being aside from only a small part of the whole gig that the recording is extremely clinical in nature.

To celebrate the start of their North American tour Coldplay are giving away another song from their website called Death Will Never Conquer – to download it you need to provide an email address on the coldplay site.

Note that the track is pretty sort and simple with pretty much Chris Martin performing solo at a piano.  The track is also only 128kbps.

  According to the Boss’ website (here) he will be releasing a live EP containing tracks taken from the current ‘Magic Tour’ with guest appearances from Alejandro Escovedo, Tom Morello and Roger McGuinn.  The EP will be available in digital download form from the likes of iTunes.

The EP is to help raise money for the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund, a charity setup after the death of Bruce’s long time keyboardist. As the release is for a charitable cause all profits and royalties are going to the charity.