This year’s Mercury Music Prize has been awarded to the Arctic Monkeys – not my choice, but there you go.  Anyway more information can be found at the Award’s website here.

Bob Dylan was famously accused of becoming a Judas at his 1966 Manchester Free Trade Hall gig for going electric.  A criticism that deeply offended him at the time.  Dylan may have been faithful to what he believes is true for his music, but appears to have really sold out now – you can find on the Apple site a video clip of him performing as part of an advert (go here).  Yet, in the next breath he is slating technology big time to Wired magazine (article here). 

Why sell out now, with Dylan a cultural icon, and certainly not having problem selling albums?

Last saturday (12th August) Mark Lemarr sat in for Jonathon Ross on BBC Radio2.  Now I’m not much a fan of Radio 2 with a couple exceptions. Both  Mark, Jonathan (with Johnnie Walker & Bob Harris having followed them from Radio 1 being the others) are both are very entertaining, informative and come across as being very passionate about music.

Any way Mark had John Otway on the show.  Not a name necessarily familiar with music fans these days;  to me he is a very much a 70s artist.  It turns out that John is still going strong, like a few other artists a fortunate enough to have very strong and loyal fan base (Gary Numan being another such example). 

The show with Mark and John had a large section of the discussion devoted to talking about John’s upcoming world tour. Nothing special in that, except John has chartered an Airbus A340 to do the tour and selling seats on the aircraft as part of a package to tour with him – for the £4000 you get to go to all the gigs, fly with the John and the band, and stay in the hotels – not bad.  The tour starts in Liverpool’s cavern (made famous by the Beatles) then heads onto New York, Las Vegas and then Tahiati for a break. From Tahiati the tour then heads onto take in Sydney.  Being in Sydney, John tried to book the Sydney gig into one of the smaller theatres in the Opera House.  The smaller threatres turn out to be all booked, but hey, the main theatre was available – so thats what he is going to do. Steve Harley is also joining the tour in Sydney onwards. 

John and his guitarist have also concocted a plan to break a world record for the longest guitar solo.  They’re going to do this by starting to play guitar  three minutes before they fly across the date line and continue for a three minutes afterwards – thus having peformed for one day and six minutes! Complete with three hundred fans on board to witness the record being set!

The tour stops off in China and performing a city with a population of seven million who have never had an artists from the west perform there before, let alone someone like John Otway. John was saying for that gig he has insisted that he go on stage and perform first (normally the support slot), just so that he can claim to be the first western musician to have performed in that part of China.

The tour is meant to last about two weeks and more information can bew obtained from John’s website here.  The fasinating thing is that the tour has been largely paid for because fans had selected a song of John’s to be released as a single to celebrate his 50th birthday which they then all proceeded to purchase, giving him a top ten hit.

The conversaion went on and joked around how fans could phone into the show and the could arrange seating reservations etc.  The show can be heard again for a little longer through the BBC website here.

We managed to catch up with Faithless again at a warm up gig prior to their appearance at the V Festival.  As the tickets where released through their website to people registered for news which meant that they had a good audience. 

Their performance did rip the roof off the house!  This was the first time that I’ve experienced the balcony’s shake at the Shepherds Bush Empire because so many people are jumping up and down with the music.

A colleague of mine managed to take some pictures with his phone which can be seen here.

Having blogged yesterday about how eMusic appears to be moving in the right direction for music downloads, I took a closer look at the service last night.

Before I comment, let me say in my opinion for a service like eMusic to achieve a decent foothold in the market I think need enough material for people become hooked by seeing enough music to download to use up their trial amount and some music that would have to paid for by the following month’s subscription or as paid for additional downloads. For the average punter, you’ll probably manage to achieve this by having significant chunk of the currently charting major releases and major artists back catalog.  Although as I understand it, the ‘Long Tail’ argument says that you can succeed by effectively filling a niche purely because of the potential market size you can reach through the web means even minor releases will generate you enough sales be viable, although this won’t make even a tiny scratch against iTunes. eMusic’s marketing seems to suggest that they want ‘to be a somebody, to be a contender’.

Having established that, I have to say in terms of music available through eMusic I was deeply disappointed. Admittedly I wasn’t in my buy even very obscure artists & randomly sample what it is out there frame of mind when I looked at eMusic’s offerings, but I couldn’t see enough music to entice me into using my 25 freedownloads and signing up to £9 per month – something I’m very dissapointed about, as I believe eMusic have got things right, I very much want to see them succeed in a big way.

The site itself actually rather nice, easy to navigate, and as far as information is concerned brilliantly detailed with biographies, reviews and cover art – but then I’d expect that as they license the information from AllMusic.

To illustrate the point, we went lookinf for Massive Attack – couldn’t find any entries (despite the Collected riding well in the charts). The Rolling Stones didn’t figure too well, neither did Radiohead. But its not all bad news if you’re a fan of artists on the XL record label then you’ll love it there is a deep vein of their stuff including all the singles. So artists such as the White Stripes and Basement Jaxx are well served.

I’ve not given up on eMusic – I’ll be checking back to see if their catalogue grows in the right direction – fingers crossed that it will.  But for now – they need to get some more agreements in place.