According to the Telegraph, Amazon MP3 is not too far away from arriving in the UK (see article here).  It has been suggested that the service will be made available before the last three months of the year. This will certainly put pressure on iTunes current market lead. At the moment there is no word from Amazon.co.uk.

It would seem that Metallica’s press agency aren’t very with it. In an interesting set of articles on Wired have documented the farce of trying to suppress album views after having invited music journalists to a pre-release listening party.  If you invite a journalist to hear a new album, particularly from a group as big as Metallica they’re bound to write about it – it’s their job after all. But it would seem that the US agency assumed that they wouldn’t, and then tried to suppress the articles by demanding the magazines and blogs remove their reviews.

When the band heard about this they weren’t too happy, and have demanded that the situation be rectified, so now reviews are becoming available.

The overview article can be found at Pasture Of Muppets: Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal | Listening Post from Wired.com and it has links to earlier items as the whole mess unrolled.

According to the NME (here) Mercury Rev’s next album will be released as a free download in September.  The album to be called ‘Snowflake Midnight’ will released on 29th September. In addition to this if you’re registered on Mercury Rev’s mailing list you will get access to an additional companion album called ‘Strange Attractor’.

According to the NME the two albums will showcase the more electronica side of the the bands music.

Mercury Rev’s site – http://www.mercuryrev.com/, their MySpace site – http://www.myspace.com/mercuryrevmusic.

Prince, who is well known for being fairly aggressive with take down notices for anything on the web that is not officially sanctioned by himself.  However at the Coachella festival the purple one performed a cover of Radiohead’s Creep.  Videos of this performance found their way onto YouTube and other web sites, Prince predictably reacted with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and demanded that the videos be taken down.  However Prince does not own the rights to the song they reside with the writers, i.e. Radiohead and as a result he doesn’t have the right to issue the takedown notices.  The fun begins as Thom Yorke when told about what had been happening told reporters that he should stop, its their song.

Article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on the subject and CNN’s report here.

  The hearya blog has got 5 songs from Matthew Ryan performed in a really stripped down form (guitar and harmonica) featuring tracks from the last couple of albums.  Go check it out at – HearYa Live Session 20: Matthew Ryan at HearYa – Indie Music Blog

Stereogum have the latest Joseph Arthur videos along with brief write ups,   I’ve not yet watch the videos, but the descriptions sound pretty good.  Check the page out here.