Violinist Tamsin Little in an effort to help popularise classical music (not to mention help raise her own profile no doubt) will be following Radiohead’s lead by giving her next album away called The Naked Violin as a free download from January 14th – 12:00GMT.

Tasmin’s website is http://www.tasminlittle.net/  and the download page is at http://www.tasminlittle.net/pages/02_pages/02_set-free-cd.htm

Thanks to David @ http://www.the-mortimers.com for pointing this one out.

Reuters/Billboard have published an article (Digital album packaging) about making CDs more attractive and encouraging people to buy legitimate downloads. The article suggests that bundling extras such as electronic versions of liner notes, lyrics etc will draw people away from P2P based illegal downloads which only have scanned copies of such material.  To think that this alone will lure more people to legitimate purchases is perhaps a touch naive. 

Additional material, particularly videos, documentaries, interviews etc can be attractive, but typically these get used to create ‘special editions’ with a huge premium attached to the price which usually puts me off. In addition to this the image quality of these additional extras has been very variable in the past which wont help either.

Counting Crows have finally announced the release date of their next studio album called “Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings” – which is to be March 25th 2008 although this may well be different for us in the UK.  The New Counting Crows album is in this month’s Uncut as a much anticipated album for 2008.

More information can be found at http://www.countingcrows.com

As the crucial period pre-Christmas period for music sales comes to a close we’re starting to already see more doom and gloom reports which will ultimately be blamed on peer-2-peer sites and so on.  However these statistics wont be examined within the context of the wider economy – such as a general economic down turn and consumer confidence post credit crunch.   The figures that Digital Music released today also point out the number of albums that have gone platinum compared to last year as another indicator.  However such indicators need good as many good albums being released each year, and I’d say that this year just isn’t the case.

A final factor in all of this is market competition and prices in relation to inflation.  This Christmas not a day goes by without being offered some sort of discount by the likes of HMV, Bang CD and CD Wow, and the prices are the same or cheaper than last year – which means in real terms prices have dropped by 2-3%.

Ike Turner accredited with one of Rock n Roll’s first songs (Rocket 88) and vilified former husband of Tina Turner has died today at his home in LA. More information can be seen at BBC NEWS – US soul musician Ike Turner dies.