Bookmarks: 4AD

This is a few months old now, and so you've probably already consumed it and moved on, but just in case...

BookD interviews Matt Johnson, Miki Berenyi and Simon Raymonde about their time on 4AD.

Downloadable: 4AD sessions

4AD have done this, a compilation of some of the best tracks from their special sessions. You can also buy it as a vinyl record, should you wish to:

eMusic waves goodbye to several indies

eMusic's unique selling point used to be that it offered a download home to the less corporate end of the label high street - a good first stopping-off point for what used to be known as indie.

Not any more. For even as eMusic adds a quarter of a million Universal tracks to its database, it's telling subscribers to grab indie stuff while they can:

As we prepare for the largest catalog addition ever to eMusic in the US - 250,000 new tracks! - and make it possible for similar additions in the UK, Europe and Canada, we want to be up front with our loyal indie fans and provide advance notice that music from Domino, Merge and the Beggars Group family of labels will no longer be available on eMusic as of Nov. 18, 2010 pending further discussion. Many of you who have downloaded or music or saved for later from these labels will be receiving an email shortly with these same details.

This is as heartbreaking to us as it is to you. Please know we have done everything we could to keep them from leaving. Forging deals with our label partners can be pretty complex. As many of you know, labels have come and gone over the years, and we hope to see these labels back soon. You can add your voice here to help us bring them back. For more info, see our FAQs.

In the meantime, we encourage you to get the music you love from these labels at a great price before November 18 - music from artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, The National, Vampire Weekend, The xx, She & Him, Caribou, Titus Andronicus, and Deerhunter, to name a few.

We understand that you may not have enough downloads before your next refresh date to get everything you want. In that case, we invite you to get a booster pack.

Yes, you did read that right - eMusic are boldly trying to make extra sales off the back of dumping a lot of its core content. That shows they have chutzpah. Even if they don't have 4AD any more.

But does losing the sort of stuff that defined eMusic mean that it has somehow lost it's soul?

Do you know, eMusic are glad we asked that:

For those of you wondering if this means eMusic is losing its focus, rest assured, we're still the place you go to find the records that hover under the radar, records that represent clear artistic vision - and the records that we find inspiring on both major and indie labels, regardless of how many albums were sold. Let us prove it to you!

It's like listening to a paunchy fortysomething pretending to still be the guy he was in college - "nothing's changed, I still support social change; it's just sometimes I have to deny protesters' applications to march in Parliament Square from time to time."

DCMA update: Warners overreach selves again

Fancy that! Once again, it was Warners who were over-reaching their powers this morning. Just had an email from Rich Walker at 4AD:

Warners via ADA are our physical distributors in the States and inexplicably chased this track, among many others for pull downs off blogs and sites. We don't know why and weren't involved. As much as we support them with taking down full albums, remixed tracks off the artist's own sites are not on that same radar. We can only apolgise and tell you that they assure us that the artist sites are on a whitelist now. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

I'd like to thank Rich for looking into this quickly, and catching the mistake (Rykodisc, I'm still waiting to hear anything from you.)

Perhaps the time has come for someone to have a quiet word with Warners and suggests they talk to the artists before launching scurrilous and baseless attacks on people via the DCMA.

DMCA: It's happened again

This was an email from 4AD the other day:

With a pretty extensive summer tour under way, Danish collective Efterklang have managed to take time out to remix tracks by fellow Copenhagen acts and friends and are very generously offering them for as free MP3s to one and all.
[...]

Follow these links to download the four MP3s for free:...

And, you might recall, we provided those links in a handy post. Because that was why they were sent to a music blog in the first place.

So, can anyone at 4AD explain why we've had a DCMA takedown notice - again, for files which are HOSTED ON THE BANDS' OWN WEBSITES?

That's twice now I've linked - not even hosted - to tracks that I've been invited to share by press officer/publicity people, only to have some dunderhead in America somehow decide that that "infringes" something and Google, with their understandable but unworkable 'take down first, ask questions to be answered by snail mail much, much later' approach.

Doesn't exactly make me warm to either the bands involved, or their record labels.

You might, by the way, be wondering if I've had the promised results of Jon Bleicher, the press bloke for Seasick Steve, looking in to why I was asked to offer links to a free track, and then got sent a DCMA for it. Bugger all from him, bugger all from Rykodisc, bugger all from Warners.

Embed and breakfast man: Tuneyards

4AD are lauching a bunch of showcase sessions, as a way of bringing their roster to the masses without the need for expensively-designed CD packaging.

Tune-Yards are first to get a go. Here's Real Live Flesh:



[You might also like the Tune-Yards weekend]

Beggar my neighbours: 4AD swallows sister labels

As part of the crazy, new-frontier world of music labels, Beggars Group have decided to thin out the number of imprints they operate under, shuttering the venerable Too Pure and Beggars Banquest labels and transferring across artists under those banners to 4AD.

It used to be quite hard to get onto 4AD; now it turns out all you had to do was sign to Beggars and wait.

The Too Pure singles club, it seems, is going to continue, though, as they sent out a press release after the announcement of the mothballing of Too Pure. This Spring, they'll be launching limited-edition singles featuring Kaputt, Electricity In Our Homes, Die! Die! Die!.

Very, very slow Breeders

We said back in September 2006 that we were still some way from a release for the Albini-produced Breeders album. We still are, but at least it has a name and a date: Mountain Battles, out at the start of April.