Embed and breakfast man: Slowdive

Apparently there's a "Pitchfork era", of which Slowdive's Souvlaki is part. (Actually, Souvlaki predated Pitchfork by a year, but that might be quibbling.) Whatever, they've produced an hour long documentary on the record. They being Pitchfork, not Slowdive:

Album charts apparently still going; intend to add streaming

The addition of streaming to the singles charts gave a headache to the Official Charts Company - how do you weight a listen to a tune against the purchase of a CD?

They're now adding streaming data to the album charts, and that's created an even more Sheldon Cooper style twisting of data to make sense.

They've rejected the model used by the Billboard charts:

In the US, the Billboard chart equates 1,500 streams of any song from an album to one sale.

However, that leads to situations where the popularity of one song pushes the entire album up the chart.

(Additionally, and surely more worryingly, it means that the effort of one song is going to be counted for both the singles and album charts, which seems odd.)

So what have the UK chart counters come up with?

The Official Chart Company says it will weight its data to avoid similar situations.

It will look at the 12 most-streamed tracks from each album, then down-weight the two most popular in line with the average of the next 10.

These streams will then be added together and divided by 1,000. This "stream factor" will then be added to the physical/digital sales of the album, to produce an overall "sales figure" that determines an album's position in the countdown.

Louis Walsh was last seen heading home to see if he still had his log table.

There's nothing like a completely transparent system to make the list of best-selling album, is there?

You might ask why it's only streaming albums which get adjusted if people access them but only want to listen to two tracks? Why shouldn't physical CDs be marked down if the purchaser only makes it through the first couple of songs, or rips it to their PC but only ever plays the hits?

The album chart, like the singles chart, will ignore YouTube data completely so won't even reflect what people are really listening to.

Gordon in the morning: Liam threatens to quit

Liam Gallagher. Well known for writing verbal cheques that bounce, and I fear this one will prove equally valueless, but he's threatening to quit if... something:

He said: “If we’re barking up the wrong tree with this record, I don’t know if I can be ar*ed with barking up it again.

“I’ll never be a plumber, I’ll never be a fashion designer.

“Maybe I’d just sail off into the distance and enjoy my life, instead of worrying about what some spotty little t*** from Hastings thinks about the record.”

Oh, people's poet, don't die.

Happily for Liam, there's no actual description of what success would look like, and there's enough middle-aged Oasis fans who will be delighted with another chunk of more of the same to count BE as a glorious success.

And even if you look to sales, with Different Gear, Still Speeding, Do You See The Subtle DRUG References only managing to scrape to 140,000 copies in two years, even a mild retail success could be seen as a marvellous result.

Much as I'd love to see Liam exit, pursued by spoty youths from Hastings, I fear these words will merely be forgotten as he grimly ploughs on to the difficult third album.

All killer, no filler. Okay, some filler

Down in the comments on the Donna Allen album being a little padded, Chris Brown asks:

Did you ever see that best of Indeep where half the tracks are sound effects?

I hadn't, but this is what the internet is for.

Not only did Indeep pad out The Collection with about half-a-dozen sound effects, but someone at Amazon rather hopefully expects you might want to buy them as individual mp3 files at 69 pence a pop.

The highlight would be twelve seconds called "toilet flushing", which seems to consist mostly of silence.

The good news is the toilet went solo shortly after recording its part for this album, and will be out supporting Lawson on their US dates later this year.

On Madonna's new album title

Really, Madonna? MDNA? Combining none-more-noughties PRMLSCRM-style Only Connect vowel-dropping with "Snurkle! It's Like The DRUCKS" common room yuks.

I don't know if Clapped Out was on the shortlist, but it would have had the same effect.

Horrifying news to wake up to

You log in to Twitter, and read this:

Nickelback announce new album 'Here And Now'

Why would you tell someone that first thing in the morning, NME? Why?

Exile in mainstream: Stones top the charts

The re-appearance of Exile On Main Street at number one in the album charts isn't so very surprising - let's not forget Vera Lynn was number one last year, so that's actually something of a cultural leap forward.

The real surprise is this bit:

The Rolling Stones bag first Number One album since 1994

The Stones had a number one album in 1994? With Voodoo Lounge, apparently. The more you look back at the 90s, the more horrible they seem.

Stop tittering, The Ting Tings

Like someone finding a street called 'Willy Road' and sending a photo to Your Crazy Signs in the Sunday People, The Ting Tings are naming their album after an awning outside a massage parlour:

Katie White and Jules De Martino's next effort, which they have been recording in Berlin, is set for release later this year – with the pair telling NME.COM that the title was inspired by a massage parlour near their studio.

The parlour was called Massage Kunst, and so the album is going to be called Kunst.

"Just round the corner to our studio there's a massage parlour, it's called Massage Kunst," De Martino explained. "It's Massage Art, basically. We took a picture of that and sent it to our label, saying this is the title of the album. They went berserk."

The label's cow probably came from the name sounding like a bad word for a good thing, but perhaps they were also a bit worried about how it would sound to the German market, calling your album 'art'. Doesn't really do much to blow away that sense of pretension that some reckon they can smell on the Ting Tings' breath, does it?

There's also the problem that Laibach have been using Kunst for years, and as part of a much wider, more challenging philosophical approach to art. Calling a Ting Tings album by the same name is a little like Joe McElderry calling a record Kid A.

Nada Surf doing some covers

Of course, there's double standards. A middle market artist does an album of covers, and it's a lazy stop gap. If someone with a shred of credibility turns in an record full of other people's songs, we applaud and gurgle with delight.

This delighted gurgle is at the news that Nada Surf are about to release If I Had A Hi-Fi. They work through stuff by The Moody Blues, Depeche Mode and Arthur Russell. Of course it'll be interesting. It should even be better than that.

Decade Null: Best selling albums

Yes, it turns out the first years of this millennium were as rubbish as you're remembering. These were the best-selling albums:

1. James Blunt - Back to Bedlam (2005)
2. Dido - No Angels (2000)
3. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (2006)
4. Leona Lewis - Spirit (2007)
5. David Gray - White Ladder (2000)

Roll on 2010. Or the day when they switch off gravity and we all float out into space.

Limp Bizkit make an announcement

Bless, Fred Durst has made of formal announcement about the title of the new Limp Bizkit album. Out goes the working title - Jesus, How Many More Of These Things Do I Have To Make Before That Credit Card Is Paid Off, in comes...

Golden Cobra.

You'd think everyone would think it best left at that, but oh, no. Fred has to give some, uh, context:

We will slowly be revealing the meaning of the title over the next few weeks," frontman Fred Durst told [Kerrang]. "Cobras are quite venomous. I wish it were a much longer, more ridiculous title, but 'Gold Cobra' is as ridiculous as we're going to get right now."

Slowly revealing the meaning of the title over a period of weeks? Isn't that a bit like unwrapping a two quid Argos voucher over several hours?

Great news from The Tindersticks

January 25th 2010. That's the release date for a brand new Tindersticks album.

Yes.

The band say so:

Here is a message from the band:

"Our last album, The Hungry Saw, was our first in five years. We didn’t really know what to expect on its release; we had just six concerts booked, and everyone was a little nervous…

That was April 2008. The success of those concerts, including the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Folies Bergere in Paris, took us all by surprise and led to seventy more shows in Europe and the US - ending with a beautiful summer’s evening headlining The Serpentine Sessions in Hyde Park in July of 2010.

In our ‘downtime’, we have scored 2 film soundtracks for Claire Denis: the much loved and critically acclaimed 35 Shots Of Rum and, due for release in the new year, White Material, which stars Isabelle Huppert. Somewhere during that time, we were also commissioned to create the music for the Louis Vuitton summer collection in Paris.

From those nervous beginnings a new unity and sense of direction grew. Where once our touring days were spent hanging around, killing time, now we found ourselves cobbling together acoustic rehearsals for new ideas in dressing rooms and venue corridors. There was a growing need to explore and we quickly started working in the studio.

Very soon this work became Falling Down A Mountain, our eighth studio album. Recorded at the band’s own Le Chien Chanceux studio in rural France and at ICP in Brussels between May and July 2009 and mixed at Le Chien’ in September and October.

With hindsight, The Hungry Saw now seems like an album made within the confines of what we knew; in making Falling Down A Mountain those boundaries became irrelevant.

The title track was borne out of a collection of moments; a dreamed idea recorded into a mobile phone in the night evolving into a spontaneous recording with the band, Terry Edwards’ trumpet (we didn’t play him the song, just gave him some clues, ran the tape and he played into the silence), singing with David Kitt and his great overdubbed guitar… All, more or less, made in one or two takes. Sometimes you just get lucky.

From the dream of building Le Chien’ three years ago, this is the first recording that gets close to what we have been looking for and gives all the effort some meaning.

The album ran on from there in many different directions, but always with a shared feeling between all the musicians and a sense of discovery towards the ideas. Highlights were many and varied: singing a duet with Mary Margaret O’Hara; new additions to the group in the shape of Earl Harvin (drums and vocals) and David Kitt (guitar and vocals) brought with them new colours to the music, and their voices combining with bassist Dan McKinna’s realised a long dreamt of “vocal section” within the band. In addition, Jo Fraser and Andy Nice, who have played a big part in our soundtrack work, provided some great flute and cello moments.

We hope you enjoy."

Quite a lengthy quote from a press release, but worth it, I think.

Strange ways to sell your band

An odd PR email, promoting The Sun (the band of the same name, not the newspaper). It's full of the sorts of things you'd expect - they're releasing a free album, which we'll come to in just a moment - but the subject line is surprising:

Ex Warner Bros Band "The Sun" Release Free Album

I'm guessing that the idea is to try and make it clear that this is a band who have impressed enough people in the industry to get some investment and support, but instead it makes them sound like the most interesting thing about them is that they've been dropped.

Still, while we're here, there's two songs designed to suck you in: So Long Sundays and In Perfect Time. If those delight you, Rock Proper have got the whole lot for you to download and muck about with.

Chocolate getting on the Apple: The iTunes bar

The suspicion was that iTunes much-ballyhooed new packaged-album format was little more than a sop to the record labels and their belief that the idea of throwing together seven or eight songs of mixed abilities is a sales proposition.

It looks like that might be the case, as when indie label owner Brian McKinney tried to bring his Chocolate Lab catalogue to the format, he got a response with shrift so short, it was immeasurable:

I contacted the digital distribution manager at my label's distributor. He had a conference call with an iTunes rep and asked how we go about putting an LP together. He was told that LPs aren't being offered to indies and that there are only about 12 LPs being offered right now. They also said that iTunes charges a $10,000 production fee for them as well. So that pretty much edges out the indie market completely.

In other words, by dinging the labels ten grand a time, Apple has merely invented a way to tax record label's beliefs in the album package.

This looks more and more like the results of a brainstorm which tried to answer the question "how can we look like we're doing our bit, but keeping the doomed-to-fail vibe at the heart of the plan?"

Seriously: Where is Beatles band?

After all that fuss last week, how have The Beatles re-releases done in their second sales stretch? (And their first full-week sale)?

Vanished completely from the Top Ten, and struggling. Rubber Soul is bested by the 42-weeks-on-chart James Morrison album; Help barely able to outsell Robbie William's Greatest Hits. They're still selling, but in nothing like the numbers the shipping figures suggest EMI was expecting.

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Making more excuses for The Beatles

So, after all that effort, all that promotion, The Beatles trot in a fifth place, far behind Vera Lynn.

Vera Lynn. The kings of the 60s beaten to a sales pulp by someone from two decades before. I've heard the streets of Ditchling are ringing with the observation about revenge being a dish best served cold.

Meanwhile, with the sudden revelation that people couldn't really care that much about The Beatles, we're now in scrabbling-around-for-an-explanation phase. Gennaro Castaldo has been working on this already, of course:

HMV's Gennaro Castaldo said the fact the Beatles albums went on sale late in the week damaged their chances of a number one.

He said: "We've seen huge demand for the remastered Beatles albums since Wednesday, but sales have been spread across all the releases, especially the box sets.

"The fact they were only out for four days also seems to have counted against their prospects of a number one."

Oh, yes. The Beatles have a massive fan base who will only buy records on Mondays and who would not go near a record shop on any other day and, naturally, that means that wouldn't buy any of the records. Apart from all the box sets. They still went out to buy the box sets, apparently. Although the box sets didn't sell that many, either, so it doesn't look like even if they had been swapped for individual sales the records would have gone any higher. And there were some dudes in Peterborough who said for sure they were going to buy all the albums, but they were waiting for the cheques from this thing they did for a bloke down the pub to come in, and if you count those sales, and treat all the sales as two, because originally they were two-sided records, they win, right?

Unwanted formats: CMX, anybody?

Given the way new formats have been launched and failed like flying ants emerging into the daylight inside an aviary, you'd have thought that anyone at a record company meeting who suggested launching yet another mystifyingly-named, undemanded format would find themselves shoving their office gonks and mugs into a binliner rather than being given a budget and small team.

Not so, though, as the majors have cooked up a new, exciting, new, exciting, new, exciting format that will - they believe - stop the decline of album sales:

Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI are putting the finishing touches to an album format that will give music fans a computerised version of the sleeve notes that come as standard with a CD, including lyrics and artwork, and videos.

They're calling it CMX. Perhaps to persuade confused grandparents to buy one when the little 'uns have asked for a BMX. Or perhaps because they're hoping it'll be as successful as the MSX computers were back in the 80s.

One senior record label insider said: “Apple at first told us that they were not interested, but now they have decided to do their own, in case ours catches on.

“Ours will be a file that you click on, it opens and it would have a totally brand-new look, with a launch page and all the different options. When you click on it you’re not just going to get the ten tracks, you’re going to get the artwork, the video and mobile products.”

Thank god for that - I would have hated it if it didn't have mobile products.

Is it just me, or does that "senior record label insider" sound like he or she has been to a couple of meetings where someone's stood up and run through a Powerpoint, and everybody has come away really excited but nobody quite understands what it is. "There's this thing with a brand new look and all the different options"? That could be anything, couldn't it?

The main weakness - beside the utter pointlessness of the idea - is that people aren't buying albums online because they can get the tracks they want without having to buy tracks they don't like. It's like the major labels have seen people getting upset at finding flaming brown paper bags of shit left on their doorstep, and decided that people might enjoy it a bit more if, before it was set alight, the shit was put into a gift bag with a ribbon on it.

Apple: The cocktail nobody wants

The drop off of interest in albums - and in particular, being forced to buy filler tracks because albums used to come in a specific size, and that's the way it should be, dammit - has worried the RIAA labels. And, naturally, rather than try and adapt to the way technology has changed their business, the response is to try and find ways to pretend its still 1972.

Apple, bless them, are helping, conspiring on a project with the supersecret name Cocktail. What's cocktail? The FT explains:

Apple is working with the four largest record labels to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads, in a move it hopes will change buying trends on its online iTunes store.

Ah yes. Sleeve notes. That'll make it worth paying for 12 tracks when you really only want the decent song.

It doesn't seem to have occurred to the labels that if they want to sell songs in batches of a dozen, or a half-dozen, the easiest thing to do would be to make all those songs worth having. No, no: Let's give people a little essay about the songs they don't want. That'll reel 'em in.

Apple, clearly, don't view this as lobbing a bunch of old rubbish into the deal in the hope of flogging a few extra units:

“It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

Oh, yes. I can't get enough of that, erm, ancillary stuff.

It doesn't make track seven any better if you're able to listen to it while reading that the middle vocalist thanks God for his help on it.

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting. Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said.

So... instead of simply buying the tracks you want, you spend more, get some sort of proprietorial locked-up thing which you can work your way through to find a way to hear the tracks you want. I really hope we can also queue up to buy these at the Apple Store, perhaps in the rain, as it doesn't sound inconvenient enough already.

Maybe this is why the project is called Cocktail, presumably after the Tom Cruise movie which also made anyone near it want to smash things until the pain went away.

Jet attempt another take-off

Yahoo is incredibly generous to Jet tonight, almost as if they know what it's like to be a hotly tipped property which suddenly runs out of support. They pick up a Reuters interview:

After selling more than three million copies worldwide of their first album, there was really only one way Australian rock band Jet could go.

Selling more, do you mean? Because three million worldwide isn't really a lot; it's all right, as sales go, but leaves plenty of room for increases.

But, no, Reuters suggests that selling three million is some kind of peak; that it is the point from which there are no more lands to conquer:

Crash and burn.

But then again, even if three million did represent a copy for everybody in the world, plus a spare, there'd also be the option of maintaining that level of interest, wouldn't there?

Apparently not. Reuters collude in trying to remake 'overhyped band shrink back to more appropriate level' as some sort of rock history:

"You grow up reading those books about (troubled classic rock bands), and then all of a sudden you find yourself in that cliche. It's pretty surreal," drummer/singer Chris Cester said in a recent interview, accompanied by his older brother Nic, the band's singer/guitarist.

No, Cester. You weren't part of some classic rock story. You were just a band that didn't really have it in you to be selling millions of records. It wasn't some terrible calamity that did for your second record; it was just the whole not being very good.

"There's a lot of goodwill that I have noticed for our band, a lot of people who really want this to go well, which I'm really grateful for," said Nic. "We're not trying to fool anyone. This isn't like a marketing campaign. We're just a good band, and we write good songs and we love what we do. It starts and ends there."

It isn't like a marketing campaign, he says in an interview with a major news organisation timed to coincide with a tour starting to promote a new release.

Downloadable: Drummer

Patrick Carney, the drummer out the Black Keys, has launched his own band. And, laughing in the face of people who suggest drummers don't have much in the way of imagination by calling the band... erm, Drummer.

There's an album due towards the end of September; if you can't wait that long, the title track has been made officially available [via Medifire].