Posts
All Comments
Completely unaffiliated with the 1990s Liverpool punk fanzine of the same name, meet Dregs.
Actually, I say they're unaffiliated - I know nothing about them beyond their Bandcamp page - they're called Suzi / Georgina / Bryony / Kaila and are based in London. And this is their demo:
Stephen Street was going to give radio listeners a treat - twenty seconds of Morrissey singing a demo track, as part of a documentary about Stephen Street:
"[I just wanted] to show that even when [Morrissey] was singing on a four-track cassette, he still sounded great," [Street] told Contact Music.
"On Friday afternoon [30 April], both the BBC and myself received a letter from Morrissey's solicitors threatening an immediate injunction preventing any broadcast unless the material was removed," Street said. "Apparently their client was 'horrified that the proposed material would be broadcast.'"
It's been repeated, and found by surveys, so often it barely constitutes 'news', but it's nevertheless timely that a Virgin Media funded survey again reports that people who use unlicensed music also spend more on licensed music, too:
The study - funded by Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED) - says a third of adults go illegal. But the additional money they spend contributes £200 million to the music economy each year.
Tucked into Andy Bell's online biography is something midway between a rarity and a historical curiosity: some of the demo he made when he was in Dinger.
This isn't, to be clear, a time when Bell was earning a crust as the Colorado Rockies mascot.
What are bands doing with all the emails they harvest in return for free music? Are they simply building up a marketing database, or do they sell them on to V1agr/\ salesmen?
Still, some things are worth the risk of a flurry of emails telling you "She hate your tiny man-gizzard -be virile with blue pill". Like, for example, a free digital bundle from LaRoux. Get across to the website, click on the bottom right and before you know it, you'll be taking delivery of a couple of demo tracks.
There's also a live session, which will be appearing on Spotify this afternoon. But - hold on! - only for premium users. The rest of the world will have to wait until next week to be able to hear it. (In passing, looks like Spotify have come up with a new way of persuading people to shell up for an upgrade.)
I'm not sure that Rough Trade are quite a desperate for new acts as NME.com makes it sound:
Rough Trade label chiefs make demo plea
At some point, Lily Allen has uploaded two Kate Nash songs - sorry, demo versions of two new tracks - to her MySpace. One of them, I Could Say, is actually quite a nice song although by the time it's been produced and had some cod reggae slapped over the top of it it'll be unrecognizable and as clunky as the stuff on the first record. The other, I Don't Know, is less charming - oh-life-is-terrible-poor-me second-album stuff - and seems to have been a bit more polished before being uploaded. Certainly, her voice seems to have been helped a little, which isn't the case with the ropey performance on I Could Say.
[via The Times track of the day]
Kelly Clarkson is really upset that tracks from her new album have found their way onto the internet - somehow, oh, who can know who?
In fact, she's been talking about how sucky it is:
Over on That Truncheon Thing, demos from Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot sessions. It's part of a week of Wilco rarity sharing from the blog.
Sony BMG have taken a bold leap into the future, telling any bands who want to get locked in to one of its contracts that, in future, it's digital or nothing from now. If you want someone in Sony's group of companies to hear your music, you now have to upload demos to one of an array of websites like RCAdemos.co.uk. It's because blogging is the future:
