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Apple’s iTunes, Radiohead and We7 featured among the winners of this year’s BT Digital Music Awards, announced last night at the London Roundhouse.

iTunes beat down 7digital, eMusic, Music Station and Napster to win the Best Music Store category.

We7 beat 7digital and Sellaband amongst others last night to win the Best Digital Music Service category, yet another highlight for the service which signed distribution deals with the Orchard this week, following on from deals made with Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music.

Radiohead won the Artists Of The Year award, while Coldplay won the Best Rock/Indie Artist award and their website, Coldplay.com, won the Best Official Music Website gong. Read the rest of this entry »

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As the band invites fans to take part in a second remix project, Radiohead has revealed some of the numbers pertaining to the band’s last remix experiment.

The last remix for ‘In Rainbows’ track, ‘Nude’, saw “6,193,776, Page Views: 29,090,134, Hits: 58,340,512, Bandwidth: 10.666 Terabytes, Number of mixes: 2,252, Number of votes: 461,090, Number of track listens: 1,745,304,” the band revealed in a note to fans despatched in the early hours today.

The band this week announced a second remix project, offering track ‘Reckoner’ in its entirety through iTunes for remixing by others. Read the rest of this entry »

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Marillion’s move to make the band’s latest album available through file-sharing networks raised lots of eye-brows, with industry mutterings claiming the scheme would never, ever work…they were wrong.

The band’s business manager, Erik Nielsen, MD of Intact/Racket Records, told attendees at yesterday’s hugely interesting EconMusic Conference just how successful the free release has been for the band.

“We made our album available through BitTorrent, ” he said. “Since then we have tripled our sales of physical product…” That’s right - they tripled physical sales - by being nice to their fans. Read the rest of this entry »

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Following the huge response the band enjoyed with its Nude Remix Project, Radiohead are giving fans the chance to remix “Reckoner”, another track from the band’s latest album “In Rainbows”.

To make remixing easy, the separate ‘stems’* from the song will be made available to purchase on iTunes. Stems include bass, lead vocal, backing vocals, guitars, piano/strings and drums.  All six stems will be available to buy for the price of a single track. 

Fans can mix the stems in any way they like, either by adding their own beats and instrumentation, or just remixing the original parts.
 
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BT has revealed the nominations for the 2008 BT Digital Music Awards, with Kylie Minogue and Bloc Party holding three nominations each.

Kylie faces Coldplay, Radiohead, Leona Lewis and British Sea Power for artist of the year, and is also nominated for best pop artist and best innovation for Kylie Konnect .

Bloc Party take on Coldplay, Ida Maria, Radiohead and The Futureheads for best rock/indie artist and are also up for best music community for Bloc Party Marshals and best artist promotion for the ‘Intimacy’ album release campaign.
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This is an excerpt, for the skinny follow this link.

Quick first take - if this just hit the Financial Times, then there is a very good chance some of the majors are about to seize the challenge of championing artists - and their audiences - and a major that gets it together to do this truly will be rock ‘n roll. Music is our cultural history, after all. Anyway - an intro:

“Rock band hits a different note on P2P downloaders - By Paul Sexton - Published: September 12 2008 03:00 | Last updated: September 12 2008 03:00
“If the downtrodden global record industry has a common foe, it is the millions of illegal filesharers who treat copyrighted music as a free commodity. So a new attempt to harness peer-to-peer users as a revenue stream is bound to court controversy, even if it is entirely legal.
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Newtonian physics has a rule - for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and the rule stays the same in download culture, which is slowly generating a resurgence in vinyl.

We glanced at this last month when it was revealed that for at least one small record shop, vinyl sales climbed 70 per cent year-on-year.

Read between the lines of just about any of the quarterly sales figures from the large music industry associations and you’ll see a little blip in vinyl sales - and this hasn’t gone unnoticed, prompting the Wall Street Journal to take a look at the trend.
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Elbow took the 2008 Nationwide Mercury Prize for ‘Album of the Year’.  Elbow frontman Guy Garvey said “This is quite literally the best thing that has ever happened to us.”  

“It feels great, very unexpected.  I suppose you could look at it in the same way that certain Bedouin tribes look at a bowl of milk,” he added. “It’s something that doesn’t occur very often, and it’s so much sweeter for it.”

“Having said that, it’s been a long time that we’ve been doing it and this is a cause for celebration. I’m just so very proud that we’ve been working together this long - to this end. We really wanted this”

Simon Frith, Chair of Judges said “The Seldom Seen Kid’ is an album of epic songs, rooted in their locality, a switchback of emotions rooted in the everyday, the sound of musical ambition perfectly realised. Elbow’s album is triumphant, heartbreaking, unerringly melodic and life-affirming”
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Radiohead did indeed last night webcast their final show of their US tour from Santa Barbara, confirming an earlier claim in BoingBoing is reporting.

The original report wasn’t definite, suggesting it heard the news through a tip-off from someone who has been following the band on the latest tour. Distorted Loop then checked with its ’sources’, who suggested the report to be ‘probably’ true, though full confirmation wasn’t achieved - it’s believed at this stage the band had only limited bandwidth to offer the stream, so that’s why they kept it quiet.

The band’s website, Dead Air Space, had little to say on the matter before the event, beyond a somewhat unusual hint to Mac users that they should download software to enable them to watch video made available in Windows Media format, or download that stalwart multimedia app, VLC. Windows users are also urged to download VLC.
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Radiohead’s “pay what you want” distribution gamble paid off despite - or perhaps because of - rampant file sharing, an report claims.
MCPS got these figures together in partnership with analysis firm BigChampagne. They declare that the album saw 2.3 million BitTorrent downloads in its first 24 days on sale - but still pushed the band to the top. In an odd conclusion, the report informs even when albums are offered for free legitimately, users are still unlikely to break the habit of using BitTorrent.
“Frequently, music industry professionals suggest that an increase in legitimate sales must necessarily coincide with a commensurate reduction in piracy, as if this were a fact,” says the report.

read more | digg story

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