Despite Sony Music Australia being on my Enemies List for wrecking eMusic, I've been trying out their download service bandit.fm. Only because they offer special promos each month that make it a good deal. Before I went to America they had a "buy your first album, get $20" deal so I exploited that with a couple of accounts.

Got some nice stuff, the Blind Faith record, some Ray Charles, a Flying Burrito Brothers set and cherry picked the new K'Naan (Somali-Canadian rapper) which is very good and a few other singles. In August they are having "buy an album and get $20 credit." So I bought Marianne Faithfull's Broken English for $10. With that, I got a Nine Simone box set which is thirty some dollars but the $20 made a nice discount.

Without these deals however and all other things being equal, I would stick to iTunes for the occasional purchases I normally make this way. The bandit.fm site is pretty and shiny but sometimes a pain to use. iTunes is not without its annoyances but at least the info is presented in a no frills style that makes scanning and picking easier. The artist pages at bandit.fm have too many giant graphics and too little easily accessiable information. You can click one extra time and get to a list of albums available, but that stuff should be right up front. There are also some technical issues. When you click on an album, a box pops up to listen to it and the rest of the screeen whites out until you close the box. Fine, except I sometimes get the whited out screen with no box and can't get out of it without shutting the tab and reopening the site entirely. The downloads are at 320kpb so audiophiles may applaud the quality but it also makes your average album a huge size in MBs. If you only have, say, a 1 or 2GB MP3 player who wants one album to take up 500MB. Don't need it, and would like a choice of formats.

So in short, the price is almost always the same as iTunes and there is no other reason to use it over iTunes - except for the special discounts each month, which is presumably why they offer them.

I have never seen Blues Brothers.

Segue:

Here is my latest 8tracks, a semi-late Friday night and RIP Koko eight songs which clocks in at just over 30 minutes. There are a few mournful eMusic references tucked away in the lyrics too. ;-(

This has been a Bad News Day in my personal music world, which I may rant about after I've processed it a bit.

BUT WAIT!! When Bob slams a window, he swings wide open a door so I am most thrilled to see Tim Dunlop's new music blog at Crikey has gone live. Yay, Tim! Apart from being (or because of being??) one of the world's stand up blokes, his taste in music is impeccable.*

We are not very well served by professional, MSM or semi-MSM music blogs in Oz, so this is red hot orsumness all 'round.

*with the exception of his woeful Randy Newman blind spot.

Shorter Bloke Who Prob Got His Ticket For Free: Eric Clapton should tailor his show much more to people who don't really like him much.

Props to my Twitter peep who suggests George just stick to Blueshammer.

I think all my problems with the term "world music" -- I use it as a category left because it is annoyingly convenient, but note the scare quotes -- can be summed up with the fact Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu won "Best World Music Album" at the ARIA's last night.

But he's ...? Um, but it's ... ! So, why ... ? Er, what? (Archie Roach was also nominated.) He was also nom'd for Best Album so it was a safe sop to give him something else which everyone thinks he deserves for it, but O RLY WTF.

I'm also annoyed because I bought a ticket to see Gurrumul at the Opera House and thought it was late October, but I stumbled over the ticket on the weekend and it was ... last Friday. I then proceeded to an anguished Mendoza! moment. Fug.

Update: I hadn't had a chance to see a paper copy of the Herald til now. Of course I'm always gratified when our paper of record takes up more than half three-quarters of the front page with a c.1987 picture of Bob Dylan, but I can't help wondering if this download was really the story of greatest domestic and/or global import today. Colour me .... puzzled.

The Mississippi track is also available at the SMH and Amazon and who knows where else besides, so they're really putting it out there.

Note to Herald subbies: it is not "long-lost." It was recorded in 1997! And at no point in the intervening 11 years was it "lost." Turn up an unheard Robert Johnson track and you can call it "long-lost." Turn up Bob singing "Love is Just a Four Letter Word" from 1967 and I'll let it pass.

it's nice they got Richard Jinman to write an original blurb for it though, although there are some weird lines in it.

Paul Cashmere asks re: iTunes, "If it doesn`t work for Estelle or AC/DC or The Beatles or Kid Rock, then who is it working for?"

A: Um, consumers?

Let's ignore the questionable correlation=causation assumptions underlying the whole thing and the extrapolation way beyond the evidence (is it too obvious to point out that what applies to The Beatles applies to ... well, practically no one else?) Cashmere doesn't mention this section from the WSJ article: "This year, Kid Rock ... has had a massive radio hit with "All Summer Long." Ah yes, commercial, mainstream radio. Nothing at all corrupt or restrictive about that method of promoting music!

And AC/DC's new album which won't be on iTunes? Exclusive to WalMart in the USA. This is a paradigm-busting improvement, how? And who benefits?

Look, clearly there are issues with all the new methods of digital delivery and their impacts on artists and labels and whoever else are many and complex. And by nature I am an album buyer. But am I really supposed to feel sorry for the major labels because they've been outmaneuvered by another big company doing a better job at giving people what they want? Uh huh. The model is going to change again no doubt, but if it changes to what the labels are pushing, I really can't imagine it's people like me who will win.

SMH FAIL.

Update. Sadly they have fixed the caption.

Muxtape, World Youth Day edn.

Further: How awesome is it that Mick/Proddy doctrinal stoushes are back in the papers? Party like its 1953!

I'm no theology geek but I'd sort of imagined the Second Coming would be heralded a little more, I dunno, auspiciously. Rather than just slipping the announcement in a Daily Tele article. Jesus will literally walk amongst us!

And it's happening here! Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi OI Oi!

Here in full is the 2/5 stars "review" by Bernard Zuel of Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind" from the Metro this morning:

You can see the attraction for the label. Here's someone who can be a lightweight-but-far-less-troublemaking cross between Ryan Adams and Steve Earle, with alcohol-soaked ballads and punchy mid-tempo country rock. It's easy to digest and has more grit than the Nashville-Tamworth axis but the trouble is when you take away the "troublesome" parts of Adams and Earle, you get by-the-numbers-alt.country.

The SMH reviewers, including BZ, generally do a good job in giving coverage to Music I Like and props to them for it, but I have a serious pet hate about their some of their critical MO. Namely: The constant and utterly unnecessary relating of everything slightly rootys to top 40 country and taking up space with irrelevant comparisons instead of talking about the music. In his excellent jazz reviews, John Shand never feels moved to mention that Mike Nock is not like Kenny G, but the blokes on the country/folk beat can't resist but shoehorn a reference to Keith Urban into damn near everything. Long time readers know I have ranted about this before. End the country critical cultural cringe!

I like this record (review coming this weekend) and he doesn't: fine, I'm not talking about that. The Adams/Earle comparisons while on the surface more appropos than Urban are misplaced too. Firstly, talk about the damn record. You've got about 50 words, why waste two of them on "Ryan" and "Adams", especially if you're not going to provide a meaningful comparison for potential purchasers? Hayes Carll is really very little like Ryan Adams musically, even when Ryan was at his most country. It seems Ryan is only mentioned because he provides a drug abusing songwriter bookend to the Earle reference which is more fitting, but still a waste of precious words. Why are we even mentioning drug abuse again? Ugh, who the hell knows.

Secondly, I strongly doubt the stated motivations apply to Lost Highway. It's just another the imposition of a random narrative that suits a lazy journo. (cf. the political op-ed columns every day of the week.) The easy-too-see attraction for the label is not that he isn't an vainglorious junkie, it is that he had already released a couple of critically acclaimed, award winning and successful Americana records and something of a reputation for being a genuine heir to the Texas country/folk songwriter tradition of Townes Van Zandt. These are the qualities that drew me to Hayes Carll three years ago.

If the new album doesn't live up to the promise, by all means say so. Don't just make shit up.

A further pet hate is the insidious definition creep of the term "alt.country." I see not the slightest reason to call Hayes Carll that, unless "alt.country" now simply means anything that doesn't chart on CMT and if that is what it now means then: over my dead body it does.