Play Me I’m Yours is an amazing project by artist Luke Jerram in which pianos are spread throughout urban spaces inviting each person to hang around, play some music, hear others play and just have fun.

Amazing work from Ross Ching.

Here’s some info:

Eclectic Method – featuring London natives Jonny Wilson, Ian Edgar and Geoff Gamlen – helped
pioneer the emerging art of audio-visual mixing since first cutting U2’s Mysterious Ways music video with
the Beastie Boys’ Intergalactic as an experiment back in 2002. The trio’s audio-visual mash-ups feature
television, film, music and video game footage sliced and diced into blistering, post-modern dance floor
events. It’s a cyclone of music and images mashed together in a world where Kill Bill fight scenes and
Dave Chappelle’s Rick James rants are ingeniously cut and looped over bootleg samples, DVD scratches
and pumped-up dance anthems. It’s a real-time subversion of technology and media performed live on
video turntables for what LA Weekly called a “mesmerizing” sensory overload.

With the easyness to copy data and the advantage of being anonymous online comes careless online music sharing, which is a real and unavoidable problem. And the music industry is only fighting itself, while it continues to carry on such a business plan.

Let me pinpoint what I feel to be the essential problem here: to sell music as a product. In a business point of view, to successfully sell a product means to outrun your competition: to do a better product and/or sell it in lower prices. Note that it’s essential that your product distinguishes itself from the all the rest out there in the market; and that its value is contained in the business’ ability to produce it like no other.

Consider now the expression “to steal music”, often associated with online file sharing. Think of what happens when you actually download a music file from the Internets: someone posts the file online and you download it. It’s simple. Now both of you have the file. But consider that if a song is actually worth any money at all, to download a song means to create monetary value out of nowhere. There is no such thing as stealing, when it comes to the digital world, since the original information is kept unchanged and remains under the same ownership as always. As least not while stealing is defined as it always was.

Copying a real-life product is actually a difficult task and that translates into how much a product is valuable to its business.

Selling music as a service is actually not a new idea, as many online websites and applications have tried to fulfill that need. And I think that has to be the way to go. Trying out Spotify was my turning point.

I had seen the video introduction a couple of months back and today I was lucky enough to have an invitation fall from the sky [or more precisely, from this awesome dude]. This application is off the charts. I mean, nearly perfect work.

The design is slick and its functionally is really perfect; I really don’t have any bad features to point out. Its library is huge, spanning all kinds of musical genres; its responsiveness is amazing, this bad boy doesn’t even have a loading bar: once you choose what you want to hear, you hear it and that’s it. It even features scrobbling.

You can subscribe to the free service (if you get lucky to have an invite) or you can use their paid services (day or monthly pass). The monthly pass costs €9.99, which is really an awesome price. I can imagine myself easily paying for this kind and quality of service.

Now this is how I imagine peacefull, profitable and problem-free access to online music. All you inflexible guys, please take note: stop chasing them unicorns, it’s time to change and finally adapt to your environment.

This is just too good to be true. The Red Hot Organization, a movement against AIDS through pop culture, has assembled this little gem. Dark Was The Night is a collection of loose tracks from a variety of folk, indie and alternative artists and it is freakin’ awesome.

Amidst collaborations between artists like Feist and Ben Gibbard (DCFC) or Antony (yes, The Johnsons one) with Bryce Dessner (from The National) you can also find tracks from single groups/artists like Arcade Fire, Beirut, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens, even Stuart Murdoch (from Belle & Sebastian)… and the list goes on:

• Andrew Bird
• Antony + Bryce Dessner
• Arcade Fire
• Beach House
• Beirut
• Blonde Redhead + Devastations
• Bon Iver
• Bon Iver & Aaron Dessner
• The Books featuring Jose Gonzalez
• Buck 65 Remix (featuring Sufjan Stevens and Serengeti)
• Cat Power and Dirty Delta Blues
• The Decemberists
• Dirty Projectors + David Byrne
• Kevin Drew
• Feist + Ben Gibbard
• Grizzly Bear
• Grizzly Bear + Feist
• Iron & Wine
• Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings
• Kronos Quartet
• Stuart Murdoch
• My Brightest Diamond
• My Morning Jacket
• The National
• The New Pornographers
• Conor Oberst & Gillian Welch
• Riceboy Sleeps
• Dave Sitek (TV On The Radio)
• Spoon
• Sufjan Stevens
• Yeasayer
• Yo La Tengo

This is a must have.

Here’s the link: http://www.radiohead.tv/

So, all the separate tracks (actually, they call them stems) from “Nude” are being distributed through iTunes, namely bass, voice, guitar, strings/fx and drums. I don’t think that I’ll give it a shot, I’m not very handy with these sort of things.

I have no doubt whatsoever that these guys are transforming the music just like the people that are really behind Web 2.0 have changed the way we face the Web.

It reminds me of an excerpt from a favourtie movie:

I like that. It’s like there’s this whole telepathic thing going on that we’re all a part of, whether we’re conscious of it or not. That would explain why there are all these seemingly spontaneous worldwide innovative leaps in science and the arts, you know, like the same results popping up everywhere independent of each other.

on Waking Life, Jesse and Celine talking.

My personal favorite is the top album Quilt. Here’s mine: