links for 2009-08-28

It's really funny to watch the old record labels try to understand the whole music blogging culture. The folks in the promotions department send music bloggers mp3s and encourage them to post them, knowing that it'll get the musician attention. That's a good thing. But the folks on the legal side go the other way… often sending takedowns to the very same bloggers.

Musicians spend too much time entering their data on multiple websites. Filling out forms. Uploading MP3s. Uploading photos. Entering dates and venues into concert calendars. Pasting lyrics and bio. All those stupid profiles scattered around the web, which of course will soon be outdated unless they're constantly updated.

Art Brut sagely advises, “Stop buying your albums from the supermarket,” and people have taken heed. In light of constantly dwindling album sales, I like reading the somewhat quaintly outdated US Neilson Soundscan chart. The thing about the chart that interests me most is what’s not selling – it reflects little about the music (predominantly rock and indie) that most people I know enjoy .

Apple says it has approved an iPhone app from Spotify, a music service that some people believe represents a growing threat to iTunes. The decision has been closely watched in part because Apple has previously disallowed apps it deems to duplicate core functions of its handset. Speculation had centered on whether Apple would regard an unlimited-music app as potentially cannibalizing its own iTunes Store’s a la carte downloads, although there’s no proof that this is how it feels.