Just What We Need: Another Beatles Compilation
For those who grew up after the Beatles broke up (read: me), it was hard not to consume them through compilation albums. We had the double red and blue albums, the Anthologies series, the Past Masters, and the ’1′ album, to name a few. Lost in the shuffle, especially now that the Beatles are on iTunes, are the fantastically laid out collections of the actual albums themselves (see: Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road). But now, iTunes has confirmed that there is a new collection featuring the Beatles “most powerful rock songs” (via Gigwise). To stop any laughter and to help promote it, a series of musicians have spoken out on the collection, notably Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl. He simply says “If it weren’t for The Beatles, I would not be a musician.” Please support future generations of musicians by giving your hard earned dollars and pounds to the Beatles’ estates, and listening to yet another re-ordering of Beatles songs that you probably already have.
Apple’s Third Quarter Report: Merely $117 Billion in the Bank Now
Apple managed to add another $7 billion to it’s bank account this past quarter, bringing it’s cash reserves to a staggering $117 billion (via Tech Crunch). Other Apple stats revealed about Q3: there are now 650,000 apps in the app store (up 50,000). Apple has 372 retail stores, 123 of which are outside of the United States. Those stores saw a whopping 813 million visitors, so 17,000 per store each week. No wonder I can never get in the bloody store!
26 million iPhones were sold last quarter, which is about 3-4 million less than predicted, and down from last quarter’s 35.1 million phones sold. Rumours of the new iPhone 5 likely slowed sales, as well as strong, new phone products by Blackberry Samsung. The iPad fared better, increasing from 11.8 million sales in Q2 to 17 million this past quarter. It’ll be interesting to see if the Nexux 7 dents the next quarter. Everyone’s favourite castaway, the iPod, sold 6.8 million, which is still impressive, but that’s down 10% from last year and 12% from last quarter.
So do what you like with these stats – even draw nice graphs!
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Tag Archives: Andrew Bird
Morning Music Notes – Paul McCartney Combines 2 Evils: Christmas And Starbucks
It’s a Starbucks Christmas, With Paul McCartney
Love them or hate them, Starbucks isn’t going anywhere. And they will continue to sell and slightly influence the music that people who like paying $5 for coffee will listen to and buy. Starbucks is now releasing a Christmas album in, um, October. The album will be called Holidays Rule, which leads me to believe it should be a Halloween album, no? The album is out through Starbucks own label, Hear Music, and will feature Paul McCartney, Rufus Wainwright, Calexico, Andrew Bird, and others (via Guardian).
If you want snippets of the songs, you’ve come to the right place. Check out a meaningless 30 seconds of each track below.
Coca-Cola Might Invest Big Time In Spotify
Soft drink giants Coca-Cola (that’s Coke to me) are looking to invest $10 million into music streaming service Spotify. The money is small potatoes in the grand scheme of their recent $100-$200 million funding round, and even smaller based on the $4 billion valuation of Spotify (via Hypebot).
In related news (to Spotify), there are plans to launch Spotify in Japan in January. Japan is a top 5 music market and the only top 5 market where no one uses it. COME TO CANADA ALREADY.
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Morning Music Notes – Apple Has Some Money to Spare
Just What We Need: Another Beatles Compilation
For those who grew up after the Beatles broke up (read: me), it was hard not to consume them through compilation albums. We had the double red and blue albums, the Anthologies series, the Past Masters, and the ’1′ album, to name a few. Lost in the shuffle, especially now that the Beatles are on iTunes, are the fantastically laid out collections of the actual albums themselves (see: Sgt. Pepper or Abbey Road). But now, iTunes has confirmed that there is a new collection featuring the Beatles “most powerful rock songs” (via Gigwise). To stop any laughter and to help promote it, a series of musicians have spoken out on the collection, notably Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl. He simply says “If it weren’t for The Beatles, I would not be a musician.” Please support future generations of musicians by giving your hard earned dollars and pounds to the Beatles’ estates, and listening to yet another re-ordering of Beatles songs that you probably already have.
Apple’s Third Quarter Report: Merely $117 Billion in the Bank Now
Apple managed to add another $7 billion to it’s bank account this past quarter, bringing it’s cash reserves to a staggering $117 billion (via Tech Crunch). Other Apple stats revealed about Q3: there are now 650,000 apps in the app store (up 50,000). Apple has 372 retail stores, 123 of which are outside of the United States. Those stores saw a whopping 813 million visitors, so 17,000 per store each week. No wonder I can never get in the bloody store!
26 million iPhones were sold last quarter, which is about 3-4 million less than predicted, and down from last quarter’s 35.1 million phones sold. Rumours of the new iPhone 5 likely slowed sales, as well as strong, new phone products by
BlackberrySamsung. The iPad fared better, increasing from 11.8 million sales in Q2 to 17 million this past quarter. It’ll be interesting to see if the Nexux 7 dents the next quarter. Everyone’s favourite castaway, the iPod, sold 6.8 million, which is still impressive, but that’s down 10% from last year and 12% from last quarter.So do what you like with these stats – even draw nice graphs!
Click to read the rest of your Morning Music Notes (or don’t)
Morning Music Notes – The Darkness to Ruin Street Spirit
MoMA PS1 Announces Warm Up Line Up for This Summer
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) offshoot – MoMA PS1 – has announced its Warm Up 2012 line up, which aims to “continue its tradition of introducing audiences to the best in experimental live music, sound, performance, and DJs”. Pretty sure I’ve heard of some of your DJs before, like this Thom Yorke guy. Warm Up starts on Saturday July 7 and runs through Saturday September 8, culminating in a DJ set by Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace. Check out the MoMA PS1 website for full line up details and ticket details – they go on sale June 18 – but highlights include Atoms for Peace (Thom Yorke!), Jamie xx, Just Blaze, Rustie, Danny Brown, and so many more that I’m being lazy and making you do the rest of the legwork.
Bye Bye Hashbang – Twitter Aims to Increase Speed
Hashbang has always sounded like some drug-induced sex to me, but on Twitter it’s more of a #! (literally). Twitter aims to increase its speed by up to 5 times, and to do so, it is removing the hashbang (#!) URL (via Digital Trends).
“To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we’ve been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server,” writes Dan Webb, Twitter’s engineering manager, in a company blog post. “This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.”
I understood about 1/5 of what Dan Webb said, but basically his message is “don’t do drugs.”
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