Morning Music Notes – Google Has Apple’s Number This Week

Songs Pulled From Radio in Light of Sandy Hook School Shooting

Just like what happened after 9/11, a selection of ‘offensive songs’ with potentially harmful lyrics have been pulled off of the radio due to the recent school shooting at Newtown, Conn., USA. The song that’s being pulled that’s getting the most buzz is Ke$ha’s Die Young, which features an offensive title (via Hollywood Reporter).

Ke$ha took to Twitter and said “I understand. I had my very own issue with ‘die young’ for this reason. I did NOT want to sing those lyrics and I was FORCED TO.” That’s the problem when you don’t write your own lyrics and sing what’s put in front of you! Ke$ha also said, “I’m so so so sorry for anyone who has been effected by this tragedy and I understand why my song is now inappropriate. words cannot express.”

Also getting the boot from the radio is Foster the People’s Pumped Up Kicks, which has a line “All the other kids with the pumped-up kicks/You better run, better run, outrun my gun … better run faster than my bullet.” So is this over the top or totally necessary? And does this mean most rap won’t get played on the radio any time soon?

Stereophonics Announce March 4 as Release Date for Graffiti On the Train

Welsh rockers, Stereophonics, will release their 8th studio album this upcoming March 4 (via Gigwise). The new album will be called Graffiti On The Train, and should inspire a generation of street vandals artists. The first track we heard from the album was Violins and Tambourines, followed by new single In A Moment. Excited or unmoved?

Google Play Music Has New Matching Service in USA, and It’s Free – Suck it, iTunes

Apple’s iTunes Match service gets a lot of hype. For a fee, the service will match your iTunes tracks with their iCloud service, and mimic your library in the cloud, and replace the songs with higher quality versions. Google Play Music is a (currently) free cloud storage service, and will now match songs for you – also for free (via Slash Gear). Google for the win! This service is available for Google Play Music users in Europe and USA – Canada currently doesn’t have Google Play Music. Womp womp!

Google Maps (Presumably) Leads to 29% Increase in iOS6 Downloads

Well isn’t this the ultimate kick in the teeth for Apple execs. Apple unceremoniously dumped Google Maps from the iPhone, opting to go with their shiny, new (high problematic) Apple Maps. It sucked – restaurants were placed in the middle of lakes, bridges were warped, and basically the satellite imaging looks like a Salvador Dali painting in places. Apple admitted their maps needed work, and recommended other map services. This was all before Google Maps came around and made an official iPhone app. It got over 10 million downloads in 2 days.

Since Apple Maps runs on the latest operating system on iPhones – iOS 6 – people might’ve been hesitant to lose iOS 5 and therefore Google Maps. Recent stats show this was likely the case, as data from MoPub shows a 29% increase in users now using iOS 6 (via Tech Crunch). Coincidence? I think not.

This is really bad for Apple, showing that holding back what used to be an excellent native app in Google Maps prevented your customer base from updating and utilizing all the other new tools your newest operation software has. All because you wanted to roll out your fancy, lameass Apple Maps.

Listen! Django Django – Love’s Dart (Egyptian Hip Hop version)

We get a retro, 80s sounding remix of Django Django by their buddies, Egyptian Hip Hop. The track is lifted from Django Django’s self titled debut album, and is Love’s Dart. Check out the radically different reworking below.