The website-only music available at Apple’s iTunes — i.e., the probable future of the music business — is helping the company in its recruitment of indie artists. In October, indie stalwart labels Matador, SpinART and Kill Rock Stars agreed to make large chunks of their catalogues available through the Internet outlet.
Now comes news that ex-Pixies’ front man and his band, Frank Black and the Catholics, have released an iTunes-only, four-song EP of unreleased songs through SpinART, potentially opening the floodgates for exclusive indie material unavailable anywhere else. You’ll have to pay iTunes to play, in other words.
You have to tip your cap at the timing of all this: Apple announced the indie partnerships the day before they launched their long-awaited Windows version of iTunes — the first Apple-authored application for the Windows operating system. The launch coincided with a mammoth price hike over at EMusic, effectively gutting one of the more popular legal downloading sites.
A few weeks later — Dec. 2, to be precise — over 250,000 independent recording artists were abandoned when MP3.com shut down after being acquired by San Francisco based C-Net. With over 40 million subscribers world-wide left stranded, expect quite a few of them — artists and fans alike — to be heading iTunes’ way.
Metacritic Year-End Results
With few days and even fewer new releases left this year, it’s a good time to check in with www.metacritic.com, the site that tabulates critics’ scores from most major music magazines and e-zines to come up with a 1-100 scorecard for new releases. The highest score this year — a 97 — went to some dirigible behemoth’s triple-live album (okay, okay: Led Zeppelin’s How the West Was Won). The rest of the best:
2) Boy In Da Corner (91) — Dizzee Rascal, 3) Neon Golden (90) — Notwist, 4) World Without Tears (90) — Lucinda Williams, 5) Elephant (89) — White Stripes, 6) The Meadowlands (89) — The Wrens, 7) Speakberboxxx/The Love Below (89) — OutKast, 8) Where Shall You Take Me (88) — Damien Jurado, 9) Rounds (87) — Four Tet, 10) Yours, Mine & Ours (87) — The Pernice Brothers.
The lowest scores? Well, no great surprises here: 1) Limp Bizkit (33), 2) Staind (34), and Puddle of Crap (36). Damn, even critics know that stuff blows.
This article appears in Dec 17-23, 2003.
