Archive for the 'Entertainment' Category

Discovering New Music

25/11/2007

There’s an interesting article on the San Francisco Chronicle site about how TV adverts can launch a song, it also mentions the shrinking options for launching a new band into the limelight:
Further complicating the matter is a decline in overall band exposure. For the most part, radio has been unwilling to break the Top 40 [...]

The Shelf Life of Music

11/10/2007

Does anyone else find it a bit odd that when you first hear a song, while it may not strike a chord immediately, once you like a song you can listen to a song over and over and it still sounds good and, for want of a better word, energises you, then slowly it becomes [...]

Finding Similar Items

19/09/2007

A lot of places, mainly online stores, now have the ‘if you like this you may like…’ or ‘customers who bought this also bought…’ features to help (and encourage) you to find similar items you might like. Unfortunately they’re often not very good, people buy a lot of wild things on one order so [...]

Stationless TV

15/09/2007

It has started. I think more TV shows will end up going out to audiences in ways like, maybe establish and audience on a regular channel, then split to online media. Some will eventually start away from TV stations, maybe a few websites will become their own TV channels or listings sites, so [...]

Irony

14/05/2007

Definition: Executives of a TV network who are unhappy about a parody of a TV show that employs parody and satire for much of it’s humour.

The Right to Royalties

30/04/2007

I’m somewhat torn by the current copyright laws. It does seem strange that a performer doesn’t get the same coverage as songwriters and composers, after all, it is they that breath life into the words and music, they the public fall in love with. You don’t see actors getting less rights than writers [...]

RIP the Album?

26/04/2007

I was reading through this article on the New Media Family, where the BBC have given a load of the latest high-tech entertainment gadgets to a family to see how we might all use media in the future, and this paragraph grabbed my attention:
But bad news for the future of the album - the girls [...]

The Return of Tomorrow’s World

6/01/2007

As I kid I used to watch Tomorrow’s World all the time, many of my friends still remember it (ask anyone in the tech world of a certain age if they remember when the Sony minidisc debuted and the person demonstrating it opened the player, removed the disc and put it back in without the [...]

Silence in Songs

7/12/2006

Why do artists insist on putting silence in songs? I’m not talking about a few second here or there for dramatic effect, I’m talking about the endless voids some people add to their tunes, sometimes with some inane riff at the end to make it seemingly worthwhile (like those snippets at the end of [...]

The Secret Policeman’s Ball

31/10/2006

A couple of weekends ago I went to The Secret Policeman’s Ball. It’s a title that’s intentionally misleading. Rather than some form of dance for undercover members of the constabulary, it’s actually a comedy event held on behalf of Amnesty International. Featuring a range of stand up routines and sketches, some were [...]