owngig.com

This is from this week’s Owngig.com newsletter. For the full content, register here…

We’ve watched the rise of Spotify with great interest. If you haven’t heard of it, then you’re missing out. It’s basically itunes but instead of having to buy the music you can search for stuff from the millions of tracks from the Spotify libraries. OK, it doesn’t have everything but it’s pretty damn close. If that wasn’t great enough, rumours of an iPhone application have surfaced. If this video is to be believed, we’re very excited. We’ve also been excited by the pretty lights of the new Royksopp video. We’re hearing very good things about the new album, Junior too, but this first single is great.

The rise of the premium version of albums is interesting to watch at the minute. Like Owngig, they look to offer something different and new for the fan. These two in particular caught our eye. Firstly, small obscure Irish band U2 have brought a set for the release of their new album featuring a limited edition box set the CD, a DVD of Anton Corbijn’s exclusive film Linear, a hardback book, plus a fold out poster.

But it’s not just big bands that are spoiling their hardcore fans. London based balearic band, A Mountain of One recently released a rather spiffy limited edition EP to preview their new album. This limited edition of 50 contains the EP, a t-shirt, poster and badge all in a rather nice box. Given we already have given out T-shirts at Owngig concerts it gives us some ideas for the future. What would you like to see as part of a special package at an Owngig concert? Drop us a line and let us know.

This is from this week’s Owngig.com newsletter. For the full content, register here…

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

Loving is probably the wrong term for this first item, maybe following with interest is more appropriate, but this week saw the start of the trial of Swedish torrent site, The Pirate Bay. This site is one of the main players in the illegal downloading of music and movies and while they host no content, they index the torrents that make it possible from around the world. Whether taking them out of business would really make much difference is a moot point but the trial has been interesting to follow. This being 2009, one of the defendants is Twittering live and there’s also a channel created where people can comment on trial developments.

At the same time we’ve seen news of a launch that look to bring digital music to the people in a legal way that offer an alternative to iTunes. BSkyB is planning to launch a music service where for a monthly fee you can listen to all the music you like. Following on from being given away.

Finally, something more light hearted – we’re looking forward to next week’s NME with a CD of Cure covers being given away. If you fancy hearing Dinosaur Jr covering Just Like Heaven, The Editors doing Lullaby or even The Futureheads doing Lovecats, check it out. We’re not sure if it’s going to be ace or awful but we’re definitely intrigued.

Proof electronic music has gone to the dogs? Far from it.

From this week’s Owngig newsletter, here’s a trio of music videos we’re loving…

This stop-motion video is a cute as a button clip for 80s fans Rex the Dog. For those who don’t know, Rex the Dog was an underground sensation for a few years, not least because he refused to drop the pretense that all the music was made by a canine. He even went to the trouble of doing a short phone interview with Radio One answering questions only in dog barks (one for yes, two for no). That silliness over, this is a great video for a great song.

We’re on a boat! Great new parody from American group, The Lonely Island (whose previous hit we can’t put the name of in this newsletter) of all those rap videos on expensive sea cruisers. They even manages to rope in everyone’s favourite auto-tune abuser, T-Pain.

Finally, this video from hip young things Chairlift could make your brain melt out of your ears. By messing around with the timeframes in the digital video they create a very trippy effect, akin to your set top box developing a fever. Don’t blame us if when you’ve finished watching you find reality has disappeared and you find yourselves in a Yellow Submarine.

Seen anything interesting on the web? Drop us a line.

“Wish I’d thought of that Songsmith mashup”

Hi,

Welcome to the weekly newsletter from Owngig.com. These newsletters bring you the latest Owngig news and a selection of music related links we’ve found from around the web.

This week on Owngig…

This week, while it’s been a pretty typical on site, with a variety of bids on a good selection of different music and comedy acts, what we can’t talk about is developments, offsite. Suffice to say there’s been some interesting developments with some big names that we hope to tell you more soon. Watch this space…

Less classified, but also coming soon to Owngig are some shiny new widgets to use on MySpace and Facebook. In the meantime if you’re a musician or fan, we already have images for you to embed on your website, blog or Myspace page. Click here to download them and show your support.

This week on the web we’ve been loving…

First, a slight return for Songsmith from a few weeks ago. Microsoft’s automatic backing band software has spread all over the web with a wide variety of different acts used to unintentionally hilarious effect for everything from Metallica to Britney Spears.

However, the latest one takes a different tack by feeding in economic data from the current recession to use as musical backing. Sound dry? Technical? Depressing? Wait till you hear it. You’ll never know a recession and economic gloom could sound so swinging!

While still on YouTube, more basically, we were impressed by a simple video/film mashup so simple but genius we’re surprised no one has thought of it before. Depeche Mode and Tron together. Just under 10,000 views at the time of writing this so far but we expect this to go up pretty quickly.

Finally a new startup, Gigulate, promises to place all the information about any band you’re into in one convenient page so you can see gigs, albums, press etc all on one page. There’s a whole lot more planned it seems so we look forward to seeing more. Check out their blog here for more…

Seen anything interesting on the web?

Drop us a line. Also if you have any questions about Owngig.com, let us know. You can get in touch here.

Find us on MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and now, Twitter