Words About Things

The Mercury Music Prize award ceremony took place last night with the honors going to The xx (spelled with lower case x’s if you don’t mind) for their album xx. This didn’t really come as a big surprise to anyone, The xx were the bookie’s favorites and seemed destined to win. If you missed the awards here are the 10 albums which were nominated, click on the title of the album to launch it if you are a Spotify user.

Biffy Clyro – Only Revolutions
Corinne Bailey Rae – The Sea
Dizzee Rascal – Tongue n’ Cheek
Foals – Total Life Forever
I Am Kloot – Sky at Night
Kit Downes Trio – Golden
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Mumford & Sons – Sigh No More
Paul Weller – Wake Up the Nation
Villagers – Becoming a Jackal
Wild Beasts – Two Dancers
The xx – xx

I was quite pleased that The xx won the award, I’ve enjoyed their album and found it to be a well rounded and complete work. I featured the band on this very blog in August of last year before their album was released (“I liked them before they were popular etc”).

I have also been enjoying Laura Marling’s album I Speak Because I Can which is well worth a listen. It is darker than her previous album Alas I Cannot Swim with a bigger sound and better production. Judging by last night’s performance she has grown in confidence and is no longer too shy to look at the audience. If you haven’t heard it yet check out the video below.

Interestingly, as the Guardian pointed out, the Mercury Prize was created by the same man who created the ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ compilations. It is no coincidence that the awards take place at a time of year when record sales are traditionally quite low. Who ever wins the Mercury Prize tend to see a big spike in sales although I’m not sure if that happened to last year’s winner Speech Debelle who seems to have vanished.

Online music streaming service Spotify has reverted back to it’s original invite-only membership setup. On their blog Spotify said that the changes were only a temporary messure brought about by a large increase in the amount of new sign ups. The recent launch of Spotify’s iPhone/Android app has bought the service a considerable amount of publicity which has no doubt lead to the increase in those signing up.

There is a way to sign up without using an invite: get a premium account. A premium account is needed to install the mobile app and costs £10 per month. Premium users don’t have to listen to adverts although most Spotify users I’ve spoken to don’t seem to mind the ads too much.

The Register reports that every song streamed costs Spotify around 1p so selling their preimum account and mobile app is clearly vital for the service to survive.

I’ve been using Spotify for a few days and it seems like something I am defenetly going to keep using. Previously I used Songza to create lists of songs to stream whilst I was blogging. Songza streams a lot of it’s content from Youtube I think so the lack of music videos left on the UK version of Youtube was a bit of a problem.

Spotify runs from your desktop and allows to to stream albums directly in exchange for hearing a few adverts. The weird thing is that the adverts are actually quite unobtrusive and infrequent. I was actually quite surprised how few adverts there were, hopefully it will remain this way.

There seems to be a lot of albums available and I have yet to actually search for many that haven’t been found. They have some great early San Diego Hardcore stuff like Antiock Arrow which is definitely a good sign.

If you already have Spotify then here are some links to what I have been listening to so far:

Golden Silvers – True Romance

The Virgins – The Virgins

Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – s/t (highly recomended)

Jimmy Cliff – The Best Of

and

Antiock Arrow – In Love With Jets

If you have anything interesting to share then add a comment…