News Corp screws musicians as Imeem debts dumped

Rupert Murdoch is fond of lecturing on morality - The Sun, John Gaunt, Fox News, it's all about telling people about what they believe to be right. And wrong.

How about deliberately cutting lose thousands of musicians from their payments? Where does that sit on the morality wheel? Because that's what the News Corp MySpace takeover of Imeem, as Hypebot reports:

MySpace only bought some of imeem's assets and assumed none of its mounting debts. Included in those unpaid debts were money owed to the 110,000 artists who used imeem owned SnoCap to sell there music on the web on a number of sites including imeem and MySpace itself.

Classy - not just dumping people who thought they'd made a few dollars through Imeem, but people who'd used MySpace official sales platform to sell songs, only for MySpace to diddle them out the money they'd earned.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Bye, 'meem: MySpace dismantles Imeem

MySpace has, effectively, switched off Imeem and slapped in a redirect to MySpace music. Which is why they bought it, fair enough, but does raise the question about what's going to happen to people who were using Imeem as an audio equivalent of YouTube?

Does the MySpace FAQ help?

MySpace Music acquired certain assets of imeem, and will spend the next few weeks properly integrating aspects of the site within the MySpace Music community. Features and functionality that you loved at imeem will soon find their way onto MySpace, and compliment our existing platform alongside free full-song streaming, artist profiles, music videos, and much, much more.

But what about audio you might have uploaded yourself? That seems to have just vanished. Not music, not the glitzy stuff, but you can't help feeling its a bit like buying AudioBoo and deciding you're only going to keep any animal noises that might be there.

[via Hypebot]

MySpace snap up Imeem, unworried by strange smell

Increasingly, Rupert Murdoch's purchase of MySpace looks like a kneejerk move that confused the panic with the strategic.

Clearly, he's managed to bring this management style to MySpace, whose purchase of MySpace looks exactly the same.

As takeovers go, it has all the thought and care of that box of Milk Trayy Way grabbed from a Wild Bean Cafe shelf moments before midnight on Valentine's Day.

Admittedly, MySpace are getting something dirt cheap - the most generous estimates are putting the price tag at nine million; shrewder heads suggest it might have been scooped up for a million dollars. The company has spent more than twenty million to get to this point.

On the other hand, MySpace is already seeing its bottom line assailed by the costs of offering streaming music - does it really need to pick up more of those costs? Especially since Imeem was undermined by high royalty demands from labels - exactly the same problem MySpace is struggling with.

God help us...

Matador's website is promising a full length stream of God Help The Girl by God Help The Girl (Stuart Murdochian side-projection), but at the moment all we're seeing is 30 second clips. Hopefully that'll be sorted soon.

To a casual observer, Warners might look like they don't have a clue

It's not so very long since Warners decided to tear up its current digital strategy and call its investment in Imeem a write-off.

Now, it's had a change of heart and is building new bonds with the struggling media service, only this time not giving them any (more) money but just handing over loads of licenses.

At best, this might have been a clumsy negotiating position - Warners playing hard-to-get like a high school prom date - but even so, it gives the impression that there might be less of a coherent policy at Warners than a big, spinning wheel of 'what shall we do now, then'?

Warners cool on digital portfolio

Having invested enthusiastically but not wisely in Imeem and Lala, Warners have decided to change their digital strategy again and are writing off USD33million worth of investment in the two companies.

Which doesn't look great, either for Warners or for Imeem. The irony is that part of the reason why digital companies like Imeem are struggling to break in to profit is the ridiculously huge sums that the traditional record labels are demanding for content - in effect, Warners has helped torpedo its own multi-million investment.

Warners has yet to announce what its plan T will be, having ditched A to S.

Easter track smackdown: Final round - Hurrah!

Yes, the end is now in sight. And how better to greet the end of a four-day experiment than by calling for Hurrahs? More precisely, Hurrah's If Love Could Kill - "you had a boyfriend, hundreds of miles away/ I had a girl, away for a day". A tale of a quick shag unraveling four lives, a big favourite with the supposedly virginal Are You Scared To Get Happy fanzine and, sadly, Hurrah's passport to a major deal which quickly beat the attention to detail out of them.

Can it be found digitally?

For this final round - to build an air of tension or something - we're bringing on the competitors based on their positions on the leaderboard, lowest to highest. First to go then is:

Spotify:
It's not even the exclamation point confusing Spotify, which ends its campaign by muttering something about Hurrah! Another Year soundtracks.

Zero points, giving a total of 9.

we7:
"Gallant and Gay, we'll march away" is amongst the bemusing and wrong responses to a search for Hurrah. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. We7 marches away.

Zero points, giving a final score of 14

eMusic:
Again, this is yer basic indie, and the sort of thing that eMusic should be good at - especially as it calls for a subscription. But, no. Bip Bip Hurrah is not going to satisfy us, sirs.

Zero points, giving a final score of 19

Last FM:
Oh, no: disaster for Last FM just moments from the finish line. Having been very good at knowing bands, even if not having much of the music, it leaps to the conclusion that we're interested in a post rock band from Orlando. We are, actually, but not right now.

After a diversion into emo, the song title comes up trumps, but still mute.

One point off for jumping to conclusions, but one point returned for treating the exclamation mark in the band name as important, for a final score of 27.

Imeem:
Like it's suffering from time lag, or hasn't quite got over the last search, looking for the song title on this one brings up Psycho Mike by KillingxLove. Perhaps this is meant to be an semi-intelligent search, learning as we go. Or maybe it can't get over the word "kill". Like a Daily Mail search engine, it's all got to be about killing.

No marks for Imeem, bringing its final tally to 33.

iTunes:
145 search results for Hurrah!, and not one of them our Hurrah! It's nice to discover a Young Marble Giants album called Live At The Hurrah, but I'm not convinced that's going to get me singing along with a catch in my voice.

iTunes has added nothing to its total, and so winds up with 37

YouTube:
Nobody is doing especially well on the final round, as even YouTube tries to palm me off with Heart's If Looks Could Kill. There's not even a sniff of the band's 1987 Tube appearance, either.

No further points for YouTube, then, but they can wave their 41 points at the PRS in some sort of second-placed victory dance.

Amazon:
Nothing from Amazon, either, so they get no extra points.

However, since we started out on this experiment, the news has broken that Amazon has started to strip sales rank data from "adult" books, and throwing its adult net a little wide, to include stuff like Sexing The Cherry, self-help books for gay men and, erm, the hardcover version of John Barrowman's autobiography; because these sales ranks drive some of the searches and Best Sellers lists, effectively Amazon is making some books invisible. Because it's thinking of the children, apparently:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D

Member Services

Amazon.com Advantage

"Adult materials" - books, in other words, books with gay characters in just as a given. Some editions of Oranges Not The Only Fruit have had their rankings pulled; The Beautiful Room Is Empty is now bereft of its sales ranking. So, since Amazon are happy to apply capricious and idiotic rulings, so too shall we: fifty points off, with Amazon ending on minus three.

Join us for the final round-up in a couple of minutes.

Easter track smackdown: Round ten - Stop The Violence Movement

Welcome, as the sun rises on the fourth and final day of the Easter Track Smackdown as we attempt to prove, beyond reasonable doubt, what your best bet for finding tracks on the internet is.

Before we move onto the first of our final three slightly obscure tracks, some correspondence which has been entered into: We7's John Taysom popped up to offer a spirited defence of his company's USP - no need to download anything, free to stream stuff before you buy - and asks if he can have their point back.

To be fair, We7 might not have the tracks we've been seeking, but they're pretty usable. And given that they're not doing very well on points, but still happy to actually take the time over a bank holiday weekend to write a proper comment that - unlike QTrax and their nasty astroturf - is polite and measured, yes: you get a point back.

So, then, to today's first tussle, and we're looking for Self Destruction by the Stop The Violence Movement. A Band Aid style project pulled together by KRS-One in the wake of the murder of Scott La Rock, the 1989 record attempted to persuade rappers to put down their guns.

It wasn't, you'd have to say, a major success, and perhaps was doomed to fail when you consider Miss Melody's line that "you ain't guarding a door, so what you got a gun for?", which seemed to just open a loophole when zero-tolerance was probably what was needed. Also, given the way violence was about to spill out into war, only having East Coast artists might not have been the best move.

But it was a well-intentioned effort, and it sounded a lot better than Ferry Aid. (Is it wrong to compare charity singles like that? Have I had three points taken off my mortal soul score somewhere?) The question, though: does it exist online?

Spotify:
Ask Spotify for Self Destruction, and it throws up goth, not rap. Poor show, Spotify. Zero. Again.

Last FM:
The best thing about this being the last day of this event is that I won't have to see that bloody Boat That Rocked banner ad any more. Bill Nighy, what were you thinking? Does Richard Curtis hold your soul in a small metal container, and won't let you have it back until he's stopped making romcoms? And even if he does, did you have to sign off on that photo? Seriously?

Anyway... not only does LastFM know of the track, but it's smarter than us, knowing the song was credited to the Stop The Violence All Stars. Doesn't have it to play, though, but - in the words of Fry And Laurie being Robert Robinson - an extra point for being so clever.

iTunes:
It's smart enough to suggest that Boogie Down Production's track called Stop The Violence might work, providing you scroll far enough through the results. Four points for being near enough.

we7:
Again, suggests the BDP version might fit the bill for KRS-One related anti-hiphop violence tracks, which garners four points. And a warning to all to stop copying from their neighbours.

YouTube:
At first, this looks like a fan video. Then, as you get to the scene which looks not unlike that Comic Relief PG Tips/Admiral/Meerkat/Smash boardroom set-up, you realise it's the real deal:



Ten effortless points for the Googleplex, and a surprised guffaw that they started the video making it look like the sort of thing the Chart Show would lob on if there wasn't a video to show.

Amazon:
Amazon coast to an easy four points by listing Boogie Down Productions - in about seventeen different versions. Including an instrumental. An instrumental? Isn't that like releasing Das Kapital, but only with the pictures.

Imeem:
The track? Oh, yes - neatly filed under all the names of the artists taking part. And the video. Almost tempted to give 20 points, but since that would mess with the results, Imeem can have thirteen.

eMusic:
Fifty nine songs called Self Destruction. None of them are the ones we're after. Zero points.

So, we're begging ourselves not to fight, but what has this round done to the rankings?

Amazon - 47
YouTube - 39
iTunes - 37
Imeem - 33
LastFM - 27
eMusic - 19
we7 - 14
Spotify - 09

So, YouTube sneaks ahead of iTunes, while eMusic starts to feel we7's breath coming up behind it. And Spotify discovering that, when the chips are down, you need more than a lot of favourable press coverage to satisfy the further-flung desires of the listener.

But still two tracks to go, with only LastFM's mid-table position seeming secure. Coming next, label mates of Frankie Goes To Hollywood: surely they must be easy to find?

Easter track smackdown: Round nine - The Fat Tulips

With Wired already planning its next big cover story - "Internet fails to find song by bloke who used to be in sitcom" - it's up to the DNS servers and, uh, electrical... stuff... to prove that all these years building the web hasn't all been in vain.

Apart from the drumstick-as-dildo porn, of course. We'll always have that.

So, can we discover Peterborough's The Fat Tulips Where's Clare Grogan Now somewhere in our various competitor's hard drives.

Coming from the is-it-ATV, is-it-Anglia town of Peterborough, The Fat Tulips glimmered around the end of the 1980s and recorded their tribute to everyone's favourite pop star for their own Heaven Records. It's one of our first experiences of just how stupid rights holders can be, as the seven inch came with a little slip of paper which explained how they'd asked the distributors of Gregory's Girl if they could include a clip of Clare saying "goodnight Mr Spaceman" at the end of the song, only to be told no. Seriously, the rights holders believed that a small snatch on a self-released 7" would harm ticket sales for the film. Because if you'd heard a five second piece of dialogue, you wouldn't bother going to see the whole film. "I know how it ends, she says goodnight. Not worth going, is it?"

In fact, when you see how difficult to cope the music and movies found 1990, it's not surprising they'd fallen apart totally when things got really difficult, is it?

Still, with The Fat Tulips having dealt with a potential rights nightmare, has the song found its way online?

Spotify:
Did you mean Fat Tulip? asks Spotify. Well... let's say I did. What have you got?

Waltzing Tulip Polka by Fat Louie Szykowski.

Are you 'avin a laugh? Really?

Zero point for Spotify again.

Last FM:
No Where's Clare Grogan Now, but Last FM does have a bunch of late-period Fat Tulips stuff, in a mix of pointless thirty second clips, full tracks and even free downloads. Impressive enough to wrestle four marks from the panel of judges.

iTunes:
iTunes is here again with the Waltzing bloody Tulip. It doesn't even have the good grace to suggest that this is anything other than Not What We Were Looking For. A point off for insolence.

we7:
If We7 can't scrape a point this time round, it's going to have an average of one point each round, so it's got a lot to prove.

Obviously, it's not got the Fat Tulips. It doesn't even have yer man Szykowski. I try to find a way to cut a deal to allow even a head-patting single point by asking about Clare Grogan, and even then there's nothing in the vaults. Some people you can't help. Zero.

YouTube:
It has Clare Grogan. It has Fat Tulip's Garden. It even has a bloke apparently smoking drugs from one of the family Liliaceae. But no jangle-pop. Two strikes in a row for Google's evil musician-crushing machine, then.

Amazon:
NO! I DON'T WANT ANY POLKA. I DON'T WANT POLKA. NO POLKA. Do you hear me? No Polka.

Imeem:
At least the weight loss advert has an aura of being related advertising here, I guess. Did I mean Fat Joe? Did I mean Fat Bastard?

It does offer a tantalising glimpse of what it claims is Wham doing Young Guns on Christmas Top Of The Pops, but with a still showing Clare Grogan on Pop Quiz. But the video isn't "available", so it's not even getting a consolation point.

eMusic:
Nothing, but it does offer a chance to search for artists like Fat Tulips. Amongst these is Ray Charles, whose C86 work was, perhaps, somewhat cruelly ignored by the critics at the time. Zero.

So, day three of our tournament closes with another track that doesn't appear to be easily found online, legally at least.

A quick look at the scoreboard as we head into the last day:

Amazon - 43
iTunes - 33
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 26
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
We7 - 09

Tomorrow, we'll start with a Band Aid style social-campaigning multi-artist effort. Don't bother uploading Hear N Aid's Starz, we7, it's not going to be that...

Easter track smackdown: Round eight - Wilfrid Brambell

Oh, yes, digital world - you might have no problem serving up a slice of Bernard Cribbins playing it straight. But what of Wilfrid Brambell's Second Hand? Can you find me that?

This is, by the way, a lovely song - Brambell clearly playing off his most famous role as Albert Steptoe, lamenting that everything he's ever owned has been found, borrowed or pre-enjoyed, before concluding that even his wife was second hand. You could write a book about what the song says about attitudes to female sexuality in the post-War era.

But not before you've heard the song, of course. Can you help, the internet?

Spotify:
It's probably not surprising, given Spotify's disappointing performance, that it can't help here. Although it does suggest Steve Winwood's Second Hand Woman might fill the gap. No points.

Last FM:
Tantalisingly, Last FM has scrabbled its scrobbles and says that, in all of recorded history, it's spotted three people playing Wilfrid Brambell but, shrugging, it doesn't even know the name of any songs he might have sung. Zero.

iTunes:
iTunes doesn't have a clue. And considering a search for Bernard Cribbins tried to palm us off with the Frenzy movie, you'd have at least hoped they would have come up with Steptoe And Son Ride Again. Apple fail. Zero.

we7:
Once we can stop it getting excited about the prospect of "advert free days", we7 unsurprisingly offers nothing by Wilf, but does bring forward a surprising number of songs called Second Hand. It's not exactly a brand new name, is it? [You may now chuckle, if you wish. No? Oh.]

YouTube:
Lots of Wilf on YouTube, of course, including his appearances on Citizen Smith, Holiday On The Buses and in the Beatles movie with Beatles. But doing Second Hand? Not a sniff. No points.

Amazon:
Even our leader Amazon can't help with this one, although it does suggest - in order - a Steptoe box set, a photo of Wilf Brambell, and an audio cassette. A tape. A point off for making a suggestion from the wrong bloody decade.

Imeem:
Imeem doesn't offer any suggestions at all - not even something from New Boots And Panties - and shows an advert which seems to suggest a weight-loss product might also perform surgeryless gender realignment. And YouTube worry they have trouble attracting quality advertising. Zero.

eMusic:
Completing another failure on the part of the Internet As A Whole, eMusic doesn't have anything, either. It does score a point for suggesting I might like to look at tracks composed by Wilfrid Brambell, and then loses it for instead listing other composers called Wilfrid.

So, as the web proves to not be quite all it's cracked up to be, no change in the rankings, then:

Amazon - 43
iTunes - 34
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 22
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
We7 - 09

Coming later today, round nine; and a band named for a Tony Robinson series, with a hymn to someone off Red Dwarf. Can the internet do better?

Easter track smackdown: Round seven - Sugar Ray Dinke

Good morning, as we pick up our Easter weekend entertainment of shaking online music services to see if they're actually any good. Yesterday, we discovered that it's easier than you might think to find Bernard Cribbins online, and - to our surprise - that there was a Charlottes greatest hits compilation. It also looks like Amazon and iTunes are better places to find slightly obscure music than Spotify or we7.

At this half-way point, we're losing Sweeping The Nation and The Internet As A Whole from the leader board, because it's a lot of typing.

Back to the tussle, then, and let's start today by seeing who can supply us with a digital copy of Cabrini Green, Sugar Ray Dinke's cry of despair at his neighbourhood. "Just don't drive a car or a bus down the street called The Vision" warns Sugar Ray, "if you do drive through, you've made a very bad decision." The risk, he says, is that you might get hit by an egg or a jar, although the song is also a tribute to his friend who got shot in the same place. Given that, you might consider needing to ask the dry cleaner to get a bit of yolk off your shirt is less of a worry.

So: one of the great lost socially aware raps of our time. But will it be available to pump directly into your iPods?

Spotify:
Spotify doesn't have Sugar Ray Dinke - although at least it doesn't insult us by suggesting we wanted Sugar Ray instead. A search on the song title brings up someone called Sir Smurf Lil' doing a track called Caprini Green, which isn't right at all. Zero.

Last FM:
Well, a couple of scrobbles show that, somewhere deep in its user matrix, Last FM has heard of the song, but it's the only evidence it has that Sugar Ray Dinke ever existed. It does try to offer us a track by Philip Glass of the same name, but Glass neglects to warn of flying missiles, so I suspect he's working from an older guide book to Chicago. Zero.

iTunes:
Apple has digitised a wide range of songs about Cabrini Green, including tracks by Glass, Mask and Dirty Sole. None are by our man, though, so zero for iTunes, too.

we7:
This is proving to be a difficult demand. We7 offers up Dirty Sole again, but that's not going to satisfy us. I'm tempted to dock them a point for an advert which keeps proclaiming that "Pink's back" for an album which came out last October, too. But for now, the ghost of Arthur Ellis won't let me.

YouTube:
Now, here's a surprise - if we'd done this over Christmas, YouTube would have failed as all its competing services have failed. But just over a month ago, someone uploaded this:



All five minutes, fifty-five seconds of the song. Ten points to YouTube, and an awkward pause from the Chicago Tourist Board.

Amazon:
Our earlier search for Bernard Cribbins has turned Amazon's head, and it's now hoping that we might want to buy a record by The Wurzels. Cool it, Amazon, we're looking for some rap.

Asked for Sugar Ray Dinke, the best they can do is offer a range of best selling tracks, including Taylor Swift. Missing the point a little. Perhaps we'll have a listen to some Wurzels instead. Zero.

Imeem:
Bloody hell, imeem can surprise you. I was already composing a putdown as I stuck Sugar Ray Dinke into the search box, when up comes the song. Only the Outro, though, so it's eight points.

eMusic:
If you ignore the stupid suggestions for artists, you can't help but be impressed by the range of albums and songs that eMusic offers up. All wrong, mind, but at least there's somethings to choose from. Zero points.

After that exciting round, here's how the placings are looking:

Amazon - 44
iTunes - 34
YouTube - 29
LastFM - 22
Imeem - 20
eMusic - 19
Spotify - 09
We7 - 09

We'll be back this afternoon with the next search - another actor doing some singing on the side; but it's not Billy Bob Thornton. In fact, it's a dead guy, playing off the character he hated to create something truly poignant. Genuinely, not Billy Bob Thornton.

Easter track smackdown: Round four - Bernard Cribbins

Welcome back to Easter Track Smackdown, a definitive attempt to prove which online music service is the best by asking them to offer up some tracks of variegated scarcity and rarity, and awarding points on a borderline unfair basis.

We enter into the second day with Amazon's mp3 store in the lead, while much-fancied golden boy Spotify is turning into the Lewis Hamilton of the competiton, yet to score. eMusic has been punished for its poor usability and elevation of putting its sign-up page ahead of actually letting people explore its catalogue.

So, now one that will separate the Zunes from the iPods. Described by Danny Baker as "the most sublime reading of the most sublime lyric", can our competitors bring us Bernard Cribbin's version of I've Grown Accustomed To Here Face?

Spotify:
Spotify, what say you? Yesterday, you came back with nothing. Can you save your face?

Why yes, you can: thirty-two slices of Cribbage, including the very song we're looking for. Suddenly, it looks like we might have a competition on our hands. Ten well-earned points.

Which is just as well, as this would really drag if it was all going to go Amazon's way, right?

LastFM:
Oooh, so close - by virtue of listing The Very Best Of, I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face is there for the scrobbling, but the only full track on offer is Right Said Fred. No points for you, Last FM.

iTunes:
Again, The Very Best Of... turns up trumps for its digital overlords, and I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face can be yours for 79p. Only iTunes has, so far, pointed out that as well as a touching love song about the scent of perfume in the air, you can also enjoy Cribbins' role in Frenzy, but no extra points for suggesting tie-related murders. Ten points.

we7:
Whoever would have thought that this one would prove so easy? Even We7, so far resigned to sitting on the sidelines, has The Very Best Of. 88pence for the track, though, so docked one point for being greedy.

YouTube:
While stacked with various versions of the more-familiar comedy stuff, YouTube can't offer us the Cribmeister doing this particular song. Indeed, it looks like Google has no evidence at all of Bernard's straight music career - how right the PRs are to characterize them as buffoons of the highest order.

There is, though, a strange, potato-like stop-motion animation version of Right Said Fred, which I'm sure once popped up on TV as a filler item during some sort of technical or industrial relations breakdown. And scarred me for life. They're not getting points for that.

Amazon:
Amazon also have The Very Best Of loaded and ready to pump at you faster than you can say "Star Turn Challenge". And since they're ten pence cheaper than iTunes, for the sake of consistency Amazon get 11 points.

Imeem:
Only The Hole In The Ground and Right Said Fred. It's like an ITV documentary version of his work. Zero.

eMusic:
Usability meltdown nightmare time. Yes, says the search, we have Bernard Cribbins. Step this way... only to show a compilation album with 49 tracks, of which you can only see the names of 15 tracks at a time, and none of which have the names alongside. Until you leave the artist page altogether.

And then it turns out that they've got Sit Down, You're Rocking The Boat. One point for having something, taken away again for being cussed.

So, four rounds in - here's the leader board:

Amazon - 25
iTunes - 15
Last FM - 12
Spotify - 10
YouTube - 10
we7 - 09
Imeem - 01
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
emusic - -04
The Internet As A Whole - -10

This afternoon, we go searching for something that originally came in a plastic bag. No, not Pete Doherty's "lunch".

Easter track smackdown: Round three - Mohobishopi

[Follow the Easter Track Smackdown tag for all the pieces to date]

With Amazon holding onto a slim lead over Last FM, we reach round three of this weekend's battle to prove, sort-of-conclusively, which of the various online music services are, by some measure, "the best".

The third challenge is MoHoBishOpi's Names For Nameless Things. Coming out of Wales in 1996, briefly the Mos - or were they the Bishes? - were forced to trade under the weight of the NME's next big thing label. Although only for a couple of weeks. They were brilliant live, but there's no way you can say that without making it sound like the faintest of praise; they managed a handful of singles and a single album before falling apart in 2002.

But: does their spirit live on online? Or has their clumsy punctuation doomed them to hide from the faithful forever? Let's see:

Spotify:
The name, punctuated or not, fails to generate a response. The song title fails to generate a response. Spotify, you were meant to be the future of music: you're looking like an empty ship right now. Zero, again.

Last FM:
Using asterisks rather than dashes, Last FM turns up the band, but Names For Nameless Things isn't part of the music on offer. There are two full tracks, though, so two bonus points for a good try.

iTunes:
Scratches its digital head faced with the band name, and suggests trying a "power search". Which fails to find Names For Nameless Things, and suggests trying another "power search". No points.

we7:
What? Don't worry about what you're looking for - we've got digital versions of Black Sabbath. And Kings Of Leon. Will that do?

No points.

YouTube:
The search engine starts off by guessing that you're looking for experts in matters Islamic before falling quiet and offering a Sweeping The Nation playlist which features the clip for Hear The Air, but more importantly has this:



The Popguns from Brighton, doing Waiting For The Winter - and, as if to crystalize the 1980s indieness of it all, it's taped from Yorkshire TV's legendary Transmission programme.

So, YouTube offers a couple of tracks by the band, but scores zero, while Sweeping The Nation gets half a point for having The Popguns. If you don't like the way the scoring is working, complain to Ben Goldacre.

Amazon:
Their search engine reveals there are no downloads on offer, but does point towards some physical records you can buy. Which is fine, and does include a second-hand copy of Names For Nameless Things for a penny, but isn't instantaneous, is it? No marks.

Imeem:
Unhelpfully, when looking for the track name, suggests that I might want to watch a video exploring if the Harry Potter books are any good. Zero.

emusic:
The rotten search engine spits back when asked for MoHoBishOpi, and suggests that 'it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing' is, somehow, a match for the song title. Man, their search needs help.

So, although we had a lovely swerve into the Popguns, the actual song we were looking for is beyond the fingers of digitalisation. Ten marks off for the internet as a whole.

After three rounds:

Amazon - 14
Last FM - 12
YouTube - 10
iTunes - 05
Imeem - 01
Sweeping The Nation - 0.5
We7 - 00
Spotify - 00
eMusic - -04
The Internet as a whole - -10

Three more rounds tomorrow, Sunday and Monday at roughly the same times as today's went live. Coming next: can Tim Berners Lee bring a showtune classic as rendered by the Dalek's foe into our living rooms?

Easter track smackdown: Round two - Gary Clail

So, it turns out you can browse eMusic without being logged in, but the big "SIGN UP" splash-screen doesn't give you a browse button; it's only later, when you've tried to get your password back that you find it. They do have Fire Escape, but are fined seven points for being a horrible experience. And, also, for having a glacially slow 'retrieve your password' service.

On to round two, and it's On The Wire/Snub TV favourite Gary Clail with his proto-Peta veg-pusher track Beef. Beef! How low can you go? Hear the cattle cry - death row. You know the one.

Officially credited to Gary Clail On-U Sound System featuring Bim Sherman, this made it to 64 in the charts back in 1990. And impacted on sales of sausages at the far end of student halls of residences for about a week.

You have to wonder: had the On-U Sound System ever got the success they deserved, and its component parts branched out into their own fashion ranges, would Bim Sherman constantly have had his clothes seized by trading standards, alongside Gooci belts and DYKN sunglasses?

Come on, then, competiting music services - can you give me a side of Beef?

Spotify:
After a wobbly start with Rote Kapelle, at least Spotify can point to a few Gary Clail tracks. But no Beef.

I am, of course, pondering at which point to deploy my 'where's the Beef' gag. Don't want to go too soon with it.

Last FM:
They come up with the goods - or, at least, thirty seconds of the goods. It's a minced Beef. To add insult to injury, it's a snatch of an extended version. What's the point of that, exactly?

Zero.

iTunes:
Again, iTunes offer a smattering of three Gary Clail tracks and one he's done a dub all over. But no Beef. Zero for them, too. This is turning into a rout.

we7:
"Did you mean Gary Clark?" enquires we7, suggesting, in the digital-stores-as-1980s-high-street metaphor, they're occupying the role of an assistant who's been shifted from the Book department to the WH Smiths record department, struggling with the paper catalogue but desperate to help. Zero.

YouTube:
Pushing aside the young pretenders, YouTube comes up with the goods:



Ten points. Although it's lucky we're not docking points for visual clarity.

Amazon:
Bemusingly, Amazon's mp3 store has no Gary Clail tracks, but offers three ways to search him to get no returns. Minus one for taking the piss a bit.

Imeem:
There's no Beef on Imeem, but they do have more Gary Clail stuff than anyone else bar YouTube. A point for the effort.

eMusic:
Bloody hell, I've used eMusic in the past and don't remember it being so user-hostile. A search on Gary Clail comes up with this:

Artist names matching gary clail (623 results)

* Gary Numan
* Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette
* Gary Peacock
* Gary Moore
* Gary Burton
* Gary Stadler
* Gary Jules
* Gary Versace
* Gary Hoey
* Gary Lewis and The Playboys
* Gary Cooper
* Rev. Gary Davis
* The Gary Tesca Orchestra
* Gary Bartz
* Gary Numan / Tubeway Army

more

How, exactly, does Gary Numan "match" Gary Clail? This is the Woolworths' assistant suggesting "ooh, there was a lad lived up the road called Gary; he was Elsie's eldest, went to sea, I think; his brother married a nutritionist." After a lot of pushing, eMusic eventually offers up rapidly-forgotten late-90s Dutch dub act Beef, which earns them a point for fighting obscurity with obscurity.

At the end of the second round, then:

Amazon - 14
LastFM - 10
YouTube - 10
itunes - 05
Imeem - 01
Spotify - 00
We7 - 00
eMusic - -04

We'll be back in the evening with the next round: Ready for some NME-praised mid-90s Welsh rock, anyone?

Easter track smackdown: Round one - Rote Kappelle

Welcome to the Bank Holiday weekend, and welcome to a scientific* attempt to determine the answer to the question: what's better, Spotify, or Last FM, or iTunes, or We7, or YouTube. Or Amazon. Or maybe Imeem.

* - it's not actually scientific.

The rules, such as they are, are simple. There's a list of twelve tracks - we'll do three a day, using the same search terms on each service. Ten points for a service offering the track, bonus points awarded for coming close. At the end of the weekend, we'll know, beyond any doubt, which music service is the best. The other services will have until May Day weekend to close down.

Exciting, isn't it?

So, round one: the track to get us going is Rote Kapelle's Fire Escape.

Named after a Soviet spy ring in Nazi Germany, and part of the incestuous rock family tree that covered The Pastels, Jesse Garon, The Fizzbombs and The Shop Assistants, Fire Escape turned up on Marc Riley's InTape label back in 1988. It featured - as was mandated by law for all political tracks in that decade - a sample of Thatcher.

So, come on then, online music services: find me some agitjangle.

Spotify:
Nothing at all from Rote Kapelle. It does offer something by the band The Fire Escape, and two other songs called Fire Escape. But that's a zero.

Last FM:
Last FM know all about Rote Kapelle and offer the song in full, from Thatcher's "It is the spirit of Britain" to the jangling end. Win! 10 points.

iTunes:
iTunes offers a download of the "non-dance mix" of Fire Escape, from the San Francisco Again EP. Not the canon version, but enough for five points.

we7:
Nothing from Rote Kapelle, and the store mocks its own lack of success by suggesting the Pyromanics' No Fire Escape album. Zero.

YouTube:
YouTube has live clips from a different band of the same name - opening for a band called The Devil Wears Prada, which is an eclectic mix of the highbrow and pop culture references on one bill. But our Rote Kapelle? Not a sniff. Zero.

Amazon:
After a little bit of thinking about it, the search returns <sixteen tracks, including both the seven inch version and the twelve inch remix. And there's even a picture of the seven inch in its sleeve. Fifteen points.

Imeem:
They've never heard of Rote Kapelle; looking for Fire Escape dredges up a lot of results - including clips of Will And Grace. I thought we'd agreed we'd never mention Will And Grace again, hadn't we? No.

eMusic requires a log-in before you can search; I've lost my password and it's taking an age for them to mail it to me. Minus five.

So, at the end of the first round:

Amazon - 15
LastFM - 10
itunes - 05
Spotify - 00
We7 - 00
YouTube - 00
Imeem - 00
eMusic - -05

LastFM does also have the extended Fire Escape, by the way, but you have to go looking for it, even after you've done a search. Also, it's not entirely a version with much of a point, apart from a late goading of U2.

Another round later today.

Imeem squeezed

More trouble at the interface of rights holders and online services: Imeem is struggling to cope with paying royalties at the prices demanded by the people who Abba don't want us to call the intellectual property industry.

There had been rumours that Imeem was about thirty million dollars awry of its obligations, but Imeem deny that figure. It also denies that it's on the point of shutting up shop altogether:

"[TechCrunch's] $30M number is not only wrong, it's preposterous," said Graves. "We don't now owe, nor have we ever owed, that amount of money to the labels. And the shutdown rumor is equally false – we are not shutting down."
[...]
Graves said imeem is indeed hoping to renegotiate its label deals.

"I can confirm that we're negotiating with the major labels to restructure our deals," he wrote via e-mail. "This is a good thing. The economy and world have changed, and just as we've renegotiated our bandwidth bills, ad-serving deals, etc. to take into account the new economic realities, it makes sense to do the same with our content deals."

Wired suggests it could be paying as much as a cent per song streaming for some tracks - which, with Imeem serving a billion streams a month, is clearly insane.

Using our adhoc 'how much would it cost to play a song to an audience the size of Chris Moyles', I make that roughly a thousand times more expensive per listener than Radio One's royalty rate.

Doubtless, though, PRS and other rights agencies will be desperately trying to come up with a justification for overcharging a company when it does have the 'well, the parent company makes a lot' argument to deploy.

Positive streaming

The Hold Steady's new album, Stay Positive. Want to hear it before buying? It's streaming over at Imeem.

Nixey delights

This here is the video for Sarah Nixey's new single, Le Temps De L'Amour, which is due for release (in America, at least) a week today. It not only features her atop a mountain, but also singing in French. [Warning: Video contains microlight aircraft]

Imeem offers music, platform, api

A lot of web companies share APIs with developers - it's what made Google and Facebook so full of third-party-powered stuff. But the opening up of Imeem's API and platform to anyone who's got an idea is a new leap forward - because Imeem is also offering its media library to be plugged into the new applications. Yes, that's the library which has deals with all four major labels and a whole slew of indies. There could be some very, very attractive hand-tooled applications just round the corner.

Imeem buys Anywhere for music everywhere

There have been services before which would allow you to store your music collection on the web to access anywhere you go - effectively, your own streaming library. Most have run aground on the copyright issue - although there's no moral reason why you shouldn't choose to keep your tracks on a server outside your home, the RIAA companies weren't happy and conjured images of one server, many users to frighten the pioneers out of business.

Now, though, with Imeem acquiring AnywhereFM, there's a chance of one which actually works. Imeem gets Anywhere's technology; Anywhere, meanwhile, is now part of a company which has already persuaded the big four labels to license their online music service.