K Records offer you samples

In aid of the UN Refugee Agency, K Records are offering a pay-what-you-want-sampler. Snaffle it down right now.

Downloadable: Four Tet

Annie Mac has been giving away a Four Tet download today. Here it is...

At last, a black Friday deal worth mentioning

The great Speedy Ortiz have made their first two records, Cop Kicker and The Death Of Speedy Ortiz free for the weekend. They're asking for donations, though, and all the money raised will go to Ferguson Municipal Public Library.

Downloadable: Hannah Peel

Here's a sweet deal: if you give Hannah Peel your email address, she'll give you a download of her cover of East India Youth's Heaven How Long.

Fair swap, surely? Especially since your email address is being traded elsewhere in return for money a thousand times a day. Make it work for you today.

Downloadable: Kill Rock Stars

Twenty-one tracks of delights from across the Kill Rock Stars roster: You don't even have to pay, but you could chip in a bit, yeah?

Included is Free Kitten, Emily's Sassy Lime, Bratmobile and... well, 18 other great bands.

Print's not dead: Horse Party want to give you a fanzine

What's the equivalent of the fanzine/flexi combo which so delighted us in the late 1980s? Probably a fanzine with a download "attached", which is what you get from "the Fugazi-channeling" Horse Party, if you're happy to give them your address.

They insist they will turn up at your house and demand toasts and other breakfast goods. But you do get a free zine, and a free download of Inbetween.

Which sounds like this:

Downloadable: Stacey

So around about Christmas last year, Stacey released her first ep. It sounded like this:

Which is great.

There's more, though, as she's had the builders in and reworked the entire thing. And it sounds great - if anything, they could have pushed the settings for her voice even further, as it travels incredibly well.

You can have it just for liking the idea of it on Facebook.

People notice Chancellor adds VAT to downloads. A year too late.

There's a smattering of panic at the news that Osborne is adding VAT to downloads from places like iTunes and the other, less successful, stores.

People who are reacting now do realise that, while it's true Osborne has done this, he did it in the 2013 budget and this year merely repeated it, right?

Gimme a Shelter compilation

Given that the government seems to be hoping homelessness is a side-effect of house prices not going up enough, the work done by Shelter is more important than ever.

But did you ever wish you could help Shelter while listening to some indie music?

Now you can: simply download Music For A Good Home 2 while slipping at least five quid to Shelter, and you'll help move the debate on the lack of affordable housing on a bit further than, well...

... let's say some stunts might, shall we, and leave it at that?

The album includes Ride being remixed by Portishead, Sennen, Four Tet and Beak>. There is no appearance by Grant Shapps.

File sharing not killing music after all, it turns out

It's not Girls Aloud coming to a graceful end; that other music industry trouper, the claim that file sharing hurts music sales, has pretty much been laid to rest as well: Extensive research from the European Union confirms what a lot of us have thought all along: unlicensed listening doesn't really take money from anywhere else:

The goal of this paper is to analyze the behavior of digital music consumers on the Internet.Using clickstream data on a panel of more than 16,000 European consumers, we estimate theeffects of illegal downloading and legal streaming on the legal purchases of digital music. Ourresults suggest that Internet users do not view illegal downloading as a substitute to legal dig-ital music. Although positive and significant, our estimated elasticities are essentially zero: a10% increase in clicks on illegal downloading websites leads to a 0.2% increase in clicks on legalpurchases websites. Online music streaming services are found to have a somewhat larger (butstill small) effect on the purchases of digital sound recordings, suggesting complementaritiesbetween these two modes of music consumption. According to our results, a 10% increase in clicks on legal streaming websites lead to up to a 0.7% increase in clicks on legal digital purchases websites. We find important cross country difference in these effects.

So - it differs a bit from country to country, but broadly speaking, there's a tiny positive effect, and - oh joy - even legal streaming leads to a small rise in actual sales.

Even if you accept that the upswings are as small as to be zero, that's still no negative effect.

You don't, of course, take down one of the RIAA-IFPI shibboleths with data and expect the music industry to admit they've been wrong. So they try a response to tear the research to shreds. It doesn't quite work:

IFPI believes the JRC study is flawed and misleading. The findings seem disconnected from commercial reality, are based on a limited view of the market and are contradicted by a large
volume of alternative third party research that confirms the negative impact of piracy on the
legitimate music business

Let's just look at that a little closer, shall we?

"Flawed and misleading" is quite a big claim - one suggesting incompetence and one duplicity. You better have something strong and convincing to follow that up.

"The findings seem disconnected from commercial reality". And, really, they don't. "This survey doesn't confirm what I believe, so it must be wrong" is just piffle.

"are based on a limited view of the market" - this seems to be the objection that the survey takes no account of legal streaming. Except it does. Look, that bit we quoted up there makes it clear that the impact of legal streaming on the download market is part of the thing they were investigating. Bit misleading to complain that research hasn't investigated the effect of legal streaming on legal streaming, isn't it?

"and are contradicted by a large volume of alternative third party research that confirms the negative impact of piracy on the legitimate music business" - nice to see the music industry calling itself a legitimate business. There's a pleasing Corleone ring to that.

I think this existence of contradictory data is upon which the IFPI are building the claim of the survey being misleading.

Trouble is, two of the three surveys are referenced by the EU survey - their findings detailed, and proper references given; the intention being that people read them alongside the EU findings.

To not have included the research which contradicts their findings would have been misleading. You know, like if the music industry issued a press release which only cherry picked research which agreed with them and ignored the research which took an opposing position. Like this one.

So what of the flaws? The IFPI details a "key example" - which apparently is so key they need no further examples:

A key example of this problem is the treatment of iTunes ‘clicks’ by Nielsen. iTunes is a major legal music service and an essential data point in establishing legal music consumption. Nielsen measures use of the iTunes application, which involves any activity around iTunes - such as a user simply plugging their iPhone into the PC (which launches the iTunes application), a user listening to music via iTunes, a user synchronising their Apple device with their PC, a user renting a film on iTunes, or downloading a game app. Each one of these instances are counted as an iTunes ‘click’ and considered as legal music behaviour by the JRC. This severely impacts the results and is not a good proxy for legitimate music consumption

Does Nielsen really count someone launching a desktop application as a click on a website? If that's true, then the methodology flaw is Nielsen's. (I've dropped an email to the IFPI to check where they're getting this definition of a click from.)

Even if we take this at its word - although people who still sync iPhones with PCs are hardly going to have much of a grasp on modern technology - there's no indication of how "severely" the impact of this is. (Really? Every time someone starts and stops a song and starts another one of their desktop iTunes player Nielsen adds a click on iTunes? That's extraordinary if true. Is it?) The IFPI might be right, this could undermine the findings. But rather than give us any data which could be set against the research, the IFPI just shrug and say they reckon it's just enough to know it could be flawed.

If they were interested in the truth, the IFPI would be pointing to a better source of the music interaction data. That they don't suggests their takedown is a panicky attempt to get everyone to look the other way.

[UPDATE: Took a while, but finally got a confirmation from Nielsen that their methodology can, indeed, include people recharging their iPhones as a visit to iTunes. I don't think that fatally undermines the EU report, but it does weaken it to the point where it's worth approaching the findings with a bit more caution. I've written more about this here.]

Downloadable: Ladyhawke

She has people in her hair, you know. Enjoy, courtesy of the Anxiety marketing push, the Villa remix of Sunday Drive:

Embed and breakfast man: Kate Nash

I'm a little in love with the new Kate Nash, turned-around-in-a-day track:



I'm even more in love with the flicker of horror that creeps over the faces of people online as they play it. "Oh noes, this sounds experimental and isn't even pretty. Oh noes, oh noes."

Kate Nash is great. And has always been more than just pretty pop songs:



You can download Underestimate The Girl for free, unless you're all "but it doesn't have a chorus".

Downloadable: Bailterspace

You know who else is about to release a new album? Bailterspace, that's who. The last one predates the start of No Rock - it's been thirteen years, an absence that has grown into puberty. Which makes Strobosphere pretty exciting.

It's not out until August, though, but in the meantime, they've snuck out a taste - No Sense:

Downloadable: Skinny Puppy

Fancy a free download of Skinny Puppy playing live? Course you do. Sideline have a handy link to grab a version of Worlock delivered live on the German stage.

Downloadable: Teenagers

Bloody teenagers, coming round here making dreamy-lovely-lo-fi sounds and giving them away for nothing:



I don't know very much about them - Daria is doing guitars and vocals; Karol is doing drums; they're from Warsaw and... I don't know, you can make up the rest for yourself, probably, and it'd be as correct as anything I could tell you.

Downloadable: Lambchop

Also free, also from Amazon: Lambchop's Gone Tomorrow

Downloadable: Sharon Von Etten

You'll possibly already have this, but just in case: Amazon are giving away Sharon Von Etten's Leonard for no money at all.

Muve on

Apparently, Cricket's US mobile-music-bundle Muve service is thriving in the US. The Guardian reports the words of John Bolton, "senior director of product":

"[O]ne year in, we have 600,000 paying subscribers, making us the second largest digital subscription service in the US."

Well, I guess if you compare your mobile phone service with, erm, digital music subscriptions - being second to Rhapsody might sound impressive. Even if you're still about half a million behind, and Rhpasody doesn't come with unlimited talk, text and data.

But how does Muve compare with products that it actually competes with? Tolerably well; it seems to be the thing that's working well for Cricket, offering lower churn rates than their traditional no-contract phone contracts. But the US has over 325 million mobile phones, so however well Muve is doing, it's still a minnow.

Cricket are proud of Muve, though - it looks like every tenth subscriber sign-up triggers a press release. So proud, in fact, it's doing most of their heavy lifting when talking up results. Given that AT&T are looking for a new target after being shut out of a T-Mobile takeover, it's probably that Cricket parent company Leap are hoping that Muve will be successful enough to fatten up a takeover offer.

Will the labels be thrilled by Muve's success, though?

Perhaps not so much. Back to Mr Bolton:

"What's powerful about this offering is that the music feels free," says John Bolton.

Isn't the idea that music is free one that runs contrary to the message the RIAA labels - all of whom are part of Muve - have been fighting against for years?

Again, though, Bolton has hit the nail on the head: the music feels free because what's driving Muve is the unlimited offering of connectivity. The music feels free because it's not what people are buying it for. Nobody will say no to Britney Spears for nothing, but you suspect Muve sign-ups wouldn't be so far off without the music element.

Downloadable: Holy Ghost

Here's something you might never have expected to live long enough to see: a cover of early-era Ministry's I Wanted To Tell Her. Dome by Holy Ghost, and yours for nothing more than a quick interact with a widget:

Downloadable: Peggy Sue

Peggy Sue were on NPR's World Cafe earlier today; you can snaffle their two live tunes for free thanks to the unique way NPR is funded.