In the coming weeks, Youtube is teaming up with curators like Vice Magazine, SPIN, XLR8R and music vloggers like The Needle Drop to offer daily playlists for further exploration. Youtube have promised these services before but this music transformation is their most complete yet.

One video sitting high in the Youtube chart is Kanye West and Jay-Z’s Otis from the Watch The Throne album.  The album broke the iTunes one-week sales record with 290,000 downloads in a week. As outlined by Billboard (bit.ly/securitywtt)., this feat was made possible by the extraordinary measures the duo put in place to ensure that the album DID NOT leak.

Yeezy and Hova decided to release the album via iTunes only in digital format first. Only after the album debuted on August 8^th was the album sent to the manufacturing process, removing the chance that a leak would have taken place at that stage. No advance listens of the album were offered to journalists or press. The only way to hear the album in advance was to have been a part of it or to have attended the invite-only listening party at the American Museum of Natural History in New York a week before.

The recording of the album was done with extreme security in mind. No traditional recording studios were used in the making of Watch The Throne. Instead, hotel rooms in Paris, New York and Sydney were used as the base of operations. WiFi was strictly forbidden lest some hackers got wind of goings on. The music recorded was kept on password-protected external hard drives that were kept in a briefcase belonging to one of the studio engineers Noah Goldstein, that could only be opened by biometric fingerprint technology. 

Producers such as RZA, No I.D and Q-Tip were required to demo their beats in person. At no point were tracks emailed.  Everything resided on the same hard drives until it was delivered to iTunes the Friday before release, August 5th. Highlighting the extreme measures undertaken, the album’s art director Virgil Abloh tweeted that Goldstein has been “sleeping with the hard drives for like 10 months straight.”

That is what it takes these days to ensure that an album from a high-profile artist these days make it to sale without pre-release leaks. Jay-Z and Kanye were rewarded for their efforts in sales but fans also benefitted from the old-school feelings of excitement and anticipation when the album finally dropped.

14 year-old Jasmine Van den Bogaerde hit UK charts and worldwide blogs after BBC Radio One play of her piano and voice cover of Bon Iver’s Skinny Love.
bit.ly/birdylove

Wild Beasts

With interest in the band rising over the last four years, England’s Wild Beasts will return next month with third album Smother. The first single, Albatross, is a lovely lilting piano number with a somewhat pretentious video.
bit.ly/wildalba

Charles Bradley

An amazing classic soul singer who never got his break finally gets recognition. Now 62, the Brooklyn singer has released the brilliant No Time For Dreaming, his debut album on Daptone Records (home to Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings). Bradley plays the Sea Sessions festival in Donegal in June.
bit.ly/charlesb

Sade feat. Jay-Z

Everyone loves Sade, even Jay-Z, as evident by this remix of her song Moon & The Sky featuring The Jiggaman on a verse.
bit.ly/jaysade

New Jay-Z – Ultra
Just in time for festival season, Jigga drops a track produced by Swizz Beats from the upcoming Trending Topics #4 rap mixtape.
Listen at Nah Right >

Florrie
The drummer from the Xenomania house band who is responsible for banging sticks on Girls Aloud’s The Promise and Alesha Dixon’s That Boy Does Nothing tries out the solo pop thing. With cool electro producers Fred Falke and Moguai helping her out, the tunes sound really good so far.
Listen at Nialler9 >

World Cup song of the week

A mix of Irish World Cup anthem Put Em’ Under Pressure and French purveyors of electro bangers Justice unite these two countries in a manner now implausible thanks to Monsieur Va-va Voom’s handball.
Listen at Soundcloud >

2. How to make ‘Smack My Bitch Up’
Insightful video tutorial which shows how Liam Howlett may have created The Prodigy’s seminal track using the music program Ableton. What’s most fascinating is how he twisted samples from other well-known songs into completely unrecognisable shapes.

3. The best multi-webcam music video ever
Japanese band Sour utilised crowdsourcing, technology and webcams to create the impressive music video for their song Hibi no Neiro.

4. Avatar = Fern Gully
Now that James Cameron’s Avatar is wowing cinemagoers in 3D, let us not forget the many parallels between the blockbuster and the animated film Fern Gully.

Contender for cover of the year?
Who would have thought a Balkan version of Katy Perry’s Hot and Cold could be this good?

Confessions of a Super Hero
A documentary which looks at three men and one woman who work as superheroes on Hollywood Boulevard while pursuing their own fame. Watch it online.
http://short.ie/superherodoc

Jay-Z recreates album covers
Innovative advert in which Grizzly Bear fan Jay-Z recreates his album covers thus far to promote his new one, The Blueprint 3.