Lady Gaga has got herself a Tumblr fashion blog.

amenfashion.tumblr.com

Dear Photograph

A photo site that places that great old photograph in its modern context to see how things have changed in its environment.

http://dearphotograph.com

GroopEase

Take the discount model forged by Groupon and apply that to music and you get GroopEase. Each day, a vetted independent band gets the “groop of the day” tag and as a member you get the opportunity to purchase their album at a discount if you like what you hear.

http://www.groopease.com

Step forward Gwilym Gold. The former frontman of London’s promising band Golden Silvers has gone solo and to mark the occasion has released his first single Flesh Freeze as a downloadable app using a new musical format called Bronze (bronzeformat.com). Far away from his former band’s sprightly indie-pop music, the new track is downbeat ambient song with Gold’s vocals pushing things along. Flesh Freeze does not have a conventional arrangement. A perfect song for some experimentation then.

The Bronze format is described as “a non-interactive music format, that transforms every aspect of a song, to create a unique version on each listen.” The result is that no two listens of the song are exactly the same. Vocals will not always follow the same order, the drum pattern may change, synth lines will appear and disappear:the arrangement and playback is always unique.

Gold himself conceived the idea and implemented Bronze along with the help of his producer Lexxx and, not your normal credit for a pop song, a team of scientists from Goldsmiths University in London. The non-static song is available for Mac only at the moment with iPhone, Android and PC coming very soon at gwilymgold.com. More music in the Bronze format is also forthcoming.

On the complete opposite side of the scale, Lady Gaga was practically giving away her new album Born This Way upon release early last week. Not only had the Gaga made myriad of deals with games companies, fashion brands, a huge global coffee chain and eh, the Google Chrome browser (full list – bit.ly/gagadeals), Born This Way was also for sale on Amazon in the US for just $0.99. It was an odd devaluing move, as Gaga fans are notoriously loyal and would happily buy her music at full price.

As it transpired, the deal backfired somewhat as Gaga’s Little Monsters actually managed to slow Amazon’s servers to a crawl, resulting in lots of negative comments and annoyed fans. Ultimately, this was a bad deal for Amazon who were using it to promote their recently announced cloud music service Cloud Player. Fans complained that the service didn’t download all of the album’s songs and their purchases were inaccessible in the cloud too.

Not only did Amazon bare the brunt of the negativity, but they seemingly have lost a lot of money too in a loss-leading campaign in which they paid Gaga’s label Interscope/Universal $7.40 per unit and sold it at $0.99. According to Billboard magazine, the reduced price album was downloaded approximately 430,000 times resulting in a campaign which lost them approximately $2.75 million in two days.

The debacle also bad news for Apple and Google who recently launched their own Cloud Music service. You need people like Gagas fans to be introduced to the concept of cloud-based music but if it at first appears unreliable, like it did during this campaign, then consumers will be unlikely to give it a second chance.

Birdemic
Imagine The Birds remade as a B-Movie in 2010 and you’ve got this cringeworthy film trailer.

M.I.A’s Born Free video
Banned from Youtube due to its explicit content, M.I.A’s graphic 9 minute video sees redheads suffer at the hands of the military. We’re not sure if there’s a message here.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

Airspace Rebooted
A visualisation of the northern European airspace returning to use after being closed due to volcanic ash. The info taken from flightradar24.com.

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

A repository of screenshots of main title sequences from films made from 1920 to present day.

Flavorwire’s 40 reasons to get excited about music.

Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video becomes the most watched video on Youtube with 184 million views.

How a lot of stranded or aborted travellers felt this week..

Before Lady Gaga
Before she was a huge popstar, Stefani Germanotta used to perform original jazz compositions on piano. Check out a performance from four years ago.

Underworld find inspiration in Dublin
Dublin video director Eoghan Kidney is behind this Underworld video which utilises the recent Playhouse project consisting of 100,000 LED lights hanging from Dublin’s tallest building Liberty Hall. The building pulsates to the song on the skyline.

The Swell Segel
Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova were joined on stage by actor Jason Segel (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I Love You Man, Freaks and Geeks) in LA last week where he performed a jokey song with the band.

“Who is Sliimy?” was a phrase bandied about by many music celebs like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Britney Spears on Twitter last month and within hours most of their followers (and intended audience) found out whether they wanted to or not. Sliimy turned out to be the first signing to celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s major label-backed record label Perezcious ( like “precious” but harder to pronounce), a French Mika-esque pop star with funny hair who releases an album in September.

Perez had enlisted the help of his celebrity friends to promote Sliimy to the masses. Perez may not be as groundbreaking as he intends to look though. Sliimy is already signed to Warner in France so Perez’s endorsement is merely an attempt to help Sliimy break into the U.S. Market.
While Perez has the pop culture platform for endorsing artists through tours and labels, on the other end of the scale, most are still relying on word of mouth and blogger recommendations to help them get where they want to go.

You couldn’t get more of a polar opposite to Perez than Neon Gold Records. The “boutique” New York-based label started by two New York college kids Lizzy and Derek began life as a blog in August last year with the express aim of releasing 7-inches of artists they were excited about. They used the music blog as their mouth-piece for getting the acts noticed and then would release 500 copies of each release, creating a hip label that majors now look to for upcoming acts.

Their indie-buzz acts have gone on to secure major label deals as the two became known as online tastemakers. Their first release was Passion Pit’s Sleepyhead – a band now signed to Sony, followed by the wonderful Marina and the Diamonds – now signed to Warner and playing Electric Picnic next week.

Most recently, Neon Gold have been bigging up the likes of London’s Ellie Goulding, Australian popster Goyte, Boston’s synth-heavy Yes Giantess, Swedish DIY pop band The Sound of Arrows and David Byrne soundalike Wolf Gang.

It proves that even without the mega-dollars hoarded by the likes of Perez, you can still make a difference. Expect many of these bands to be on the major label release schedule come the end of the year.

Adrian Crowley – The Beekeeper’s Wife
This promo video for Adrian Crowley simply shows him playing an electric guitar in the beautifully shot, lush green surroundings of the Dublin Mountains.

Lady Gaga gets indulgent
We all know that Gaga’s fame theme is all a dumb allegory. This Jonas Akerlund-directed video for ‘Paparazzi’ takes that stretched concept a bit too far by featuring Gaga’s lover throwing her off a balcony, wheelchair and crutch-featuring choreography and the usual paparazzi nonsense.