“How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” To borrow a studied Sinatra-ism, you can’t have one without the other, and that’s exactly the way Pink Floyd wants it:

Pink Floyd won a legal battle Thursday against EMI that prevents the band’s long-time record label from selling individual songs online.

Sir Andrew Morritt, chancellor of Britain’s High Court, ruled that Pink Floyd’s contract forbids EMI from breaking up the band’s albums without its permission, according to a spokeswoman for the British judicial system. EMI had argued that the stipulation only applied to physical albums, not online sales.

The group’s contract reportedly contained a clause to “preserve the artistic integrity” of their albums. The band has traditionally resisted selling individual songs from their “concept albums,” which are meant to be listened to from beginning to end.

As of five minutes ago, the iTunes Store was still vending individual tracks, albeit at the higher $1.29 price, except for stuff from The Division Bell and various live performances, priced at 99 cents a track.

A song by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs showed up in the iTunes shuffle, and for some reason the stuff immediately above it in the list struck me as weird:

Then again, I suspect any dozen songs picked from the list (current count is 5227, this is from a selection of 500) in any sort order will probably look, in aggregate, just about as strange.

What does iTunes recommend for singer Deborah Gibson? Something she already has:

[iTunes] just recommended I buy my own album based on my other musical choices? Funnnny!

Hmmm. I’d be tempted to experiment here, except that of the 52 Debsongs iTunes has to offer, I already own 48 on CD (plus the occasional 12-inch vinyl single) already. And Colored Lights: The Broadway Album, the one album of hers I haven’t bought yet, they don’t have.

The iTunes shuffle just served up one of Eric Carmen’s Rachmaninoff rewrites, “All By Myself,” and then tried to follow it with a Raspberries hit, “Tonight,” on which Carmen sings lead. Fearing what might come next, I aborted the sequence. (Substitution: George Benson’s “Breezin’,” followed by “Leave It Alone” by Moist. I may have been better off with Raspberries.)

Yours truly, a few days ago, contemplating the new iTunes Genius Mix function:

What I really want to see, I think, is what the Genius deems appropriate to go with, say, Tim Curry’s “I Do the Rock.”

This is precisely what the Genius horked up for me:

Tim Curry, “I Do the Rock”
The Flying Lizards, “Money (That’s What I Want)”
The Jim Carroll Band, “People Who Died”
Nick Lowe, “Cruel to Be Kind”
Dave Edmunds, “Slipping Away”
Wall of Voodoo, “Mexican Radio”
Devo, “Working in the Coal Mine”
The Waitresses, “I Know What Boys Like”
Thomas Dolby, “Hyperactive”
Bob Welch, “Ebony Eyes”
Nick Lowe, “So It Goes”
Loudon Wainwright III, “Dead Skunk”
Talk Talk, “Talk Talk”
Reunion, “Life Is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)”
John Stewart, “Gold”
Fun Boy Three, “Our Lips Are Sealed”
Trio, “Da Da Da”
Timbuk3, “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades”
Devo, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
Melanie, “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)”
Warren Zevon, “Excitable Boy”
Was (Not Was), “Walk the Dinosaur”
Nick Lowe, “I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass”
Dada, “Dizz Knee Land”
Adam Ant, “Goody Two Shoes”

This actually flows pretty well, but two Devo tracks? And three Nick Lowe tracks, none of which is “Marie Provost”?

Patti gets some mileage out of that new feature of iTunes 9:

Listening to some Genius mixes on iTunes as I sit here at the Laughing Goat in Boulder, soaking up the lattés and the free bandwidth. This is a perfect way to re-discover all of those songs and tracks that you have loved but haven’t listened to in a while.

A folky sort of Genius mix just brought forth “Early Mornin’ Rain” from Peter, Paul & Mary’s 10 (Ten) Years Together album. This is an album that I first got in high school, back in those early, early days when the idea of a group of musicians managing to stay together for ten whole years was astounding to me, a feat of endurance which should probably hit the record books any day now. Of course, I played it often, and had most of the songs memorized, especially during that time when I was also learning how to play the guitar.

I had no facility for the guitar myself, but I bought this same PP&M album way back when, and wound up with several others, including the infamous Album 1700. And “Early Mornin’ Rain,” a staple of the Gordon Lightfoot catalog, is always welcome: I recently picked up a cover by Richard Hawley that approaches Lightfoot’s world-weariness.

But now I’m curious as to what Genius might concoct as a mix for me. Since Apple introduced Genius, I’ve kept it toggled off and out of sight, but the new Genius Mix feature looks almost intriguing. The PC World guy didn’t seem thrilled, though:

My tunes are largely a mix of alternative rock with some electronic thrown in. Genius created several alternative mixes, each combining different groups of artists, but it didn’t create a single electronic playlist. My guess is that I don’t have enough of that particular genre for Genius to make anything of it. The differences between my Genius Mixes, style-wise, are so slight that it defeats the purpose to some extent, too; it should work better if you listen to a wide array of music.

My big iTunes install is on the work box: 4,870 tracks. But I haven’t installed iTunes 9 there yet. (I probably wouldn’t have installed it at home, either, but I took an update to QuickTime — 7.6.4, I think — and iTunes followed it home like a lost puppy.) What I really want to see, I think, is what the Genius deems appropriate to go with, say, Tim Curry’s “I Do the Rock.”

Lileks hasn’t been using his iPhone for music much:

a) I don’t listen to that much music when I’m out and about, and b) I was convinced it would drain my battery in 42 minutes. (Factory specs says 43 minutes, but that’s under ideal conditions when you have the volume turned to 1 and you’re playing 4′33″ by John Cage.)

Had I an iPhone, I would so be testing this premise: 4′33″ is these days available from the iTunes store. It’s in three movements, so it’s $2.97 for the download; apparently it’s not available as a ringtone. More’s the pity.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the piece, you must be new around here: I mention it pretty much every chance I get, and I’ll even send you to the video of a live performance.)

Today’s odd juxtaposition of tunes, courtesy of the iTunes shuffle:

• They Might Be Giants, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”
• Franz Ferdinand, “Lucid Dreams,” which contains the line “But I’m flyin’ to Istanbul / Oh, so why don’t you meet me there?”

(Previous odd sequences noted. Current track count: 4,861.)

From the iTunes Shuffle Segues from Hell:

• “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper
• “Losin’ Myself,” Debbie Gibson

(Compare to previous weird juxtapositions.)

Some folks see monopolies that aren’t really there, argues Megan McArdle:

Apple has a monopoly over [iTunes, iPhone, iPod] only in the trivial sense that P&G has a monopoly over Charmin, and I have a monopoly over the chocolate cake I baked last night. Neither “monopoly” is withholding a critical good from people, or forcing them to pay an extortionate price for same. If you don’t want to buy your music from iTunes, you can trot right over and buy MP3s from Amazon. And they’ll play just as well on a Zune.

But, you say, you’d like to buy music from iTunes and play it on a Zune? Well, I’d like to get takeout from Ray’s Pizza and enjoy it in the stunning ambience of Cafe des Artistes. If the waiter refuses to let me do so, is that a monopoly?

It is no trick to convert iTunes’ current de-DRMed inventory to MP3 files, which will play on a Zune or on my MP3 Walkman or any number of other players — for that matter, current Zunes will play Apple’s unprotected AAC files (.m4a extension) without conversion — but there’s no good reason why Apple should be forced to provide, say, an open API for every other machine on the planet so long as it remains no trick. And come to think of it, you don’t see anyone demanding WMA support in iTunes.

Meanwhile, my next pizza will likely be consumed in the stunning ambience of my kitchen.

Apple is now vending through the iTunes Store something called “Digital 45s,” which purport to be original singles plus their original B-sides, sold for (sometimes) less than the cost of the two tracks separately.

The most essential offering is the Doors’ “Light My Fire” b/w “The Crystal Ship,” originally Elektra 45615, mostly because this is about the only source for the original 45 version in mono except for the actual vinyl (mine was styrene) single; the band is reputed to dislike the edit, and all compilations have included the full seven-minute version. I actually bought this to make sure that’s what it was.

Not everything is what it’s supposed to be. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” originally RCA Victor 47-9248, was backed by “Plastic Fantastic Lover.” For the D45, Sony, curator of the RCA archives, has chosen to include both mono and stereo mixes of “Rabbit” and no version of PFL whatever. One reviewer at the iTunes Store has already flamed Sony for this gaffe. Another Sony title, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” has the correct B-side, “Smokin’,” but there’s a different flub: the version of “More Than A Feeling” is LP length, at 4:46, while the actual single version (Epic 50266) was edited to 3:25. For the time being, I’m going to assume that Sony is unclear on the concept.

(Muchas gracias: Kim_Lou.)

You might expect this from a stripper econobox — say, Nissan’s bottom-of-the-line Versa — but from a $300k-plus Ferrari? It’s true, says Automobile Magazine (August, not on their Web site yet): the standard audio head unit for the new Scuderia Spider 16M, which lists for $313,350, is a 16-GB iPod Touch, which docks neatly into the dash. There’s a console-mounted volume control, but everything else is controlled by the iPod itself, assuming you have time to take your eyes off the road long enough to work those controls while whipping along at Ferrari-appropriate speeds.

Ferrari doesn’t chintz out on the speakers, mind you: they’re JBL, and, says the mag’s Jason Cammisa, they’re more than worthy, but:

[W]hen we asked for more information on the sound system, we were handed technical specifications on that magnificent 4.3-liter V-8. Point taken.

Obviously Ferrari has its priorities.

Otherwise known as the old technology. Trini found this blurb with the CD of Goodbye to the Machine by HURT:

“Goodbye to the Machine” was recorded using 2″ analog tape and mixed down to ½” analog tape. It was mixed by hand without the aid of a computer. This technique was utilized to further accentuate the honesty and integrity of HURT’s music. Great care was employed to maintain the highest fidelity possible. It was also cut to vinyl directly from the analog ½” master tapes to avoid digitization of the pure analog sound.

Although this much is new, sort of:

As part of your purchase and to fully experience the music the way it was recorded we are pleased to offer you 320 bit mp3s taken from the vinyl cut of the album.

I’ve heard only one track (“Wars,” now playing on iTunes) from this album, and it does not remind me of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.”

We all thank Marko for asking, but I’m not in a position to list the five most embarrassing albums on my iPod, for the following reasons:

1. I don’t have an iPod. I have a Sony MP3 Walkman and a couple of iTunes installs, the bigger of which is on my work box.
2. No actual albums were uploaded to the Walkman; it’s all singles.
3. That large iTunes install (4,563 tracks) is mostly singles. Apart from classical sets, there are only six complete albums:
   • Ory Chalk, Queen of Hearts
   • Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
   • Jethro Tull, Thick as a Brick
   • Local H, Twelve Angry Months
   • Mike Oldfield, Tubular Bells
   • She & Him, Volume One

I don’t find any of those particularly embarrassing. Then again, this comes from someone who owns four Enya albums.

Aside: I did an experiment last week during the commute: two days with Enya on the stereo (Watermark and Shepherd Moons), followed by two days with Nine Inch Nails (both discs of Ghosts I-IV). If my driving was at all affected by what was playing, I didn’t notice.

(Suggested by Mark Alger, who has even more Enya than I do. Then again, I still have all those Debbie Deborah Gibson albums.)

I have occasionally snickered at iTunes’ idea of “random,” but sometimes it produces pure comic gold.

Or maybe Acapulco gold. Yesterday’s twin-spin: the (post-Diana Ross) Supremes’ “Stoned Love,” followed immediately by “Earache My Eye,” by Cheech and Chong — it may not be love, but it’s definitely stoned.

(At least slightly funnier than this instance, anyway. Or this one.)

Somehow this does not surprise me:

SeeqPod, the bankrupt streaming MP3 search engine currently being sued for copyright infringement by several major labels, went offline over the weekend but is reportedly close to announcing a buyout by “a large media company” that is “a competitor to Apple,” according to MP3Newswire. SeeqPod CEO Kasian Franks told MP3Newswire that the site is offline because it is “in the process of moving a few servers due to an acquisition by a media company.” Emeryville, Calif.-based SeeqPod declared bankruptcy on March 31.

Aren’t they all competitors to Apple, really?

I have to admit, I’ll miss the little jukebox: while it was up and running, I got to listen to a lot of stuff I might not have heard otherwise, and its lack of an obvious Save button apparently did not ward off the industry’s hounds.

(An encounter with SeeqPod and its Songerize front-end here.)

Gear Live reminds you that iTunes may not be used as a weapon or as a component of same. From the most recent EULA, under “Export Controls”:

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

So if you’re planning to force a dictator from his hidey-hole by playing loud music at all hours, take note: Steve Jobs does not approve, and he might just take away your iPod.

(Suggested by this Fark thread.)

John Cage’s piano piece (well, technically, anyway) 4′33″ gets mentioned here pretty much any chance I get.

And this week the first movement, Tacet, is a free download at the iTunes Store:

John Cage was a modernist composer with a playful sense of humor. In 1952 he wrote this short piano piece, which instructs the soloist not to play any notes at all — the only sound you hear being provided by audience and their surroundings. The ensuing argument over whether this counts as music quickly made 4′33″ the most famous and controversial composition of Cage’s career. Today, the work is most widely understood as a challenge to the concept of silence — even when there’s apparently nothing present to make a sound, you can always hear something if you listen hard enough.

Then again, to me anyway, the really amazing aspect of 4′33″ is that someone was once accused of plagiarizing it.

(No, I’m not putting up an MP3, wiseguy.)

Oh, I’m sorry, that’s NIN|JA, as in Nine Inch Nails | Jane’s Addiction, who will be mounting a tour of North America this summer, opened by rap act Street Sweeper.

At the link: a “tour sampler,” two tracks from each of the three acts, which can be had as DRM-less MP3s or, if you do torrents, lossless files in several formats. Cost: your email address, so they can send you the download link. Since they already know me — I’ve dealt with Reznor’s Pretty Bait Machine before, and they have yet to spam me — I figured said cost to be essentially nil. (Your mileage may vary.)

I am always on the alert for unexpected juxtapositions in the iTunes shuffle, and this one shook me: “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” an unreleased Frank Sinatra session from 1959 that made it to The Capitol Years box set, followed by Gene Pitney’s “It Hurts to Be In Love.” And why does it hurt? Yep.

Current track count: 4,344.

From last summer:

The iTunes installation on the work box, set to shuffle through 3,236 tracks, managed to put these two together:

• P. J. Proby’s “Niki Hoeky,” from 1967, cowritten by Pat and Lolly Vegas.
• Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love,” from 1974, written and sung by Pat and Lolly Vegas.

As the phrase goes: “What are the chances?”

Doing the actual math is left as an exercise for the student. But clearly this phenomenon isn’t exactly unheard-of; almost daily iTunes surprises me with an unexpected but utterly spiffy juxtaposition of two, sometimes even three tunes.

And it’s not just me, either. From Rich Appel’s Hz So Good newsletter (3/09):

I’d be lying if I said I understood how “shuffle” works on the iPod. I’ve been using it for weeks, and I’m convinced there’s a miniature Lee Abrams in there. Why else would 50s and early ’60s cuts almost always play together (such as, the other day, The Volumes’ “I Love You” followed by Don & Juan’s “What’s Your Name”)? Why would Kelly Clarkson’s “If I Can’t Have You” come after Beyonce’s “Halo”? Or Tommy Roe’s “Sweet Pea” go into The Osmonds’ “Yo-Yo”? Sure, there’s the occasional train wreck — Sinead O’Connor’s “Mandinka” was paired with Steve Lawrence’s “Poor Little Rich Girl” the other morning, and just yesterday Beyonce’s “Video Phone” was followed by Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” — but most of the time, with a 4,600-and-still-growing playlist, my ‘Pod sounds like nothing more than a very good oldies station (with the occasional “Future Gold”).

About 4240 here, but the same general results.

That’s one key point about [Portable Digital Music Players]: if yours doesn’t sound like the best oldies station you’ve ever heard — music-wise, that is — you’re either doing something wrong or you’ve programmed all new music (and if you’re doing that, I take off my hat to you: we need more folks like you). I might be hitting some musical extremes on mine — nowhere near what several of my friends have going on theirs, trust me — but for most users, I have to think that even a 500-song playlist on shuffle would sound like a ballsy AAA, Urban AC or Hot AC.

Get up to 1500 or so and you’re already ahead of Jack and Bob and all those other FMs with Christian names and snark from elsewhere.

Trini and I have been experimenting with the shuffle, or at least with trying to see if we can outguess it. As applied to my current automated playlist (the 320 tracks least often played, your mileage may vary), it has some predictable tendencies: it tends to jump to a track by an artist whose name begins with the same letter, or to a track with the same playcount — or, most remarkable of all, to a track with a combination of both characteristics. With this in mind, and Andy Kim’s remake of “Baby I Love You” (the Ronettes song) playing, we recorded our predictions for the next track to be shuffled in. I picked “Too Shy” by Kajagoogoo; she went for “Lips Like Morphine” by Kill Hannah. These tracks were exactly two apart, when the list is sorted by artist, and the one iTunes eventually served up was the one in between: Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long.”

This also precipitated a discussion of whether Kid Rock should be filed under Kid or under Rock. I pointed out that despite his name, Kid Rock is not a kid, nor does he rock, but this observation did not result in a re-sort.

Attila Girl, thinking she might be an “electronic glutton,” asks: “[W]hat if I have too many songs on iTunes?”

Which, of course, invites a further question: at what point does iTunes have too many songs?

My work-box install has 4200-odd, which hasn’t created any issues; Trini has about twice as many and has reported no problems; I know of people with upward of 10,000 tracks in their libraries.

In search of answers, I stumbled across this thread, which contains the following:

My client had an iMac that was accessing a PC formatted hard drive that was connected to a wireless network and when he got it up to 300GB with over 100,000 songs, it began to bog down and crash. The reason it was crashing and bogging down had nothing to do with limits of iTunes. It had everything to do with the following factors:

• Hard Drive Format.
• Wireless communication.
• Permissions.
• Corruption.

In short: Macs can talk to PC-formatted drives, but for optimum speed and security, they prefer something of their own kind, and wireless speeds are still markedly slower than what you can get with actual wire.

Still, 100,000 songs sounds like something to shoot for. I’m adding around 60 new tracks every month, so I should hit 100k right around my 190th birthday, at which time you should be able to fit an iMac into something the size of an early-21st-century Bluetooth headset.

Stiff Little Fingers once put out a single (well, a B-side anyway) with that very title, though they were careful to note in the lyrics, “you can play shite all day.”

The iTunes store doesn’t balk at that title, but the current Kelly Clarkson single is rendered there as “My Life Would S**k Without You.” I’m assuming it’s neither “silk” nor “soak.”

Obvious question: Do I want to fork over 30 cents per track to strip the DRM off my iTunes purchases?

I dunno. It’s not an enormous bill staring me in the face — maybe fifteen bucks — but pretty much everything I’d want to move around outside Apple’s FairPlay has already been burned to unprotected CD-Rs.

CD sales in the US are down about twenty percent. If you’re thinking “Oh, that’s bad,” Bill Wyman says no, that’s good:

Why is this good news? Because the record industry is built on three pillars of corruption, on which it built an edifice (the manufacture and promotion of physical CDs) that is no longer needed. One of the unappreciated side effects of the digital revolution in the media space is its contribution to a drop in white-collar crime.

In the radio world, the record industry used payola for decades to get radio airplay; with radio’s influence waning and industry earnings dropping, those days seem to be over. In retail, price-fixing was the norm; now the prices are being fixed (lower than what they might otherwise be) for a format (the single) the industry stopped selling to force people to buy full-length CDs, all by a guy (Steve Jobs) who doesn’t even work in the biz!

But it’s not all unicorns and teabiscuits just yet:

The third pillar is relations with artists, whom the labels have screwed on royalty payments, virtually with impunity, since the dawn of the modern industry. I assume this activity continues.

There really isn’t a whole lot of reason to think it doesn’t.

There are a lot of tracks available for legal download that, well, aren’t being downloaded:

The internet was set to re-shape our music-buying ways – opening up a vast market for sellers and buyers where obscure tracks would drive sales.

However a study has found that more than 10 million of the 13 million tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.

Chris Anderson has yet to comment, but:

This is the first big challenge to Chris Anderson’s ‘long tail’ theory — that niche markets were the key to the future for internet sellers.

Anderson used data from an American online music retailer to predict in his 2006 book, The Long Tail, that the internet economy would shift from a relatively small number of ‘hits’ — commercial products — at the head of the demand curve toward a ‘huge number of niches in the tail’.

The gory details:

[A] new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, suggests the success of online sales still depends on big hits.

The not-for-profit royalty collection society found that, for the online singles market, 80 per cent of all revenue came from 52,000 tracks.

For albums, the figures were even less encouraging. Of the 1.23 million available, only 173,000 were ever bought, meaning 85 per cent did not sell a single copy all year.

Hey, I’m doing what I can.

Rolling Stone these days has slightly less hipster cred than Popular Science, but inasmuch as they did send me an issue in the hopes of luring me back onto the subscription rolls (hint: it won’t work), I figured I’d at least read the Singles of the Year piece, which lists a hundred records they think had some sort of impact this past year. And, I decided, if I had heard of more than four or five, there’s something seriously askew with the world.

To my horror, I discovered twelve of them in my iTunes install at work. (Current song count: 4,045.)

I guess it’s time to subscribe to PopSci.

Okay, who picks the tunes?

When I was studying for my GCSEs, I remember hearing someone on the local radio station discussing the merits of listening to music during revision sessions. I needed no further reason to whack up the volume on OK Computer and The Fat Of The Land (have you guessed the year yet?), and since then I’ve always played music while I worked.

It’s fine when you get to choose the tunes yourself, but what if you’re one of many in a workspace? The factory I worked at in school holidays would never budge from the local dance music station, and subsequent offices have kept strictly to one channel, usually the one with five ever-repeating tunes.

We maintain a music server at 42nd and Treadmill, with a surprisingly-wide variety of stuff, though people who have access to it are generally expected to keep it to themselves, dammit. I occasionally raid it for single tracks, often at Trini’s suggestion, but in general, what plays in my office is my iTunes install, currently closing in on 4000 songs, mostly ripped from my own Stacks O’ Wax.

Then again, I spent 99 cents yesterday for Leo Kottke’s “Up Tempo,” from his eponymous 1976 album, mostly because I hadn’t heard it in a long time and I figured it would be a while before I got around to ripping that LP. At 1:41, that’s almost one cent per second, so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t download, say, Quadrophenia.

Almost everyone has bought a used CD at one time or another, and inasmuch as CDs don’t become used all by themselves, you have to assume that someone sold that disc back to the store at some point. The record industry doesn’t like this much, but the record industry doesn’t like much of anything these days; as a matter of fact, they didn’t like it back when people were trading actual records.

But with MP3s and such largely supplanting CDs these days — no, wait, don’t even think it:

Bopaboo is a music download service that offers DRM-free music at far lower prices than you’ll find elsewhere — as low as 25c per song in fact. How do they do this? Because the music is second hand. Yep, you read it right.

Someone has decided that people are going to want to sell MP3s that they’ve already listened to or, don’t want anymore, to other people. That’s if, of course, other people are going to be willing to buy them.

Used MP3s! Wonder if they’ll be graded for quality the way used records are.

Surprisingly, this is apparently not a new scheme of the Worldwide Nanny State:

A temporary error with the UK’s iTunes Music Store has caused some inoffensive song titles to be censored.

Tracks affected include “Hot” by Avril Lavigne, which is displayed as “H*t,” while The Cheeky Girls’ biggest hit has become “Cheeky Song (Touch My B*m).”

An Apple spokesman said a “database glitch” occurred when the service was checked for explicit references, and would be fixed as soon as possible.

J****y Cash was not available for comment.

(Title adapted from Dr. Dre. Via Fark.)