‘Love minus zero / no limit’ [live 1992] | Johnny Cash & Joni Mitchell - ‘Girl from the north country’ | ‘If you see her say hello’ [tour rehearsal, 1978] | Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova - ‘You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere’ | ‘Forever young’ [from The Last Waltz] | Andrew Bird - ‘Oh sister’ |‘Can you please crawl out your window’ [outtake] | Jeff Tweedy - ‘Simple twist of fate’ | ‘Bob Dylan’s dream’ [live, 1963] | Drive-By Truckers - ‘Like a rolling stone’ | Dylan & Neil Young - ‘The weight’ [live] | ‘Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine) [Mark Ronson Re-Version]’

Recently, beleaguered music companies discovered that what Steve Jobs has been doing to them for the last few years is what they’d been doing to consumers for many years previous to that and guess what? It hurts!

Then over the weekend at Midem, Qtrax boldly ventured forth with its ad-supported free download business model- ‘From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally’

Sadly no deals had been finalised. As Bart the Amnaoiseach would say, it was all ’smokes and daggers’. You couldn’t make up such ineptness - according to themselves, Qtrax have been working on this for 4 years.

Kudos to the Qtrax PR people for getting the (wrong) word out there, but surely they realised who they were trying to play hardball with? When I initially scanned the Times article I was surprised that the big four music companies were actually doing something to try and loosen Apple’s firm grasp on their online revenues.

However it seems that isn’t the case. We can look forward to more attempted litigation aimed at filesharers in jurisdictions outside the US. We can also look forward to a continued stream of focus-group identified pre-chewed ‘music’ which we didn’t ask for. I’m looking at you, Louis Walsh,

a man who still equates artistic worth with financial success as that allows him to cast himself as a sort of modern-day Phil Spector, instead of someone who makes his living selling children’s music to slow adults.

Thank you Graham Linehan

The £500K (Sterling) launch party, the hype, the advertising-supported business model, it’s all sounding awfully familiar. I’m also taken with the eagerness of understaffed weekend newsrooms to reprint press releases. Some things never change.

Of course, it could be a fiendishly clever reverse-hype anti-marketing campaign. Mention of Qtrax will waft around the web for a while, then just when the buzz is dying down the CEOs of Warners, Sony, EMI and BMG will appear on the (obviously inferior) screens of non-Apple MP3 players. Dressed as the Fab Four, they’ll tell us that it was all just a clever jape, and if you point your browser to Ptrax.com you can download up to at least 300 free songs. Yay!

If you’re still interested, have a look at Qtrax. Will they still be around at the end of the year?

Edit: Excellent piece in the Guardian.

What are the chances?

I’m flattered …

Image from yadogg. I shall be stealing liberally from this page in future due to its general wonderfulness.

Unlike previously, I’ve tried to put these in some kind of order, which requires some careful listener participation. As you work your way through this lot, you have to gently increase the volume track by track. This is because the tempo gradually increases until (almost) the end. Obviously, fast music is better loud. And loud music is better … than most other things. To prove I’m taking this seriously, I resisted the temptation to tack a version of ‘Heart of gold’ by Boney M on at the end (it exists, oh yes indeed, my ears are still recovering). No novelty cover versions here.

Anyway, if you don’t know all of the originals here you should be ashamed of yourself and beat yourself around the face with a handful of kippers. TWO Smiths covers! TWO Marychain covers, one with harmonies!

Xiu Xiu - ‘Fast car’ | Dar Williams - ‘Whispering pines’ | Billy Bragg - ‘Reason to believe’ | M Ward featuring Zooey Deschanel - ‘When I get to the border’ |Sandie Shaw - ‘Jeane’ | Dolly Parton - ‘Stairway to heaven‘ | Katie Stelmanis - ‘Natural woman’ | Yo La Tengo - ‘Dreams’ | Joe Cocker - ‘The letter‘ | P.J. Harvey - ‘Highway ‘61 Revisited’ | Tralala - ‘Never understand’ | Sons & Daughters - ‘Killer’ | Ramones - ‘Surfin’ bird’ | Me First and the Gimme Gimmes - ‘The boxer’ | Elf Power - ‘Upside down’ (wow! could have done with a few more guitar parts at the end though ) | SchneiderTM - ‘There’s a light that never goes out’

As part of this new year efficiency drive, I even numbered them all and put ‘em in a Zip file [68MB, approx 60 mins] which you can download if you’re that way inclined. You could then even put the tracks on a CD, then stick this super-useful label on the CD to make sure you don’t use it as a coaster by mistake.

On a completely different note, if any of the roughly two people in NYC who may occasionally look in here happen to notice this before midday, there’s somewhere you should be this afternoon. Go and cause a scene.

Polaroid picture.

So, who wants to start a ukulele orchestra? Looks like a hell of a lot of fun, and inexpensive.

Still Friday!

MC Hammer has a blog.

Please please please make it some strain of super-irony I haven’t come across yet. Meta-irony even.

Behold Inga. I hear she’s from Sweden.

It seems to be real, whatever that means in this case, and it adheres to the instructions in ‘The Manual’. Therefore I’m just getting old …

Carrie Brownstein has a blog on NPR, and although only launched this week is already answering questions that need to be answered. Questions such as "If you carry a cat around on your shoulder when you go out, or a bird, or a lizard, what music do you listen to?".

She’s also doing ThunderAnt with Fred Armisen which unfortunately isn’t very funny.

There’s a new media player over there to the right. It’s the best one I’ve come across after testing a bunch of them. It allows you to upload your own tracks (unless they’re protected AAC, hello real Steve Jobs) and build playlists. It then buzzes off and finds the album art, which is almost utterly pointless since it displays album covers as half-inch square thumbnails. Ah well, can’t win ‘em all.

There’s also a (currently fairly sparse) recipes page which I hope to add to if I remember. I’m putting together a few Pageflakes Pagecasts, a cooking one will probably be the first one I publish. Drop me a mail with any cool foodie links you have …