Twitter’s revolution blues

That’s the trouble with announcing a revolution. If you fall short of your lofty ideals, you’re left looking somewhat exposed.

And while Twitter didn’t explicitly proclaim the music service it launched last month to be revolutionary, it certainly sailed pretty close on its official blog:

We7 moves on (again)

Pity poor We7. First the UK-based streaming music service was aiming, not entirely unsuccessfully, to be a browser-based Spotify, then it shifted to something more akin to Last.fm, and now it’s moving on again.

Or more accurately, Tesco has decided to subsume the company into its online film and TV download and streaming brand Blinkbox, nearly a year after taking a majority stake in the company for £10.9m.

A digital music nation?

The recent release of a new album by indie cult favourites My Bloody Valentine was, if it ever happened, always going to be a big deal.

It’s not just that they invented a sound that simultaneously inspired a genre of music while  remaining impossible to accurately emulate. There’s also the small matter of the 22 year gap between new record M B V and Loveless, their last.

For the purposes for this blog what struck me about the record was the way it arrived, which was with almost as big a surprise as the new David Bowie album.

Ping: say goodbye

There will surely be few people who will mourn the demise of Apple’s music social network Ping.

That the ‘walled garden’ within iTunes didn’t “gain traction”, as CEO Tim Cook put it in July, is little surprise.

It offered a poor user experience within iTunes’ familiarly clunky interface, with little reason for visiting. Bands more often than not used it as a somewhat perfunctory news feed and this, combined with Ping’s small and unenthusiastic audience, meant it felt like a slow-moving, neutered network.

Who does Tesco want to compete with now that it owns We7?

Whether Tesco’s acquisition of We7 last week is a measure of the music streaming company’s attractive vitality, or just a sign it’s gone from being the poor man’s Spotify to a pale version of Last.fm is besides the point.

The deal, which saw Tesco take a 91% stake in We7 for £10.8m, marks another move by a bricks-and-motor retailer to grapple with digital retail, but at least it’s a stronger step for We7 than Sainsbury’s £1 purchase Anobii (also last week) was for the ebook retailer.

Despite a tongue-in-check headline from Techcrunch that asked What the heck is a grocery store doing buying a music streaming service? Tesco hasn’t been just a ‘grocery store’ for quite some time.

Virtual museums – a window to the world

The Google Art Project, which I stumbled across recently, is an amazing undertaking, providing instant access to pictures from some of world’s most renowned galleries.

There are also Street View depictions of places like the National Gallery in London, the National Museum in Delhi and even The White House.