Various: Hear Iceland!So here we are ten weeks into the year, and I haven't actually bought a CD yet. Sure, I've paid for 80 tracks from eMusic — and these days I am put off buying CDs by the knowledge that every one just adds another day to the sentence I've handed down to myself on this site… Nevertheless, without trying, I've accumulated ten CDs (that's one a week); nine of them come from magazines to which I subscribe (Word, The Wire and MusicWeek) and one was a freebie at a Califone gig.
This promotion of Icelandic music came with MusicWeek a couple of months ago. It joins a spate of national promotions I had in January (1, 2, 3, 4). One of the things about listening to out-of-the-way artists on iTunes with the Last.fm software is that you can see how many other Last.fm users have listened to them. In the case of Lay Low, their tracks have been played over 7,000 times at the time I listened to them. Many of the other artists on the album have fewer than ten plays to their name.
As is often the case, the compilation mixes indie rock tracks with doom metal and a kind of cabaret chanson. I'm no expert on Icelandic culture, but the music here seemed to be place-less and anonymous, trying too hard to fit in with genres that started elsewhere.
None of the ten tracks are particularly long, so at least half of the CD's storage capacity is unused. I know this is a low budget operation, but couldn't they have put just a few PDF profiles and press releases to tell us about the artists and where to get their stuff if we like them? Or maybe everyone just relies on links to the likes of Last.fm and Wikipedia now.
Source:
http://www.musicarcades.com/2007/03/various_hear_ic.html
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