"Social networking sites" and music

"Social networking sites." MySpace, Facebook, Bebo in standard parlance. Do you use them?

According to the mainstream media peeps, Facebook is taking over the universe. It has a moon for breakfast, a planet for lunch and a star for dinner. Maybe, maybe.

But for those of us who were able to instantly hear a huge range of music online through MySpace, the now News Corp-owned mother of all social networking sites (at least till the start of 2007), Facebook has left out MySpace's crucial music features.

Yes, Facebook works better and connects you to people you actually know rather than randoms - usually, anyway. Friends on MySpace are, sometimes, lists of mutual appreciation. On Facebook they might well have been to uni with you and suddenly turned up 10 years later (naming no names...). And Facebook is a cleaner design, has far fewer errors and, crucially, allows one to poke and be poked. But Facebook's music functions are, to be nice, naff.

MySpace has none of these networking thrills but remains the undisputed place to hear and be heard. What's more, by allowing users to design their own pages with a variety of free software, it does allow for something like an individual representation of identity. One need not be blue and white. (As an aside though, why do people make their MySpace pages so slow to download? We don't need white semi-transparent overlays. They're tedious. Get rid.)

As with Amazon's endlessly nearly-arriving digital downloads shop, rumours of Facebook's rebuild to showcase music in a way as successful as MySpace has and does have been circulating for ages. Almost as long as suppositions about whether Google will schnaffle the company before Microsoft does.

For the moment at least it's still MySpace where new music can be heard, where tour dates are listed and where, at least grudgingly, anyone serious about new music must still tread. But it'll be Facebook where the talking happens.

Cover versions

Cat Power is to release her second album of cover versions in January.

Which got me thinking that old favourite - what's your favourite cover version?

Post them here...

film festival

The London Film Festival starts in two days, so it's getting to crunch time for deciding which tickets to book. Things are, unsurprisingly, already selling out, including Wes Anderson's new film, The Darjeeling Limited (don't panic though, it's on general release late in November). To help you decide, Neil Dowden has written a preview for musicOMH.com, and there's also the festival's excellent website, www.lff.org.uk.

And if you can't find anything that isn't sold out, don't forget the free showings. I'll certainly be down in Trafalgar Square on Thursday evening for the open-air screening of Hitchcock's early classic, Blackmail.

one for the arthouse crowd

Some say his work is profound, beautiful, capturing deep ripples of meaning and understanding in the very fabric of the celluloid. Others say it's incoherent rambling trash. Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Luc Godard is not everyone's cup of soufflé. He has been doing what he does for 50 years now, though, and that's an achievement in itself: either he's been brilliant for half a century, or he's gotten away with it for just as long.

In recognition of all this, the European Film Academy have announced he's to be awarded their Lifetime Achievement Award. Quite what he's achieved, I'd rather not be asked; when I saw "A Bout De Souffle" ("Breathless", and the source of the dreadful pun above) it left me yawning, and the dreadful cod-polemics of "In Praise of Love" (in which The United States of America is lambasted for a good twelve minutes for not having a proper name as a country, America being a continent you see), I was put off for life.

But your view may differ...

Madonna ditches Warner

According to The Times, Madonna is to walk away from Warner and jump into bed with gig promoters Live Nation instead in a deal reputedly worth $120 million (£60 million).

Her recent Confessions Tour grossed $260.1 million worldwide, according to Billboard magazine, with £11.8 million coming from her London dates alone - at Live Nation-managed Wembley.

Following Radiohead's decision to self-release new album In Rainbows and Paul McCartney's Starbucks deal, both at the expense of erstwhile label EMI (itself now swallowed up by private equity outfit Terra Firma), Her Madgesty's decision is likely to further the already decaying state of the majors.

Prince's album giveaway essentially nullified his deal with Sony BMG in the UK, which was left with nothing to sell. The Charlatans are allowing fans to download their new album for free. Trent Reznor looks set to leave Universal-owned Interscope and has been encouraging fans to steal Nine Inch Nails' music gratis. Reports this week suggest that Jamiroquai and Oasis are seriously looking at non-traditional means of releasing their music. What started as a pioneering foray into a brave new digital world now looks like a headlong rush to end the status quo of (in particular) the majors.

But who, if not record labels, is going to fund the career development of the next Madonnas, Princes, Reznors and Radioheads? It's one thing for MySpace to help a career to gain exposure, as in the case of Lily Allen, Kate Nash, the Arctic Monkeys et al, but quite another for that to translate into an income stream to pay for tours.

While Madonna's deal is quite different again to what Radiohead have done, it poses as many questions for the record labels. And fans shouldn't be surprised if, as artists come to rely increasingly on touring to make ends meet, gig ticket prices escalate into realms previously not even countenanced by Barbara Streisand.

At the other end of the scale, as majors inevitably reign back artist advances, will the DIY ethic of music-making become the dominant, rather than the indie, route to success? And if so, will music-making become the privilege of the wealthy few?

Interesting times ahead, anyway.