Music
BUG 15 Music Videos
Here are the videos (in you tube form) that were featured at BUG 15 on the 18th September at the BFI, presented by Adam Buxton. Special guest director was Tim Pope.
Coldplay - Strawberry Swing
Director: Shynola
(embedding disabled on youtube)
Lucy and the Teenage Monster - Dance Steps
Directors: David Strindberg, Johan Bring
Tiesto/Sneaky Sound System - I Will Be Here
Director: Muto Masashi
Just Jack - The Day I Died
Directors: Ben & Joe Delaney
(embedding disabled on youtube)
The Walkmen - On the Water
Director: Nir Ben Jacob
Ill Ease - Here Comes Trouble
Director: George Wu
Sour - Hibi No Neiro
Directors: Masashi Kawamura, Hal Kirkland, Magico Nakamura, Masayoshi Nakamura
Neurosonics Audiomedical
Director: Chris Cairns
Major Lazer - Pon the Floor
Director: Eric Wareheim
The Hickey Underworld - Blonde Fire
Director: Joe Vanhoutteghem
Many of the Tim Pope videos are available on his website.
BUG 11 Videos
This is something I’ve wanted to have and since I couldn’t find it out there I thought I’d do it myself. It’s a collection of the videos shown at the BUG film night at the BFI Southbank, hosted by Adam Buxton. These are the videos I could find from BUG 11 on the 22nd January, with guest director Kim Gehrig. If I’ve omitted any - I think there may be some from the laptop sections - let me know. Enjoy!
Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.
Handfed - Above the Sea from Dan on Vimeo.
Amnesty International You Are Powerful - Funny home videos are a click away
Spotify: Following Best Practice or Just Copying?
I’ve recently started using Spotify thanks to an invite from my friend Julian. Spotify is comes in a desktop client form and streams music a la Last.fm.
It has less social networking elements and doesn’t do recommendations to nearly the same extent. Where it does excel is that it has a great library with great search capabilities and as an experience it feels like you’re listening to your music own collection. At least it would after you’ve sprinkled your music collection with 1 minute ads. Actually the audio ads are not too bad, not being so frequent as to be annoying. There are also banner ads on the client but since that’s minimised most of the time I don’t notice them.
I shared it with Richard, who is an extreme music buff. His comment was this:
Like it so far. I get fed up with so many beta apps cos’ they take time to install and learn how to use them – time which I don’t have. This was easy – up and running in a matter of minutes. I can live with ads. Music is a little limited but still finding some good stuff.
I couldn’t help but wonder at that easiness. A glance at the interface is enough to show why someone familiar with a certain dominant music player might find the client quick to get to grips with (I think Rich was also talking about the end to end experience of signing up also).
What I’m wondering is whether this is a clever play to follow the design of an application that people are familiar with rather than trying to reinvent the music player format. And iTunes is a pretty well designed application at its core, though it’s really starting to bloat. Or is this a convergence of laziness, cutting time and effort in design? Or is it just plain plaigarism?