After the protests of indie music fans clogged up Apple’s music store with bogus iMixes, the company is close to completing a deal to get more indie music on the service.
Hundreds of artists have not been able to get their music on iTunes because lengthy, piecemeal negotiations with individual indie labels. Sony and Napster managed to get round this by doing a single deal with the Association of Independent Music, the UK trade body that represents many of the labels in question.
This means that popular acts such as the White Stripes will finally be available for download, and music fans will be able to download Franz Ferdinand rather than Franz Liszt. Not that there’s anything wrong with Franz Liszt – other than he didn’t come from Glasgow.
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.
Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.
At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.
After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.
These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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