Musicians Plug Upgrades to Flat-Sounding Digital

Free All Music is innovative, but still might not work

(NEWSER) - A new site thinks it has the answer the music industry’s woes: Free All Music will allow users to download a high-quality mp3 with no copy restrictions in exchange for watching a 15-second video ad of their choosing. The site then takes a user’s handle and uses it to produce another ad, for third-party sites, that announces what the user downloaded and who sponsored it. Users may download 15 mp3s a month—and perhaps more if Free All Music eventually sells more sponsorships. More»

CDs showcase Fab Four as they were meant to be heard

(NEWSER) - The Beatles just got better: every one of their original albums and a batch of collected singles has been remastered, boosting the quality to the level “the Beatles themselves would have heard and intended,” writes Matt Hurwitz in the Washington Post. The stereo CDs remind us that the Beatles were a “rock band”: these recordings pack a punch not heard on the older discs. More»

(NEWSER) - In honor of Woodstock—which happened 40 years ago this weekend—and the “seminal documentary” that captured it, John Farr shares his list of the 10 best rock concert/performance films—all of which are “meant to be played loud,” he writes on the Huffington Post. “So crank it!”

• A Hard Day's Night (1964): “The disarming charisma and spontaneous energy of the Beatles made no traditional plot necessary. It was sufficient to portray a day in the life of the world's most talked about rock band.”

(NEWSER) - Radiohead made waves when they let fans download their last album for whatever price they wanted, yet a new online-only track has been released in the past week to far less fanfare. "Harry Patch (In Memory Of)" commemorates the last British veteran of World War I, who died last month aged 111, and proceeds from downloads are going to a military charity. The lush, orchestral song is a "masterly achievement" far from their traditional sound, writes Wall Street Journal critic Jim Fusilli. More»

10-disc set bursting with music, photos, video

(NEWSER) - Neil Young leaves other retrospectives in the dust with a look back at his career that spans 10 Blu-ray discs or DVDs, or eight CDs, the Chicago Tribune reports. Neil Young Archives: Volume 1, 1963-1972 contains everything from high school band recordings through Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young to his first solo work, a 20-years-in-the-making collection that's "gone on to usurp even Chinese Democracy as the ultimate lost-album punchline," writes Stuart Berman of Pitchfork. More»