Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Almost the return of Nereffid's Guide

My contributions to musicisgood.org now number two, both of them filed under "Classical highlights". The first provides short quotes excerpted from the reviews of the best-received discs in the September/October 2011 issue of Fanfare, while the second does the same for American Record Guide. I intend to do this for all future issues, and for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, and International Record Review.
So, the venue and the format may have changed, but I seem to be back where I started five years ago, when I first created an eMusic List highlighting what was in the latest issue of Gramophone. Some good things sprang from that initial attempt - not least of them the Nereffid's Guide Awards, soon to make its fifth appearance - so who knows what might emerge from musicisgood?
It's ironic, too, that this harking back to the olden days comes when it does: I fell out of love with eMusic when the site drew down the ire of its customers over adding Sony products; and at the moment there's yet more rage, this time as the company rolls out a completely new design that it seems to have forgotten to beta-test, or perhaps even alpha-test. This is all to "enhance your music discovery", apparently, although it seems to have involved removing pretty much all the tools that people used to find music and replacing them with adverts for editorial content. In the past I would say "ah well, at least the downloads are cheap" but at the moment I'm afraid to download anything because chances are it won't work but I could still be charged. At the moment eMusic seems to be nothing but a good-looking corpse, and even the "good-looking" bit is arguable.

No comments: