You know what the best thing about a CD or vinyl record is? It’s something physical you can actually hold and call your own. In the old days people used to go round to their friends house and even swap what they had bought! Who’d have thought that the power of watching a 12” record spin round and around whilst listening to some killer beats could be so thrilling?

Of course nothing lasts for sodding ever. In the so called digital age where everything is meant to be easier and supposedly more enjoyable to consume, the humble CD and vinyl suffered. People opted to stop buying records as the faceless MP3 had been created. Now you could own a lump of musical coding that could be stored on a mini music harddrive known to the majority of people as an iPod.

Big whoop indeed, where is the fun of displaying your music collection off? Instead of thumbing through faded record covers and marvelling at the artwork, you can now scroll through a digital collection in roughly one minute. Enjoyment factor? Roughly zero percent. However, the MP3 has become the victim of its own success. As we all know, the invention of swapping music files illegally was established way before some bright spark realised artists we’re being ripped off.

After a few years of battle, music lovers with a few morals used online retailers such as iTunes to purchase their music. Old songs then became remastered and bundled with all sorts of random crap. Often the misleading chance to win a competition to get exclusive gig tickets. Just when the dust is settling on this tediously new format, news has reached us that bigwig music chiefs want to flex their muscles and balls things up for all again.

It all gets spectacularly nerdy as reports all talk about something called BACH Techology. This sounds alarmingly worrying to begin with seeing that they can’t even spell back properly. That’s probably because it’s some sort of wacky European creation. Possibly by the Germans, they wear leather shorts for God’s sake. From the sound of what’s being planned, it looks like the humble MP3 might be getting an injection of intelligence as these details have emerged:

“The new media extension, MusicDNA, allows owners of an MP3 file to access additional updated content, including lyrics, artwork, tour dates, blog posts, videos, and Twitter feeds.”

At the moment, CD’s and vinyl purchased back in the mid nineties are just sitting on a shelf collecting dust. With the introduction of this technology it means that when JLS announce a new tour, a bare chested member from the X-Factor losers could personally tell us that they’re playing our local leisure centre or rehab centre. How terribly exciting.

For more information which will no doubt chew up your brain, visit the website where all of these proposals are being pitched:

www.musicdna.com

Whe it comes to music, Vice magazine seem to either discover and champion amazing underground bands that deserve more attention and have their finger on the pulse of fascinating new scenes that are sure to blow up…

Or

Go on and bloody on about bands that sound like someone throwing angry electro cats down some stairs in a dustbin.

Either way, when they launch a music player on their site you know it’s going to be filled with music that is definitely different. And different is good. Most of the time. Well, they have and it is. It should be refreshed with new music every now and again, so if you can’t be fucked to seek out new music yourself (you lazy bastard) you can name drop any of the bands on the player and instantly win at cool.

Well worth checking out if only for the 8-Bit Dub of Darkstar. Here is your Linky.

Google is all powerful! It knows who you are, where you live and what you watch when you’re jerking off. Luckily there’s still a way for rock n’ roll to stick it to the man – even a man that will happily make naked ladies appear on your screen whenever you like – form a band even the big G can’t track down! DT ignores the spellcheck and checks ‘em out:

1: The Band.

The masters of post-modern irony. It’s fairly obvious these days that Bob Dylan is an alien time traveller, which explains how, despite dying before the spread of the internet, Richard Manuel managed to utterly confound the combined powers of Google and..erm..Ask Jeeves..with this name, which returns just about every MySpace page on the planet. Good work alien Bob!.

2: !!!

Sacramento, California, has it’s fair share of funk/dance/post-punk ensembles, all dying to get talked about. Unfortunately !!! seem to have chosen their name based on the sound their maternal grandmother made upon finding porn in their bedroom.

3: MP3

A brilliant name unfortunately hoovered up for use by some bloody politicians -Members of Parliament… and there’s three of them..do you see what they did there? Do you get it? How we laughed at the DT office as we spent 3 straight hours trying to find a website almost as elusive as D.A.D’s  (before realising we could find them on wiki. Strangely, they recently changed the name to MP4, which made sense with the extra member, but must have halved the number of hits these guys were getting.

4: Torrent.

It seems like a great name doesn’t it? It’s fresh and modern sounding, with a bit of an edge, some meaning behind the name. Until one of your fans wants to know more, and is faced with 248,000,000 results, most of them for knocked off copies of The Wedding Crashers. Not helped by that terribly familiar logo..

5: James.

Luckily no one in their right mind would bother searching for the baldy Manchester egomaniacs, but try googling them – or indeed their hit Sit Down – and see what you get: More adverts for beanbags and office furniture than you can shake a lazy Madchester shoegazer at.

6: Sunn0)))))))

A bit of an anomaly here, as the titans of drone doom can actually be googled. What they can’t be however, is downloaded. Go to BT or Kazaa or whatever –try typing that name in. It can’t be done! So underground they refuse to believe anyone would be able to share their music – probably because they record it on wax cylinders.

7: 404 Forbidden

A band so difficult to find, that after an hour of looking for a picture, I though “ah fuck ‘em” and instead used an image of Bay Area Thrashers Forbidden (Partially because I vaguely resemble singer russ)! 404 encapsulate the frustrations of legions of garage band users, as evidenced by similarly named associates 403 and 405. Face it Casio-centric noisecore-ists everywhere, you’d be better off with a moog.

8: A!

Proof positive that the Aaron A. Aardvark trick may mean you’re first on the shelves in HMV, but when the entire music marketing game changes overnight, you’re fucked. It also doesn’t help that A! are fucking awful.

Any more? Send ‘em in and undermine their undergroundness!