As you may have heard from the last Episode of the Matt Keil Podcast, my band Le Monnier found ourselves in a dispute with Sony Music over rights to a song we uploaded to YouTube.

We think Sony may have been making money out of our music by falsely claiming one of our songs as their own. Are they doing this to other bands? We hope not. After Sony finally removed their claim to one of our videos, I posted this blog video on the band’s YouTube channel.

In 2006 I first created an Art film entitled ‘Kurfürstendamm Nuclear Bunker’ which contained footage from a bunker in Berlin, Germany when I went there one summer. The soundtrack for this is a series on manipulated sounds and historical recordings.

All the way from New Orleans, Soul Rebels Brass Band are currently on tour and on their visit to the UK stopped off at Morpeth School to put on a short concert and run a workshop with the schools’ big band Urban Playground. These guys sure know how to put on a show and the volume they create is immense. Sure enough, the hundred or so pupils who were lucky enough to attend the event gave them an rapturous welcome and got into the party atmosphere as they got up, sang, clapped and danced their way through the band’s short set which included a fantastic cover of Katy Perry’s track ‘California Gurls’.

Vaughan Williams is a terribly unfashionable composer in the eyes of musicologists and academics, especially when he shared a similar period of history to the mind-blowing brilliance of composers such as Stravinsky. There is a wonderful simplicity to his music that seems to strike a chord with me. Having studied various composers of the 20th century for several years and sat through many listening sessions and score reading exercises during my University days, it’s very hard to listen to a piece of music without trying to analyse it. Trying to spot the clever things the composers have done, or explore the conceptual background of the music – and to be honest, it saps the fun out of it.

Amazon today announced a new service that will soon be available called the ‘Cloud Player’. The idea is that users can upload their music tracks to their own space on the internet and access it from any computer or Android phone. This beats Apple and Google who are apparently developing similar systems themselves. The idea of a large amount of online storage space for general public use isn’t exactly a new idea (i.e. Dropbox), but the fact that the major players see this as the way forward means the demise of the CD and the hard drive.