iTunes Ping: reinventing the Iron Curtain

The new iTunes 10 includes Apple’s social network for music, Ping. It’s like a combination of Twitter, Facebook and last.fm, within iTunes. As we said earlier, we hate iTunes, and we’d recommend everyone to buy our music from our own webshop or Bandcamp, but we also know that iTunes has 160 million users worldwide, which would be kinda hard to ignore. Our music is available on iTunes, so let’s claim our artist profile on Ping, and see what we can do with it! Continue reading

Punk rock bands that inspired us: Descendents

The Descendents were the Buzzcocks‘ equivalent on the early American hardcore punk scene: they were a lot more melodic than their contemporaries, and they were fronted by a nerd. But they were much more than that. They invented melodic hardcore (or melodycore), paving the way for NOFX, No Use For a Name, and almost every popular punk band in the golden years of Epitaph and Fat Wreck. Continue reading

The new MySpace Profile 3.0: no css customization

Yesterday we got a reminder from MySpace that we could upgrade our artist profile to the new 3.0 version, so we did. Since we didn’t really have a MySpace design, we didn’t have much to lose, and the upgrade was relatively painless.
The new profile editor lets you choose modules for your site, which you can drag and drop to their preferred positions. All the html in the old profile got dumped to the new html box, and it took some time to figure out that it needs to be edited there, and not in the bio section. This was the only issue to be solved after the upgrade, and we’re happy with the new cleaner layout of profile 3.0. The new marquee header lets visitors see the latest status update immediately, and the video slider is a great tool to present your videos if you have 10 of them, like us. However, if your band has a MySpace design based on custom css, you’ll have a hard time keeping your layout after the upgrade, since profile 3.0 doesn’t support css customization. Continue reading