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We See Lights and Frightened Rabbit DJs added to anniversary show lineup

A couple of announcements re the previously-announced birthday/anniversary/xmas show on the 13th…

Opening proceedings on the 13th at the Electric Circus will be local indie combo We See Lights – watch the site for a mini-feature on the act soon, and have a look at the video below (though no guarantees the puppets will be at the show!)

We also have Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit spinning some tunes while is this music? DJs will fill in the rest of the gaps with some festive tunes chosen by the website’s writers.
Tickets are now available via Ripping & Tickets-Scotland as well as Tickets for the show can be found online at TicketWeb
and See Tickets.

The rest of the info is as before, pasted below for your convenience

Indie music website isthismusic.com is celebrating its 10th year in existence with a show at Edinburgh’s Electric Circus on Thursday December 13th, with headliners ballboy, plus a solo set from Adam Thompson (singer with We Were Promised Jetpacks) plus local indie types We See Lights, and Scott Hutchinson from Frightened Rabbit on the wheels of Steel (or possibly iPod). Entry is £6.

The night will double up as itm?’s Xmas night out and doubtless writers past and present will also be in attendance at what will be one of the must-see lineups of the busy festive gig calendar.

About the bands:
ballboy are stalwarts of the Edinburgh indie scene. They have appeared on countless is this music? bills over the past 10 years with singer Gordon Macintyre often a solo addition to itm? shows across the country. Their appearance on the 13th is also particularly apt: issue 2 of is this music? featured ballboy as its cover stars.

We Were Promised Jetpacks are a band who have been supported by is this music? for many years. And vice versa, the band donating, as many acts have, a track for one of the many cover CDs that came with the printed version of the magazine. In fact, it was an itm? gig which saw the band make their live debut under their current name – part of the magazine’s long-standing tie-in with Tigerfest.

We See Lights, an Edinburgh-based indie collective – i.e. we’re not quite sure what form they will take on the night, but they’re always engaging and entertaining, and since itm? somehow hasn’t had them on a bill before we’re very pleased that they will open up what is for us quite an auspicious occasion.

Frightened Rabbit gained their first exposure through is this music? so it’s apt and very pleasing that Scott should share a few of his favourite tunes with us

About is this music?
is this music?’s first issue went to print in November 2002, with cover stars Idlewild and the exclusive tale of Bob Fairfoull’s departure from the band. This first issue was followed by a more substantial second the following month with a free CD and ballboy on the front. 22 more issues followed over the next 5 years before financial reasons and good sense meant the transition to a web-only publication, which continued for the next 5 years (and beyond).

The magazine had a few notable ‘firsts’ – Franz Ferdinand made their print feature debut, as did Frightened Rabbit, as well as a plethora of, er, less successful acts. The magazine also commissioned cover features for the likes of Snow Patrol, Mull Historical Society, the Beta Band, and of course Teenage Fanclub (from whom the magazine took its name). We also saw around 250 bands exposed to thousands of music fans by appearing on the cover CDs, which, in the days before the open internet access we have today, became something which the magazine was as well-known for as the printed word.

However, no magazine is anything without its writers, and itm? has seen over 200 come and go – some remain to this day, while others are now carving out a career in journalism and music with the likes of NME, the Guardian, Daily Record, The List, BBC Scotland and Capital Radio. God help us if they all show up on the 13th!

Summer Soundtracks

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Finding the perfect soundtrack for your summer is a serious task. The warm summer months go by all too quickly so it’s important to have music that you can return to in the dark days of winter and remember the feeling you had when you were lying in the grass with the sun on your face listening to the perfect song.  
more… “Summer Soundtracks”

Moving on up

- the digitalisation of music
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All we hear today is how we’re in a digital age, and how a focus on digital is what is moving our lives forward for the better. When it comes to music, many things have happened in the industry and there’s a debate regarding whether this is moving the industry forward or making it lose touch to where it came from.
The romantics among you will be harking back to the days of vinyl, when life was a lot simpler and you knew what you liked and didn’t like. There was no electronic background, and artists had to be far more practical in their creativity to reach the summit.
Since everything went online, and the world began to be powered by the electronic world – we’ve gone from cassettes to CDs to having collections stored in computers to being put on mp3 players to being put on your phone as a custom ring tone.
Without sounding too much like someone born in the wrong era, whatever happened to our industry? This transition means that music takes on a digital existence in the main. This convergence threatens music that is in its original condition.
The legends that we look at in the 50s and 60s – from Elvis to The Beatles – started the traditional music industry, before disco and rock began to take the world by storm. This was all before there was a sniff of the digitalisation of music. From here we saw world stars emerge and stadium concert tours were now on the menu. With music in a real golden age, bands like Oasis and Nirvana entered. From here, digital took over, consumerism began to rule the world and the transition from analogue to digital seemed to happen effortlessly.
It’s gone from what was an art form, to what is now entertainment. A song doesn’t turn into a worldwide sensation without a good music video, and bands don’t get printed unless they have a dark or wild side.
From where I’m standing it’s starting to lose touch with where it came from. Whatever happened to the finger snappers? And have did we manage to manoeuvre our way through these ages without taking at least something with us. Hot pants are still around, but how did flares ever die out? That said, things change – people don’t always like it but they do. In the 1980s, Nottingham Forest were huge in the world of football – that changed. Before 1991, the World Wide Web didn’t even exist in its simplest form – boy, has that changed.
This move away from tradition didn’t happen overnight, but it was seamless in the way it worked. But, what happens with your old vinyl and CD collections. Is it time to make room on your shelf by selling CDs or should you keep them for sentimental value?
Ultimately, that is something only you can answer but the truth is that you will have all your songs on your iPod, phone and/or computer so it is surely something worth considering. Using a service like Musicmagpie can help you to make some pennies back on your vast collection which you can invest into your digital collection.

Website of the Week!

accolade for itm? from amazingradio.co.uk
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As you know we’re never ones to blow our own trumpet – (or update this ‘news’ section that often) but itm? was recently awarded the accolade of ‘Website of the Week’ by AmazingRadio (the UK DAB/web radistation that features purely unsigned music).

You can read all about it, or listen again to the piece.

And of course you can hear unsigned music, 24/7, at amazingradio.co.uk