*BEEP* The sausages go through *BEEP* Followed by Tesco Value beef paste *BEEP* Four tins of cat food. *BEEP* Nadine Coyle’s first ever solo album.

Girls Aloud’s Nadine Coyle is releasing her first album exclusively with Tesco, which seems peculiar. Mainly because you’d think she’d sell more copies if she sold it through… I dunno… loads of different shops. Is your average curious pop fan likely to change their shopping habits over the possibility of buying some faux grown-up LP from a singer from a pop group that has, quite possibly, four members more popular than her?

The album, called ‘Insatiable’, is available to buy from Tesco on November 8th (with a single of the same name available on November 1st), which equates her music with things like scratch cards and tins of vegetables in brine.

Coyle says of it all: “So much has changed in the way artists work now. I think we have learned that the traditional model for selling an album isn’t the only way of doing things. To be able to create an album where you are in complete control of your own work is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for an artist.”

Of course, it’s not that different from artists who have given away their work with the Daily Mail or Starbucks… but at least with the latter, there’s some bullshit lifestyle choice involved. People associate buying overpriced coffee with stupid Italian names as having an air of sophistication… but Tesco? Really?

Naturally, this album is going to sell by the bucket-load and presumably she’s coining it in by signing an exclusivity deal with Britain’s most notorious retailer… so is this the future of releasing music?

Who wants free stuff? If you do, start jumping up and down on the spot and yell ‘Free stuff! Free stuff!’ now.

Wow – you actually did it. Amazing. So here’s some free stuff then, courtesy of HotUKDeals…

FREE OLAY TOTAL EFFECTS WAKE UP WONDER: Anything that will help us wake up easier is welcome. Just don’t drink the stuff.

FREE EBAY LISTING: For today and tomorrow. Zero insertion fee for everyone except business sellers.

FREE CUPS OF TEA: From Twinings. Two cups – more if you’re into reusing the bags!

FREE RING SIZER: For, erm, sizing your ring.

FREE ENTRY INTO CHESSINGTON WORLD OF ADVENTURES: The only snag is that you have to dress up as Mario (pictured) but you were planning to do that anyway weren’t you?

FREE 22-TRACK SUB POP ALBUM: A sampler from the label that gave us grunge. Thankfully, they’ve given us other stuff since.  Includes tracks from Wolf Parade, The Shins, Flight Of The Conchords and the MIGHTY Iron and Wine.

You know the festival called The Big Chill? Did you know it used to be called The Wanky Balls Festival? No? Well, if you read the Independent recently, that’s what you would have learned:

It won’t surprise you that Big Chill was never called Wanky Balls, Sweaty Nads, Greasy Schlong or anything else for that matter because you see, the bone idle newsrag decided to believe something that was written on a Wikipedia page about the event (screengrab here).

We think you lot should now see this as a challenge to add horsepiss facts to Wikipedia pages before a prominent event is due to receive coverage, to see if you can get them published. Send us the clippings, of course.

[YouDoTooMuch]

Lots of people in the music industry are weighing up ways of stopping people from illegally downloading music. Most of these people own labels and see themselves as out-of-pocket after nurturing and developing new artists. Effectively, they want the money back from someone and they don’t care who has to pay up. However, suing people willy-nilly would be a PR nightmare, so for the time being, they continue to scratch their chins while they make a plan.

However, in a weird turn of events, Gallant Macmillan has got the ball rolling with some mass litigation against 2000 filesharers on behalf of Ministry of Sound record label – which is weird, considering that MoS don’t seem to do much other than make compilations of other label’s bands.

The file-sharers have received threatening legal letters which basically state that they have to cough-up a settlement fee of something in the region of £350 or have the axe hang over them in court with much larger penalties. It seems incredibly heavy-handed.

Even the BPI (British Phonographic Industry) isn’t best pleased with this move. They’re okay with with trying to penalise copyright infringers, but tend to save this action for the most serious abusers.

ExtraTorrent report that some people have panicked and simply stumped up the settlement fee, whilst others have shrugged and binned the letters.

What’s odd about this action is that MoS can’t be certain that the individuals who have received the letter have done anything wrong. The only certainty is that the ISP IP address has been used for filesharing, which of course, could have been hacked or indeed, used by a family member who doesn’t pay the bills.

For the time being, those that have ignored the letter have not heard of any further action but Gallant Macmillan is saying that Ministry of Sound is serious about this action, even though no-one has been summoned to a court as yet.

HMV are continuing with their diversification plans so that they don’t go the same way as the late, lamented Our Price. Not content with planning to open cinemas in their stores, they’re now going toe-to-toe with iTunes and Amazon with the launch of a new music download service, hmvdigital.com.

The move comes after HMV acquired download service 7digital last year, and they say that customers will be able to pre-order tracks, gift purchases to friends and re-download previous purchases for free. It’s a veritable hammer-attack against their cyber-rivals and no mistake.

HMVdigital are promising free tracks for selected early adopters (whatever that means), a limited offer of 40p per track for all Top 40 chart choons and chart albums for only £4.99 at launch. If THAT doesn’t stop you all from nicking your music for free, then NOTHING will.

Picture this: You buy a stack of records from a record shop, frequently enough that the shop owner knows your face. However, someone pinches your credit card and spends a whole load of your cash at the record shop. You’d be pretty pissed off with the store owner for not doing anything about it. Worse still, you don’t like the way he broke into your house and stole all the music you’d previously bought from them, back.

While this seems like fanciful glue-sniffing nonsense, this is the allegory used by Pete Bilderback at the Flowering Toilet blog after Apple’s iTunes stung him after he’d been the victim of  a hacking.

Bilderback says that someone got access to his iTunes account, changed my account name and password, and proceeded to charge almost a thousand dollars worth of merch in a 24 hour period. They bought a load of rubbish music and iPhone apps, despite the fact he didn’t even own an iPhone.

His credit card company got in touch after they smelled a rat and disputed the payment with Apple.

Oddly, Apple’s view on the best way to solve this predicament was to close Bilderback’s iTunes account completely, taking all the protected AAC music files, TV shows and films that he’d purchased with them. Oh, and they won’t answer his calls.

It seems there’s a gaping hole in Apple’s security as this isn’t exactly an uncommon scam. The Japanese Government has made an official inquiry with Apple about its billing practices and it is dicking people out of things that are rightfully theirs. If you’ve spent loads of money with the company and have a library worth of music and film bought from iTunes, it might be worth looking into ways of protecting it. Be it by removing your credit card details or storing your music on an external hard-drive or somesuch. Or, easier yet, buy your music elsewhere or you’ll end up out of pocket and tuneless.

Read the full saga here

This is hardly surprising news, but touts make a lot of money selling tickets for sports and music events on online auction sites getting a decent profit of 59%, according to people who have researched this kind of thing slightly needlessly.

Apparently, if you really put your back into it, a “committed tout” can earn more than £28,000 a year. That’s not a bad wage is it? I bet you can diddle your expenses on your tax as well. According to the research, you only have to sell around 10 tickets a week. Its almost worth thinking about taking it us as a job, eh?

Big events still get the biggest mark up, unsurprisingly. For example, a pair of Paul McCartney tickets sold for £450.

“Fans continue to pour thousands of pounds into the wallets of the touts,” said Mark Hamilton, managing director G4S Events. “But, fans should be aware that in buying tickets from unauthorised outlets, they could find themselves barred from entering events if their tickets are found to be fraudulent, or their identification does not match up with the ticket purchaser.”

Of course, you could side-step the scalpers and get tickets from your fave band at stupidly inflated prices. For example, if you want to watch Bon Jovi (you should be shot) you could fork out £1,200 for ringside seats that come with a black metal folding chair with a gold and cherry-red Bon Jovi logo on the cushion to take home. Or maybe, you’d like to pay £600 to have your tea with The Eagles… BUT NO PICTURES!

Is it any wonder everyone steals music these days?

[NYTimes]

As we anticipated, Google have today launched Android 2.2, to be better known as ‘Froyo’ (no, us neither). But Google wiseguy Vic Gundotra also gave the world a sneak peak of another forthcoming concept – and it’s got the makings of being an iTunes-killer.

Before too long, Android users will be able to download an app from the Android Market and then have it automatically download to all of their Android devices. Now take that concept and apply it to music.

With the new system, you’ll go to the Market, choose a song to buy, click on ‘download’ and it’ll download to all of your Android devices simultaneously (or at least we assume it’ll go to the ones you’ve selected for downloads). Music in the cloud.

Details are still sketchy and no prices have been revealed yet, but it could be another boot in the balls for Apple and their old-fashioned iTunes nonsense. It’s all going to kick off with this one we reckon…

[Tech Crunch]

Spotify is bloody great. It’s the online and mobile app that gives you access to music for free. If you’d prefer not to have poorly produced commercials rammed in your head holes, then you can subscribe to the premium service for £9.99 a month.

Spotify grew quickly in its home country of Sweden, but after several months of establishing its userbase in the UK by allowing free sign-up, they reinforced its invite-only policy. Today, two more ways to use their service have been announced, one of which doesn’t require any invites. The first, Spotify Open, can be signed up for immediately – the downside is that it’s ad-supported and usage is capped to 20 hours per month.

The second new option is Spotify Unlimited for £4.99 a month, which allows unlimited, ad-free access, but none of the Premium features (which still costs £9.99) – offline features include better sound quality, offline access and mobile apps.

Despite initial reservations about a deal with Apple concerning their iPhone app and the lack of a US launch, Spotify are quickly establishing themselves as a must-have service, a service enhanced by community sites – Share My Playlists is the most prolific, with over 18,000 user playlists (as well as playlists from artists and radio stations) that can be searched and played in one click. Free music, free playlists – ideal for the frugal music fan.

What are you looking for today then? A cheap Premier League season ticket? A massive range of cheap downloadable musical albums? A big bottle of cheap salad cream? We’ve got all of them mate.

AND there’s even more over at HotUKDeals too. Makes you glad to be alive doesn’t it?

First off, here’s one if you live in the North West and enjoy spending cold afternoons watching a football team struggle valiantly against relegation from the Premier League. It’s a season ticket for Wigan Athletic for the 2010-2011 season.

You could even get one if you’re a Manchester United fan or another kind of rabid hater of Chelsea and want to see Wigan prevent the Blues from winning the Premier League title this weekend. Go along and give praise from just £250 for the forthcoming season.

Next is a huge collection of mp3 albums all reduced to the low, low price of only £3.00 each. Artists available in the range include Led Zeppelin, Metallica, The Killers, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse.

Of course, there are those who say that pirating music is the only way to go, but they are wrong. Did you know that under new legislation, if you have been caught downloading music illegally three times, Feargal Sharkey will come into your house at night and lick your neck? And he can do it without waking you up as well. He’s good.

Finally today, a good old fashioned bottle of salad cream, all nice and cheap with the summer of barbecues, salads and unusual salad cream-flavoured bedroom horseplay in mind.

It’s the market-leading Heinz brand and is reduced by more than half its RRP at the moment – a 290 gram bottle down from £1.49 to just 72p. Squirt on, you perverts, squirt on…

(deals found by HUKD members never_waz, The Illusive Man and ianshona)

iPhones? Yeah. Only dreary wankers have those right? They’re not so special are they? They’re just stupid gimmicky gadgets which people buy to light up their otherwise drab lives? I mean, apart from a few fun games, they’re pretty pointless. Apple fans? Gits the lot ‘em.

Well Apple haters, get this. A lady who is, shall we say ‘easy on the eye’, has managed to recreate Lady GaGa’s ‘Pokerface’ using just apps on her iPhone. It’s very clever and a fine use of a smartphone. To be honest, I’d rather watch dancing and singing than listen to some anti-Apple twerp moaning about Steve Jobs.

It’s very clever isn’t it? Even non Apple fans and GaGa haters should like this on some level. Anyway, over to you Dear Reader to make blindingly obvious jokes about ‘Engrish’.

The Killers, yesterday, eyes filled with murderous intent

As we pointed out yesterday, we live in troubling times. Would-be terrorists lurk on every street corner, their minds addled with thoughts of creating death and destruction. We are truly living through the War On Terror and every one of us is a soldier, armed not with rifles and bayonets but with vigilance and common sense.

Two of these soldiers work for South West Trains as security staff and when they saw a passenger writing down a list of bands and their songs that included The Killers, they did exactly the correct and proper thing and threw him off the train.

The passenger, 25-year-old Tom Shaw was writing out a list of song titles that his band, The Magic Mushrooms, planned to play at one of their upcoming rock ‘n’pop concerts. The set list included Take Me Out by Franz Ferdinand, Cigarettes and Alcohol by Oasis and Love Me Like You by The Magic Numbers.

It was then that the keen-eyed train security staff intervened, asking potential Jihadist Shaw to disembark at the next station whereupon they ordered him to explain his list song-by-song. Shaw alleges that the security staff told him that he had been questioned because there had been a number of arrests in the area including a man who had murdered his wife. Proof, if proof is needed, that we can’t be too careful in the War On Terror.

A South West Trains spokesnoddy says that Shaw was asked to leave the train as it was busy and the officers needed to speak to him about their concerns. We say they did the right thing. It is but a short leap from listing pop groups to strapping half a ton of explosives to your person and throwing yourself at Wembley Stadium.

Tom Shaw can only be thankful that he wasn’t watching a DVD of the cult 1960s classic movie ‘Blow-Up’ – the officers might well have shot him on sight, and they’d have been fully justified.

Let’s keep ‘em peeled out there…

Half Man Half Biscuit ironically sang about Joy Division oven gloves, as branding the most miserable band in music history is one of the more difficult things to do. That was, I presume, the joke.

However, once, I saw a t-shirt in Urban Outfitters which featured the artwork for the group’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ LP, complete with Mickey Mouse ears slotted into it.

It was a baffling sight as, and correct me if I’m wrong here, it’s hard to imagine Ian Curtis settling down to watch The Little Mermaid or Gummi Bears.

However, we’ve had it wrong all this time. You see, Ian Curtis wasn’t in Joy Division. Nope, a t-shirt found on eBay clearly shows that the Factory band were clearly fronted by Mark E. Smith (click here if the eBay auction vanishes). You thought he was from The Fall didn’t you?

Well, you’re an idiot like me then.

So with that, let’s warm our pipes and sing. All together now – “Love-ah… Love will tear us apart-ah, again-ah…“. Whilst you sing, sport this lovely ‘Bob Marley’ t-shirt – you’ll look the fucking business.

Mick Hucknall is an impressively disliked man. Once, on a trip to Whitby, I discovered that the whole town hates him. After he filmed the video for ‘Holding Back The Years’ there, and essentially, acted like a spoiled little shit throughout, the town has been completely unwilling to stop slagging him off to absolutely any visitor who might mention this fact to them.

One bloke in a pub spat on the floor at the mere mention of his name.

It’s pretty fair to say that Simply Red are not… and have never been… a cool band. Some jumped-up scrawn-bag belting it out under the assumption that he sounds like Marvin Gaye over muzak Casio demo setting ’soul’ was only ever going to win over slightly overweight women who spend most of their day in their dressing gowns and eating scratch cards and Quavers for their tea.

Naturally, Mick Hucknall isn’t the coolest of humans himself, these days, looking like someone drew a face on a cushion and stuck some orange wool on top and tried to pass it off as a Malcolm McLaren bonfire guy.

With that, we shouldn’t be surprised that Simply Red have signed to the hippest, coolest record company in the world – Tesco.

Yep, reducing their product to a similar level of dog food and Value stewing steak (please note, both of these products are the same with different labels on them), Hucknall & Co have signed up with the supermarket giant for the first in a series of albums to be sold exclusively in its stores and via www.tescoentertainment.com.

So yeah. If you don’t even own rudimentary listening holes on your head, you might want to scoot over to Tesco and buy Simply Red butchering the very air that sound passes through.

[Music Week]

Johnny Rotten once sang; “blind acceptance is a sign, of stupid fools who stand in line like EMI“. Yeah. He also sang “And you thought that we were faking, that we were all just money making” before doing a load of butter adverts.

So I don’t know why I included those lines at the start of an article… unless you want to examine just what a vapid, crock of shit the music industry (and musicians) are.

It’s so badly down the shitter currently that EMI is on the bones of its arse. This week, the music group will report that it lost around £1.5bn in the last financial year. That’s a lot of cocaine (aka ‘Flowers and chocolates’) for the hangers on.

This figure is the worst in the firm’s history and follows the take-over of EMI by private equity tycoon Guy Hands three years ago.

Sky’s Mark Kleinman says: “He paid about £3bn for EMI and since then it’s struggled particularly because of the conditions afflicting the music industry but also he has struggled to come to terms with the company’s vast cost base.”

A report in the FT is claiming that Hands will have to ask investors in his Terra Firma private equity group to inject another £100m so it can meet the terms of Citigroup’s loans from earlier this year, largely because of EMI’s failings.

“Guy Hands is taking legal action against Citigroup alleging he was misled during the sale process, so we have a pretty explosive situation here and then this loss will really shake those taking an interest in the company’s future,” said Kleinman.

Could this be curtains for EMI? If it is, it’s all the more shocking seeing as they’ve got some of the biggest names in music on the roster. We’re talking about big unit shifters The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Coldplay, Robbie Williams, Blur and… er… Falco.

Ritch Ames, head of online digital marketing firm Tomorrow Never Knows, said declining sales of albums were partly behind EMI’s woes.

“The trouble for the labels in the current market place is that people don’t like downloading albums, but prefer single tracks, and labels make more money from album sales than single sales. According to BPI figures, 2009 saw a huge jump in single sales, up 32.7%, mainly due to digital downloads, however album sales were down 3.5%.

“EMI’s share of album sales were 7% last year, with albums from Robbie Williams, Queen and Cliff Richard doing the best for them. Compare this to their rivals, 40% for Universal, 32% for Sony BMG and 16% for Warners and you can see they are struggling.”

Since Hands’ Terra Firma group took over, EMI has been in all sorts of trouble. Most publicly, the artists signed to the label have been wanting out. Radiohead couldn’t wait to get away and Roisin Murphy recently stated that she has left EMI because of difficulties she had while recording her second solo album ‘Overpowered’. Joss Stone said she’d waive £2million+ just to jump ship. Last year, there were reports that EMI would stop selling albums to independent retailers in a bid to cut costs.

Things are looking pretty bleak for EMI, no question.

[Sky]