I should have spotted this years ago: Donald E. Knuth is a legend in the world of Computer Science. His writings, The Art of Computer Programming, should, despite being over 30 years old, be on every software engineer’s bookshelf. There are algorithms in Volume 2, Seminumerical Algorithms that helped me through university.

In 1977, he published a paper in SIGACT News entitled The Complexity of Songs (later reprinted in the Association for Computing Machinery’s main journal), in which he suggests that our predecessors invented choruses in order to reduce the spacial complexity of songs, thus making them easier to remember.

The article is available for download and is entertaining reading, especially for the hilarious schema for ‘Old MacDonald’.

Rumours are abounding that Jay-Z – now free of his obligations to Def Jam – is going to team up with Apple to start a record company.

Please no. My next door neighbour’s terriers are better yappers (sorry, rappers) than Jay-Z. And he like totally ruined Umbrella okay?

When Radiohead were signed to EMI none of their albums were sold on iTunes allegedly because of Apple’s insistence that all tracks had to be available separately, which would have disrupted the artistic nature of the albums.

Now that Radiohead have the freedom to do what they want, In Rainbows is not only available on iTunes but each track is available separately too.

It’s possible that the ‘artistic’ stance that Radiohead used when with EMI was to limit digital sales – given that the band weren’t getting anything from digital sales, according to their contract which hadn’t anticipated them.

Of course, if you’re signed to a label, rather than doing your own thing, even credit card companies get more income per iTunes sale than you do. Fortunately, Radiohead, like many wised-up artists, are going alone – so they receive the label income and the artist income.

I’m not about to reveal my favourite albums of 2007 – these will take their usual leisurely time to appear and once again include albums that weren’t released this year. Nor am I going to reflect on specific music – it’s all in this blog anyway.

Instead just a simple acknowledgement of how the community around last.fm can do wonders. I’d like to thank all my last.fm friends and especially undrentide72 and jadedingenue for prodding me in the direction of new music. This is a roundabout way of thanking Hannah Fury for revitalising my love of music and teaching me to feel every note and every word, to wear each song and to continuously dig for more. Each listen bringing new discoveries.

It’s no coincidence that 2007 also saw more growth in the democratisation of music – bringing artists and fans closer together. Kristin Hersh and L7’s Donita Sparks launched CASH Music, Trent Reznor split from Universal/Interscope and Radiohead did their thing with In Rainbows (which in its brief ‘pay whatever you want’ run netted the band more income from digital sales than all their previous albums put together.)

Music is only the start. Direct connections between providers and consumers will grow throughout 2008. Distributors of content and the physical stores associated with them should be very afraid.

I have few expectations for music of next year, apart from a regular arrivals of something from Kristin Hersh. Surprise me! However, I live with the hope that Butterfly Boucher will release her second album, probably named Scary Fragile, early in 2008. The Breeders have Mountain Battles scheduled for release in March and Rochdale’s electronic duo Autechre should release Quaristice in April. Goldfrapp will release Seventh Tree in February, but I think most people who care will have heard it already given it leaked in November. See above. There’ll also be albums from Terami Hirsch and her tantalising side project Story Of My Ghost.

I also want more stuff from Ayria and from fellow Canadian Emm Gryner (will happen), I want Sleater-Kinney to reform (won’t happen), I want Electrelane to reform (might happen), I want to receive my Pretty Balanced albums. And finally, I want George Pringle to release something. Yeah, okay I might be a year late here and I know I can get hold of Carte Postale and I can listen to her tracks on last.fm or MySpace and I know that Poor EP, Poor EP Without a Name is due out in March, but still. All this waiting just sucks.

And I want musicians to start blogging properly. This means not using MySpace or Facebook – ‘cos that’s like trying to paint the Mona Lisa on the back of a beermat, when you’re in a pub full of strangers. Oh, and private blogs are so bizarre, so they don’t count either. No, I mean a proper regularly updated blog with music and photos and comments. For everything. None of this separation of news from other content. It’s all the same. It’s all about engaging with your audience.

After all the joyous congratulatory news items that welcomed Radiohead’s decision to release In Rainbows as a ‘pay whatever you want’ download, the skies have cleared and Radiohead have decided that it’s time for this to stop.

Yes folks, we’re rolling back to the traditional outlets and traditional paid-for downloads for the CD release of the album – via XL Recordings – on 31 December 2007. According to c|net News, Radiohead are even negotiating with iTunes, which they’ve previously avoided because they reckoned they were obliged to sell tracks individually (which was a wrong assumption).

Next step? Radiohead sign to major label and normal service is resumed. Remember folks, follow the money..

News arrived yesterday that the Warner Music Group is considering switching to a month-to-month deal with Apple, when its existing contract expires at the end of the year. If this goes ahead, Warner will join Universal Music in this position. A month-to-month deal allows content providers to be free to deal with other distributors.

It could lead to music appearing, then disappearing from iTunes, and perhaps also incomplete catalogues of music from artists. Users of iTunes would have to trawl other online stores to get their music, with the inevitable incompatibility and variable DRM issues. The same would probably apply to users of other distributors. There are parts of the music industry hell bent on breaking the iTunes virtual monopoly at the expense of their own survival.

This left me wondering if there is a service that currently allows me to search across lots of music distributors in one go, and pick from the one I want.

There is: it’s called BitTorrent. Hmm.

Tori Amos Bootlegs are available for some of her US shows. More will be added as and when the relevant shows are finished.

Available for purchase in MP3 or FLAC format.. if you live in the US that is.. or Canada ‘shortly’.. and you have Java installed (which you might have, even if the site says you haven’t).. and if you can get the download software.. and if you can actually buy the show you want.

And people wonder why iTunes dominates.

One of the inevitabilities of subscription digital music services is that when you stops subscribing you lose all that you’ve been downloading. The same goes for when that service is withdrawn. This is why subscription music is a bad idea.

Virgin Digital is in the process of being shut down. A process that will complete by 19 October 2007. Subscribers to this service could not (obviously) burn downloaded music to CD, so after that date there’ll be no more music for them to listen to – even if they downloaded it.