The NBC programming that went missing from iTunes last December has finally turned up in the Zune marketplace. Fans of The Office, Heroes, and 30 Rock can once again pay to download episodes of their favorite programs — provided they own a Zune and a Windows PC.

Given the Zune’s miniscule market share it’s curious to see any network choosing Microsoft’s media platform over iTunes for paid downloads. When NBC pulled its programming from iTunes, network officials sniffed at the relatively small sales the Apple service had generated. By comparison, sales in the Zune marketplace are bound to redefine the term “nano”.

Clearly this move isn’t about selling digital content online. NBC seems to be more interested in punishing Apple for exercising control over iTunes pricing than it is in actually expanding the market for legal downloads.

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The biggest running joke is all of rock music, of course, has become the imminent release of the next Guns N’ Roses album, Chinese Democracy which is due to come out, either any day now or never. Even Syd Barrett was able to make a couple of solo albums after he went crazy, Axl.

However, Neil Young fans know that the wait for Chinese Democracy is nothing compared for how we’ve been waiting for Archives, the career-spanning box set that he’s been promising since — shit — Guns N’ Roses was just becoming the biggest band on the planet. We’ve been waiting for so long that his length of time that Archives can cover has actually doubled.

While some performance CDs have been released (the awesome Live at the Fillmore East and the not quite as awesome Live at Massey Hall, the bulk of the material assumed to be on Archives has only been available on bootlegs. Well, yesterday, Neil has made his latest announcement concerning Archives. The first 10 discs are coming out this fall. Whoo-hoo! On Blu-Ray. D’oh!

So despite the fact that I’ve been looking forward to this for nearly 20 years, right now I’m kinda disappointed.

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In case you haven’t seen it, the next Rolling Stone magazine has the girls from MTV’s The Hills on the cover.

Really? The girls from The Hills? That’s the best Rolling Stone could do this week? Wow. Really?

Look, I realize that criticizing Rolling Stone for abandoning their original music-oriented mission by putting actors, models and other non-musicians on the cover started in earnest over twenty years ago, when Jann Wenner started putting his Hollywood buddies on the cover, so this isn’t about that.

I don’t really have an issue with their long-ago morphing into a general pop-culture magazine. After all, had they stuck to just covering music, we wouldn’t have had Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe or PJ O’Rourke or Matt Taibbi, just to name a few non-music writers that they’ve featured over the years.

Nor do I have an issue with them trying to stay relevant for what is now the third generation of kids they’re trying to deal with. New generations have new popular culture icons, I get that. Maybe these girls are the Kurt Cobain or Johnny Depp of the Millennial Generation.

Maybe. So why does this week’s cover feel like a new low?

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A while back, Kirk wrote an article called “Prepare for the Worst: 4 Simple Digital Media Backup Solutions.” One of the options was the digital Music Locker at MP3tunes, where you could upload your music and store it, secure and password-protected.

This is not file-sharing. File-sharing is, of course, the digital equivalent of what music fans have been doing since the dawn of time: turning other people on to music they love. This is really the exact opposite: it is more akin to locking your music in a safe deposit vault, where only you have the key.

Apparently, EMI didn’t think so, and sued MP3tunes, essentially trying to shut down online storage of music for any purpose whatsoever.

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How I Met Your Mother is one of the three funniest shows on TV right now, along with The Office and 30 Rock. However, because it’s on the normally sucky CBS, it gets very little love and very little attention, except when they do things like stuntcast Britney Spears.

Sigh. They don’t need Britney, not when they have great comic actors like Neil Patrick Harris,Cobie Smulders, Josh Radnor, Alyson Hannigan and the absolutely awesome Jason Segel.

For the uninitiated, the framing device of the show is simple: in the year 2030 (still no flying cars, sadly), this guy Ted is telling his kids the story of how he met their Mother. That’s it: nearly every episode starts with a shot of highly uninterested teenage kids staring in the camera while a voiceover starts the week’s episode with a “Kids, let me tell you …), before flashing back to the present with that week’s part of the story of how he met their Mother.

Seems simple enough, but within that framing device lurks misdirections, fast-forwards, flashbacks, Rashomon-like POV changes, and, so far, no concrete idea of who The Mother actually is. And oh yeah, lots and lots and lots of great jokes.

At its best, it is, in a word, awe–

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Bravo, Bravo! You have finally done it! You have taken one of the best websites ever to grace the internet, and in just a little over space of a year, you have turned it into a garishly unusable pile of synergy-laden shit.

Awesome!!

When you took over TWOP last year, I said I wasn’t worried. Well, you showed me. Turns out, I’m a fracking idiot. Who knew that when I professed my love for this site after it had been one of my top destinations for years that it would all end so . . . badly. Well, I guess you did, huh, Bravo?

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Previously, on An Early History of R.E.M.: We have complex, life-long relationships with the bands we love . . . It’s a piece written in 1991 . . . R.E.M. is discovered via Trouser Press flexi-disc . . . Chronic Town was their first EP . . . Murmur becomes an obsession . . . The R.E.M. lyric-deciphering party . . . Later on came Reckoning . . . The great American rock underground coalesced . . . R.E.M. is the “acceptable edge of the unacceptable stuff,” so they’re on a lot of TV shows . . . Interviewing Bill Berry . . . Fables of The Reconstruction of The Fables . . . R.E.M., back in Fresno . . . Their big rock albums . . . The long wait before Out of Time . . . How do you reconcile huge success, when you were originally a group of arty college-age bohos who somehow got world famous for doing exactly what you wanted to do?

And now, the exiting conclusion to An Early History of R.E.M.!!

Written in March, 1992. Published in Rotting America in Summer, 1992

It’s been almost a year since I first posed that question (which just goes to show you how things really work in the wild, wooly, unedited, and unpaid world of ‘zines), and since then R.E.M. have racked up the accolades for Out of Time. They have become the mainstream — winning MTV’s video awards, Rolling Stone’s readers poll, and even a Grammy for “Best Alternative Album.”

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Kassia is fond of saying that around ‘Loper HQ, April Fools isn’t a day, it’s a season. However, this year, real life has gotten in the way, so in honor of that, I’ve decided to point out a few actual real things that are far more absurd than most of the jokes you’ll see today.

Let’s begin, shall we.

• Continuing Record Company Cluelessness About the 21st Century
  Last week, there was an article in Entertainment Weekly about the rush-release of the new Gnarls Barkley album. Apparently, the fact that it leaked online a few weeks early caught Atlantic records by surprise.

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Longtime readers of this site (that would be Will and John) know that there are consumer products to which we’ve never been very kind. These products include Microsoft’s Zune, anything from DuroSport Electronics and of course SpiralFrog, the major label-sponsored website that allows you to download DRM’d music for FREE! All you have to do is ignore some ads.

After first making fun of the concept, then making fun of the amazingly long time to market, and finally, making fun of the thing itself, I figured that I was done with ever writing about it ever again. Hell, I thought I was done with ever thinking about it again.

Until last night.

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Just six months after the launch of its mp3 music service, Amazon has emerged as the number two digital music retailer. While Apple still has a huge lead, that lead seems to be dwindling quickly.

The major labels may see this as some form of progress in their efforts to break Apple’s perceived monopoly in the digital music market, but the truth is they are very likely creating a new problem for their industry.

Despite the fact that the majors have begun licensing the rights to distribute DRM-free tracks to multiple retailers, Amazon seems to be the only company that has a clue about building a successful online marketplace. As a result, Amazon could quickly become something of a de facto monopoly for legal mp3 downloads. That’s astounding when you consider that the marketplace for unprotected music downloads should be wide open and highly competitive.

The formula for building a successful digital music marketplace seems relatively easy. Consumers want access to a wide selection of reasonably priced DRM-free music, presented in a well organized marketplace that supports all computing platforms. Retailers who expect to compete should offer decent search and discovery capabilities, and maybe even a few social features. This is 2008, after all.

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