Hitting off 2010

WE don’t have to wait long for the contenders to the crown of best album of 2010. The new Hot Chip album is out for starters. The Mercury Prize-nominated electro boffins deliver their fourth album One Life Stand in early February, which carries on perfectly where their last record Made In The Dark left off.

In an age of albums often being nothing more than a collection of singles rather than one coherent entity, it will stand out while still offering the sort of indie dancefloorfillers they’re now famous for.

Corinne Bailey Rae gives us her second album around that time too.

Understandably a number of The Sea’s tracks deal with the accidental death of her husband in 2008, but musically it sees her living up to her early potential as a classic-sounding jazz singer, rather than the chart-lite easy listening star she seemed to morph into.

Sade releases Soldier Of Love in February too, the first album of new material from the British-Nigerian in ten years.

March will see a new album from Goldfrapp too. It’s impossible to know which way the band will go. After three albums of glam-pop, their fourth album, Seventh Tree, was a pastoral, folky gem, which evoked images of maypoles and other age-old typically English traditions.

Later in the year there will also be records from Red Hot Chili Peppers, who are now without the services of guitarist John Frusciante, and Mercury Prize-winners Klaxons, who had their planned follow-up to Myths Of The Near Future scrapped by their record label and were told to get back in the studio and make another record, sharpish.

U2 are also rumoured to be making another album. There were five years between their last two albums, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb and last year’s No Line On The Horizon, but Bono et al are supposedly going back to the studio already.

COULD it possibly be anything to do with the latter album being one of their poorestselling to date?

The Irish mega-band are headlining Glastonbury though, so maybe they want some new songs to play down in the field. The decision to have U2 there has already split fans, but anyone who saw their spectacular world tour recently will know the four-piece are nothing if not swaggering showmen.

Talking of Glastonbury, it’s going to be a belter this year. For one, The Rolling Stones are among the other bands rumoured to be headlining. It’s festival founder – and recent Beard Of The Decade award-winner – Michael Eavis’s last year in charge of Glastonbury. He’s said to be handing over the reins to daughter Emily completely next year, so the 2010 gathering will be extra special. Eavis says the line-up will feature a bigname artist from each of the years it’s been running. A hugely impressive feat if he pulls it off.

While we’re on the subject of festivals, this summer could be quite different to ones in recent memory.

Every summer it seems there are more and more outdoor events to choose from – there were around 400 registered festivals in 2008 alone – but 2009 saw a slight collapse in the industry.

The financial crisis is an obvious explanation for the cancellation of a number of shindigs, but things haven’t improved so significantly that it’ll be back to normal.

There’s still the same appetite for festivals, just not as much money to go around meaning ticket-buyers are more careful with their choices.

As a result, demand for the established festivals such as Glastonbury, Isle Of Wight, V, Leeds and Reading, Latitude and T In The Park will be more fierce than ever, while the smaller, fringe events may be the ones that suffer. Considering the average weekend of music, camping and boozing can cost as much as a week away on the continent, it’s little wonder festival folk are craving a bit of value-formoney.

Downloading music, legally or otherwise, certainly shows no signs of abating. A massive 98 per cent of all singles are now sold online, with around 80 per cent sold on iTunes.

Despite these huge figures, illegal downloading continues to be a hot topic. Could 2010 be the year when a solution to the problem is found?

There are those, of course, who believe illegal downloading isn’t a bad thing at all and there is research to back that theory up. Indeed, some studies show music pirates pour money into the music industry in other ways, namely by going to gigs and by buying merchandise.

That’s all well and good, but that money goes to promoters, venues and the bands. Where’s the money going back to the labels for the development of new talent? Record labels need to move on from the idea that throwing enough money at an artist automatically means some of it will stick.

In the multimedia age, the public are wiser than ever and are less likely to take what they’re fed than ever.

Look no further than the recent campaign to get Rage Against The Machine to the top of the charts instead of Joe McElderry.

For too long Simon Cowell had just assumed the X Factor winner had a divine right to be Christmas No 1, and last year, the public stood up to that. Such a shame the song chosen by Jon and Tracy Morter’s Facebook campaign was so old and not in the least bit seasonal, but still, ten out of ten for effort.

Of course, predictions are all well and good, but as we all know, the most exciting or dramatic events of 2009 were the ones no one saw coming.

Here’s to more of the same.