September 29th marked the six month anniversary of the launch of the Irish Times blog section. The first of their blogs to go live was Jim Carroll's On The Record (the first entry of which was posted on March 29th). The Present Tense, Pricewatch and Correspondant blogs soon followed, although the latter of these was only active until shortly after the General Election.

Thankfully, from the off, the decision was taken to not lock the blogs up behind the 'Premium content' wall that cuts off most of the Irish Times website. If they had been, the blogs certainly would not have seen the success nor secured the extensive visibility they have in the Irish blogosphere. On the Record in particular has made its mark as a must visit blog for anyone in Ireland with a healthy interest in the music scene and industry.

The success of these blogs however is not just reflected in the number and quality of informative blog entries (and it must be said equally informative comments left on the blogs) but also in the raw numbers of links the blogs have attracted in this short space of time. When it comes to the interweb it is the links your site (or blog) manages to attract from others that plays a vital role in making or breaking your site. So how can you measure the number of links a site (or an individual page on a site) has received? Yahoo's "Site Explorer" tool is widely accepted by those with an interest in such matters as being the most accurate tool to do so. At the time of writing this tool throws up the following number of links from other websites ("Inlinks") that each Irish Times blog has attracted:

• 38,965 inlinks for 'On the record' (Jim Carroll) 
• 35,309 inlinks for 'Present tense' (Shane Hegarty)
• 1,209 inlinks for 'Pricewatch' (Conor Pope) 
• 824 inlinks for 'Correspondent' (Mark Hennessy)

This adds up to total of 73,307 inlinks, an impressive enough figure on its own. But even more so when you consider that, over its 8 or so year life, the entire Ireland.com website has managed to attract a total of 525,745 inlinks. In a nutshell the blogs, in the space of six months, now attract over 14% of all links to Ireland.com.

All this new 'link love' is going to have a consequence for the blogs, and for the other freely accessible, non-premium parts of the site. I'm over-simplifying here but, in effect, thanks to this 'link love' pages on these blogs can expect to rank more highly on search engines for relevant key word searches than many other similar pages recieving less link love. In addition the 'link love' will be seen by the search engines to 'leak' to other (non-premium parts) of the Ireland.com site raising the potential of those pages to rank more highly in search engine result pages.

The consequence of this? Well for one, an increase in the number of visits referred to Ireland.com by the search engines. I'll stick my head out a bit and venture that the Ireland.com backroom geek team - if they have their eye on the ball - is already seeing this happen. And in 2007 more visits from the search engines mean you can serve up more advertisements, meaning more moolah to be made.

It is this exact cycle that recently made the NY Times realise that charging for access to certain parts of their website meant they were actually losing money. Big time. Hence their decision to drop their premium pay-to-read sections. Their entire site – including their archives – is now totally now free to browse.

Ireland.com however seems to be going in the other direction. They don't just continue to insist you pay to access the vast majority of articles (EUR 79 a year to access the last 10 years of articles), but they have also gone and introduced a new 'Premium Plus' subscription (for a whopping EUR 395 a year) to access their full archive dating back to 1859.

Asking your readers to pay to access content is soooo 2001. It is simply no longer a growth industry. The growth curve now lies with online advertising which is becoming (if it is not already) the primary source of potential revenues for non e-commerce websites. And if you choose to lock up 99% of your content behind pay-walls (as Ireland.com do) you are also making an active choice to restrict your ability to pull in the (growing) online advertising revenues out there.

My guess is that in recent years Ireland.com was not seeing much growth in their basic subscription revenues and they did the opposite of what they should have - they introduced yet another premium service (the 359 euro a year 'Premium Plus' product) in the hope it would grow their income and get them out of the loss making situation they are in (EUR 180,000 loss in 2006). Indeed publicly available tools for measuring the popularity of websites (such as Alexa.com or Compete) show that over the last 12 months the full Ireland.com site (see Alexa data in the first graph, Compete.com data in second graph below) has not been a period of explosive growth. The success of the blogs has itself not been enough to reverse the tide (yes, yes, I am fully aware that these tools are not perfectly accurate, but for the purposes of this discussion they, together, can be taken as a strong indication of traffic trends).

Thankfully for Ireland.com they also decided to try out a bit of blogging outside of their 'pay wall'. In doing so they managed - as we have seen - to attract a huge number of links, not just attracting a new set of visitors to the blogs but also, I am sure, increasing the ranking of of Ireland.com pages (but only the 1 or so % of pages that are 'non-premium') in search engine result pages. In the right hands this translates into potentially very serious increased revenues. Imagine however the links (i.e. traffic, hence ad revenue) they could generate if all their content - not just 1% - was free to access?

Bottom line? Ireland.com has more to benefit by going subscription-free than it does hiding behind a pay wall. My guess? The wall will be dismantled within 6 months. Hopefully Hotpress.com will also see the light and drop their insistence on paying to access hotpress.com content.

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I came across Angus and Julia Stone when I was chatting a record store guy in Bondi Junction and I asked him to put a CD in my hand that he thought I would love. That CD was a compilation of the 2 EPs they had recorded to date - Heart Full of Wine and the charming Chocolates and Cigarettes.

I was completely hooked. One of the key characteristics of this Sydney North Shore sibling band is that each one writes songs that are instantly identifiable - Angus is more a strum-a-long Elliott Smith type whilst Julia veers from acoustic Bjork to a kind of breathy Joanna Newsom folk sound.

They recently recorded their debut album in the UK (where they fell under the wing of Fran Healy of Travis fame). The album is called A Book LIke This and this is the lead off single, The Beast. I find it uttlerly beguiling and it's a lovely video too.

The Beast is very much an Angus song. Julia's music is a little more challenging, but it's part of the drama of this band. Have a listen to I'm Yours.

I can't wait to see these guys live. By all accounts, it's like seeing two acts... the other melds into the background during each song. But... I'm waiting until a certain someone who's currently in the UK beats a path to my door here in Sydney before I book some tickets. I have a feeling it will be a night that I want to share.

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France's biggest music star, Manu Chao (right), is playing at the Big Top in the Phoenix Park on Sunday 4 November.

Tickets, costing €35.60 plus 'booking fee' (i.e. the cost of shoving them in an envelope) have just gone on sale on the Ticketmaster website and at those famous 'usual outlets'. Tough luck if you're hoping to grab some for you and your seven mates: tickets are limited to six per person.

Chao's current album, 'La Radiolina', is currently doing great chart-topping business across Europe, and his live shows are renowned for being energetic and exciting. He may not be a household name in Ireland, but Chao is a million-selling artist across the world, with huge support in South America and continental Europe.

Expect this gig to sell out very quickly...

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Thanks to Merrill from French Friday for letting us know about this: cult '80s French popstars Les Rita Mitsouko are playing at the newly-refurbished Whelan's in Dublin on Wednesday 17 October.

The duo - singer Catherine Ringer and instrumentalist Fred Chichin - are currently promoting their most recent album, 'Variety', released in April of this year in both French and English versions. Whichever language you listen to it in, though, it's a fairly unspectacular collection of jangly MOR guitar pop.

However, most punters won't care about this, as they will probably be there to hear the French band's fantastic 1980s material. Colourful, brash, bizarre, kitsch, eclectic - singles like 'Marcia Baila' and 'Andy' sound like pop music à la Jean Paul Gaultier. This is a compliment.

In an earlier post we told you all you needed to know about Les Ritas: the explanation of their strange name, the story behind 'Marcia Baila', and Ringer's now-legendary TV clash with Serge Gainsbourg.

We definitely recommend that our Francophile Irish readers check them out. Tickets are available from those usual outlets you know and love.

However, all the French people in Ireland will want to be there - and as there are a lot of French people in Ireland, we reckon that (a) tickets will sell out in Arcade Fire-style time, or (b) it'll all get moved to somewhere bigger.

(We've already mentioned the Dublin promoter who booked Manu Chao - million-selling global star - to play a 2004 show in... Whelan's. The concert eventually took place in... The Point. It doesn't look like today's promoters are any more clued-in to non-Anglophone music and the potential market of non-Irish audiences in Ireland.)

Anyway, here's Les Rita Mitsouko with their hit single 'Andy'. As we said before, only French people can make music like this:

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Here's another gem from the Take Away Shows/Concerts A Emporter, the Paris outdoor-session series by Vincent Moon on French music blog La Blogotheque which we featured recently.

Named after a city not exactly conducive to street performance, it's Beirut performing (almost appropriately - right country, wrong town) 'Nantes', from their new album 'The Flying Club Cup'.

Our trendier Paris readers will recognise the mural wall as the gable end of Café Charbon on rue Oberkampf, one of the city's hippest bohemian café-bars.

You can also watch Beirut playing 'The Penalty' (also from the new album)in a bar further down the rue Oberkampf (we recognised the Hotel Luna Park), and read about the background to this session.

Make sure you check out the full archive of performances in the Take Away Show series, each accompanied by a short article in English or French. And if your French is good enough, La Blogotheque is quite good too.

Anyway, as we were saying, voici 'Nantes' by Beirut live on a street in Paris:

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Amazon's MP3 store went live yesterday (well, it opened its doors as a public beta) on the US Amazon site. At a quick glance it is an impressive offering for a Beta:

• All MP3s they sell are without any form of copy-protection.
• About 2 million songs are available for purchase which, for a freshly launched public beta service, compares favourably to eMusic and Apple (who claim 2.7 million and three million tracks respectively).
• Half of the songs are priced at US $0.89, the rest at US $0.99. This is cheaper than iTunes DRM-free MP3s ($1.29 each), but eMusic still offers a better deal to US downloaders
• Prices for complete album downloads are in the US $6-$10 range.
• Unlike many other online music stores you don't need iTunes or Windows Media player to download, play or manage the tracks, even so…
•  …Amazon offer an application (for Macs and PCs) that you can download that automatically adds Amazon MP3s to your iTunes or Windows Media Player music library.
• Downloaded tracks can be played on any PC, portable MP3 players or mobile phones that support MP3.
• The MP3s are encoded towards the higher end of MP3's sonic capabilities (256 kbs) and using the (somewhat) more efficient Variable Bit Rate format.
• Of the major labels EMI & Universal have provided the store with (some of) their catalogues.
• Smaller labels at launch include Righteous Babe, HighTone, Madacy Entertainment, Sanctuary, Trojan, Rounder, Sugar Hill and Alligator.
• Radiohead MP3s are being sold by Amazon, the first MP3 store to do so). But no individual tracks, only full Radiohead albums can be bought.

On the downside for the Amazon store:

• Warner and Sony BMG artists are absent. And a large swath of Universal's catalogue is not yet in the store.
• There is no word yet on when Amazon.co.uk will start offering downloads.
• Each MP3 has a 'digital watermark'. However Amazon confirmed that this only contains data indicating that the MP3 was purchased on Amazon. It does not have a unique signature that can identify the purchaser (in other words, it doesn't represent a threat to privacy).
• There is no indication that Amazon plan to deploy the very innovative MP3 pricing model of Amie Street, the small MP3 store they recently acquired (with their pricing model MP3s are initally totally free to download but as more people start to download the song the price rises, up to a predetermined maximum, previously 98 US cents).
• Only customers with US addresses can purchase MP3s.

This last point is obviously a major stickler for those of us over here in Europe but I found that Amazon doesn't enforce this too strictly. Or not yet at least. I discovered that if you have a US address among your shipping addresses you are allowed to purchase a song, even if your billing address is outside of the US. How long this will be allowed remains to be seen but I, with a US shipping address among my registered addresses and a European billing address, had no problems purchasing an MP3. With the current strong Euro against the dollar these downloads represent a fair price to European-based music fans.

With Amazon's announcement, copy protected MP3s are clearly on the way out. Here is one area where Apple is not leading marketplace innovation. But more worrying to Apple must be the fact that the Amazon MP3 store - with its considerable reach to mainstream consumers - represents the most serious competition yet to iTunes.

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Marseille is the Cork of France. Both cities are ports on the south coast. The two have a very independent attitude and distinctive mindset (exemplified by Eric Cantona and Roy Keane).

And both share an intense rivalry with the capital city (the terrace scenes during PSG v OM games look terrifying and insane even just on television).

[If we were to extend our Ireland-France analogy, that would make Kilkenny equal Lyon (cultural city, always champions of their sport), Limerick = Bordeaux (the latter a recent temporary home to Irish rugby), Tramore = Saint Tropez (glamorous coastal resort) and Clones = Paris (self-explanatory). And Dingle would be Biarritz. But we digress.]

Having swatted away the hapless Irish in Paris last Friday, the French rugby team will be in Marseille this weekend for their final group match on Sunday, against Georgia (while expecting - DEMANDING - that Ireland beat Argentina at the Parc des Princes later that day so that Les Bleus can avoid a dreaded Cardiff quarter-final against the All-Blacks).

One well-known Irish rugby fan will, to his misfortune, be in Marseille rather than Paris this weekend. Neil Hannon and his Divine Comedy are playing the Marsatac festival on Saturday night.

Now in its ninth year, Marsatac 2007 also features Architecture In Helsinki, Kill The Young, Simian Mobile Disco, The Cinematic Orchestra and many others.

Hannon is an unlikely figure to be seen in the southern port city. The foppish Fermanagh man is adored by the intellectually-élite Parisian bobo (bourgeois bohemian) community, and belongs more in Le Marais, the capital's bobo quarter, than Marseille, home to some aggressive Paris-hating French rap. He may need a Scarlet Pimpernel to get him out of the city after the show.

The Divine Comedy's set in Marseille is unlikely to feature their most French song. At their Paris show last year 'The Frog Princess' wasn't played, perhaps omitted diplomatically.

Now your blogger has plenty of love for his French friends (and yes, the occasional Frog Princess) - but after last Friday's result, the triumphalist gloating we've had to endure, and the danger to us if Ireland don't do France a favour on Sunday, who could blame us if we reach for the guillotine? Here's 'The Frog Princess':

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In recent months there has been growing talk of services that would allow music fans to download legal MP3s for free, thanks to the support of ads. While a number of services are already seeing the light of day the bad news is that not all of them can be used by music fans outside of the USA or Canada.

Take Spiral Frog. Launched last week (6 months after they originally planned) they describe themselves as a "Web-based, ad-supported music experience, combining music discovery with the free acquisition of audio and music video files". Right. Boiling it down to brass tacks, they currently have 800,000 tracks licensed from Universal Music and several independent labels that you can download for free, all supported by ads. Unfortunately though if you're based outside the US or Canada you can't sign up for their service so I haven't been able to check how intrusive their ads are. The word however is that users will have to put up with a 90 second advert before a track can be downloaded (advertisers signed up include Chevrolet, Colgate and Burger King). That translates to about 15 minutes of ads if you want to download a 10 track album… As of yet there's no indication if an advertisement will also be embedded into each file.

We7.com on the other hand offers a similar service but a) they allow music fans outside North America to sign up for their service and b) you do not have to watch an ad before being allowed to download a track. Instead up to 10 seconds of an ad is embedded at the start of the MP3. Launched last April, WE7 has Peter Gabriel behind it and V2 records are on board. I gave it a test run and it does pretty much what it says on the tin. It looks like they haven't yet filled their ad inventory as tracks I downloaded had a short generic WE7 ad 'grafted' onto the beginning of the MP3 (192 kbs bit rate BTW), but then again they are still in Beta. Whether a short embedded ad that you will hear each time the track is played is going to be considered intrusive is really an individual call. No doubt though it'll only be a matter of time before some code monkey comes up with a separate tool that automatically cuts the 10 seconds of an ad out of your MP3s.

QTrax, another ad-supported MP3 service, is due to launch later this year. They say they will give users legal access to 25 million tracks and do so using peer to peer technologies. No idea yet how they plan to integrate ads into their service, but considering it will be using P2P technolgies I guess the most likely scenario is that it has to be ads embedded in each MP3 file.

Do these sort of services have a future? Impossible to say with the sands shifting as music industry tries to find its digital feet. But it is encouraging to see - at long last - major labels embrace services that are free both in terms of cost and Digital Rights Management.

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Matt Cutts (a Google employee whose blog I dip into for nerdy hints on how Google's search engine works) last week posted, as a diversion from his usual geeky stuff, a blog entry about a fledgling business idea he had that touches directly on music and how it is consumed today.

His idea (which BTW he has no intention to follow up on) was for a company to provide a service of making someone's illegal MP3s legal. Something along the lines of allowing the company to scan your music collection for illegal file-shared MP3s and to convert them to legal MP3s (with high quality bitrates and maybe cover art, lyrics, etc). (Obviously there are privacy & trust concerns with letting a company scan your computer in such a way. But for the sake of exploration let's assume that a company offering such a hypothetical service is a) considered trustworthy by its targeted consumers and b) addresses privacy concerns.)

Now with the CLUAS faithful being a law-abiding lot, you're not going to have such illegal MP3s scattered across your digital devices. But if you did, would you be prepared to pay to make them legal? If so what's the most you'd be prepared to pay per MP3? In his blog post Cutts floats scenarios where the cost to the consumer could be kept low (and potentially even free) by, for example:

• anonymizing the data and licensing the anonymised data to various businesses;
• Making ancillary revenues by getting people to sign up with other music services (Pandora, Last.fm, or Rhapsody, etc);
• Not even making money on it. Using such as service as a way to build brand recognition or positive karma.

An idea like this that was knocked up quickly is going to be full of holes, some of which could be plugged, others which perhaps can't. Leaving that aside for the moment, the truth is there is a pretty big potential market out there. I don't know if anyone has ever estimated the number of illegal MP3s that have been downloaded from the interweb, but we have to be talking multiple billions, and I hazard a guess that more people than you'd imagine would be keen to clear their conscience by "legalising" their illegal downloads.

So would you pony up to make illegal MP3s legal? And if so how much? Or maybe you couldn't care less. Answers on a postcard. Or, failing that, in the comments section below.

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Chapeau to our Icelandic friend Ulfar for tipping us off about this ages ago (and reminding us this weekend): French music site La Blogotheque has a brilliant feature called Take Away Shows (in French, Concerts à Emporter) where indie bands visiting Paris are filmed playing an impromptu live set in unusual locations.

A typical Take Away Show usually (but not always) features the act performing on the streets of Paris before a handful of bemused onlookers. It's a great opportunity to see acoustic or stripped-down versions of great tunes by your favourite indie acts.

Since starting in May 2006 the series has featured the likes of Arcade Fire (live in a freight elevator: how scarce were tickets for THAT?), Andrew Bird, The Divine Comedy, Tapes N' Tapes, The Shins, The National (in Perpignan in southern France), Beirut and any hip alternative act you care to mention.

La Blogotheque's posts and articles are only in French - but the Take Away Shows come in French or English with a short text describing how each performance came to be staged.

The Take Away Shows are unmissable: take some time to browse through the archive. To whet your appetite, here's the aforementioned show by Arcade Fire (backstage before their Paris Olympia show last April) performing 'Neon Bible' and 'Wake Up',  where everybody ends up in a freight elevator:

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