This is ‘See Me (I Cant See You)’, the latest track from Anniversary Circle and the best thing they’ve done so far. Main songwriter and guitarist Martin Johnson was in a band with me called the Fruit Eating Bears years ago. Our main claim to fame was winning Gary Crowley’s Demo Clash show on BBC Radio London and supporting Divine Comedy at the legendary Bull and Gate in London’s Kentish Town.

Anyway, the track is a cross between late 80s UK goth (circa Banshees) and low-fi new wave, for want of a better description. There’s a fantastic dirty bassline wandering around in there too which brings to mind classic JJ Burnel in his Stranglers heyday.

There’s more music on the bands blog, the choice of which is ‘Winters Children’ and you can grab the MP3 here.

Anniversary Circle
(MySpace)

I recently got hold of a copy of a promo video for one of my tracks from the mid 90s, the 99th Floor Elevators “Hooked”.

I was eager to get a copy of the video, which saw some MTV airtime in Europe, simply to use it as another online tool to promote my dance tracks which have recently been enjoying something of a revival in the UK with a series of new dance mixes.

Anyway, I posted the video on MySpaceTV, YouTube, Facebook and Last FM and it was interesting to see the difference in quality of the video stream and also the feedback reaction.

For a start most people associate online video sharing with YouTube, no ifs and buts about that one and that seems to be reflected in the amount of page views and feedback of my promo video, comparing the four services.

I’m pretty sure most people are still not fully aware that Facebook have branched out into MySpace territory with its Facebook Music spin-off and MySpaceTV has a while to go before it gets similar eyeballs to YouTube.

The difference is noticable (at least using this video as an example). The ‘Hooked’ – 99th Floor Elevators video so far has 2095 views on YouTube vs. 80 on MySpaceTV. The video was posted within twenty four hours on each service.

There does seem to be a noticeable quality difference though, with MySpaceTV winning quite easily with a noticeably superior quality stream compared to YouTube.

Though there is a settings change mentioned here to up the default YouTube stream quality. Facebook have a bigger pixel stream though on the downside there is no embed code like the other sites, just an email link to send the video link.

Related Links

Social Impact of YouTube (Wikipedia)
YouTube The King of Video Sharing? (Mashable.com)
List of Video Sharing Websites (Wikipedia)
New YouTube Developer Tools…..(Wired.com)