You may have noticed that Hypeful was down for a couple of hours today courtesy of Katy Perry and her representatives at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). It seems Katy/IFPI were not happy with Hypeful hosting a remix of one of Perry’s songs, which was previously available as a free download from Perry’s very own MySpace page. Rather than contact me personally to remove the track in question, they went directly to my hosting provider and had my site suspended - not cool.

Hypeful’s primary purpose is to help spread the love and good word about artists and their work that I think others would enjoy. Based on my experiences in the past year, I have to say that I’ve found that 95% of the musicians featured on Hypeful and their representation have been extremely great and cooperative towards my site. Accordingly, whenever someone has had a problem with the materials that appear on Hypeful (which is rare), I have honored their requests and worked in an expedite manner to rectify the situation.

I like to keep things, well, hypeful on Hypeful, so I hope you will pardon my ranting. I’ve had similarly absurd experiences with other artists and I know other blogs that have had to deal with these ongoing and ridiculous anti-piracy tactics. (Last month, Berkeley Place did an ace job of addressing this topic!)

Although Hypeful is back up and running, I still feel this situation has left a bit of a quandary for this site in preventing further host take-downs and dealing with non-cooperative artists. For the time being and per the IFPI’s requests, you can obviously expect a lot less love for Katy Perry around these parts. I’m going to grab a beverage and cool down, but may have more to add to the the topic later on.

Thanks for your support of Hypeful and allowing me a bit of time on the ol’ soapbox!

After flipping up the traditional music sales model, Thom Yorke has told The Hollywood Reporter that Radiohead is unlikely to repeat the pay-what-you-like offer used to launch their latest album In Rainbows for their next release. However, the groundbreaking move toward quasi-free music has been adopted by a number of other big artists, including Coldplay who began giving away its new single “Violet Hill” free of charge on Tuesday. In the 24 hours since it was made available, Coldplay’s new single is a certifiable digital success having been downloaded by over 600,000 people.

For those of you growing tired of your Meg White sex tape, Vivid Entertainment is reportedly planning to release a 40-year-old sex tape they’ve somehow acquired featuring guitar God, Jimi Hendrix. The film (creatively titled Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape), shot in 8mm, is 11 minutes long and shows an obviously experienced Hendrix having sex with two women. The film will make its *ahem* premiere online today, followed by the release of a DVD scheduled for release on May 6th. (Obvs, all links are NSFW!)

MP3:
Jimi Hendrix - “Message of Love”

Coldplay have made the first single from their upcoming album, Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends (June 12th), available as a free download on the band’s website. The track, “Violet Hill”, was made available at 7:15 a.m. ET today and will be available as a free download from the website for one week. What do you think of Chris Martin and company’s new harder, more experimental sound? Is it a shrinking violet or are you happy to hear that it’s not all yellow?

MP3:
Coldplay - “Violet Hill”

Despite previous reports, superproducer Mark Ronson has confirmed that he and Amy Winehouse have started work on the theme song to the forthcoming James Bond film, Quantam Of Solace, despite the duo not officially being signed up to release the official film song. Ronson added the following to BBC Music Week:

“Hopefully it will get used. But I don’t think we’ve been guaranteed it, so we’re working on it and we’ll see happens. They asked Amy, and I think Amy said that if she did it, she’d want to do it with me. So hopefully something will come of it. The demo sounds like a James Bond theme, hopefully. But I don’t know if it’ll get used. I’m sure there are loads more really famous people that probably we’re competing with and we don’t know about. I’m not sure, but hopefully I’ll still be alive for at least 12 more Bond themes. If we don’t get this one maybe we’ll get another one.”