TV has new way to do music shows, and it doesn't involve a television set.
December 18 will see the first episode of From the Basement. There will be stylish, exciting performances from the White Stripes and Thom Yorke; the producer is Nigel Godrich; and the team's credits include The Beatles and Pink Floyd. But the programme will be available only as a series of downloads of individual songs. According to Godrich, his interest lies in "the visual arts side of things, and somehow integrating that into what records have become".
Coincidentally, January sees the launch of Live from Abbey Road on Channel 4, a 60-minute show with stylish, exciting performances from the likes of David Gilmour, The Kooks and Snow Patrol. It claims to sound like an album and look like a movie and I suspect that almost nobody in the UK will watch it.
Why? Because Channel 4 are proposing to premiere it terrestrially at midnight on a Monday. Now that's not exactly a ringing vote of confidence, however many repeats and digital transmissions you factor into the equation.
Against that background, it makes perfect sense for From the Basement to look for a different route that suits the needs of their audience. What it doesn't signal is the end of music TV as we know it.
One of the less-discussed factors in the demise of Top of the Pops earlier this year was the issue of audience availability. For the last few years, both on BBC1 and BBC2, TOTP was scheduled against either Coronation Street or Emmerdale - soaps whose audience was exactly the same as that of TOTP. In a lot of households, it would have been a straight choice: one or the other.
If you don't force that choice, but put music where the people have a realistic chance to watch it, then music on TV begins to look a better bet. You just have to look around: Top of the Pops is back on Christmas Day; TOTP2 (where I'm executive producer) is thriving in Saturday night primetime; Later... is a stronger brand than ever and there's currently more music on BBC1 than there has been for years.
You'd have to do an awful lot of downloads to catch up.
