Sony Apologizes to Bradford Cox for Deleting His Online Recordings

The key part to note here: Deerhunter is not actually signed to a Sony-affiliated label. Oops! It appears that this was a case of the misdirected takedown notice. We love Deerhunter’s newest album Halycon Digest by the way, especially the songs “Coronado” and “Helicopter.”

Label giant Sony Music took the liberty of deleting four of Bradford Cox’s MP3 albums he posted on Deerhunter’s blog last week inexplicably. Now, they’ve apologized.“Apparently Sony Music Owns my bedroom,” Cox said at the news of the initial interruption. The label removed the Atlas Sound home recording files, Bedroom Databank Vol. 1-4, without consulting Cox. Not to mention that neither Cox, Atlas Sound or Deerhunter is on a Sony-affiliated label. “Feel free to call or email and let them know what you think,” Cox advised fans.

- Sony Apologizes to Bradford Cox for Deleting His Online Recordings

Cassette Goodbyes: Sony Is Shutting Down Production Of The Walkman

_{Photo courtesy of edvvc}

Slate has a great article on the history of the Walkman. We’re feeling a little sentimental to see Sony shut down production, and we’d like to see the lowly, now-obsolete Walkman get a little credit for the impact it had on how people experience music. Contrast this with how teenagers experience music now.

Consider this: The first Walkman model, the TPS-L2, introduced in the summer of 1979, was equipped with two headphone jacks. Sony’s ads showed pairs of very different people—for instance, a short old Japanese man and a tall, young American woman—both wearing headphones plugged into the same Walkman. The TPS-L2 even featured a button that let the sharers filter out the music for a moment, so they could talk to each other through the headphones.

“Up until the Walkman, listening to music was a shared experience,” Bob Neil, a Sony vice president told me back in 1999, when I was writing a story for the Boston Globe about the player’s 20th anniversary. Nobody could imagine people buying something that would let them listen all alone; the whole notion would surely strike the people around them as “rude.”