Comrade Mike

Proof

Not Spotify, but iTunes Festival: London 2011 is back on Apple Music. Not to be confused with the other one with the same title (or the other 5 or 6 different versions from over the years). I assume the cover art is a placeholder.

If you live in the US, it's now possible to stream Proof outside of Apple Music via a compilation called Relax in barca.

Labels like to churn out these shovelware compilation albums, seemingly in an attempt to game streams for their artists' songs. They usually have a generic title and a cover that looks like it was designed by someone who just discovered Photoshop and stock images. Or it could just be spam. It's hard to tell the difference.

There's been a trickle of 1 track singles released over the last month and a half. Notably, A Spell a Rebel Yell and Clocks (Royksopp Trembling Heart Mix). Not so notably, some Viva la Vida and Mylo Xyloto singles that are identical to the album tracks.

It's a B-side from 16 years ago and its presence outside of Spotify is very welcome.

How You See the World (live from Earls Court) and Death Will Never Conquer, from The Hardest Part and Viva la Vida singles respectively, are now available outside of Spotify. That's 2 that can be struck from my previous list.

I'd like to see them release a new mix of the album, like REM's Monster or Muse's Origin of Symmetry. I'd love to see them do what the Manic Street Preachers did with Know Your Enemy. Expand the tracklist with B-sides and split it into a double album, one called X and the other Y. Edit that stupid "Others are puzzles, puzzling me" line to "Others are puzzles, troubling me". Include a new mix and demo of How You See the World, but not the original. Reveal that, I don't know, The Hardest Part originally had the lyrics of What If or something. You know, something interesting. What I actually expect them to do is throw out a Dolby Atmos mix and two 4K music video upgrades and then call it a day, like Coldplay did with A Rush of Blood to the Head.

As of January, Wish I Was Here is downloadable/streamable and US fans can finally listen to the Talk single somewhere other than Spotify or Apple Music. On the other hand, you'll have to go back to those to listen to Moving to Mars again because that Ambient Pop compilation has gone from the US. For anyone else keeping track of these things, that leaves Proof, The World Turned Upside Down, Pour Me, How You See the World (live from Earls Court), A Spell a Rebel Yell and Death Will Never Conquer as platform- and/or region-locked songs that should otherwise be widely available.

You can stream it too, if you live in Canada.

If you're in the US and don't use Spotify and/or Apple Music, the songs Moving to Mars and Sleeping Sun are available to stream on the compilations Ambient Pop for Relaxation and Winter Ballads respectively. Edit: For anyone in the 15 countries which can't stream True Love (Davide Rossi Remix) (notably Canada), you now can via the compilation Friends Pop.

Adventure of a Lifetime (Yotto Remix) I don't think this one was commercially available until now.

Midnight (Jon Hopkins Remix) is now on Spotify and elsewhere. If anyone wasn't already aware, How You See the World No. 2 also returned in September.

How You See the World No. 2 (from the Help: A Day in the Life charity compilation) is back on streaming/download. There's also pre-orders for vinyl releases of the album at https://warchildrecords.tmstor.es/, for anyone into that kind of thing.

Proof is on Spotify everywhere but in the US, where it's only available on Apple Music/iTunes. Does anyone know if Lhuna played on the SiriusXM station from last year? That would be a good sign for it showing up elsewhere at some point.

Both versions of How You See the World are missing too. There's also several B-sides where "on streaming services" actually means "just on Spotify".

LeftRightLeftRightLeft is popping up on Spotify and elsewhere, in timezones where it's now Friday. Looks like it's streaming-only, like the Christmas songs.

I should clarify that when I say it's available losslessly, that's dependent on whether there's any stores in the country selling at that quality. With that in mind, the ones I know of in Europe are 7digitial, Juno Download and Qobuz. There's also Tidal, but that costs more and you can only buy the full release instead of individual tracks.

Moving to Mars is available to purchase losslessly everywhere but the US, same with the Talk and A Sky Full of Stars B-sides and Proof. On the flip side, the Fix You B-sides are only available in the US and France.

And? Although at least they fixed it being called 'Till Kingdom Come on the lyrics bit.

Til Kingdom Come, actually. No apostrophe, one L. See here, here, here, here, here, here and here for releases where it's officially named. Typical CD releases of X&Y only have it listed as + on the CD tracklist, while all digital versions I've checked (except iTunes and Nokia Music) have it correctly named.

There's an advert on TV where Rihanna says Capital FM is the middleman between her and her fans. Whenever I hear that, I think to myself "Isn't that a bad thing? Wouldn't it be better for her to cut out the middleman and interact directly with her fans?" Back at the start of June 2011, Coldplay were off to a good start with Mylo Xyloto. After cryptically teasing it at the end of May, they released a brand new song as a digital single, Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall. This coincided with them playing at an assortment of festivals, previewing ETIaW as well as other new songs. It was during the run-up to their appearance at Glastonbury that they then announced they would be re-releasing ETIaW. Making their fans buy the same thing twice is shady enough, but at least they planned on making it up by also releasing it on CD and vinyl with a new song (Major Minus), right? Wrong. Coldplay decided a third song, Moving to Mars, would only be available specifically on iTunes. This was the first of several intentional missteps. Who benefits from this arrangement? Certainly not the people who buy ETIaW on CD, vinyl or generally anywhere other than iTunes. They get the privilege of paying for an incomplete product. Not the people who buy it from iTunes, for whom buying MtM is no different to buying any other Coldplay song, except that they have no other option than to buy it from iTunes. Probably not Coldplay themselves, who locked out a portion of their fanbase for nothing at best or extra money at worst. Only Apple benefits from this, reaping 100% of the sales of MtM instead of just the 70% they'd get if it were available elsewhere. Having already bought ETIaW when it first came out and having no intention of ever buying anything from iTunes, I didn't bother with MtM or even MM. I opted instead to see if maybe a promo CD with all 3 tracks on it would appear. It didn't. Then I waited to see if MtM would make it to the MX tracklist. It didn't, nor did it appear as a B-side to the Paradise single. Finally, I waited to see if it would be on the Japanese release of MX. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't. It was mid-September by this point, almost 3 months since ETIaW had been re-released, and it had become readily apparent to me that Coldplay had no intention of correcting their fuck-up. All the excitement I'd felt from watching YouTube videos of their festival appearances had vanished by this point, replaced with disappointment and a sense of "Why bother?". With no intention of supporting a band who were willing to screw over both their fans and the current state of music downloads, I made the conscious decision to not only avoid MX, but to also stop listening to any other music of theirs. I'm glad I did, because MX has been an unmitigated disaster for fans. Gone were the glory days of 2008-09, when Coldplay tried to be as inclusive as possible with the availability of their music. Viva la Vida Coldplay streamed their album on MySpace a week before its release, whereas MX Coldplay made Spotify users wait an extra 100 days before letting them listen to the album. Viva Coldplay knew that making promo CDs and a video for Lovers in Japan doesn't constitute releasing a single without making a separate release for people to buy, whereas MX Coldplay want to claim that they released Charlie Brown as a single. Viva Coldplay gave away a live album for free from their website and at concerts. MX Coldplay? Their Live in Madrid EP is only available on the US Google Play (last I checked, Madrid isn't in the US) and the only download store Live 2012 is available from is iTunes. Viva Coldplay helped me realise that paying to legally download music was finally a viable alternative to pirating, whereas MX Coldplay took a steaming shit all over virtually every download store other than (you guessed it) iTunes. Viva Coldplay gave one of their B-sides away for free as well as offering options to buy it, whereas the only B-side MX Coldplay have released is... well, you know the rest. If I didn't know any better, I'd say the entire point of MX has been to take all the goodwill Coldplay generated with their fans from the Viva era and then drive it straight into the ground. So what does all this have to do with Rihanna and middlemen? Simple. Coldplay looked at the musicians -> middlemen -> fans equation and decided to cut the fans out. They decided they'd use their music to promote middlemen, rather than the other way around. Everything they have done in the MX era has been to the benefit of these middlemen, usually Apple. To this end, MX has been a huge success, one that's still going strong. As a musical statement and a measure of Coldplay's artistic integrity, it's been an enormous failure of their own making. As for whether the music's any good or not, that's an entirely moot point, since they've been doing everything possible to prevent their fans from listening to it. Everything short of just plain not releasing it, that is, which actually would've been preferable since it would lack the pretence that they actually bothered. 16 months on from MX? They killed it 4 months before they even released it.

There's at least 3 live albums: Live Recordings 2004, Live 06 and Live Recordings: European Tour 2008.

I'm not aware of any download stores which have it in lossless format, but the compilation CDs listed here should have it. They should be cheaper and easier to find than the Christmas Lights promo releases too.

X&Y (and some of the singles) uses EMI's now defunct Copy Control protection scheme. You can usually bypass it by ripping the CD with a DVD-R/RW drive. If that doesn't work, try ripping it with Exact Audio Copy instead.