If you are a fan of information displayed graphically and also the Beatles, this site may be of interest http://mikemake.com/Charting-the-Beatles. I particularly like the work schedule for 1963 to 1966.

Since he has appeared on the Word CDs in the past, people may be interested in knowing that Joseph Arthur has decided to make his new double album available as a free download at http://www.josepharthur.com/. Not listened to all of it yet but sounds good so far.

I have been to a lot of concerts where there were banks of amplifiers at the back of the stage (Status Quo always used to have a lot). There is an interesting picture at http://gizmodo.com/5644585/the-concert-speakers-are-a-lie of what these amps sometimes look like from the back of the stage. Even though I assumed bands did not need that many amps, I had always thought there was a back to them.

Here is a quiz to see if you can spot the made-up artist name from the real ones (some are more obviously made up than others). The quicker you answer, the higher the score apparently. I managed to get to 46th place once but most attempts were much worse than that. I suspect some people on here can do much better than this.

http://labs.echonest.com/NameDropper/

There is an interesting talk by David Byrne available for viewing at http://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolv... (and as a podcast on iTunes). His topic is whether the acoustic properties of the rooms where music is likely to be heard influence the sort of music that is written (ie if a band knows it will be playing arenas, does it write music to fit the acoustics of an arena rather than say a small club). He shows a lot of examples to illustrate his points.

Given his reputation for being a bit grumpy, the picture of Van Morrison (which I guess is the cover of his new CD) at his homepage (http://www.vanmorrison.com/) came as a surprise. New Year = new smiling Van?

If you are a Dylan fan, you may want to check out his homepage (http://bobdylan.com/) which has details of the latest instalment of the Bootleg Series. This one is mainly unreleased songs from 1989 to 2006. If you register for the site, you can also get a download of one of the tracks. Like a lot of albums these days, there is a deluxe edition with an extra CD and a book of singles covers.

I am sure there has been a topic on here in the past about the trend of artists playing albums in track order live. The latest example is Bruce Springsteen. Last night at a charity event, he did the Darkness On The Edge Of Time album in full followed by the Born To Run album. Details at http://www.backstreets.com/setlists.html