Playlists for The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb

Well, there's nothing on my playlists anymore.

During the production of The Horsepower Whisperer and The Wormton Lamb, I developed a playlist of music that inspired me for each book. Either that or I could imagine certain songs contributing to the sound track to the film of the book. A new playlist is currently emerging as the soundtrack for The Grey Ones, which will be the third part of the Soul Trader Trilogy. This is very exciting - I love this process! I don't know what song or scene will happen next and the plot is evolving nicely.

The social networking site Imeem enabled me to put these songs onto the net and share them - my idea was that readers could experience a multi-media event by reading the book and/or listening to the tunes.

Imeem appeared to have the licensing arrangements all sussed but then it began to unravel. Instead of playing the whole samples, Imeem began to only offer samples. Often they were from the middle of the song so my playlist sounded bloody awful. I have been seriously considering taking the playlist out of the webpages.

Now it's been done for me. Imeem has been bought out by Myspace and the embedded link on the webpages for my books don't work. There's just a big silent orange square on each page - see for yourself.

To add insult to injury, my Ipod has gone what is technically known as "tits up." I can't even listen to my own playlists on the move, let alone with Imeem!

Imeem's original popularity with the listening public is said to have been as a direct result of its flexible attitude to the licensing laws. At one stage it had agreements with all 4 major US record companies to play their artists' tracks in full. Funny old thing - wherever Imeem detected that licensing arrangements did not exist with the record company, then only a 30 second sample could be played. As most of my stuff is on the obscure stuff (nothing by Simon Cowell fr'instance) none of it was covered by Imeem's agreement with the big 4 US companies so all I had was a badly edited selection of my favourite songs that didn't do any of them justice.

Myspace have closed down the playlists that all Imeem's members put together. The big silent orange square is useful for buying ringtones from popular culture (i.e. popular with nobody I know) and nothing else. Myspace/Imeem have published various insincere statements about the playlists being reinstated but I don't see this happening.

My playlists still exist, though, it's just that the media has been taken away by corporate America and fat cat copyright lawyers.

So, to enable people who want to play music while they read either of my books for that multi-media experience I alluded to earlier, my playlists for my published books (so far) will appear on here dreckly.

I might even tantalise you (ooh, I'm such a tease!) with songs for The Grey Ones.