The Smashing Pumpkins are taking a lot of rightly deserved heat for their 4-versions-of-the-same-CD release strategy. As Pitchfork writes in a story headlined Smashing Pumpkins to Fans, Indie Stores: Fuck You:

Billy and company would like you to know that they fully support the extinction of the American independent record store at the hand of large, faceless, little-guy-crushing big boxes. They also support bleeding their fans dry. How? By releasing FOUR different versions of Zeitgeist.

Best Buy and Target each get a version with an exclusive bonus track. So does iTunes. Like, a different one for each. Everybody else gets the regular version with no bonus tracks. So if you want all of the bonus tracks, you have to buy an album at Best Buy, an album at Target, and an album at iTunes.

All one can really conclude from this is that it’s going to result in hardcore fans doing a lot of illegal circulation and downloading of the extra tracks. It’s very hard to imagine any fan being excited about this or thinking it’s anything other than an effort to rip them off.

As far as I can tell, the Smashing Pumpkins have not had any press/net coverage that thinks this is cool. Instead response ranges from annoyed to livid. It’s hard to read it as anything other than a scheme to make more money for themselves and the big box stores at the expense of fans and independent record stores.

Seriously not cool. Goodbye indie credentials.

I’ve been writing this blog for about a year now, and I’ve written many times about Last.fm and iLike, and often in the same post. But every since iLike’s Facebook app began its juggernaut climb to the top of the FBapp charts, the number of hits this blog gets from people searching some variant of “iLike vs. Last.fm” has shot up dramatically. Ok, well, dramatically might be overstating since we’re talking relatively small numbers. BUT we weren’t talking any numbers at all a month ago.

What do I take from this? I think iLike is getting more attention and its viability as a Last.fm alternative is being considered by people who weren’t considering it before. Or another interpretation is that the iLike application has made people aware of music-based tracking/networking sites and they’ve heard something about this ‘last.fm’ thing and want to know more.

I’m not sure what the explanation is, but it seems pretty clear that there’s more explicit comparing of the 2 services going on in the last few weeks than there was before.

If you use both — the sites, the FB apps, both, either — tell us how you think the 2 compare in the comments!