Before we brave the Chicago rain and head to the Pitchfork Music Festival, a few items of note from the week:


• “Domino Effect” is by the UK duo Addictive, and it definitely has some late-summer-jam potential, thanks to it being kind of like the bad-ass British cousin of the Vistoso Bosses’ sweetly crushed-out “Delirious.” [:: arjan writes ::]


• If I ever had to do an interview where my subject was being distracted by an underwear-eschewing 20-year-old groupie, I would probably not handle it with the wit employed by the Guardian’s Tom Bryant, who had to deal with this particular occupational hazard while interviewing Tommy Lee. [Guardian]


• Another worker injured in Thursday’s collapse in Marseilles, France—where a stage for an upcoming Madonna show fell apart as it was being built—has died. CNN had no photographic metacomment on the incident. [Reuters]


• Raise your hand if you think the Pirate Bay’s new direction—which involves charging users a monthly fee to rifle around in its waters—is completely hilarious. How many people who donated money to the site’s “cause” feel like suckers now? [TorrentFreak]


• Lots of talk about the State Of The Music-Writing World that I wanted to get to this week, including Drowned In Sound’s week-long attempt to examine the question “Is Music Journalism Dead?”—perhaps the best distillation of the discourse comes from the always on-point Scott Tennent, who makes an important point about readers not really drawing a distinction between writing that’s been invoiced for and writing that comes from a more labor-of-love-borne (or just wanting-to-see-groupie-crotch) place. [Pretty Goes With Pretty]


• I always get frustrated when I see American news sources citing studies from other countries as evidence of behavior here, like this Atlantic piece that burbles a bit about a recent British survey claiming that the number of teenagers engaging in non-paid downloading had plunged over the past year. One of the main sites those teenagers use is the not-yet-available-in-the-U.S. site Spotify, which I’ve heard raves about and which could maybe be a game-changer as far as skewing this survey’s results in a direction at least slightly different than they might be over here. Anyway, this piece was hanging out in my “tabs of note” queue all day so I just wanted to mention that. (P.S.: The guy writing this blog post didn’t even link to the article he was citing! Bad form!) [The Atlantic Business Channel]