Good news everyone! There was a great song on the radio yesterday. By great we mean GREAT and by radio we mean Beats 1.
The song was 'Jitter' by Grace Mitchell. Grace isn't a brand new artist, but she's fairly new. 'Jitter' feels like the sort of song that'll put a rocket up her career, and Zane Lowe alerted us to the song's existence when he hit play, which was kind of him.
Hey @Popjustice this @imgracemitchell record 'Jitter' is amazing @Beats1 #GreatMusic
— Zane Lowe (@zanelowe) August 18, 2015
The song was, indeed, #greatmusic. Zane said on air that he thought it might be "the pop song of the year". He said there were "more ideas in that song than most people have in an entire career".
At this point we got a bit carried away with things and tried to get Zane to play the Hailee Steinfeld song.
@Popjustice yep, station is on it
— Zane Lowe (@zanelowe) August 18, 2015
THEN we said the Grace Mitchell tune (which by this point Zane was playing a second time) was a bit like how we'd have hoped Girls Aloud might have sounded if they'd been around now, but on reflection that was just us getting overexcited and trying to drag Girls Aloud into everything like we always do.
@Popjustice it setting a standard for sure. i love pop music when its this good.
— Zane Lowe (@zanelowe) August 18, 2015
Thinking about it after some sleep, we reckon 'Jitter' sounds like a cross between Charli XCX and early Bananarama with a little bit of PC Music thrown in. There's a bit where she talks in FRENCH. It's a great song.
Well naturally by this point we'd fired up WordPress. The world, or at least the few hundred Twitter and Facebook users who click on links to artists they're not already aware of, needed to know about this Grace Mitchell song. We built the page, and waited for some audio to appear online.
Usually, just after a song premieres on the radio, the label will flick the switch over on SoundCloud or YouTube, and an audio stream will appear. That's when you can embed the song and publish it as quality content on your blog or website, and the obvious benefit here is that the momentum from a song's premiere can then carry on across the internet and then everyone gets very excited, the artist starts endlessly retweeting praise and so on.
But the Grace Mitchell song was nowhere to be found on Grace's SoundCloud or YouTube.
This was annoying. For what is content, in 2015, without an embed code?
We mentioned this in passing to a chap called Evan on Twitter and three hours after the song's premiere the Marketing Director at Grace's label sent us both a tweet to say the song was now online. That's 10/10 customer service for you right there.
@EvanCandelmo @Popjustice and we're live on @AppleMusic http://t.co/Z9xpmca7iu
— Mike (@mikeosta) August 18, 2015
We tried that link but it didn't take us to 'Jitter', or the 'Raceday' EP Grace had purportedly put on Apple Music. Instead, we just got Grace's artist page.
We thought maybe Republic Record's fancy URL shortener wasn't working, but when we searched Apple Music for the new EP, there was nothing. We searched the iTunes Music Store too: still nothing.
Three things seem to have happened here.
1. The EP's been released on a Tuesday even though everything's supposed to come out on a Friday.
2. You can't access it from the UK even though we thought the whole Beats 1 / Apple Music thing was global etc etc.
3. Crucially, the song isn't appearing in other places because it's billed as an Apple Music exclusive, and if this isn't an example of how streaming service-specific exclusives are crap for consumers then we don't know what is.
This morning we had another look at SoundCloud, YouTube and Spotify to see if the song had popped up anywhere else. But no. Not even any dodgy radio rips. Then we spent five minutes trying to find the archived recording of Zane's show from yesterday, because we'd heard Beats 1 had just started doing a 'replay' thing.
We didn't find that, but buried in the darkest recesses of iTunes we did, eventually, find 'Jitter'.
We listened to it and fortunately, after all that faff, it was still amazing. You can and should listen to it too.
Here's how to find Grace Mitchell's 10/10 song 'Jitter' in a mere eight easy steps
1. Open iTunes
2. Go to Radio
3. Click on Beats 1
4. Scroll down until you get to Zane's face
5. On Zane's page you'll see a playlist of all the songs from Zane's show from yesterday. Don't click on that — the Grace song is the only tune not in there.
6. Go back to Zane's page and click on 'Connect'. Yes! Connect has a use!
7. You see the bit in that screengrab, under the 'Zane Lowe on Beats 1' header? The Beats 1 logo with 'Zane Lowe on Beats 1' written inside it another two times? CLICK THAT.
We'd embed it here but you can't embed Apple Music stuff like you can with Spotify. There's a direct link, at least, which is here.
So there you go. A great new song that's difficult to listen to.
In one sense this brings back memories of the good (bad) old days of music shopping: walking to a record shop, trying to find something you wanted, having to order it because it wasn't in stock, then finally picking up the record a week later. In another sense, of course, it's just annoying and rubbish.
UPDATE! The song has now appeared on the UK version of Apple Music. You can buy it on iTunes too. Still nothing anywhere else :(