It’s a bit thick, but good to my eyes:
Music is the discourse that passes itself off as nature; it participates in the construction of meaning, but disguises its meanings as effects.  Here is the source of its singular efficacy as a hidden persuader.
Teaching a week on ads for my music video course, and thus had [...]

Fetish!
From a very promising new blog. Lots of great stuff here, for those, like me, interested in the bizarre collisions between songs and soap, inter alia.

From the Department of Attempted Musical Distinctions:
“‘If 37 people in California logged on to your MySpace page last month, you can argue that you provide goods or services in California,’ even if you’re a Connecticut band who hasn’t released an album or toured out of state, says Atlanta lawyer Joel R. Feldman of Greenberg Traurig [...]

“The Dodos are relatively new to the placement game.  Their song ‘Fools’, from the 2008 album Visiter, was placed in an ad campaign for Miller Chill, a lime chelada beer, that started in May this year. Miller approached the band during the past winter.  After the band accepted, ‘they came back with the commercial mock-up [...]

“Bands are moving from being bands to being one and two pieces because of the economy. It’s really expensive to be in a band right now, so it’s easier to get acclaim by what you post to the internet.”
Like everything else he writes or says, this Eye Weekly interview with Christopher Weingarten is full of [...]

“The underground echo chamber of the Web has become indispensable for developing early buzz, but to reach a large audience, there’s nothing more powerful than a major label’s radio and retail promotion machine.
‘Having the viral, online grassroots discovery is the single most powerful way to expose a consumer to your brand,’ said Mr. Young’s manager, [...]

“That’s very simple. ‘Indie’ is short for ‘independent.’ Independently released music is not directly financially dependent on any of the four major labels (WMG, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal). ‘Indie’ does not refer to a style of music; it refers to the financial circumstances of its distribution. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to [...]

1.  “‘The Underdog’ has a million chords,” says Daniel. “A lot of songs on this record are just one or two chords. There’s a lot more droning.”
Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).
2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and [...]

“The most striking thing to me about this isn’t: Downloading possibly leads to sales. But: Over the course of the past decade, a lot of people just stopped giving a shit about music altogether. Yet the survey, its results (from what I’ve seen) and the discussions of it don’t seem to consider this at all.”
This [...]

Spotted and snapped, oddly enough, while buying my niece a giftcard at the same store.