“Today the bankroll required for at least token establishment as a tape ‘manufacturer’ is even smaller, and the repertoire possibilities even wider.  And entrepreneurs, undaunted by the still limited number of suitable tape recorders in American homes…are jumping in wholesale.”
…
“Conspicuous by their absence, however, are the major record companies, of which only RCA Victor has [...]

“What constitutes a hype?  It’s the launching of tunes and records with great fanfare and thousands of free promotional records to disk jockeys and juke box operators, tunes which were recorded by top artists on major labels and which inspired numerous ‘cover’ disks and reams of publicity.  A flock of big hypes have faded away [...]

Swap out some nouns and Mad Libs this mug, 2010-style:
“Wanna be the big teen in hardcore circles?  Get some other dillheads together, call yourselves Antagonistic Decline or Vicious Tendencies or Unrepentant Youth or some such thing, copy every lick from the Dischord collection and write songs about military intervention, whether you know anything about it [...]

And yesterday’s post seems quaint in relation.

Since it’s been “popular,” music’s always had to leech off of other entertainment industries and forms of media for power and dissemination.  Recorded works have been the central commodity objects since sheet music died off, but the “meaning” of music has always been parted out across all sorts of media: television, film, print, and all [...]

Depressingly on-point post-SxSW take from Advertising Age on indie’s long road to Automotive Brand Enhancement.
Basically, in the post-unit-sales, file-sharing era, indie music is ever more about marketing. The music, in fact, becomes marketing for an event (e.g., a concert) or merchandise (e.g., a T-shirt) and/or marketing for a third-party product (e.g., a Scion xD). Marketing [...]

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 [...]