“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.
HAMILTON: The flavor industry can lend diversity to products that aren’t really that diverse. Soft drinks are a perfect example: They’re corn syrup and flavor. With orange juice, it’s masking the processing procedure rather than the diversity of ingredients.
IDEAS: So parse the carton for us. For example, what is the phrase “not from concentrate” really [...]
It’s been widely reported that CBS’s “Love Monkey” is not much more than a mutual hand-job between the network and Sony/BMG—Teddy Geiger (his Sony debut drops in February, y’all!) as the new Beck, Franz Ferdinand’s “Do You Want To” (distributed stateside by Sony) popping up in the background of a club scene, and main character [...]
Before catching the Rosebuds at Bloomington’s Second Story Nightclub last night, I gathered with some friends at my girlfriend’s house (she has cable!) for drinks. The television was harmlessly on in the background, but eventually we began dissecting what we were seeing. It wasn’t too hard to analyze the program, because there was so much [...]
A post on Stereogum today highlighted a settlement between the State of New York and Sony/BMG music publishing over “inducements for airplay,” otherwise known as “payola.”In a series of events that should come as absolutely no shock whatsoever to anyone familiar with the corporatized media culture in the United States, Sony/BMG had been (gasp!) paying [...]