Saturday, November 03, 2007

The CD is Dead?

It just might be if this proves a success.

Radiohead made and estimated $10 million so far from their new album, by making it free to download, but merely asking for donations.

Personally, I think this kind of model may become standard for a lot of things, not just music. And that would be great. 

Friday, November 02, 2007

Music Map

Find out who the top artists and albums are in your state. It may surprise you.

The Beatles and Led Zeppelin cameup in the top two of a lot of states I checked. 

Monday, October 15, 2007

REVIEW: Trav’lin’ Light

Queen Latifah showed she could sing well in the movie Chicago. It made you wonder why she bothered rapping. She then released the excellent Dana Owen’s album. It contained a series of jazz and pop standards all done to excellent orchestration.

Her follow up is Trav’lin’ Light, which continues with more great covers of songs from the 50s through the 70s. I especially loved her rendition of Phoebe Snow’s Poetry Man and an excellent reinvention of 10cc’s I’m Not in Love. That was one of my favorite songs in high school and she reinterpreted it as a kind of light jazz tune. The result is wonderful.

This CD is highly recommended if you want something light and breezy to listen to.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

The Day The Music Died

It used to be the goal of every performer to sign with a record label. Times have changed.

Album sales are currently in freefall all over the world. The 10% drop in the UK over the past year is dwarfed by a 15% slide in the US, 25% in France and a whopping 35% in Canada. The bankruptcy this summer of the CD retail chain Fopp, HMV’s announcement that its profits halved in the first six months of this year and Richard Branson’s recent decision to dump the Virgin Megastores – which have reportedly lost him more than £50m in 2007 – are only the most visible signs of a crisis that has rocked the music industry on its axis.

The point isn’t just that people are buying fewer CDs; they are paying as much as two-thirds less in real terms today for the music they listen to on their iPods than they used to when the compact disc first took over the market. Twenty years ago a chart CD cost about £14. Today you can buy the same in a super-market for £9.

The online market may have grown recently, but not enough to fix the hole. Here, too, margins have shrunk. A download of a single track now costs 79p against the £4 a CD single cost in 1999.

The internet is changing the world in many ways. This is just one of them. These days, new talent is crazy to sign with a label. It’s often not worth the trouble .  In a way, this makes the playing field more level. Certainly, if artists can succeed, they will do much better not having a record label stealing all their profits, as they have for so many artists in the past.

For a long time now, artists have made most of their money from concert sales and merchandising. Expect that to be a continuing trend with a new emphasis on finding other ways to market a band.

Though I haven’t been in a record store in years ( I used to go to one every week back in the day), it’ skind of sad to see them go. But time marches on and the future is an unpredictable thing. I suspect the internet will change the world in many other unforseen ways in due time. 

Sunday, September 02, 2007

The Stolen Sweets

I just discovered a new band in Portland which I highly recommend. The Stolen Sweets is a jazz band that styles itself after the 1930s sound of the Boswell Sisters. Since Auricast, the company I am working for is also an independent music label, this crossed my desk and I was hooked from the first song. Every song on this CD is great. Here’s how the describe themselves:

The Stolen Sweets perform vocal jazz arrangements inspired by New Orleans favorites, The Boswell Sisters, one of the hottest girl groups of the 1930s. Comprised of vocalists Jen Bernard, Lara Michell and Erin Sutherland and string syncopators Keith Brush, Pete Krebs, and David Langenes, The Sweets deliver a unique brand of vintage swing jazz, dishing up abundant doses of coy stage antics and sideways glances as they play.

The Boswell Sisters were verifiable radio stars in the late 20s and early 30s, keeping company with the likes of the Dorsey Brothers, Bunny Berigan, Eddie Lang, and Benny Goodman - partnerships that provided the jazz world with some of its most influential recordings.

The nature of the music was auspicious and good-humored, providing a ray of hope to listeners during a truly dispiriting economic depression.

Their music is available on iTunes. Just search for the Stolen Sweets on the store and give them a listen. I can’t recommend their stuff enough. 

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Rock Out

This looks like a 70s video, but I can’t tell if its real or not. The 70s is self parody.

UPDATE: Some of the worst cover songs of all time. And the worst videos of all time.

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Matt Roach: RIP

Jazz lost one of its greatest drummers Wednesday. Roach revolutionized percussion.

Monday, August 20, 2007

“Rap” is Done

I’ve been predicting it for years, just like I predicted the housing crash, and its finally come true for both of them. What goes up, must come down.

While music-industry sales have plummeted, no genre has fallen harder than rap. According to the music trade publication Billboard, rap sales have dropped 44% since 2000 and declined from 13% of all music sales to 10%. Artists who were once the tent poles at rap labels are posting disappointing numbers. Jay-Z’s return album, Kingdom Come, for instance, sold a gaudy 680,000 units in its first week, according to Billboard. But by the second week, its sales had declined some 80%. This year rap sales are down 33% so far.

Longtime rap fans are doing the math and coming to the same conclusions as the music’s voluminous critics. In February, the filmmaker Byron Hurt released Beyond Beats and Rhymes, a documentary notable not just for its hard critique but for the fact that most of the people doing the criticizing were not dowdy church ladies but members of the hip-hop generation who deplore rap’s recent fixation on the sensational.

The article seems to imply the fake tough guy posing and bad language became stale and part of that is true. But the fundamental reason hip hop is fading is its not creative or original (with a few exceptions). Most of it is repetitive, swiped hackwork. The Jay-Z comeback they cite is a great example. The lead tune off that CD has him repeating the same five words over and over again ("Show me what you got") between uh-huhs and yeahs. It’s amazing the genre lasted as long as it did.

Now, I like some old school hip hop, back when artists actually used their own music and weren’t sampling and remixing everything. But I feel sad that the culture that gave us jazz, the blues, R&B, and soul music could provide this abortive fetus of a genre. It became nothing more than a parade of subliterate thugs repeating themselves. And the whole gangsta culture is so laughable and ripe for parody from the get go, that any generation could be sucker by this crap is a sad commentary on the human race.

I’m sure hip hip will always be around, but it will fade into the background like jazz did, metal music, etc. There will always be its fans. But its heyday is over. 

Monday, July 30, 2007

Hip Hop is Dead, Part 2

Friday, July 20, 2007

And I Thought My Typos Were Bad

Courtney Love’s blog has to be seen to be believed. L33tspeak’s got nothing on this girl.