Entries associated with the tag "Business":

File under "cool but more interesting conceptually than it is to actually listen to"*: Adidas' Sportive commercial with a soundtrack assembled completely from the sounds of people doing sporty things.

Props for the elegant and intuitive visual representation of EQ sweeps.

*An attribute that could be more succinctly termed "Matmos-y."

(via Copyranter/AnimalNY)

Earlier today I really wanted to blog about Gibson's new Joan Jett Signature Melody Maker, but I couldn't come up with much more to say than "DO WANT," followed by a sort of boring tribute the Melody Maker in general and my '72 MM in the SG body style in particular, with its neck that just blah blah blah. Scott Thill at Wired's Listening Post points out an obvious fact I overlooked: "the Joan Jett Signature Melody Maker [is Gibson's] first signature electric guitar ever for a female artist."

"She has been a groundbreaking artist and a trailblazer for women in the genre," praised Henry Juszkiewicz, Chairman and CEO of Gibson Guitar. And of course, he is right. But it still feels weird that it took Gibson until the 21st century to find an influential female rock guitarist to honor. From PJ Harvey to Kim Deal and Carrie Brownstein to this shredding metalhead, there have been more than a few feminine ax grinders to fete with a custom hook-up. And while they might not all play Gibsons, one wonder whether a kind offer of the Jett variety might change their minds.

There's a good chance I'll end up throwing down for the JJSMM. If Gibson ever gets the genius idea to produce a Mary Timony Signature Les Paul, I'd cop that one too.

Jimi Hendrix hawks Guitar Hero from beyond the grave. Activision, the game's maker, is celebrating the main-stage Guitar Hero performances at the Isle of Wight Festival this weekend by modding the island's bronze statue of Hendrix.

(Question: Can Jimi beat Dragonforce on expert?)

(Music Radar via Kotaku)

Radiohead just announced that it's running a fan-created remix contest at radioheadremix.com, where you can listen to remixes of "Nude" from In Rainbows, vote on your fave, and post your own.

I actually have a column coming out in a couple days on the benefits of artists going open-source with their music and encouraging fans to get creatively involved with it through things like remixing, so I like that Radiohead's going there. I just think the way they're going about it is a little off.

To remix the song you have to buy its "stems," as they're referring to the component tracks--i.e., vocals, drums, strings, etc. They're available as DRM-free MP3s for purchase through iTunes for 99 cents apiece, and if you buy all five stems you get an access code for a GarageBand-compatible project file. (Strangely, buying all five together costs you a dollar more than buying each separately.)

I think that if musicians expect their audience to work for them for free--which, when you break it down, is what's happening here--they shouldn't charge for the privilege, especially if they're the ones who made such a big deal out of releasing the actual album in a way that encouraged free downloading and trading. 

Of course Radiohead has the kind of fans who will buy anything the band tells them to, and considering the number of remixes that have already been uploaded to the site, plenty of people aren't bothered by the situation.

I'm not one to knock on someone else's hustle, and as a recovering sneaker addict I have a hard time bagging on any sort of special-edition shoe, no matter how ridiculous, but I can't really hang with Converse's Kurt Cobain signature series. It's not so much that the series includes prescuffed replicas of the shoes he killed himself in--which is at least as morbid and exploitative as the death-certificate T-shirts that came out within days of his suicide--but that the insoles of the death shoes have "punk rock means freedom" written on them.

Will some 17-year-old kids please start a punk band that is so obnoxious and shitty that no one as old as I am can get into it? Otherwise I'm afraid that after this atrocity the cosmic punk scales are gonna end up tipped the wrong way.

I fully agree with John Darnielle: motherfuck KFC and their stupid-ass jokey "black metal" commercial. Aside from the sub-half-ass music and makeup jobs and the fact that this is--as Darnielle points out--yet another example of a shitty corporation jacking a subculture for lulz, the wrongest thing about the ad is its assumption that black-metal dudes eat food. They survive on booze and hate and occasionally bits of each other's brains, not on crispy chicken whatevers.

Usually when I get pissed off I like to turn on metal really loud, but I just put on some Mayhem and it's only reminding me of that commercial, which just pisses me off worse. It's like a vicious circle of hate and Mayhem and it's really . . . well actually it's kind of weirdly perfect.

Was anyone else excited about downloading Qtrax, the free and legal P2P music-sharing source? I was, until I realized that the beta that'll be made available at midnight is Windows only. Oh, and also it has none of the major-label deals that were supposed to make it a legitimate threat to iTunes et al, so it's already starting to look like a nonstarter, especially considering that Amazon's poised to jump into the mix and fuck everyone's day up.

In related and less legal news, the Pirate Bay has announced that its user base has broken the ten million mark, offering up over a million torrents to share, including one that contains the complete Slayer discography and is extremely highly recommended.

The guys over at Daytrotter (my past column on them is here) are fiercely independent, almost on an Ian MacKaye level. So when I opened up my RSS feed this afternoon and the first thing I saw was the news that the site is getting a "substantial investment" from the more Dad Rock-leaning Wolfgang's Vault I was a little thrown. I e-mailed main Daytrotter-er Sean Moeller for some info and got back a typically upbeat and verbose reply, which follows in its entirety:

Thanks so much Miles!
The great thing about all of this is that nothing is going to be affected at all. I retain my share of the ownership of the company and all of the creative control/vision of Daytrotter. Bill Sagan and Wolfgang's Vault have no intention of messing with anything involving Daytrotter, which was the most important thing for us to know going forward with partnering with them. We didn't have any intention of doing any of this if we weren't going to get to continue calling all of the shots. We were doing fine going about this our own comfortable way. We didn't need anyone. But when the WV folks approached us and allowed us to continue with the freedom that we've always had while providing some always necessary money to make sure that's possible, we felt really lucky. It's been an intense amount of hard work to get to this point and we had no intention of throwing that away for a few bucks. We are still Daytrotter, I am still Daytrotter, along with Pat Stolley, Brad Kopplin, Phil Pracht and Johnnie Cluney and that's never going to change. You're not going to see anything different in the way we exist. You're going to see MORE great stuff. That's it.

I don't know how you go about getting sweet-ass deals involving no-strings-attached cash injections, but if anyone has any suggestions please send them my way.

I suspected that John Lydon would justify the Sex Pistols' involvement with Guitar Hero III with the same aren't-we-naughty-punks irony they used for their original reunion tour. Instead he claims--in this clip from a GHIII press conference--that he did it because he "fucking loved" the game. And then he goes on a profanity-laden tear decrying seemingly everything on earth that is neither Guitar Hero III nor John Lydon. Probably the most shocking thing about the video is realizing that Johnny Rotten for whatever reason still thinks that people will be actually by offended by f-bombs. 

MusicFirst is a lobbying group with ties to SoundExchange and the RIAA, but dedicated specifically to inflicting those entities' brand of self-destructive greed on terrestrial radio. Also, like SoundExchange and the RIAA, it seems to be staffed mostly by colossal assholes. At the moment MusicFirst's primary concern is making radio pay performance royalties--which the National Association of Broadcasters and the U.S. Congress have repeatedly deemed unnecessary, given that radio play works in effect as a promotional tool to drive record sales. MusicFirst and its parent organizations think that's unfair, and to draw attention to their plight they've designed a fake coupon, which allegedly entitles you to free promotional items from the NAB online store. The text:

Valid: When Turkeys Talk

At NAB, Promotion Equals Free

No limit per customer. No minimum purchase (after all, they don't purchase the music they use). May be combined with a 70-year history of refusing to pay artists for their music. Your copyright must be surrendered. No cash/no credit for your work. Not valid outside of the U.S.--every other major country actually pays a performance right. Subject to common sense and basic fairness. For more information: www.musicfirstcoalition.org.

Because there's nothing like aggressive sarcasm combined with vague threats to earn you the public's sympathy, right? OK, the sarcasm is a little heavy-handed, but the irony is sublime. First there's the spectacle of a sock puppet for the major labels condemning radio's "70-year history of refusing to pay artists"--look up the word "recoupable" sometime--and then there's the fact that SoundExchange, which is supposed to distribute similar royalties collected from Internet radio, doesn't have such a hot record of finding the people who are actually owed the money. I don't know how they keep a straight face.

Right after I woke up today I read through a couple weeks' worth of the Lefsetz Letter that had backed up in my RSS feed. Usually I only read Bob Lefsetz for the bizarro logic he flings about seemingly at random as he mixes strange proclamations about how hip-hop doesn't matter as a cultural or economic force with nostalgic odes to ski seasons and Eagles shows 30 years past. He's like the crazy uncle of the music industry, and I know several other people who read him regularly for that fact alone.

But the other day he wrote something that I not only fully agree with but actually sort of respect. In a post decrying Clapton and Steve Winwood charging $250 for tickets to a sort-of Blind Faith reunion, Lefsetz writes:

What’s next? Reunions of bands that didn’t exist in the first place? Is Eric Clapton going to go out with David Gilmour? Is Ozzy going to tour with Alice Cooper as part of the same band? We are really scraping the barrel here.

But that’s rock history for you. Everybody’s cleaned up. And now cleaning up. That old soul, that’s gone, been long eviscerated, and the only people who won’t admit this is those on the take.

Pretty good, right? And right on the money, too? But 10 AM is far too early to be having unsettling experiences like agreeing with Bob Lefsetz. Only now, and with the help of some coffee, am I feeling OK about things.

I'd heard of Britain's annual No Music Day before the Times' writeup, but not Pipedown International, a group devoted to eliminating piped-in music in public places:

“Think of the misery of shop workers forced to listen to the same tape over and over again, especially at festive seasons,” said Pipedown’s founder, Nigel Rodgers. “According to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf, an average shop assistant hears ‘Jingle Bells’ 300 times in the few days before Christmas — enough to go mad. And it’s the same in restaurants and hotels: bad for the customer but worse still for the staff.”

I can relate with that average shop assistant. I was reminded of my employment in a retail establishment that played one two-hour disc of music for four weeks at a time when I was in IKEA the other day and discovered that I still know all of the words to Jessica Simpson's "With You." Christmastime was especially dire, what with the forced repeat listenings of Luscious Jackson's "Let It Snow" and all.

Too bad Pipedown International appears to be an army of dicks:

At an individual level Pipedown members carry printed cards to give to store and restaurant managers, graded in order of approval from “Thank you for having no music” to “Your music has lost you my custom.” More sweepingly the group exists to lobby Parliament (where it is currently promoting a bill to ban Muzak from hospitals) and speak to the senior management of larger retail companies.

I just imagine a mustachioed man in a bowler coming up to a counter, slamming down a card that says, "Your music has lost you my custom," and then waiting for the person behind the counter to read it and look back up so he can have eye contact when he says, "Good day!" before huffing off.

Like, passive aggressive much, Pipedown International? 

If you thought malicious, greed-motivated legislation was strictly for Republicans, you should meet Democratic Reps. George Miller (CA) and Ruben Hinojosa (TX), who have added language to a 747-page spending bill that would axe federal financial aid to schools who don't sign up for paid "alternatives" to P2P filesharing. Essentially it says "sign up for these for-profit services or no more Pell grants" and then cackles demonically. CNET didn't get any comments from the RIAA, but the movie industry is predictably, slime-ily thrilled. Here's MPAA spokesperson Angela Martinez: "We very much support the language in the bill, which requires universities to provide evidence that they have a plan for implementing a technology to address illegal file sharing." If she had anything resembling a soul she would've had to choke those words out through her own vomit.

Anyone in Congress looking for an easy Crusader-for-the-People makeover should take the obvious step of standing up and saying "Motherfuck this shit" before taking the amendment out back and capping it in the head. 

The label-less, pay-what-you-want download of In Rainbows has banked Radiohead a lot of loot, their fans seem ecstatic, and the distribution structure seems to be the hot new thing in Internet-ified commerce. But the band's former label, EMI, isn't sharing in the love-fest. The upcoming reissue of Radiohead's seven albums for the label—in box set, downloadable, and custom USB stick formats—may be purposely designed to spite the band, if an unnamed tipster who contacted BoingBoing about the matter is correct:

Despite their contract being expired, EMI had been counting on the revenue from the forthcoming album. When the band put out the digital version of the album themselves, EMI threatened them with re-releasing their entire catalog on the same day the discbox of IN RAINBOWS was being sent out, Dec 10, unless the band gave EMI the standard physical release of the album.

I wonder if the rumor will get big enough to get a comment from Radiohead or EMI.

When Microsoft first dropped the Zune—for the many who may have forgotten, it's like a bad, brown iPod—it really tried hard to sell it to the tastemaking indie scene, filling the ads with blissed-out, scruffy boho types and the players with recent Sub Pop releases and such. Obviously that didn't work out so hot, as I've seen exactly one Zune being used in the wild, by a hardcore computer geek who looked like he might have actually bought it just because he loves Microsoft. I know the company still wants to hit up the hipsters eventually, but in the meantime it's turning its attention to an underserved demographic with a player branded with monster reggaeton artists Wisin y Yandel.

It's an uncharacteristically smart move for the Zune. Going by street-level metrics—like the number of cars you hear it pumping from—reggaeton's ridiculously massive, but mainstream pop culture doesn't even seem to know it exists. Maybe mainstream America has a problem with lyrics in Spanish. Or maybe it's just that Anglos aren't feeling it. Personally I can only take reggaeton in small doses. I find it to be overly repetitive and shallow, and I listen to ringtone rap and house music for fun so that's saying a lot.

But the Wisin y Yandel Zune could win Microsoft the hearts of a lot of reggaeton listeners out there. Niche marketing can do that. I'm sure most of them won't even mind that Microsoft is basically just selling them a dressed-up version of the original model.

It's 1984 and you're in charge of launching a brand new home video format, Laserdisc, that's supposed to compete against a far more widespread technology that has only recently become the established popular standard. You need a spokesperson to make your sales pitch for you in the form of a promotional film to show in home electronics showrooms. Out of sheer desperation, cocaine-based decision making, or--more likely, given that this is 1984--a combination of both, you decide to hire a group of sarcastic avant garde types who will sneer their way through the presentation while wearing masks that make them look like radioactive mutants. For good measure, you decide to recruit one of the world's most famous blind men to make a cameo where he makes blind jokes.

This, I believe, is the only explanation behind "1984 Pioneer Laserdisc demo with Devo" over at Google Video, featuring guest star Ray Charles. 

Via the always-brilliant Metafilter.

A little while back I did a column on webcasting and the egregious royalty rate the RIAA's shill-men, SoundExchange, pushed through the Copyright Royalty Board. In it, I quoted a few theories from the webcasters at AccuRadio about how the rate hike might affect the industry, if it didn't demolish it outright. Daniel McSwain floated a theory that labels—specifically major labels, due to administrative complications that could effectively lock indies out of the process—might use a legal loophole to offer lower royalty rates to webcasters who agreed to play certain artists the labels were pushing. (And, incidentally, screwing over the artists that are supposed to be entitled to a cut of the royalty cash.) Excerpt: "This would allow the industry to 'dictate the look and sound of playlists,' according to McSwain. 'It takes away any autonomy from webcasters and puts it completely in the labels' hands.'" 

Including that idea in the finished piece was a tough sell to my editors, as it's impossible to prove that the labels intended to exploit a loophole they might not even know was there. Even I thought it verged on the kind of feverish hypothesizing that I recognized from reading too many books on conspiracy theories.

Tuns out we shouldn't have underestimated the majors. SF Weekly has broken the news that a new start-up webcasting service called Slacker.com has "stated in the press that it made direct license deals with the majors that have saved it the hassle of paying higher royalties." Reporter David Downs is calling the setup "dark payola": indebting the company to the labels' wishes with rate cuts rather than flat-out giving them money.

Major labels: making your most evil nightmares come true.

So, doesn't it sound like a good time to call your congressperson about the Internet Radio Equality Act? 

My column last week, "In Praise of Selling Out," on the advertising industry's adoption of indie rock, has generated probably the most mail of any piece I've written so far. Unsurprisingly, most of it's been negative. People, and especially people from the glory days of the DIY movement, don't like seeing the bands in their scene show up on a commercial for burgers or something. Also unsurprising—to me at least—is that every positive response I got came from musicians, who are looking at a future where making a living off the former staples of album sales and touring seems impossible. And actually, a couple of them have popped up in articles since then. Last Friday, Little Steven Van Zandt—who's doing more than maybe anyone else right now to promote independent music—dropped a pro-commercials piece in Billboard, arguing with only slight exaggeration that, "If you don't have a song in a TV commercial your career is over." And yesterday AdFreak pointed to a recent interview with Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney where he called commercials a way to pay the rent.

While I can understand the opposing viewpoint—I came up in the DIY indie/hardcore scene myself—a typical response like this one over at the Beachwood Reporter (scroll down to "Sell-Out Secrets") offers a lot of outrage, and nothing in the way of real solutions. (Google ads? Really?) I wish small indie bands weren't in a situation where selling their songs to sell burgers wasn't the most attractive career path. But I'm also starting to understand that a lot of people are expecting bands to hold up their end of the DIY contract while bailing out on their own responsibility to support the music. Given the number of indie releases up on OiNK, I'm willing to bet it's more than just a few.

The Great Webcasting War of 2007 between the burgeoning Internet radio industry and SoundExchange, the rather heinous tool of the RIAA, is turning into a drawn-out, mean-ass event. And since the only people who side with SoundExchange on the matter are label execs desperate for revenue and a few recording artists who haven't figured out that you can't collect royalties from a format once it's been legislated into extinction, public opinion is solidly against the greed-heads. SoundExchange is currently backpedaling a bit, and just offered a reduced royalty rate for small Webcasters. SaveNetRadio, the loudest voice on the Webcasting side, basically told them, "thanks, but fuck you," and plans to keep fighting the egregious royalty rate. Whether the decision to turn down a chance to save at least part of the industry is wise or not will ultimately depend on how the Internet Radio Equality Act does in Congress. But regardless of the outcome, SaveNetRadio's statement goes a long way toward refuting any claims that Webcasters don't care about artists or music. You don't make huge, possibly fatal decisions unless you are absolutely dedicated and in love with whatever it is you're defending.

Here's a big quote from the press release explaining SaveNetRadio's reasoning:

"The proposal made by SoundExchange today would throw 'large webcasters' under the bus and end any 'small' webcaster's hopes of one day becoming big," SaveNetRadio spokesperson Jake Ward said.  "Under government-set revenue caps, webcasters will invest less, innovate less and promote less. Under this proposal, Internet radio would become a lousy long-term business, unable to compete effectively against big broadcast and big satellite radio-- artists, webcasters, and listeners be damned.

"Labeling webcasters small or large is a distinction without a difference," continued Ward.  "Two of the most prominent webcasters, Pandora.com and Live365, are models of industry success but would be bankrupted by the CRB and by the SoundExchange proposals. Pandora employs 100 people in an enterprise zone in Oakland, California, but its popularity would put it out of business. Similarly, Live365, an aggregate webcaster that provides a platform for more than 10,000 individual webcasters, has a staff of fewer than 40. Though clearly small as a business, Live365's enormous importance and scope among webcasters would force them to shut down."  

In tackiness news, Dr. Martens has enlisted the aid of four dead counterculture icons to hawk footwear from beyond the grave. Like the old advertising adage goes, nothing moves units quite like nauseating your consumer base.

Beyond the general ickiness of the campaign, I've been thinking all day about what these pictures say about Saatchi and Saatchi's particular view of the afterlife. Apparently heaven is really fucking boring. If you take the images at face value, it looks like Kurt Cobain is spending eternity sitting around being bummed, Joe Strummer's so bored to tears that he's about to collapse (or marybe he's just practicing his poses for a comeback as a Calvin Klein model), and Joey Ramone is spending his eternal reward whistling and tapping his foot, waiting for something interesting at all to happen. I'm taking Sid's apparent good humor as proof to my theory that if you die while you're wasted you arrive in heaven still high, and you stay that way forever.

The only upside I can see to the whole situation is the potential for getting an outraged and probably incoherent Courtney Love back in the news. It's always so drab when she's away.

Amazon just announced that sometime this year they'll be opening an online music store stocked with "millions of songs" from over 12,000 labels, including EMI. No word on pricing or bitrate yet, or who else they're dealing with besides EMI, but they're promising that files sold through the service won't be locked down with DRM, which is killer news. Given the amount of love consumers seem to have for Amazon in general, I could see it being one of the only real threats to the iTunes Music Store's dominance of the online music market.

I'm guessing that Amazon's deal with EMI will include Paul McCartney's solo discography, which is about to be reissued and released to online music stores. I highly recommend you take the opportunity to purchase a copy of McCartney II, which has been sort of hard to find on CD, probably because it's supposed to be his least favorite work. Which I can sort of understand. Most of his solo material can be divided into sappy sentimental ballads ("Feelings" Paul) and elaborately structured pop ("Important" Paul), but II is a lunatic sugar-rush of home-recorded synth-pop full of bizarre ideas and nonsense lyrics ("Stoner with a 4-track" Paul). Recently the Devo-ish track "Temporary Secretary" has been revived, bizarrely enough, by some European hipster DJs who figured out that it can totally hang with Daft Punk and trashy electro hip-hop remixes in terms of providing goofy, hyperactive good times.