Canada Invades US – With Indie Music
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on September 14, 2009 by admin in Music
Monday, September 14th, 2009While we’ve been busy trembling in fear of terrorists and calling our new president a socialist (is that actually an insult?) Canada has been busy invading our country. With a bunch of awesome indie music.
The New Pornographers’ Myriad Harbour may end up being my favorite video of 2008 |
It’s somehow telling that there’s only one derogatory name for Canadians, and even that one’s pretty friendly sounding. I mean, who could get mad about being called a Canuck? I’ve been marveling for a while at the explosion of indie bands over the past several years, whether from the American scene, the Balkans, Japan, Iceland, or even in the form of surprisingly un-incongruous German Reggae. It’s almost impossible to keep up! And thanks to our kind & sensible friends north of the border, now I have even more to catch up with. I hadn’t noticed until recently how many bands creeping onto my playlist were Canadian: Arcade Fire
XX’s Extra X Has Made Me An Ex-X Hater
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 3, 2009 by admin in Music
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009All Ian wanted to do was say he really likes XX’s first release, but no-OO-oo. First he has to ramble on for 224 words about the history of bands with X in their name.
These kids are so shy that they don’t stop mumbling and get to the good stuff until about 0:55 |
I wish bands would stop resorting to using “X” in their name. For me it all started with X in the 70′s. My friends and I were all busy cutting ourselves, wearing second-hand clothes, getting weird haircuts, and listening to weird music, when all of the sudden people started calling us “Punk”. It wasn’t long after that that there were all these “punk bands” running around, acting all punk and stuff. One of the first in the states was, of course, “X”. In spite of (or maybe because of?) their solid musicianship, I remember distinctly thinking they sucked, and seemed incredibly contrived. Punk Lifestyle Rule Number 1: You can’t call yourself punk and actually be punk at the same time. It’s sort of like Groucho’s line about not wanting to belong to any club that would have people like him as a member. I mean c’mon, these alleged rebel misfits actually received an “Official Certificate of Recognition” from the City of Los Angeles for their music. We also would always confuse X with Generation X, until Billy Idol left the band and started his solo career. Which has turned out well
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star Part III
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 11, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Why Your Band Doesn’t Need A Web Site
 We’re still not sure why you’d want to pursue this. |
Two different musicians asked me recently if a couple thousand dollars was a reasonable quote for a basic web site. I said “Absolutely” and then immediately added “but don’t do it”. Interestingly, both were asking for my expertise (I do have a little) but neither were asking me to do the work. Musicians are cheap bastards. I should know, I’m a recovering musician. So why did I tell them not to bother? Because almost everything you would want a web site to do for your band – streaming music, streaming video, user interaction, downloads, etc – is available as a free service elsewhere, with widgets that you can easily embed not only in a very simple site of your own, but in the billions of pages that are the Internet as well. Ask yourself the rather silly (but oft-overlooked) question: Do I want to spend a bunch of money building a destination site of my own and stuggling with SEO to get people to see it, or do I want my music on my site, several other massively trafficked music sites, and thousands of Facebook, Friendfeed, and other Social Networking pages? So the great thing is that whereas this wasn’t really possible even a year ago, there are a slew of sites now that make this absurdly simple. The embedded player from SoundCloud that’s featured below took about five minutes from account setup to embedding to create. For the record, it’s some soundtrackish dreck I did a few years ago for a benefit CD for Kenya-based Amara Conservation. But we’re not showcasing the music, we’re showcasing SoundCloud. They’re just one player in an emerging scene that is sort of like “YouTube” for audio. Below are some of the other key players.
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part II
[ Comments Off ]Posted on August 4, 2009 by admin in Music
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009Well, since your music probably sucks, you might as well plan on getting naked.
 If you play your cards right, you could end up as happily successful as this fellow! |
If you really have an interest in succeeding in pop music, there’s one way to avoid having to do many of the things we’ll suggest in this piece: be an absolutely f***ing brilliant songwriter with solid musicians to play your broadly accessible music. Then some top-notch management will find you, and your only battle after that will be not getting screwed by all the deals you’ll be offered. Since you almost certainly don’t have that particular set of attributes in your possession, ask yourself a few more questions about why you’re seeking to promote your music: Do you want to make a living at it? Are you convinced for some reason the world just needs to be exposed to your genius? Do you think you might have some reasonably marketable music, and wouldn’t mind getting paid for it? Have you been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard again? The fact is that even the established music industry has one of the highest failure rates of almost any business, and you’ll be entering one of the “noisiest” markets on the planet, alas, with a “naked” product. For some interesting thoughts about the new marketplace, check out Digital Music Can’t Be Marketed, which points out that you can’t really package and Read the rest of this entry »
So You Wanna Be A Rock & Roll Star – Part I
[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 29, 2009 by admin in Music
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009A few of the music industry’s most successful artists share how.
 Are you sure you wanna go down this road? |
Music won’t leave me alone. Not that I mind; I’ve been in love with music since I was about four, when my mom managed a music store and would bring home demo models of pianos and dual-keyboard Hammonds with beatboxes built into them. As a teen, I had an Arp Axxe synthesizer before most people knew what a synthesizer was. In the early 80′s I had a good-looking but tragically Human League-like band, and in 1989 was convinced by a very savvy manager to turn down a major label deal. At that point I put music on the backburner as a career, doing occasional soundtrack drivel (well, maybe my stuff’s not that bad) through the nineties, until 2005 when I came close to jumping into the fray of on-line music distribution by expanding my web business. Recently, I’ve been hired to research and plan some marketing for a couple of artists (including Ann Arbor’s Khalid Hanifi), and among other things, was blown away by this 2007 article (which I somehow missed at the time) in which Columbia Records’ Rick Rubin actually says out loud that the traditional music business model is toast. More interestingly though, I’ve been impressed by the wealth of information shared by artists who’ve been very successful with the new business model, much of which can be distilled down to one simple idea: forget unit sales and Read the rest of this entry »