At this point, everyone's familiar with the RIAA and their delightful campaign to sue whoever it can, including that guy who sneezed in a sort of funny way that made it sound like he was saying "Kazaa." Now, the organization is trying a new angle: Going after people who dare engage in smack talk.
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Bacardi, the rum company that was last seen 'round these parts signing the big beat duo Groove Armada to a 360 deal, is pursuing even more "innovative" music-business ventures: It'll start commissioning music from artists, then disseminate said tracks to music blogs. Because, you know, music blogs are totally awesome. Whether or not Bacardi's system will operate under the walled-garden RCRD LBL model or just serve as a glorified PR company that pays for the tracks it winds up promoting isn't yet clear, but the first act in the company's system has been identifed: It's the UK electro act Metronomy.
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An unnamed "high traffic" New York City-based music blog is looking for writers to post three to five times a week. Must-haves: blogging experience, the ability to hold on to your attention span long enough to write 400-500 words per post, "frequent concert attendance." Take note that you'll get "payed" on a per-post basis, so I'm thinking that it's also a "bring your own spellcheck" affair. [Craigslist; HT Matos]
Despite the threat of thunder, lightning, and pouring rain, yesterday's show at Brooklyn's McCarren Park Pool featuring MGMT and the Ting Tings filled the place to capacity—even on the celebrity side, as Agyness Deyn and Kirsten Dunst were both in attendance. Alas, I had a date with an awesome Mets victory, so I was not in attendance, but I got a feel for the afternoon's vibe via those sweaty New York City types who can't help but gloat about their ability to stand in line and, therefore, be better than everyone else in the comments section of Brooklyn Vegan. Their writings have been giving me fits of laughter/periods of despair at our future, and naturally, I couldn't help but share some of the "best" comments, with the definition of "best" either meaning "funniest" or "aptly capturing the multitude of reasons I was happy that the Warped Tour was my weekend all-day outdoor concert of choice." (Hey, I am a girl from Long Island. I know my place.)
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Hey, Fortune! I know that as a Time Inc. publication in 2008, you're pretty much charged with putting a shiny happy gloss on news pegs for "interesting" business ventures out there, and doing so in word counts that are dwindling so quickly, you'll eventually be communicating via semaphore. (Or photo galleries. Or both.) But when you drop a statement like "Just as the political bloggers are altering the outcome of elections, MP3 bloggers are changing the way people discover new music" in an otherwise decent article on the Hype Machine, maybe you should actually hold up an example of that "discovery," so as to give your readers a little bit of context? Especially given that the one good thing the Internet music elite seem to be better at chewing bands up and spitting them out before they've even been partially digested than actually "discovering" them? [CNNMoney]
Not-So-Subtle Hints
MTV-owned blog pens post saying that Lil Wayne "absoluteamentely needs to host the 2008 MTV VMAs" for a variety of reasons, including his previous appearances on the channel, his forthcoming line of bubbly and his unabashed willingness to wear two-year-old Urban Outfitters offerings on TV. So this means that the announcement will happen what, next week or so? [Buzzworthy / Photo via FNMTV]
Brooklyn Vegan's commenters respond to AP's version of the "hey, gas prices may be getting too expensive for small bands to tour" story the only way they know how: "hey. whatever it takes to get some of these bands who can't play their instruments to begin with off the road...i'm all for it." [Brooklyn Vegan / AP / Photo: Khuong Hoang]
Fortune reports on "OMG blogs can be record labels" poster child RCRD LBL hooking up with The Fader's site, indie-leaning tipsheet The Tripwire, and the members-only DJ site 1200 Squad to form an ad network: "Thefader.com, for instance, has 93,000 unique monthly users. RCRD LBL has 125,000. Thetripwire.com, an 'indie' rock destination, has 15,000. The hip-hop oriented 1200squad.com has only registered users.... By rolling the sites into a network, Cohen and Stone can now approach advertisers with an audience of nearly 240,000." Is it just me, or does simply adding up those unique users and reaching a nice, big, round number equal some faulty math? Especially since the two largest sites in the equation frequently give each other the linkaround, and presumably have some unique-visitor overlap?
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A 58% year-to-year increase in monthly unique visitors has resulted in imeem becoming the No. 1 destination for streaming music on the Web, according to statistics collected by compete.com in March 2008; the former No. 1, Yahoo! Music, slipped to No. 2 on a 14% year-to-year dip (9.6 million). Coming in at No. 7 on the Compete countdown with 2.3 million uniques: HM1500, a shorthand term for the aggregate unique-visitor traffic of more than 1,500 music blogs tracked by the Hype Machine. (The Machine itself is at No. 16.) One glaring omission from Compete's list: YouTube, which I use for streaming much, much more than any of the sites in the top 20. (I know, I know, pulling music-only data out is a pain in the butt, but they're an analytics company! They can analyze!) [Compete.com]
Former Sleater-Kinney guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein blogs at NPR, and her latest post has a fully cleared MP3 mix that has tracks by the likes of Pylon and Wire, and is appended with a note: "This mix was supposed to have the Grateful Dead on it, whose music I really love, but they refused unless we promised to do a piece on them on All Things Considered. In addition, we would need to run a feature on The Dead on the site. Here's a sentence I've never written: Someone needs to take a bong hit and chill out. Just a simple 'no thanks' would have sufficed. Are The Dead really in need of publicity? Because I swear there's a dancing bear sticker on every third car I see in Portland." Hey, they're just trying to take blog payola to the next level! Never underestimate those dancing bears' marketing savvy. [Monitor Mix; HT BV]
Yet another pop-centric blog bites the dust (and from the commenters' murmurings, it looks like the culprit is whoever handles Oasis' business affairs): "PRETTY MUCH AMAZING, HAS ONCE AGAIN BEEN TRUMPED. I DONT KNOW IF I WILL BRING IT BACK THIS TIME. IT'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING, HASN'T IT. BUT THIS MAY BE IT FOR PMA. WHO KNOWS. WILL UPDATE AGAIN NEXT WEEK TO KEEP EVERYONE IN CHECK." Kind of surprised that the leaked Kelly Clarkson demos didn't do him in, but I guess the music business is still in "slightly slower than your average tortoise" mode when it comes to its endless game of whack-a-mole. [Pretty Much Amazing]
Ah, trend stories, the bane of every journalistic enterprise. On the one hand, they are handy for editors who want to know what "the kids" who will be taking their jobs and houses are up to. On the other hand, they're generally vacuous glosses on subjects that are way too surface-gleaning to even be called "superficial." Greg Sandoval at CNet took the world of "music blogging" under his trend-story wing this morning, and if nothing else it's a primer in how not to tackle this admittedly knotty, yet way too often completely misunderstood subject. Five anti-lessons after the jump.
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Operation Shutdown
It would seem that the leak of Madonna's Hard Candy has succeeded in taking out most of the pop music leak blogs that linked to its Rapidshare-enabled downloads earlier today, i.e., most of the pop music leak blogs that weren't demolished by the great Mariah Carey blog purge of early 2008. For now, anyway—who knows where else this game of whack-a-mole can lead us? [Where Is Chris Pix?!?]
Now that Pitchfork's video-heavy Pitchfork.tv and Stereogum's "Television With Even Less Pity Than Television Without Pity" spinoff Videogum have safely launched, we can all see the folly of all the pre-launch "OMG direct competitors?!?" chatter that threatened to sag the meta-music-blogosphere past its already-pretty-low point. Yes, "video-related sites that are brand extensions of popular music sites and launching in early April" could be a (somewhat wordily named) trendlet, but surely anyone trying to lump the two together as direct competitors is either really overly invested in pitching a trend story on this topic or not so into concepts like "nuance" or "completely different business models and also kind of different audiences." [Hypebot]
"U STILL THE HOE U ALWAYS BEEN. AND HOES DONT GET NO RESPECT!!!!!! PUPPETTTTTT!!!!" Harsh! Looks like the vicious feud between sexually demanding rappers Khia and Trina didn't end in 2006. Khia, author of "My Neck, My Back" and ringer on VH1's upcoming Miss Rap Supreme, went to Target Tuesday and bought Trina's new CD, Still Da Baddest, just so she could give it a track by track review (hopefully the only one that will mock Trina's '06 miscarriage and contain the phrase "I OUGHT TO TAKE OFF MY BIG RED CLOWN SHOE AND KICK U IN UR BIG BOBBLE HEAD!!!!!!!!").
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Lil Wayne will release The Carter III on May 13. Maybe. After all, the guy has spent the last two and a half years doing everything but making actual studio albums: seven or eight mixtapes, dozens of guest appearances, several arrests, and more hype than the"Loungin'" video*. Some of this attention has been warranted. The Carter II, his previous studio effort, is a good but not great record, with "Tha Mobb" ranking as one of the decade's finest rap songs and "Shooter" impressively meshing hardcore raps with a crossover sensibility (though Alan Thicke will forever out-class his son). Moreover, Wayne's ascendence benefited heavily from 2005's ignominious distinction as one of the worst years in rap history, with critics so strapped for music to ride for that they actually tried to convince themselves that Paul Wall and Mike Jones were good.
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Do you want to enter the lucrative world of music blogging? Do you lack the ability to put together sentences, dig through piles of publicist e-mails, surf the hype/backlash wave, and actually take the time to hit "publish" once you've slogged through the previous steps? Well, fret no more! Someone has put together a guide to putting together your own MP3 blog that will take up no more than 10 minutes of your time thanks to some "clever" use of the music-tracking site last.fm, the apparently-still-around Yahoo! Pipes, the microblog application Tumblr, and, of course, deeplinking content that other people have already posted. You'll never have to look at the gaping yawn of a "Compose New Entry" page again!
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As it turns out, the spate of leak-blog deletions that I reported yesterday isn't the result of Mariah Carey's people coming down hard—it's the fallout from a leak-blog war where, as Crazy World Of Music's Vicki describes it, "The blog gets hacked and I had to change my password for 4 hours yesterday... [Some dude named Kevin is] coming back on March 10 but his blog sucks and won't be #1 since he's the one who's behind hacking this blog and shutting other blog down so he can be #1 in the blog world. Well, get a clue you won't be #1 BUT you ruin a lot of good sites on the way cause you are jealous of them. No, he's NOT Kevi-ipods, its a 12 year old Kevin who's immature.... mine got hacked but the other ones got reported by Kevin and his "friends" for no reason. Yea its stupid but his blog won't be #1 at all." And now Vicki is coming back on March 17! Whew. This all sounds like the plot to a movie that would culminate in a dance war—of course, that dance war would have to be in Second Life, but at least it would have a bleeding-edge-of-pop soundtrack to make up for that awkwardness. [Crazy World Of Music]
Idolator
