The new music-recommendation service Songkick–which sends out e-mail alerts to users when their favorite artists come to town, and uses a last.fm-like recommendation engine to tell its users about “similar artists” being out on tour–has developed a Battle Of The Bands application, which is sort of like Googlefight with the added nebulousness of using data from MySpace (like number of friends and number of song streams added per week) and Amazon. We put it to the test with three artists who have recently made headlines by using the Internet as part of their distribution strategy, and the results may surprise you:
Hits has its weekly prediction of next week’s top 10 albums, sales-wise, but there’s one notable release from this week that’s missing from its projected tallies: Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple, which was rush-released this week in response to its being leaked two weeks ago. It lumbered to the upper reaches of digital-music outlets’ charts almost immediately upon release, but will those numbers be enough for it to crack the top 10, even in these days of weak record sales?
Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple, which had its physical release date bumped up from April 8 to “sometime this week,” has appeared on the iTunes Music Store, and it’s already No. 2 on the store’s album chart. More »
Less than 24 hours after the Raconteurs announced the one-week gap between announcement and in-store date for the group’s second album, another hotly awaited follow-up, Gnarls Barkley’s The Odd Couple, has been bumped up to… any day now. Excerpted release from the duo’s publicists after the jump.
So that story yesterday about Gnarls Barkley’s video needing re-edits before it could get added to MTV’s playlist because it failed the Harding Test, which measures whether or not a video can trigger epileptic seizures, neglected to note that this only applied to MTV in the UK, where they… More »
ARTIST: Gnarls Barkley
TITLE: The Odd Couple
WEB DEBUT: Mar. 4, 2008
Last week, Jess pointed out that the new video by Gnarls Barkley–a tribute to TV dance parties of the past that features Justin Timberlake sporting white leather–“should probably come with a seizure warning” thanks to a blitz of black-and-white effects in the clip’s closing minutes. More »
Bookended by a cameo from a Justin Timberlake profiling in Cazals and white leather, the gleeful new video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” is a tribute to a beloved but short-lived teevee hip-hop dance party, at least according to one Idolator reader left irate by certain lazy comparisons to American… More »
Yesterday, a song from Gnarls Barkley’s forthcoming album The Odd Couple leaked, and late last night, the Daily Swarm wondered if it was a sign that the viral marketing for the duo’s next album, out in April, had already begun. This sounds like a job for our long-dormant feature Track Marks, in which we track the popularity of a blogger buzz band–especially since the hype cycle on this traveled so fast, and even made a pit stop at our inbox. So without further ado…
ARTIST: Gnarls Barkley
HOMETOWN: The Internet Los Angeles
ALBUM: The Odd Couple, out April 8
In Gnarls Barkley news, Danger Mouse is set to work with acclaimed producer/songwriter Van Dyke Parks and John Cale on a forthcoming album, so maybe the next Cee-Lo single will feature beats by Mo Tucker and Joanna Newsom? You know he’s totally got the same taste in hats. More »
