The Remarkable Career of Malcolm McLaren

The music world has lost one of its most influential, eccentric and (at times) maddening figures. Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away on April 8, and he continues to confound and confuse in death, much as he did in life-—the announcement of his demise was compounded by conflicting reports on the location of his passing, which could have been in a clinic in Switzerland, or may have been in New York City. Just one last little dab of chaos from a man who positively thrived on pulling a strange, raucous and compelling kind of beauty from disorder.

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The iPad and the Publishing Industry: A Match Made in Heaven?

Stephen Fry has posted a lovely reminiscence on the TIME website, which looks back on his early days playing with a Mac computer back in 1984. Fry and author Douglas Adams were the first two people to own Macintosh computers in England, and they would regularly meet up to exchange floppy discs and rearrange their desktop icons. The article discusses how those early dalliances with the Mac brand were the first time that computing had been a fun experience for both Fry and Adams—-something Steve Jobs and his team would ultimately build on as they produced the iPod and the iPhone. But expectations for the iPad, released this past weekend, inhabit some strange middle ground in the suite of Mac products, with a certain industry banking on it to blow some much needed air into the lungs of its failing business model.

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The New Era of Pop Exclusitvity

Everyone hates an exclusive club, unless they’re asked to join or can somehow force themselves in. For a long time, the Internet has operated in direct opposition to such exclusivity-—it’s a free-for-all, where user generated content is king, and anyone with a half-realized idea can easily foist themselves onto the public for five seconds and then shrink back into anonymity. This way of working hasn’t been kind to the music industry, which once thrived on the removed other-ness of pop idols. Those kids in the '70s who spoke in awe-struck tones about David Bowie coming from another planet now seem impossibly naïve, their wide-eyed wonder replaced with an all-knowing savvy, because we’ve all been drawn so much closer to the people whose art has inspired us. We can even interact with many of them directly via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook or [insert name of preferred social networking tool here].

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Military Madness: How the Army Courted the Music World

Anyone browsing the U.K. arm of MTV’s website may find themselves raising an eyebrow when they see this page. Yes, MTV is using its considerable weight to bolster Army recruitment figures, presumably realizing the age range that the network attracts makes for ideal cannon fodder. Naturally, the advertising campaign features very little about the prominent hazards of the job-—U.K. troops are still being deployed to Afghanistan, but it would be unthinkable to mention something related to that on the MTV page-—instead choosing to focus on other aspects of military life. Predominant among these are ways in which the Army can indefinitely enhance civilian life.

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The Struggle to Stream: Spotify Delays U.S. Launch

Any music fan outside a handful of European countries has faced a familiar frustration when browsing certain websites during 2009. The streaming music website Spotify has popped up everywhere, with many sites collating playlists to help supplement articles and generally waxing lyrical about this wonderful new discovery. The only problem? All those audio wonders are unavailable unless you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the United Kingdom, France or Spain—-the set of countries where Spotify is, at the time of writing, freely available.

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Kickstarter, Topspin and the New Transparency

We’ve been blogging about the annual CMJ Music Marathon on Culture Now for the last few weeks, which featured performances from some of the best up-and-coming artists around the world. People who flocked to the shows probably didn’t pay too much attention to how each act got there, or how much money they made from the event. The truth is, most of the artists probably lost money to appear at CMJ, and those losses only increase significantly when further demands, such as national and foreign tours, become a necessary part of the promotional grind during the early stages of a band’s career.

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The CMJ Music Marathon 2009: Best of the Panels

There are two sides to the annual CMJ Music Marathon, which exerts a vice-like grip on the music industry in New York in October. At night, there are fallen-down-drunk bodies strewn throughout the streets, as industry workers stumble out of venues after a selection of their bands play showcases all across the city. Free and cheap beer helps add to the madness, and corporate sponsors proliferate throughout-—it’s not unusual to see a group of people playing a demo version of Rock Band while an actual rock band plays in the same venue. Fortunately, the real-life musicians were just about winning the battle for attention at CMJ ’09.

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The CMJ Music Marathon 2009: Tips, Hints, and Previews

The storied history of the annual CMJ Music Festival in New York City includes many legendary performances and panels. Who can forget Factory Records head honcho Tony Wilson and his infamous “wake up America, you’re dead!” conference from 1990? Or appearances by Nirvana, R.E.M., the White Stripes, Eminem, and countless others? It’s certainly not easy to obtain entrance to the festival—-the price is steep, the lines are long, and a badge doesn’t guarantee entry at the packed-out shows. But people come back undeterred year after year, and the 2009 incarnation of the Music Marathon will be no exception.

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The Future of Music Coalition Considers Journalism

The annual summit held by the Future of Music Coalition occurred in Washington D.C. this past week, allowing a number of music industry figureheads to get together to discuss pertinent problems in the business. Topics such as royalty rates and net neutrality dominated proceedings, but there was also a sizable chunk of debate about the future of music writing. You just know the art of writing about music is in trouble when the Coalition decides to name a panel Critical Condition: The Future of Music Journalism, although there were a few thoughts and debates on future innovations in the field.

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Back to the Future: How the ‘90s Infiltrated the ‘00s.

The alternative music scene has often looked to the past for inspiration. In the ‘80s, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen respectively paid tribute to the Velvet Underground and the Doors, and that lineage continues to flourish to this day. A cursory listen to Brooklyn bands like Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls offers two examples of bands strung somewhere in-between the territory mapped out in the ‘60s and the ‘80s, with influences amalgamated through obsessive listening to both leaders and followers. An entire decade stretched out before those ‘80s bands began plundering the past and, for a while, a 10-year stretch of silence seemed to be the normative passage of time before old sounds became fresh again and aging rockers began eyeballing a big bag of reunion swag.

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Kraftwerk and the March of Progress

The earliest Kraftwerk records weren't exactly made in a void—-Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 bear some obvious rock hallmarks that depreciated significantly as their career unfolded. Those albums are loosely connected to similarly minded experimentalists in the then-burgeoning krautrock scene, who were, like Kraftwerk, enamored with the nihilistic proto-punk of the Stooges and the MC5. That those two bands hailed from Detroit, a city that toiled away to the ingrained rhythms of industrial machinery from the then-thriving auto industry, was telling. The march to work, soundtracked by the precision-tooled cadence of pistons and parts being methodically slotted into place, has often been summoned up as a common metaphorical motif to describe Kraftwerk's steely stomp through music history.

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The Battle For Your Eyes

It’s been a long time since anyone instinctively turned on their TV set for a music video fix. Waiting patiently in the hope that something good might appear has been made redundant in the age of ultra-fast streaming online video, and MTV knows it; the network has steadily reduced its music video content to such an extent that it’s a surprise to find they haven’t shunted the annual VMAs ceremony to one of their smaller outposts. YouTube is now the place where most people get their music video kicks, and statistics compiled by TubeMogul indicate that these short promotional clips are dominating viewing habits on the site. TubeMogul estimates that 76.5% off all views in the Top 25 uploads on YouTube have been provided by major music companies.

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ATP and the New Festival Experience

The music world has ushered in some radical innovations this decade. The preeminence of iTunes, the iPod, and MP3 files has caused us to fundamentally alter the way we listen to music. But this has also been the decade when the music festival grew up and branched out into previously uncharted territories. A typical scene from a ‘90s festival featured concertgoers caked in mud, sword-swallowers and jugglers, and unhappy camping experiences for all concerned. The lineups had certainly improved, with forward-thinking festivals such as Reading in the U.K. and Lollapalooza in the U.S. mostly shedding the hippie jam-band ethos that had prevailed, instead bringing in alternative rock and indie acts to entertain the masses.

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Rock Music and the Battle to Go Green

In 2007, a series of concerts took place across the world under the Live Earth banner. The aim of the shows was to alert people to the damage being wreaked on the planet by climate change, a hot-button topic that was facing resistance and scorn from the George W. Bush administration. Madonna, Genesis, Bon Jovi and Spinal Tap were among the eclectic lineup of performers who played on the day, sparking many jokes that hairspray bills and expensive lighting were causing irreparable damage to the environment despite the good intentions of everyone involved. The organizers refuted these claims, saying the events were carbon neutral and promising to purchase carbon credits to offset any damage done.

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Everybody Needs a 404

In 1996, Fatboy Slim released his single “Everybody Needs a 303,” and the genre that would become known as Big Beat was born. The song paid tribute to the Roland TB-303, a bass synthesizer/sequencer that had long been a key component in the hardware arsenal of many influential electronic music composers. The instrument initially helped define house music as Chicago musicians picked up and manipulated the 303, and its squelchy synth patterns became ubiquitous when the acid house boom took hold in the early ‘90s.

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The Selling of a 21st Century Pop Star

Hundreds of used copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame are freely available at knockdown prices on Amazon and EBay. It’s not surprising; journalists were flooded with copies of the CD prior to its release in August 2008. Sometimes, multiple copies of the disc would even arrive in the same week. Her name wasn’t as recognizable back then, her ubiquity still agonizingly out of reach. Fast forward a year and it’s difficult to imagine Gaga having many aspirations left, although her bolshy, Madonna-esque outlook on life would never allow her to admit to that. For Lady Gaga, this is just the beginning.

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Chris Brown and the Death of the Music Video

So video didn’t kill the radio star after all. For a while back there, it even seemed like the two mediums were happy to co-exist. Radio proved to be a remarkably resilient beast, while video became an artform in its own right via innovative work from directors such as Russell Mulcahy, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry. Certain posthumous commentaries on Michael Jackson’s career recalled the halcyon days of MTV, and how he became the first African American artist to gain heavy rotation on the network. Jackson did more than that-—his “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” videos helped establish MTV as a powerful force in the American pop culture landscape.

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The Artist As a Business Start-Up

Radiohead’s manager, Brian Message, appears to be on a mission to restructure the music industry. His ideas on how music should be presented and sold have already caused a mixture of glee and controversy among his peers. The pay-what-you-want model for In Rainbows set a fascinating precedent for the selling of music by major artists, and Message has also voiced his support for Joel Tenenbaum—-the man facing a court case against the RIAA for illegally downloading music files.

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The New T-Shirt Revolution

Most music fans have shelled out hard earned cash for a band T-shirt at some point. Sometimes, a simple band logo will suffice. At others, a tour T-shirt with a great list of dates on the back can work as a great souvenir. The recent(ish) trend for retro designs proves that the lowly band T-shirt is far from dead, and has even sparked a bizarre trend for people sporting clothing bearing the name of artists whose work isn’t familiar to them. How else to explain the abundance of Motorhead T-shirts draped over the skeletal frames of catwalk models a few years back? Lemmy must have had a good laugh about that one (a laugh that took him all the way to the bank).

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The Shock of the New

With MySpace caught up in a downward spiral, the question of where new bands should go to promote their wares online is currently a major issue in the music industry. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor has made a thoughtful post on the topic, in which he outlines various strategies for upcoming artists who want to make their mark. Reznor believes that free is the way forward, and encourages new bands to forget about record sales. He proposes that bands build a fanbase by giving away music in exchange for an e-mail address, which can later be utilized for marketing purposes (promotion of live dates, merchandise, and even future record sales once an artist’s name is properly established).

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