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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Tiny Vipers - Life on Earth: Album Review

Vincenzo Natali’s 2003 film Nothing takes its two central figures, Andrew and Dave, and positions them in a characterless white void. The big endless nothing appears to stretch on forever, triggering a peculiar kind of claustrophobia in the two men, who slip into various existential crises as they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings. All that remains of their previous world is the house in which they both lived. Tiny Vipers’ Life On Earth is music that barely exists, that sounds like it was recorded after Jesy Fortino (who is Tiny Vipers) fell into a deep chasm and wasn’t particularly bothered about getting out. There’s almost nothing here. No air, no light. Sometimes there’s hardly any music at all.

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Top of the Pops: Do Charts Still Matter?

Are consumers still aware of the singles and albums that currently stand atop the Billboard singles and album charts? Like many other countries in the world, Billboard welcomed legal digital downloads into its chart gathering statistics back in the mid 2000s. Before then, sales of physical copies were merged with statistics from Broadcast Data Systems, who tracked radio airplay. This system worked fine, until now. With traditional radio outlets battling online competitors, it’s become increasingly apparent that Internet streaming services need to be welcomed into the fold.

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Anatomy of a Scoop: The Music Media and Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s sad passing occurred less than 24 hours ago at time of writing, but we all know how this one went down. Speedy gossip website TMZ, who have been the first to publish numerous celebrity gossip/scandal stories in the last few years, got the scoop to end all scoops on June 25. After publishing a story that Michael Jackson had collapsed from an apparent cardiac arrest, they followed it with the real hammer blow: The self-styled King of Pop had died after paramedics failed to revive him on arrival at his home in Holmby Hills, California.

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Freemium Thinking

A few cosmic forces aligned last week. On Monday (June 15), Wired Magazine’s editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson, gave a thought-provoking speech on the future of free products. Anderson’s core belief is that any product sucked into the digital realm will ultimately end up being given away for free. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a 32 year-old mother of four named Jammie Thomas-Rasset was pondering the actions of a jury who had just fined her $1.9 million for music copyright violations. Her decision to illegally share MP3 files by Green Day and Sheryl Crow (among others) via the P2P service Kazaa had caused her long-running battle with the music industry to come to an unfortunate ending.

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Sonic Youth on Jimmy Fallon: Report From the Band Bench

We cover a lot of band performances from late night talk shows here on Prefix. So I thought we should take it to the next level and actually attend one of the shows and report back from there. I scored a couple of tickets for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week, figuring they have the best range of musical guests of all the talk shows. Last night (June 22) I made the trip to 30 Rock, where Fallon’s guests included John Leguizamo, Nick Cannon and Sonic Youth. These were ‘Band Bench’ tickets, meaning I would be ushered onto the bleachers behind the stage when Sonic Youth played, with instructions to “go crazy” from one of Fallon’s producers.

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Tiny Masters of Today - Skeletons: Album Review

Ava made the transition to her teenage years with this record, and it shows. Her oblique lyrics work as allegorical paeans to typical aspects of teenage life—suffocating peer group alienation, a drive to be cool, the possession of a jaded seen-it-all-before outlook. She’ll often just repeat catchphrases (“drop the bomb, man”, “banging at the rhythm of my big bass drum”) that she’s picked up, which don’t ostensibly mean much, but serve as a fond reminder of how such things play an important part at that age: all the cool outsidery kids at school add jargon-filled catchphrases to their dialect. There’s no great lyrical depth at work here, other than a few barbed comments at Ava’s fellow teens, and nor should there be; her self-reflective Billie Holiday opus can wait until she’s at least 16.

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