The hype around Facebook's application platform has created a mad rush to grab potential riches, but like many a Forty-Niner, developers are bound to find mountains barren of gold. In the case of MediaMouth, formerly Digital Kiosk Technologies, they are staking their claim to the "First Music Store Inside Facebook." The only problem? MediaMouth's store is not what you would think.
Who says todays kids aren't politically motivated? Demonstrations and protests are growing across American campuses. Today's youth feel a need to do something. And that something, of course is ... protest our involvement in Iraq? Peace for Myanmar? The environment? Don't be silly — today's college students are up in arms over their "right" to free music.
It's time for the recording industry to embrace digital music instead of focusing on CD sales and cell-phone gimmickry (the ringle?). So says Guy Hands, CEO of Terra Firma, the new private-equity owner of EMI. About time someone said it. Radiohead leading the charge into "free" music territory with the digital release of its new album for whatever consumers are willing to pay for it, and others are following suit. EMI and other record labels risk getting cut out of the equation. The music industry needs a new business model, nowish. One suggestion by Hands: Instead of granting big advances, they should offer to subsidize recording costs in exchange for a stake in earnings.
On Friday we wrote about Facebook launching a possible iTunes competitor. We've now found a new, more compelling rumor from Rafat Ali of PaidContent. Instead of a music store, Facebook is said to be launching an artist platform to compete with MySpace's musician-friendly profile pages — a feature that has been a huge part of the social network's growth. Ali says that the platform includes iTunes integration for buying music through Apple's store, special profiles for bands, and unique widgets for music promotion, tour dates, and more, all within the clean Facebook interface.
Remember Bearforce1, the world's first all-bear Dutch synth-disco boi-band? Of course you do! Well, they're in New York for their big American appearances, and our Rod Townsend and Nick McGlynn sat down with the bears last night for an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW (as they say in the tabloids) that includes a live a cappella performance from the band.
Last night whilst we were pondering the finer points of coq a vin on 'Top Chef,' a small but serious contingent of Greenpoint hipsters (they're just like Williamsburg hipsters but taller, slightly less preposterous and more rugged) were enjoying a drink-laden and secret show by Beirut, Zach Condon's Balkans-Brooklyn indie-folk-whatever band. But the hipsters had a dirty secret.
Pitchfork, the music site "often compared to Rolling Stone in its prime," can, they say, make or break an album. But rarely do we get to see the men behind the curtain. Men, you say? Oh yes, we say. Our Intern Sheila checked genders on 10 business days of Pitchfork's bylined reviews from each of the last two months, as well as from March, 2007 and from September, 2006. In each of those periods, reviews by men named Mark appeared at least twice as frequently than any reviews by women. The good news: Pitchfork appears to have doubled its contributions by women in the last year—their lady-numbers have jumped from 4% to 8% of all bylines! Wowza!
Publicity averse hip-hop artists Kanye West and 50 Cent, as you may have heard, have mutually agreed to participate in a "feud" over the sales of their just-released albums, wherein 50 has promised to retire if West's CD outsells his, and West has pledged to suffer a marginally more intense conniption of wounded self-regard at the next awards show that fails to recognize his greatness if outdone by his rival. As we're deeply invested in the outcome of this competition, we dispatched Defamer videographer Molly McAleer to Hollywood's Amoeba Records for an update on the early results of the local sales race and some incisive analysis of the rapping frenemies.
I was in the DUMBO West Elm watching stroller-pushing condo-dwellers tap their toes to the beat of "Sealion Woman" while admiring antler lamps when it finally dawned on me: Feist's "The Reminder" is totally the "Speakerboxx/The Love Below" of Summer 2007. Leslie Feist's Canadian smart-rock was fun for a minute and then so ubiquitous you felt like killing someone every time you heard it. Sure, the first few hundred listens were great! And those wistful yearning songs about how "I will be the one to break my heart" were perfect complements to all our summer crushes. But it's fall now, even though it's still 85 degrees out, and everyone's job is back to being serious and all those summer crushes have decayed like so many overripe farmer's market tomatoes. Please. It's over. It's time to forget.
How long will it take the corporate suits at Viacom to realize that MTV Networks will never, ever, ever succeed in digital music? The latest move, folding MTV's Urge online music store into RealNetworks' Rhapsody service, is just another example of its fumbling. One could point out that MTV doesn't actually broadcast much in the way of music these days; to the extent it's holding onto its youth demographic, it's doing so with a TV schedule packed with reality shows and teen soap operas. Do its viewers even know that the "M" in "MTV" stands for "music"? But never mind that. The reality of MTV is a decade-long history of complete and utter failure in digital music. The timeline of missed opportunities, botched deals, and general cluelessness, after the jump:
Granted, I have no taste in music, either. But at least I have the good sense to hang my head in shame and not trumpet this fact, as Arrington's just done on TechCrunch, the tech blog he edits, in the course of writing about Apple's new My iTunes feature, which lets you broadcast your iTunes purchases on the Web. For the record, Arrington is into Gnarls Barkley, OutKast, Green Day, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers ... and the Pussycat Dolls. (I always wondered about Arrington.) I mean, for me, one of the best things about ripping my music library to iTunes was no longer having a rack of CDs on the wall for houseguests to peruse and mock. This new iTunes widget essentially restores that previous state of affairs, letting even perfect strangers lambaste your musical taste. Speaking of, after the jump, a detailed analysis of Arrington's musical misdeeds from Idolator editor Maura Johnston.
Executives at SoundExchange, the much-hated collectors of digital-music royalties, have been caught doing something naughty . Much to the delight of Internet radio stations fighting higher online-music fees, a federal appeals court slapped their wrists for supporting special interest group MusicFirst Coalition. The supposed "coalition," actually an industry front, is lobbying to levy performance royalties on terrestrial radio stations — much like SoundExchange's own mission to collect billions of dollars from Internet radio.
We hear that bottomfeedy lit agent David Vigliano is shopping Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo's journals, which, if they're anything like the rest of his creative output, started out world-changingly awesome and then became so lame they make Pete Wentz seem profound. Also, they're probably more in the vein of the essay about his battle with weirdly-defined celibacy he wrote at Harvard. Remember? "I didn't touch her down there, but I ran my hand up and down her arm, feeling her muscles tense up and twitch as she worked herself more and more furiously. She kept going until finally she let out a big moan and relaxed. I looked down on her, whimpered, and then fell over onto my back and stared at the ceiling, fire-like sensations bursting from every cell in my body." We can only hope there's more where that came from. Or, uh, forcibly-didn't-come from.
We had sensibly assumed the respiratory infection that struck down Christina Aguilera — forcing her to cancel her Australian concert dates — came from screeching those high notes prior to a parade of all-night, stress-relieving tour-bus orgies. But apparently we've been short-sighted, forgetting God's distaste for Louboutins, blondes, and wanton displays of sexuality the likes of which would make Satan pump his claws in triumph. Says the Baptists For Brownback blog:
"Odds are also that there's someone hot in your office you've considered dating. And to that I say: Go for it," begins romance expert Julia Allison's latest Time Out NY column. After all, she reasons, if things ultimately don't pan out, "there is always another hedge fund, publishing house or law firm willing to harbor you should you need to, um, extricate yourself." Wow, spoken like someone who has never had a real job. Maybe there's a counterargument to be made here. And we know just the woman to make it! You guessed it: Stevie Nicks.
The Village Voice, home of cultural relevance, hosted their seventh annual Siren festival on Saturday. David Johansen, the 57-year-old frontman of the New York Dolls, shuffled on stage; swaggering, skinny, senescent. The Dolls rocked but in more of a social artifact way. M.I.A., the darling of the summer of 2005, almost didn't make it to the show due to visa issues but she was perhaps was the most convincing performer. The crowd, mostly young and white, stood crisscrossed by the shadows of the nearby roller coaster. They drank beer out of those elongated plastic containers you get at Renaissance Fairs and nodded their heads. Those who wore caps to protect their scalps under their prematurely thinning hair, did so at an angle. We sent Brad Walsh to capture the awful jubilation.
During a recent visit to Winnie's, the onetime Chinese mafia hangout and current downtown karaoke dive, it occurred to us that in every karaoke bar in this town (and really, all over the world), one encounters the same cast of characters. They vary in accent and affect but, for the most part, karaoke is the closest thing to commedia dell'arte we have. In an effort to prepare you for the battlefield that is not only love but also karaoke, we've put together a field guide to karaoke archetypes, or as we call them, karaokarchetypes.
