It is the 102nd birthday of Woody Guthrie, and it’s Bastille Day, commemorating the storming of the royalist political prison in 1789.
It seems very apropos.
Category: Music
I Feel So Bloody Old
It’s been 52 years since the Rollings Stones played their first gig, at the Marquee Club.
I don’t know about you, but I feel so f%$#ing old.
I Want this, and I Don’t Even Know How to Play It
We were at Honfest (The term “Hon” is a Baltimore thing), and I saw this guitar.
Epic win!
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My Daughter the Concert Promoter
For her 17th birthday party, Natalie decided to throw a fund raising concert for the Open Space Arts community theater troupe.
She got 3 bands, Silent Society (shown), Winter Hill, and 3PM, printed tickets, arranged for PR and food, etc.
I am managing to grill, cooking hotdogs and veggie burgers.
Posted via mobile.
This is Prize
I don’t hear a single here
An indy band needed to raise money for their tour, and the payments received from Spotify weren’t cutting it.
They came up with a remarkably innovative way to monetize the streaming service:
Last month, indie band Vulfpeck wanted to go on tour. Like most indie bands, though, they didn’t have the money. With streaming dominating the industry and music streaming giant Spotify paying a grand $0.007 per stream (Vulfpeck sights it at $0.005), it didn’t look like they’d be making money anytime soon. Spotify had been promising they’ll start paying more — just as soon as they grow their Premium user base from 6 million to 40 million. In short: never.
So scrappy soul band Vulfpeck came up with a plan of their own.
They uploaded 10 tracks of silence to Spotify under the name Sleepify. Then, they put out this video, urging fans to stream the album on repeat while they slept. The band pledged to use the royalty revenue they racked up to fund a tour, where all shows would have free admission. And it worked.
Short version, the netted over $20K before Spotify sent a C&D for violating their TOS,* but they have the folding green to tour.
I will note that while musicians compare about the rates for streaming, they typically compare it to selling an album, which a user can listen to many times, to a single streamed song listened to once.
Of course, bands have been f%$#ed by the middlemen since ……… forever ……… And the real question is how a model that disintermediates between them and the fans.
*E-I-E-I-O
Saw Blondie on The Daily Show Tonight
They did a new song, and one of their standards, Dreaming,
The performance was good, and Debbie Harry’s voice is still good, though she’s lost a bit on the high end of her range.
I will note, I just Wikied her, and realized that she is 68, and she is still smoking hot, and still maintains the New Wave attitude that she, and Blondie pioneered.
Ear Worm is not Necessarily a Pejorative
I woke up this morning, and had a song that I could not get out of my head.
Thankfully, it was IMNSHO, the best song from The Who album Face Dances, Tricky Day.
Have a Youtube link, because my so does not support embeds.
Enjoy.
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What I Really Hate About United Airlines
On Hold for Hours
If you read of my recent travel problems, I should note that they were all weather related, and everyone at United was polite, and efficient, energetic, and quite competent.
I really mean that.
But, because of the inevitable consequences of the snowtastrophe, it meant that I spent hours on hold.
And United has licensed George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue as its theme, and so it is their on hold music.
So I heard it for hours ……… and hours ……… and hours ……… AND HOURS ………
It’s a musical masterpiece, and I can no longer listen to it.
UAL, drop Rhapsody in Blue as your hold music, please.
Capitalism, Huh?
click a picture for a slide show
When Metallica discovered that their music was being used to torture inmates at Guantanamo, they send a cease and desist letter.
Canadian electro-industrial band Skinny Puppy went a different route, and have sent an invoice demanding payment:
By now we’re all familiar with the U.S. government’s practice of using heavy metal to torture detainees. We’ve all seen “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Homeland”—we get the drill. Usually metal music is used for its general unpleasantness. It’s impossible to sleep through and just all-around unnerving.
Except Canadian band Skinny Puppy had no idea their music was being used in the service of the U.S. military.
………
The Independent points out Friday that when Metallica learned their music was being used as a torture device at Guantanamo they sent the the government a cease and desist. Skinny Puppy, on the other hand, went the other way and just sent an invoice.
“We heard that our music was used on at least four occasions,” Evin Key said. “So we thought it would be a good idea to make an invoice to the U.S. government for musical services.”
Asked how he felt about his music being used to torture people, he said, “Not too good. We never supported those types of scenarios. Because we make unsettling music, we can see it being used in a weird way. But it doesn’t sit right with us.”
It doesn’t sit right with anyone who values the idea of rule of law and civil rights, Evin.
I would remind you thought that the statutory damages for such a use, it is clearly a public performance, are on the order of $150,000 per infraction.
It might be more worth your while to sue.
Deep Thought
The death of Pete Seeger has me thinking of Woody Guthrie:
See the label on his guitar saying, “This machine kills fascists?”
Folk songs are about not some sort of generic emotional warm fuzzies.
They are about life, and they are about deep moral outrage.
H/t TPM for the picture (c. 1943).
Pete Seeger 1919-2014
A fixture at my house
And some biting social satire
Growing up, I remember listening to his album Gazette.
And there was also his lifelong political activism, along with his standing up to the evil bullies of HUAC.
He was, of course, a bit subversive, but art tends to be subversive.
We will not see his like in the foreseeable future.
Chris Christie Weeps………
Chris Christie is a huge fan of the Boss, and Bruce Springsteen just lambasted Jabba the Governor for “Bridgegate” on Jimmy Fallon.
What’s more, he did this to the tune of Born to Run.
Sucks to be you, Chris.
F%$#ing Civil Liberties, How Do They Work?
Insane Clown Posse – Miracles, (Completely NSFW) it explains the reference in the post title
It’s not odd that a group would object to being characterized as a criminal gang by the FBI.
What is odd when a the group in question are fans of music group.
Here’s a hint to the FBI, if you are being accused of being over the top by a a group called Insane Clown Posse, and they are making cogent arguments that the response is excessive and an unconstitutional violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, perhaps it is time for some self examination:
The Michigan rap group Insane Clown Posse filed suit on Wednesday against the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying that the United States government had made the “unwarranted and unlawful decision” to classify fans of the band as criminal gang members, leading to their harassment by law enforcement and causing them “significant harm.”
The lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Detroit by lawyers for the band and for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Plaintiffs include the Insane Clown Posse founders Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler, who perform as Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, and whose fans call themselves Juggalos.
Also listed as plaintiffs are four Juggalos from Nevada, California, North Carolina and Iowa, who offered details of incidents in which they said they had been subjected to police harassment or other punishments for identifying with Insane Clown Posse.
………
The seeds of this lawsuit were sown in 2011, when the F.B.I.’s National Gang Intelligence Center published a report that described Juggalos as “a loosely organized hybrid gang” whose members were “expanding into many U.S. communities.”
The report, titled “National Gang Threat Assessment: Emerging Trends,” cited a 2011 incident in which “two suspected Juggalo associates were charged with beating and robbing an elderly homeless man,” and another in 2010 in which “a suspected Juggalo member” shot and wounded two other people.
The report also included a photograph of a woman described as a “Juggalo member,” wearing face paint similar to the kind used by Insane Clown Posse and pointing a gun at the camera.
………
The lawsuit asks the court to set aside the findings of the 2011 F.B.I. gang assessment, order the elimination of “criminal intelligence information” on Juggalos from government and law-enforcement databases and prohibit the gathering of further information without “sufficient facts” of a “definable criminal activity or enterprise.”
Mark Parsons, a Juggalo from Las Vegas and one of the plaintiffs listed in the suit, said in the complaint that he had been detained in July by state troopers outside Knoxville, Tenn., for displaying Insane Clown Posse’s insignia, known as “the hatchet man,” on his semi truck.
………
Jeff Engstrom, a lawyer and blogger who writes at Abovethelaw.com under the pseudonym Juggalo Law, said in an email that the government’s actions were “laughably off base” and “the equivalent of placing Phish fans on a terrorist watch list.” He added, “It elevates an Internet punch line into something even more absurd.”
You’ve seen this FBI report used to cancel concerts, refuse enlistments in the military, and deny custody in divorces.
This is not just a bit of silliness. This is a McCarthyesque abuse of power, and I hope that ICP, and the ACLU get their case to court, get the full story, and discover which nut job did this.
Whoever did this should not be in law enforcement.
How Iron Maiden Got it Right, and Metallica Got it Wrong
In the early days of P2P file sharing, it was Metallica to the first file sharing site, Napster, which was shutdown and eventually reemerged as a ……… (furiously Googling) ……… a link to Rhapsody.
Metallica earned a lot of enmity from its fans, and probably sold no more songs as a result.
Iron Maiden found a similar problem, they recently discovered a spike in file sharing in Latin America, and their response was to aggressively market there, and put on a concert tour:
Enter another U.K. company called Musicmetric, which specializes in analytics for the music industry by capturing everything from social media discussion to traffic on the BitTorrent network. It then offers this aggregated information to artists to decide how they want to react. Musicmetric noticed Iron Maiden’s placement and ran its own analytics for the band.
“Having an accurate real time snapshop of key data streams is all about helping inform people’s decision making. If you know what drives engagement you can maximize the value of your fan base. Artists could say ‘we’re getting pirated here, let’s do something about it’, or ‘we’re popular here, let’s play a show’,” said Gregory Mead, CEO and co-founder of the London-based firm.
In the case of Iron Maiden, still a top-drawing band in the U.S. and Europe after thirty years, it noted a surge in traffic in South America. Also, it saw that Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile were among the top 10 countries with the most Iron Maiden Twitter followers. There was also a huge amount of BitTorrent traffic in South America, particularly in Brazil.
Rather than send in the lawyers, Maiden sent itself in. The band has focused extensively on South American tours in recent years, one of which was filmed for the documentary “Flight 666.” After all, fans can’t download a concert or t-shirts. The result was massive sellouts. The São Paolo show alone grossed £1.58 million (US$2.58 million) alone.
New fans, new sales, a new market.
Interesting business plan, no?
Most Amazing Medical Development Ever Happened Wednesday
This guy turned 70 on Wednesday.
Considering the level of abuse that he has voluntarily inflicted on himself, he should have been found dead in his swimming pool about 40 years ago.
Somewhere in his genes is the making of an absolutely indestructible superhero, as well as a kick ass rhythm guitarist.
You can hover over the image with your cursor to get the answer if you do not recognize the guy.
Yes, the Administrators at My Alma Mater are Complete Prats
At UMass, the administration has banned electronic music parties because concerns about XTC use:
The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMASS) has banned all Electronic Dance Music events from its campus, in response to a surge in MDMA use in the United States.
MDMA, or ‘Molly’ as the drug is referred to in the US is being categorised as a health and safety risk to students and EDM is seen by College administrators as the reason for its rise in popularity.
In a campus wide email the UMASS interim Vice Chancellor, Enku Gelaye said, “We have grown even more concerned about the ongoing reports of overdoses…The Molly taking culture at these shows is real and now exceedingly dangerous to the health and safety of concert attendees.”
The response from students at UMASS has been strong, with a number of petitions being set up and a flash mob started outside the students’ union in protest. Many feel the majority are being punished for the actions of the few.
When I was at the school, I got a good education, audited a thoroughly corrupt athletic department, and dealt with an administration that was a miasma of incompetence and hypocrisy in their attempts to eliminate the “Zoo Mass” reputation of the institution.
Let me repeat something to tweak the administration and the search engines: Zoo Mass, Zoomass.
I am seriously considering adding it to my metadata.
Please note that nothing here should be construed as an endorsement of Electronic Dance Music.
Yes, I Know that Miley Cyrus is on My List of They Who Must Not Be Named, But This Is Really About Daven Attenborough
This is too good not to share:
JR at the H/t Stellar Parthenon BBS.
This is a Level of Surreal that Buggers the Mind
I am at a Jiffy Lube, and a Football Game is on, Baltimore vs. Buffalo.
They cut to the Vikings-Steelers game at Wembley in England.
It’s a foreign outreach thing that the NFL does.
They show the singing of both national anthems, the Star Spangled Banner, and God Save the Queen.
Singing the the Star Spangled Banner was Kiss bassist Gene Simons.
Gene Simmons singing the Star Spangled Banner?
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
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Why I Left Texas
Because this song by Macklemore, American is way to close to the reality down there.
I did not want my kids to be Texans:
I Cannot Believe that I Haven’t Put Her on the List
Miley Cyrus is now on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.
As to why?
Just ask the crew of the star ship Enterprise:
That which is seen, cannot be unseen. Play the vid at your own risk.