If You're in Sweden, You Like Streaming Over Downloading. Will the Rest of the World Follow?

Sweden--the birthplace of both Spotify and The Pirate Bay--has become the world capital when it comes to streaming music services.  From TheLocal.se:

Legal downloading sites like Apple's iTunes Store were once thought to be a panacea for the global music industry, providing an alternative to illegal download sites like Sweden's Pirate Bay.

But if the high-tech Scandinavian nation is anything to go by, music downloads could soon be as obsolete as CDs or vinyl records.

iTunes' success has been modest here, with the vast majority of consumers preferring to stream songs rather than owning them on a hard drive.

Last year, 2012, was the best year for music sales in Sweden since 2005, with 63 percent of revenue coming from digital sources, according to data from the Swedish Recording Industry Association (GLF). Out of that, 90 percent came from streaming services.

This could be the way the rest of the world is headed.  Read more here.

The Case Against Digital Recording

The line in the story that got to me was this:

In an age where most music is recorded directly to computers and is then edited, spliced and mashed to a shiny gloss with no errant notes to be found, the mistakes and idiosyncracies that used to appear on records have all but disappeared. Call it heart, or soul, or personality, but there is a small population of musicians who are trying to bring it back to the record making process.

Yep.  I couldn't agree more.  Read the entire story about Jace Lasek in the Toronto Star.

NIN Drummer Hates the Carly Rae Jepson Mash-Up

It's an insult, say Chris Vrenna.  From TMZ:

"Honestly I find the whole thing silly and partly offensive ... I find it kind of insulting." 

He explains, "It has trivialized something we've done. I am proud of what we've done and to take art -- just to be a joke -- I don't have any respect for it."

 Just in case you're one of the few people in the world who haven't heard this yet...

The Authenticity Fetish

If there's one thing that will kill an artist among a certain group of potential fans, it's perceived lack of authenticity.  If you're not "real" or "street," then you're dead to them.  But why?

The New Statesman explores this concept of cultural authenticity.

Picture the tragic scenes in Crouch End, north London, early this year. The patrons of Harris + Hoole, a local coffee shop, had just learned to their horror that the supermarket chain Tesco owns a 49 per cent stake in the company. Shaken caffeine-guzzlers told the Guardian that they felt “duped” and “upset” because they’d thought it was an “independent” coffee shop. A rival coffee hawker sneered that Tesco was “trying to make money” out of “artisan values” – although, presumably, so was he.  Most charmingly, the manager of the café confided that head office had instructed her to make the store feel as independent as possible. "We try to be independent," she said. "We want to be independent. We want to have that feel."

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The Truth Behind Van Halen's "No Brown M&M's" Story

On a recent episode of The Secret History of Rock, I referenced the infamous story about how Van Halen once specified in their backstage rider that there were to be no brown M&M's served in the M&M's bowl. That story is true.

However, as I recounted in the show, Van Halen weren't being douchebags.  There was a solid reason behind this demand.  Peter was kind enough to send this excerpt from David Lee Roth's authobiography.

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.

So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen amperes . . .” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was: “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”

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