Silverchair Fans: Is Daniel Johns About to Surface Someplace?

Aussie artist 360 offered this tease of a new track of his called "Impossible."  Listen carefully to the guest vocalist Is "Golden Table" code for "Silverchair?" 

(Via TheMusic.com.au)

How Brands Are Taking Over from the Music Industry--And Bands Are Okay with That

This is a really good article from Music Ally about a company that connects advertisers with bands who want to make some cash by licesning their material to ads.  Hey, you gotta make up that CD revenue somewhere, right? The age of "selling out" is long, long over.

You’d be surprised at how many Russian songs there are about cheating lovers. There are hundreds in the database of Music Dealers, for example, and that’s a tightly-curated catalogue of tracks for use in advertising, TV shows, films and games.

I discovered the glut of unfaithfulness music during a demonstration of version 3.0 of the company’s Discovery Tool, which is used by the likes of MTV, Sony Pictures and Coca-Cola to source music for their content and campaigns, with detailed filters to sort through material from more than 20k artists around the world looking for sync deals.

“We help brands act as a filter to find the most relevant bands or artists anywhere in the world,” says CEO Eric Sheinkop, in an interview with Music Ally.

“We’re providing a similar service to the jingle houses and production studios that supply a lot of music for commercials and television shows, but in our case all the music comes from real bands that are gigging.”

Continue reading.

Geeks & Beats Podcast Episode 6 Now Available (Show Notes, Too)

Every Wednesday at midnight ET, another Geeks&Beats podcast gets posted.  Subscribe through iTunes or stream it here.  This is what Michael Hainsworth and I discuss on Episode 6:

• 80s compilations going up in price? 
• Cassettes are back.  Why?
• A 130 Year Old Recording of Alexander Graham Bell
• Scary realities of today’s music 
• Ask Alan Anything - Q: Whatever happened to “Romeo Void?”
• Testimonials
• Heavy Metal Watches 
• SpaceX Vehicle + Johnny Cash = Awesome 
• This week’s song:  Sloan’s hardcore track
• Casey Kasem puts his house up for sale.  Wanna buy it?

Grimes Wins a Webby!

Grimes, the Canadian electronica artist, picked up a Webby Award for Artist of the Year.  But lest you think that she won for music, that's missing the point.  Her award was for her bold stance on a variety of issues. From The Huffington Post:  

Grimes, who recently won a Juno Award and has also been nominated for Prism Prize and Polaris Music Prize awards this year, earned her nod as Artist of the Year "in recognition of her ability to harness the power of the Web to engage and inspire millions of fans," according to the Webby website.

"Since launching her earliest recordings on the Internet for free, Grimes has used the platform to spread a unique and compelling mix of cutting edge music, visual art and DIY style that has defined her as one of contemporary music's most interesting and engaging artists."

Most recently Grimes used the Internet for an epic teardown of sexism in the music industry. It was a fact not lost on the Webby folks.

Read more here and here.

An Interview with Corey Glover of Living Colour

By Andrew Epstein

Recently I got a chance to sit down with vocalist Corey Glover of Living Colour on the Toronto stop of the 25th Anniversary Tour for their debut album “Vivid”. To this day the album remains passionate and political, focussed through the sound of youthful optimism. But the band’s following albums got funkier and heavier, with a distinctly palatable sense of anger. Record sales declined until only the die-hard fans remained. After an aborted attempt at a fourth album in late 1994, the band went their separate ways. The break-up would last five years.

Fan support for the band has always been strong. The last time I met up with Corey was in 2009 when the band performed a headline show at Toronto’s Lee’s Palace. The place was probably over-capacity and the band delivered a two and a half-hour set. This was with almost no promotion or press coverage that I had seen.

All of a sudden things are different. The press coverage for this tour has been immense. They even performed at Wrestlemania, as their biggest hit “Cult of Personality”, has become the entrance theme for wrestler CM Punk. While their other pre-break-up albums are now out of print, “Vivid” continues to be a strong seller. This recent attention seems strangely out of place for a band who continues to extol fierce societal messages. So a tour where they play their most commercially successful release front to back comes as a bit of a surprise. Corey is extremely candid as always, and provides a lot of insight into their recent coverage and where he is now as an individual as opposed to when “Vivid” was released 25 years ago.