Hey, you don’t see this every day: a company ditches its corporate master to be all chill on its own. Congrats, Last.fm. Last.fm is still the greatest music-related social networking site I’ve come across.
Covered, brilliantly (Jesse Walker is an alt radio guy himself), in Reason magazine here and Idolator here, the Performance Rights Act is a massive scam that’ll screw over hosts of musicians.
See, the idea is that radio stations should be happy, under this bogus Performance Rights Act, to pay copyright owners and the occasional performer (if you’re lucky enough to retain your copyright) extra cash for giving their music promotion and rotation.
And since this blog often covers things of an independent and punk variety, it only makes sense to talk about how this impacts indie labels. As Mr. Walker points out:
Ah, you say, but what about the independent artists who don’t get big promotional pushes from the major music labels? Surely they’d benefit from a new revenue stream? Actually, they’ll be even worse off. The economic mission of most commercial radio stations is to deliver audiences to the sponsors whose spots are aired between tunes. So programmers have a built-in preference for music whose mass appeal has already been proven. If you increase the cost of playing a record, that just intensifies the incentive: The more you pay to play a song, the more conservative you’ll be about which songs you play. The marginal cost of playing each track is the same, but the commercial payoff is greater for established artists.
Indie bands didn’t get helped by song-writer bonuses. They don’t even get airplay, realistically. Yeah, we can talk about Tegan and Sara bullshit, but actual indie bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat are not going to get much radio play. So this is yet another attempt at a giveaway to major labels and their minions. Hooray!
Well, a few news on the Metal scene:
The Cavalera brothers, Max and Igor, reunited once again to create an old school thrash album that is worse than the Roots Era of Sepultura. Seriously, people who go mad with popularity never know how to give up. When will the Cavalera boys realizs that the more they make albums, the less fans they have before they cross the mallcore fans line.
Metallica released the album art for there new album called Death Magnetic.
Heathen, one of my favorite Thrash band, is back on the studio after a 15 year break of making an album. This is the best news to come out of Heathen’s website incredibly topping the knotch of giving there early albums for free.
Porcupine Tree’s singer is producing the new Orphaned Land album, a Middle Eastern Extreme Progressive Metal band.
Exodus is re-making there first album Bonded By Blood. 3 words Why The Fuck?!!?!?!? Why would you re-make something that is perfectly fine.
How about some celebrity news aye? David Beckham was recently seen in an Iron Maiden and Exodus Bonded By Blood shirt in public. When reporters say if he listens to those bands, he clearly just said “its whats in right now”.
That is all for now.
