If you've ever been interested in Sonic Youth's collective songwriting technique, the improvisatory philosophy of jambands and jazz artists, or whether a verse got composed in a notebook or on the spur of the moment, you know that the mechanical process of making music can have an enormous effect on the end product. Artistic decions are made partially out of taste and inspiration, but in large part, songs are shaped by whatever's close at hand. That's why seeing the actual physical arrangement of Timbaland's recording setup is so interesting. He makes it really easy to throw in keyboards, electronic drums, or his own vocal ad-libs, but not so much other stuff. You see him move around the space enough to get a sense of how he puts songs together.

This isn't just for the edification of gearheads, though. The studio is on a bus sponsored by Verizon; Timbaland calls himself "the new mobile producer" (like a cell phone, geddit?). They show him recording with Keri Hilson, play the song they make, and then flash a link to buy the song. This is the Radiohead model gone pop: don't just release an album right after it's made, release individual songs as they come off the production line. In a way, it's nothing new—think of dubplates, or Elvis running his new 45 down to the radio station in Memphis. But Elvis wasn't sponsored by a cell phone company. For better or worse, this might be where things are heading.

Timbaland On The Verizon Bus [XXL]

Which are which? Well, go to the Web site and look at the pictures; the ones where you can see more tattoos or tongue are rockers. This didn't seem to be the case with Flavor of Love, where none of the contestants claimed to be, say, a big fan of Nas. But in the rock version, quite a few of the participants are at least presenting themselves as true music fans who just happen to have gigantic bazoombas. This seems to mark a significant change from the hair-metal glory days, when acts like Poison were dismissed for being "bands that girls like," the only female musician seemed to be Lita Ford, and the only role female fans played in the iconography were as groupies. Of course, this was a distorted picture, as there were lots of female metal fans who were just as dedicated and knowledgeable as any male fan. (At least two of my friends fell into this category.) But of the many, many women who showed up in metal videos and were mentioned in interviews by metal bands, almost none qualified as pure fans.

Of course, you can understand why band members might have been more interested in the groupie side of the equation. But today, women seem to have achieved something like parity in hard rock. Bands such as Kittie make albums noisier and more intense than anything released in the '80s, ladies who can hold forth on what rocks and what doesn't with some authority are welcomed members of the community, and now you've got essentially a groupielympics with a sizable contingent of girls who are at least trying to appeal on the basis of their being like Bret Michaels, rather than different from and dumber than him.

Still, is this really a difference, or just a stylistic shift? And what does it mean for the younger genre of hip-hop, given the absence of fangirls on Flavor of Love—will girls who can quote Lil' Wayne one day be competing for the heart of Lloyd Banks? Also, how funny is it that Bret Michaels doesn't even seem to be making any pretensions of finding someone to actually marry? They might as well call it Rock of Love: The Quest To Touch Bret Michaels' Herpetic Male Member.

Rock of Love [VH1]

That's the mayor, right at the beginning. Apparently the director was an intern at City Hall, and asked for an endorsement, and, well, he got one.

And now he's been shot through the wrist.

The Syracuse man who duped Mayor Matt Driscoll into endorsing a video filled with drugs, sex and violence, was shot in the wrist Sunday...

Williams, a former city intern, asked Driscoll to do an on-camera endorsement for Constantly Under Surveillance Everywhere Vol. II. Williams is one of the producers of the video.

In it, groups of young men rap about the glories of the gang lifestyle and condemn those who give information to the police.

Video Producer Shot in Wrist [Syracuse Post-Standard] (2nd item)

Part of it, obviously, was that the deal fit right in with Fergie's image: she's in a Candie's ad that uses "Glamorous," she's part of the endorse-anything Black Eyed Peas, and she generally seems to have no shame or artistic credibility and thus no compunctions against whoring herself out quite so spectacularly. But at the same time, there's a real misperception about what's going on when singers or rappers drop the names of commercial products in their songs. Sometimes there is an endorsement thing going on, but that's usually when the product is one the artist stands to make money from directly—i.e. a clothing line or vodka brand that they actually own. Everything else is just there because commercial products are part of our lives. The same thing happened with the movie Josie and the Pussycats: there were lots and lots of product placements, but they were there as a joke and/or a point about pop bands (and, presumably, because the Target logo is awesome); no one actually got paid. But because it didn't seem serious, and because people saw logos, they assumed the placement was the result of a sell-out.

We like to think of pop artists as purely commercial creatures, cynically calculating the precise point where endorsements and credibility most profitably meet. But these people are musicians, too, and have most (if not all) of the hangups about the genuineness of their art that any other musician does. Maybe you don't think that sampling Dick Dale and yelling "Pump it!" represents something true and meaningful about the human condition, but chances are that will.i.am, for better or for worse, does. No matter how much money you're making to do it, writing and singing lyrics is done alone, and the act is inevitably a personal one. You eat at Taco Bell because it is delicious, and so you might want to also sing about it. And you do it because you think it'll make for what you consider a good song, not because someone pays you to do so.

Alternately, it's not like Fergie needs more money, right?

Memo Pad: Fergie's Sour Candies... Week End... Hot Flash... [WWD, via Jezebel]

A common argument for why critics should beat up on mainstream pop music was the fact that it didn't need the help. Pop music had achieved such omnipresent dominance that championing it would be as individually insignificant an act as voting for a major-party Presidential candidate. But nowadays mainstream acts do seem to need the help, as major labels lack the funds to make them ubiquitous and the public cares more about voting for them than listening to them. Music's cultural importance has perhaps never been lower in America: while a TV show with a million viewers is considered a failure, you get a platinum plaque for selling a million albums. Sure, it costs more money and time to buy a CD than to watch a TV show—but that fact is precisely why we find ourselves in the present state of affairs.

And so as the record industry floats gently toward rock bottom, maybe critics are realizing that it's not just that things are changing, but that something has been lost, that a creative method is slowly ceasing to exist. Sure, the means were and are deplorable. But check out those ends! Without the supposedly artistically bankrupt major-label system of songwriters and producers for hire creating an artist's sound and style for—and/or with—them, we wouldn't have "Heartbreak Hotel," or "Like a Prayer," or "Since U Been Gone." And without the products of pop's manufacturing line, the music made by all those small, artistically respectable artists critics are supposed to champion might be very different—or might not even exist at all.

My December and Kelly Clarkson here represent the last change for the system to function at peak capacity, to match a hungry, adventurous, golden-eared young phenom with the best talent money can buy, and to produce an album like Off the Wall or a single like "Heart of Glass." Instead, in the view of most critics, it's just another crappy self-written rock album, and worse, one that doesn't even do the one thing rock albums can still uniquely do: exude bland authenticity (to confused white people). With Kelly going her own way, the era has perhaps officially ended for big-budget rock albums, and for all the sins of such gilded enterprises, a method's just a method, and this one produced some classics. In the end, its erasure means new rock bands' possibilities are circumscribed. Nevermore will a guitar act with members younger than 30 find itself in a $30,000-a-day studio with Desmond Child and the London Philharmonic. Even if that scenario doesn't sound too desirable to you, in a genre ossifying itself out of options, it's understandable that critics of all inclinations might lament its passing.

The music industry has long blamed illegal file sharing for the slump in music sales. But now, a key part of the industry is trying to harness file sharing to boost its own bottom line.

Earlier this year, Clear Channel Communications Inc.'s Premiere Radio Networks unit began marketing data on the most popular downloads from illegal file-sharing networks to help radio stations shape their playlists.

Jack White will not be pleased! The info comes through industry powerhouse Mediabase, which in turn gets it from a company called BigChampagne. A little history: a few years back, companies started offering labels various services in connection with P2P networks. Some concentrated on disrupting Napster and its descendants by flooding the tubes with bogus or bad-quality copies, others by tracing files found on P2P networks back to their original owners, and some tried to track what was being downloaded and how often. Guess who won?

The Huey song "Pop, Lock and Drop It" was in light rotation in April at Power 106, a big Emmis Communications Corp.-owned hip-hop station in Los Angeles, and listeners weren't requesting it much. The station's own research on the best music mix to play indicated the song wasn't catching on with listeners. But data from BigChampagne showed the song was hot on file-sharing networks, including in Los Angeles. Emmanuel "E-man" Coquia, the station's music director, decided to stick with it. Now, three months later, "Pop, Lock and Drop It" is prominent on the station's playlist.

This all sounds a bit fishy (radio stations playing a song because people want to hear it? Since when?) but it's also proving useful to labels:

Universal Music Group, the record company that distributes Shop Boyz, also looks at file-sharing data, largely for help figuring out which songs are working best or what to pitch to radio. But executives have mixed feelings about the information. "It's troubling that there is so much activity [that] it's useful" for research, says Larry Kenswil, executive vice president for business strategy.

Troubling? Larry, I think you mean "ironic."

Pirated Music Helps Radio Develop Playlists [WSJ]

Today you can expect some MP3s from Athens bands, an item about Syracuse that doesn't involve hardcore, and some posts that are way more wordy than they should be. I may even actually pick an avatar! Nominate a picture in the comments and maybe we'll have a poll, if I can figure out how to do one.