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Posts Tagged “Spin”

spin the black circle [redux]

Best Buy Going For Warmer, Fuller Sound


Hey, independent music stores: Did you think for a minute you had the vinyl market to yourselves? With the vinyl market as the only physical portion of the biz that improved last year (nearly a million new vinyl albums were sold, up 15 percent), did you think the big boys wouldn't notice? Well, they have: Best Buy is looking into the vinyl biz, testing the format in several of their stores. Obviously, Best Buy doesn't expect record sales to become a huge portion of their business, but at very least, it keeps kids out of those pesky local stores. [Minneapolis Star Tribune]

2:00 PM on Tue Jul 8 2008
By Dan Gibson
200 views, 3 comments

Latest by Captain Wrong: Great. Now we can look forward to soccer moms crowing about the superiority of the warm sound of vinyl just like an asshole hipster. more »

rock-critically correct

"Spin" Turns The Rock-Star Notion On Its Ear

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin: More »

10:00 AM on Thu Jun 26 2008
By Anono-Critic
822 views, 9 comments

spin the higher-bitrate circle

Seriously, Who Cares About Fidelity Anymore?

There's hardly a month that goes by without a attempt at improving the way that music sounds. The problem is, nearly all these brilliant moves come from artists and producers. Do consumers really take fidelity into consideration when making the few music-purchasing decisions? More »

3:00 PM on Tue Jun 3 2008
By Dan Gibson
949 views, 24 comments

rock-critically correct

"Spin" Is Out Standing In A Field

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who's contributed to many
of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin: More »

2:00 PM on Fri Apr 25 2008
By Anono-Critic
1,251 views, 3 comments

downturns

Four Reasons Music Magazines Are Doing Almost As Well As The Music Business

This year has been a rough one for music magazines: their ranks are thinning, the business they're covering is becoming more notable for being one that's putting out a product people don't want to pay for than anything else, and now Crain's New York Business puts into numbers what anyone who picked up a music magazine probably noticed already: Ad pages at the big four magazines are down substantially from last year's tallies, even as the magazines are increasing their rate bases. (Only Spin has weathered the downturn, with its ad pages actually up 22% since 2007.) Why? More »

3:45 PM on Mon Apr 21 2008
By Maura Johnston
1,241 views, 10 comments

Latest by porkch0p31: I haven't read Rolling Stone for years and years. It's just not an enjoyable magazine anymore ... and they certainly don't "keep it real." more »

single spin

Single Spinning Crackling Finns, Acidic Brooklynites, And Billy Joel (Sorta)

Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to a return to form from a Finnish dub-techno master, a goofy jam from a trio of sloppy New York indie kids, and faux-reggae scourge Sean Kingston warbling through the Billy Joel songbook. Yes, you read that right. More »

1:00 PM on Wed Mar 26 2008
By Jess Harvell
558 views, 4 comments

Latest by n/a: My soul is crying...I feel the need to dropkick a third grader. I wouldn't call myself Billy Joel's biggest fan (I like him...just not THAT much), but that's just WRONG. Dear Sean Kingston, Stop stealing otherwise great songs and damning them to more »

project x

Project X Spins Top 35 Rock Lists Compiled By "Spin"

As part of Idolator's continuing effort to geekily analyze every music chart known to man, we present a new edition of Project X, in which Idolator Critics' Poll editor Michaelangelo Matos breaks down rankings from every genre imaginable. In this installment, he looks at an issue of Spin from 1990 that attempted to tell rock history through Top 35 lists:

If you saw my bulging shelves full of CDs, books, magazines, photocopies, and printouts, you might call me a collector. But I've never been entirely comfortable with the designation: even when I was 13 and deep into comic books, I wanted to read them more than I wanted to preserve them. Keeping them around was a fringe benefit. The same has been true with music magazines, but it wasn't always, which is what has lately driven me to eBay to find old copies of Spin. One of my favorite issues was cover-dated August 1990: Jim Morrison against a bubblegum-pink background on the cover. The headline: "35 Years of Rock'n'Roll." A subhead: "Top 35 Lists of Everything From Guitar Gods to Dead Rock Star Charts."

More »

11:00 AM on Tue Mar 25 2008
By Michaelangelo Matos
1,077 views, 9 comments

second spin

Pop-Punk: Dead Or Not? (Depends On Your Definition)

In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we'll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. (The occasional just-released rave may sneak in there, too.) This time a compilation provides a look at the current crop of "pop-punk" bands escaping the attention of both the radio and the blogosphere.

Recently, I wrote a piece attempting to link various poppy, punkish bands like Be Your Own Pet and Times New Viking into some kind of subaltern united front for 2008. After finishing, I realized I had unconsciously slighted a large swathe of underground-ish pop-punk that's already all but been written off by my music hack peers, that I snubbed an entire scene to focus on a few semi-pop faves with a decent press push. I should have known better. Somewhere, 16-year-old Jess was drumming his fingers on a study hall desk in irritation that his grown self had seemingly forgotten these catchy, sweetly sardonic, seven-inch-friendly songs about girls, boys, and the dumb things they routinely do to one another, songs that made high school tolerable for many bespectacled kids left cursing the fates come prom time.

More »

2:00 PM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Jess Harvell
1,382 views, 15 comments

Latest by MrStarhead: You missed the craziest thing about that Ben Weasel solo album: it was produced and financed by one of the All-American Rejects (who put it out on his own boutique label). more »

rock-critically correct

"Spin" Reunites With R.E.M.

And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the most recent issue of Spin: More »

12:20 PM on Thu Mar 20 2008
By Anono-Critic
1,415 views, 12 comments

nostalgia

Hey, Hip-Hop Fans, Remember 1990?

The June 1990 issue of Spin is certainly a time capsule. The cover star is Lisa Stansfield, which greatly annoyed the mag's alt-leaning readers but is fine with me—Affection is one of my favorite albums ever, though "All Around the Girl" disqualifies it for the Cover Head Hall of Fame. The reviews section ("Edited by Jim Greer," it notes; Greer went on to play bass for Guided by Voices and then write a book about them in which Greer's time in the band is barely mentioned) features write-ups of albums by Nick Cave, Cowboy Junkies, Blue Aeroplanes, A Tribe Called Quest, Television Personalities, the House of Love, the Sundays, Ernie Isley, the Silos, Stone by Stone with Chris D., Tony Williams, and Loop; Frank Owen's "Singles" column takes on New York's John Cardinal O'Connor's condemnation of heavy metal and the flap over Chill Rob G's and Snap!'s competing versions of "The Power"; the contents page tells us the magazine has 98 pages, which is a good thing considering there are almost no page numbers on the actual pages themselves. (That Bob Guccione Jr. and his minimalist design sense!) But the main reason I tracked down this piece of nostalgia on eBay is that after seeing the Ludacris Area Codes Map, I remembered the "Hip-Hop Map of America" by Bob Mack, who would go on to edit the Beastie Boys' 'zine, Grand Royal. The full map, and some choice excerpts, below. More »

2:00 PM on Wed Mar 19 2008
By Michaelangelo Matos
2,035 views, 19 comments

Latest by Raul23: Detroit's move really didn't help Michigan's economy out like it was supposed to, either. more »

single spin

Single Spinning Three Rappers, One Dubstepper, A Critical DJ, And Mr. I Get Wet Meeting Mr. John McLaughlin

Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to the latest grim banger from a Philadelphia hip-hop institution, a decidedly less grim groove from not-so-sunny London, a music critic delivering a mournful techno remix, and something totally, unexpectedly, ridiculously astounding: Andrew WK's new mash note to a TV roundtable legend (!), which comes complete with MP3 so you can download and boggle along. More »

12:30 PM on Thu Mar 6 2008
By Jess Harvell
1,165 views, 4 comments

Latest by Fawn Liebowitz: What's Big Daddy Drew's picture doing on Idolator? more »

second spin

Second Spinning Labor, Lungs, And Legends

In the current climate of ruthless blog scrutiny, good records can easily disappear with little or no press and supposedly major albums are forgotten within weeks of release. With that in mind, we bring you Second Spin, where we'll take a look at records that have either slipped between the hype cracks or re-evaluate albums after the press cycle has left them for dead. (The occasional just-released rave may sneak in there, too.) This time we look at 51 tracks of "grindpop" from some Brooklyn art-punks, 20 tracks of grind minus the pop from two Seattle misanthropes, and 25 tracks of hardcore hip-hop from an ATLien with a very different definition of "grind." More »

2:00 PM on Wed Mar 5 2008
By Jess Harvell
373 views, 1 comment

Latest by n/a: Haven't heard it, but the last three Dro tapes were fire, and that album of his was pretty slept on, considering that his flow bears a lot of the technical flourishes that the OkayPlayerHaters claim don't show up anywhere but more »

single spin

Wiz Khalifa, Alice Deejay, And The Pop Potential Of Turn Of The Millennium Club Cuts

Whether they're petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop's most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we'll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link—whether it's CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we hear a combination of unrealized promise and cheesy cheek in a current blog favorite that revives a 1999 pop-dance smash you may have wanted to forget. More »

3:00 PM on Mon Mar 3 2008
By Jess Harvell
967 views, 7 comments

Latest by n/a: Wiz is an interesting artist. his freestyles have been legit for a while and his song Say Yeah is finally getting radioplay. Itll be interesting to see how he grows. more »

rock-critically correct

"Spin" Enters The Vampire Weekend Debate

And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the most recent issue of Spin: More »

10:00 AM on Fri Feb 22 2008
By Anono-Critic
4,425 views, 10 comments

Folio has the complete list of magazines that were recently ditched by Wal-Mart for still-undisclosed reasons. While a good chunk of the titles are publications that have folded in the past few years—CMT Magazine, holla!—there are some still-publishing music-related mags on the list, including Billboard, Spin, Paste, and Rap-Up. Between these moves and the retailer's plans to cut floor space devoted to music, it looks like 2008 might not be the best year for heartland dwellers who actually want to purchase their alt-rock-leaning music in an actual store. [Folio via Gawker]

1 comment

rock-critically correct

"Spin" Casts A Glance Across The Pond

And now it's time for another installment of Rock-Critically Correct, in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he examines the most recent issue of Spin: More »

4:00 PM on Thu Jan 24 2008
By Anono-Critic
3,516 views, 22 comments

second spin

Second Spinning 2007 With Three Kinds Of Groove

Until the end of the year—hey, that's only four posting days!—we'll be devoting our Second Spin column to running down albums from 2007 that somehow slipped through the blog posts, great records that we never got to mention until now. If you're looking for something to spend that iTunes gift card or record store certificate (do they still do that?) on, consider these our late-breaking recommendations. We start with three underground dance LPs, two of them full of up-to-date club cuts and one that dropped 25 years ago and may out-groove (and definitely out-freak) them both. More »

11:20 AM on Wed Dec 26 2007
By jharv
358 views, 2 comments

Latest by BleepBot: please point in the direction of the juiciest, fruitiest trance... kthanxbye. more »

rock-critically correct

"Rolling Stone," "Spin," And "Blender" Wrap Up 2007 With Lists, Quips, And Ad Supplements

Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who's contributed to several of those titles—or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, he takes in the year-end issues of RS, Spin, and Blender: More »

11:05 AM on Fri Dec 21 2007
By Anono-Critic
3,009 views, 12 comments

Latest by Captain Wrong: @MATOS, also the audio compression thing predates, and has nothing to do with, MP3s. It's all about making your music sound louder on terrestrial FM radio. more »