Hey, did you hear about the survey that claimed eight out of 10 consumers "are turning away from professional music reviews and looking online for guidance when buying CDs or downloads"? That sounds kind of bad for people who aspire to make their living offering guidance to people who 
Avril Lavigne's video for "Girlfriend" is currently YouTube's all-time No. 2 clip, having been viewed some 88,739,107 (and counting) times; it's playing second fiddle by some million views to the "inspirational comedian" Judson Laipply's "Evolution Of Dance," a clip that jerks the "OMG, remember this?!?!" chain harder than Girl Talk and is even less enjoyable to experience than Gregg Gillis' most recent nostalgia trip. (How many people have actually sat through its entire six minutes? Surely it has to be a fraction of the 89 million-plus views it's garnered.) Well, now that Avril Lavigne's fanbase is home from school for the summer, its members have started a campaign to oust "Evolution Of Dance" from the top spot—and they're not above engaging in some HTML trickery to get the result they so desperately need.
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Who on earth thought that a show set in the halls of Universal's London office and modeled on the 1987 Michael J. Fox vehicle The Secret Of My Success would be a good idea for dissemination in 2008? I have an answer: Bebo. And I have an addendum that makes said answer cross over from "ludicrous" to "amazing": It's only going to be online. A synopsis: "The series revolves around a junior employee in Universal's facilities department who secretly launches his own start-up label in the post room and is "hungry for success" to make his way up the ladder and take over the job of his boss Greg. ... The producers of the Bebo show, which follows in the footsteps of Kate Modern and Sofia's Diary, will 'draw on real life experiences' and use cameos of real life Universal artists to bring 'additional authenticity' to the storyline." Perhaps this is supposed to be entertaining in a "last days of a crumbling empire" way, although something tells me that they won't be getting to the Very Special Leak-Related Storylines until, say, season five. [Guardian; HT Loudersoft]
Something to mull over if you want to think about music this weekend (but please, do it away from the computer, unless your area of the country is going to be as oppressively hot as the NYC area is slated to be and the only climate-controlled option you have is a tiny room with nothing but a glowing MacBook): Is the increased capacity of MP3 players, and the resultant passivity a listener can engage in when listening to their record collection, resulting in people actually listening—really listening—to less music, and subtly narrowing their tastes? The Phoenix New Times thought about this recently, and as luck would have it, I have been too.
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Quotable
The director of Weezer's "remember that thing on YouTube? wasn't that funny?" video for "Pork & Beans" speaks about his, ahem, "inspiration" for the clip: "When I heard 'Pork and Beans,' I loved its non-conformist message and felt like it was a natural anthem for the self-expression that's been taking shape on YouTube and the Internet. At that point, I connected the dots and wanted to create Weezer's mash-up of their favorite popular culture of the Internet—a viral music video made of virals, rather than just a traditional music video." Seriously, dude? I thought that your concept was more along the lines of "hey, we can probably get some easy Internet buzz by reminding all those kids of things they laughed at six or eight months ago, and the 'talent' will cost a lot less than Playboy bunnies." Shows you what I know. [Buzzworthy]
Facebook is the hot new social networking platform (of 2007), so it makes sense that Live Nation, which has been aggressively expanding its data-mining efforts online, would try and get in on some of the site's poke-filled action. But is the company's Facebook application really going to make non-employees of the company embrace the Live Nation "brand" and post on their friends' walls that they think hot-pink Web sites that are overly frame-laden are the best way to get totally pumped for that upcoming $100-a-seat show at the local arena?
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Borders relaunched its dot-com as a free-standing online store today, and while it's allegedly been put up as a way to help make the brick-and-mortar parent company more attractive to potential buyers, one wonders if pouring money into developing a section of the store where people can purchase CDs at full, $15-price-point-brushing prices was a better allocation of resources than, say, a launch party for the site where each attendee got their own Grey Goose-filled ice sculpture and a $100 donation in their name to the Web Merchants Who Were Crushed By Amazon Fund. [Borders.com]
Sure, Kenny Chesney may have won his fourth straight Entertainer Of The Year Award at last night's Academy of Country Music Awards, but he's not all that happy with it! Why? Because he feels like the newly introduced element of fan voting has turned the award "into a sweepstakes to see who can push people's buttons the hardest on the Internet," instead of recognition from the winner's peers. If he'd added in "and a gimmick to cheaply drive up traffic to whatever Web site is hosting the awards for future purposes of advertising pitches," I would be in 100% agreement with him!
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Currently climbing the Digg charts with 503 votes from the social-news site's "we hate the music business, even though we probably wouldn't have known who our patron saint Trent Reznor was without it" faithful: 22 Websites That Are Driving Daggers Into The Heart Of The RIAA, a list of 22 sites where you can get free music and totally give those evil record executives what-for! So what's on the list? RAR blogs that offer full albums? Nah, the sites that Tiny Dad likes are even more bad-ass! You know, like that outlaw site imeem, which has signed licensing deals with the major labels. Or those RIAA-nose-thumbing dudes at last.fm, which is also operating legally. Not to mention the ad-supported, also fully legal SpiralFrog. Yeah, Diggers! Fight the power! And don't forget to click on those SpiralFrog banners! [TinyDad.com]
You'd think that someone whose album has sold 3.4 million copies in this arid music marketplace would feel that she doesn't have to promote her album by engaging in silly stunts that only use the commercial breaks on The Hills to show the world that Nick Lachey has more acting chops than she does. But in the case of Alicia Keys, you would be wrong! And her stunting has somehow gotten even more embarrassing—she's recruiting a backup singer (who's 21-30, "physically fit," and "able to dance") via MySpace, perhaps in honor of the site's new karaoke area. This is one of those times when I feel like an elopement would have at least a bit more dignity in the grand publicity-stunt scheme of things. [Billboard]
Yesterday, a judge ruled that RealNetworks, AOL, and Yahoo! had to pay the American Society of Composers, Arrangers, and Performer 2.5% of "adjusted music-use revenue" between 2002 and 2009. That's half a percentage point higher than what terrestrial radio stations have to pay to the organization, a decision that U.S. District Judge William C. Conner came to because online radio generally plays more songs per hour than its over-the-air The three companies—who had proposed rates ranging from .9% (for music videos) to 2.5% (for on-demand audio)—could owe as much as $100 million to ASCAP as the result of the decision, and needless to say, they are not very pleased.
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Attention readers! Do you use the "any thought worth communicating must be distilled into 140 characters or less" microblogging service Twitter? Is your account lacking in music news? Well, Idolator has an account on the site that pings your instant messenger account/mobile device every time we have a top story. Unfortunately the service doesn't whittle our posts down to the 140-character limit that our attention-span-challenged culture craves, but I'm sure there's a team of robot editors being developed for that very purpose right this minute. (Also, if you are interested in a sorta-real-time chronicle of my time at Coachella, I sent messages to the service throughout the weekend. And no, I didn't try the burgerrito, alas.) [Twitter]
One of the venture capitalists at this week's Leadership Music Digital Summit brought back some of the overheated first-tech-bubble rhetoric when he proclaimed that "the next big thing is going to be music discovery" as far as business models go, a declaration that caused a few raised eyebrows, including one of those attached to the face of your correspondent. Do people really want to be told what to listen to by anyone—even people that some algorithm has decided they have supposed musical affinities with? I have my doubts, and so does Marc Cohen at Ad-Supported Music Central:
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Hey, older music fans! Is Mojo a little "critical" for your tastes? Does VH1 not devote enough time to remembering when? Tired of falling for intriguing young women in bikinis who turn out to be viruses? Well now there's a social networking site designed to do nothing but blast your brain with memories of cultural events that happened before 1990. Getback.com will remind you of stuff, and then introduce you to other people who remember stuff! And don't worry about getting confused by all that cutting and pasting, that's for kids! Classic songs and movie trailers are already on the site, just waiting for you to put your name next to them. A Facebook for your generation—a generation that's already dead.
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Digital-Age Phrases That Should Never Be Used
"Within 2 years, the leading music blogs will become what used to be called 'Record Labels'. The people running them will be those sharp, tuned-in, hyper-networked and resourceful BlogJs formerly known as bloggers." Not only does "BlogJ" sound, well, dumb, the whole thing is even worse when you realize that the only reason the full half-word is being used—instead of the rhymes-with-DJ term that makes more sense—is so as not to offend delicate ears who think of different things when the letters "b" and "j" come together. Of course, the irony there is that "BlogJ" types are very well-versed in giving BJs of the verbal sort, amirite? [Digital Music News / T-shirt via Gifts For A Geek]
The music-video site PluggedIn launched today with about 10,000 videos from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI. Branded with the tagline "Filter the noise. Hear the music," PluggedIn is being seen by the major labels as an opportunity to once again dictate how their content should be experienced and used by the masses, bringing things back to the way they were before those pesky indie labels and YouTube remixers ruined their expense accounts and fat-cat lifestyles. Its picture quality is really quite nice, but it doesn't allow embedding of its videos, and as mentioned, it only has about 10,000 clips in its label-generated database right now—although it's licensed the All Music Guide's content in an effort to make its content well look a lot deeper than it actually is. And not only that, it kicks those pesky people who have opinions about music that may be different than yours—and the ability to spell—to the curb, too!
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Radiohead fans, are you tired of congregating everywhere on the Internet to sing the praises of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and those other dudes? It doesn't seem like it, from the way that you'll take to any comment section in any far-flung blog, but the boys in the band are betting that you'd love to find just one place to get together and find people just like you! (Plus, now that Thom et al have already changed the music industry forever and ever, they need to give their Web team something to do.) Head on over to Waste Central, Radiohead's safe space for fans to bond over their shared ownership of the In Rainbows box set. The best part about the site? It shows that the trailblazing band isn't afraid of following in the footsteps of Fall Out Boy, 50 Cent, Kylie Minogue, and other artists who have decided to "monetize their userbase" by cutting them off from the rest of the Internet and plopping them inside boutique social networks that are emblazoned with lots of e-commerce links.
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