Here in the Product department, we’re always busy building cool stuff to make life (and business) easier for our clients. This time, we’re very pleased to announce the launch of a brand new Accounting section. Please, everyone, calm down. Excuse me, sir, can you put your shirt back on? This …
Videos are by far the most engaging form of social content. This isn’t exactly a new discovery, but there’s a lot of missed potential by bands that claim to have a YouTube presence. The common misconception is that your music videos go up on YouTube and you’re done. Although MTV …
Plugging — it’s a word we often hear in relation to promoting something, recommending it, giving it your stamp of approval. iPluggers does just that for your music, and it does it all around the world. With a 100% airplay guarantee (or your money back), iPluggers provides the platform for …
Meet our latest partner: Conduit Mobile. The mobile app creator is getting all kinds of press these days, and it’s not without good reason. Their sexy app offers every function you could dream of with the ease of use you’ve always wanted. What’s more, they’re compatible with all major mobile …
”Wolves At The Door,” the first track from David Bazan’s upcoming new album Strange Negotiations, premiered yesterday on NPR’s All Songs Considered. Check out the lyrically and musically powerful song below.
Listen to David Bazan’s “Wolves At The Door” from Strange Negotiations [Barsuk Records] here.
Strange Negotiations will be released May 24th on Seattle’s Barsuk Records. A North American tour in support of the record will begin June 1st in Salt Lake City, UT, and continue through mid July, ending with a hometown show in Seattle.
Bazan, the songwriter and driving force behind indie band Pedro the Lion, built a following and sold a couple hundred-thousand albums based in large part on his extraordinary melodic sense and erudite, theologically-themed songs. After a decade helming the project, Bazan found himself dealing with a crisis of faith and a growing drinking problem. Bazan got to work exorcizing both his demons and angels, producing two incredible pieces of work under his own name in the Fewer Moving Parts EP and the 2009 full-length Curse Your Branches.
Curse Your Branches is considered by many to be a legitimate masterpiece, charting Bazan’s increasingly skeptical struggle with the precepts of the evangelical Christian world in which he was raised. Strange Negotiations focuses his energies toward the external, centering on his disappointment in the current state of accelerating American and global social fragmentation. Although it has yet to be released, Performer has already called the record “a near-perfect fusion of lyrical content and musicianship.”
Strange Negotiations is the first full-length Bazan has recorded with a band – the same band with which he toured relentlessly in support of Curse Your Branches – and the joy that he, Andy Fitts (bass), and Alex Westcoat (drums) take in playing these songs is beautiful.
There are distinctions (although eroding) to be made between music consumption behavior in the US vs. EU, and for several key reasons:
1. Mobile vs. Broadband behavior
2. The perceived value of music is zero
3. Successful service offerings in the US vs. EU
Europe has always been a bit quicker than the U.S. at adopting the newest technology offerings. Yes, broadband penetration in EU is strong, and the networks are getting faster. However, just as they never really adopted the “wired” cable implementation, aka the “last mile” doesn’t exist there, they also will not embrace the PC experience to its fullest as long as there is a mobile option. It’s engrained in their culture, country by country.
When Napster and all the rest of the P2Ps launched, people were stealing music left and right since access was offered. It was easy. It was “free”, and it was portable. But it was still download driven, and you could get viruses. The RIAA started freaking out and suing 10 year olds, and still there was no way to just play what you wanted to hear right when you wanted to hear it if you didn’t think ahead to load your iPod with the download before you left the house. No access. So iTunes launched a legal download business and they did a great job at convincing everyone that owning your music was important. If you bought it and downloaded it, you owned it. There was value to that, plus it was legal. However, iTunes comes out with an update every five seconds that is enormous in size and takes forever. Not only that, people are terrible at content management. Everyone’s music library has each track in triplicate, and you can still never find that boot you recorded because it had no metadata and is listed as the orphan “Track 09” amongst all the other “Track 09”s. Sad. Anyway, people also started catching on that in order to fill their iPods, they’d also have to spend $10,000 (20GBs). Not cheap. And it still didn’t solve the issue of access.
The young Wisconsin-bred Brooklyn-based quartet Locksley tweaks British Invasion pop, early American punk, and contemporary garage rock. Their new stomping, ebullient, and glammy single “The Whip” is full of “whoa oh ohs” and crazy-in-love enthusiasm. They’ve been touted as a band to watch by SPIN, Rolling Stone, and Alternative Press, and have toured with Ray Davies, The Rapture, and The Hives. Stay tuned for their full-length album, Locksley.
Watch the messy paint-party-tastic video for “The Whip.”
Following a successful Midwestern jaunt with fellow indie-pop group Ra Ra Riot, New Orleans quartet Generationals just announced an extensive run of tour dates that will keep them busy this spring and summer. They’ll be joined by Oh No Oh My, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and Gardens and Villa along the trek. Check out dates below.
Buy Generationals’ Actor-Caster [Park The Van] packages from the band here.
Download “Ten-Twenty-Ten” and “Greenleaf” here.
Ten-Twenty-Ten by Generationals from Jubadaba on Vimeo.
New Zealand rockers Cut Off Your Hands just revealed the first new track from their upcoming album, Hollow, which will see the light of day later this summer via Frenchkiss Records. The bouncy yet mature “You Should Do Better” offers a nod to their influences while nicely following up their impressive debut You & I, which Frenchkiss released in 2009.
Listen to/download Cut Off Your Hands’ “You Should Do Better” here at My Old Kentucky Blog.
