More than ever, people are now discovering new bands thru advertisements: 69% of the Y generation finds new music thru adverts and 68% of them thinks it's ok to have bands linked with brands (GMR study which we hoover above here: http://blog.kollector.com/?q=blog/music-more-important). Licensing music has become an important mean of getting your music to be known, specially in an age where CD sales suck and only works as appetizer for touring and the merch you sold at the gig only pays for petrol...

So, your job as a musician is to find where to licence your great tracks and you, or someone around you, should start pitching it to music supervisors in movies and in adverts. Ryan Fitch is Music Supervisor at Saatchi And Saatchi, a huge multinational advertisement company (with a strong interest in art actually). There's an interesting interview of him in Sonic Scoop which is filled with insights on how, what and by which means to pitch your work.

There are now quite a few online places selling music ready-to-be-licensed and Ryan talks about "Jingle Punks" and "Pump", good companies indeed to which...

There was a time long ago where mp3 didn't exist and one could still released an album and hoping people would buy it and make it possible for him to live from his music.
And the scariest thing wasn't that people would copy it on cassette but it was merely about the sound quality of the LP...

Paul McCartney doesn't need an introduction, even for people who have discover music with Daft Punk or MGMT, and he surely doesn't need the money, but he surely likes us to remember who he was/he is and no one can blame an artist for wanting to have a legacy about his work. This documentary is about "RAM", an album he did with his long-departed wife back in 1971. The album was a commercial succes but somehow critics thought at the time it was not interesting. Now, 40 years later, they do....

Artists are fragile creatures tortured by they need to be good and being heralded as being great, and most of the time they may do the total opposite of what's needed for their art in doing what's great for their career. But ultimately, what's left is music people can drown in and appreciate its richness and how it makes them feel.

That's the real succes of an artist: not...

As pointed out a few months ago, seems like the 80's are by now officially uncool and totally dried out of all its usable content and the 90's are officially and most definitively the decade to swear by these days, and it's not the Tupac hologram that will deny this :)

Garbage, the band which symbolizes the 90's with Nirvana, have a new record out and it's always a pleasure to listen to the Butch Vig guys and gal having a go at their rather specific mixture of radio friendly rock/pop formula. Shirley Manson has a great voice and she knows how to use it to devastative effect.

This new album, called Not Your Kind of People, seem to have been slow at coming out as it's been started in october 2010 but let's not forget Butch Vig is an uber-busy succesfull producer and he may have had little time for this new record. The album will be released on their own Stunvolume label on May 22 and a tour will soon follow.

The interesting thing, and we'll keep you posted, is that MTV will stream live their NYC concert. Seems like MTV is back with a vengeance too, with the short adverts that made them so famous, and so is Myspace. My my my, it really feels like the 90's...

This sounds like an amazing documentary: "The Tailenders" , by Adele Horne, tells us about Global Recordings Network, based and born in LA since 1939, which's aim is to produce audio versions of the Bible in all 8000 languages spoken on Earth (the Youtube short clip tells us about 12.000 tho).

Far from us the idea to speak about religion, this is a mined area, but Global Recording Network is indeed on a mission. Adele Horne, a US filmmaker specialized in documentaries, was always fascinated by an old and primitive cardboard record player her Evangelical christian family was sent when she was 8 years old. She later went on to learn more about GRN and wants to tell us this fascinating story: how Evangelists are recording the "message of Jesus" on records in all possible languages and send missionaries in remote locations all over the world and tries to bring "the good word" to people who, in most cases, have never heard a recording before, never heard about "progress" or about a different "religion".

Exposing indigenuous populations to what seems to us a desesperately and impossible low tech audio playback solution but is probably the most advanced item these...

In Germany, at the last Berlin elections, the Pirate Party made it to no less than 15 seats on the 141 available at the regional Parliament. That's enough to get the other political movements attention, I tell ya....

But what do they want ? Their platform very much revolves around legalization of file-sharing sites, legalization of cannabis and generally more freedom and less state involvement in citizen's informations and data. It also wants open governement and the availability of API's to be able to control said-governement (which is actually a really cool idea).

All this sounds interesting, but do they really know the subjects ? One wonders after reading a surrealistic debate (in Der Spiegel) between a german pop artist who lives, or tries to, from his music and a Pirate Party member who's one of the 15 elected at the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus. (House of Deputies). Clearly, the Pirate Party member doesn't know what he's talking about and it feels like he's finding excuses for downloading illegal material more than having a vision of a society where culture will be available to all at the speed of light and for little or no money.

Something somewhere...

Someone's got to stop Michael Moore singing: while being a very funny, entertaining AND interesting movie maker, as a singer he's ...euh...challenging to say the least but we'll pass on this as it's for a good cause.

There's undoubtely something happening in this western world where more and more wealth is being accumulated on one side (the 1%) and more and more poverty/less and less freedom taking over on the other side (the 99%) but the Occupy Movement (which we talked about a few times already) is fighting to get things rights. And it's good to see artists who decide they can make people aware of the situation and put their name and talent down on realizing an album as this. There are 99 artists on this 4CD compilation and all funds will go to help the movement.

Aldous Huxley, the visionnary man, wrote in 1947: "...think of what ninety nine percent of the human race want – food, shelter, a secure family life and to be left alone by bosses and busybodies. Unfortunately the one percent who are interested in power and ideals and ideologies are the ones who call the tune". And that tune doesn't sound right no more for hundreds of thousands of people fighting for...

Usually a band forms, rehearses, has a few bumps up and bumps down, makes some records, get some recognition (or not), flops or succeeds and, most of the times, its end is dirty and nasty, with members of said-band lashing out on the other members all their hatred and bad feelings and it's all over the papers. See with Oasis, or The Beatles, or even the band in your area: it seems like the split of a band needs to be ugly.

With James Murphy's LCD Soundsystem, nope. And the ending was so happy and climatic that they even did a documentary about it and it looks and sounds superb: "Shut Up And Play The Hits" shows the emotionnal last 48 hours of a band that will be remembered as one of the main bands from the last decades. Their mixture of rock, dance and punk even generated the music style known as "dance punk". One of their most famous song is the so-funnily called "Daft Punk Is Playing At My House" but other great moments are "All My Friends" or "Someone Great".

The reason for ending the band aren't all clear: it seems James was feeling his age was getting in the way (42 years old) in a business so devoted to youthful energy and strass.
I bet he will...