- Jets Alive Added to Canadian Music Café Line-Up
- The Real Reason Major Labels Love Spotify
- How Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue Shaped 50 Years of Music
- Michael Jackson Planned 50ft Robot for Las Vegas Residency
- Jackson Brothers Reality Show A Go At A&E
- Ukulele Girl Strumming Her Way To Helsinki
- Death by Discovery: The Interminable Churn of Music Startups
- The Ten Worst Rock ‘n’ Roll Career Moves
- Jazz Fans Kinda Blue Over Declining Audiences
- Broadcast News
JETS OVERHEAD has been added to this year’s line-up at the 5th annual Canadian Music Café , September 15th – 17th.  For six years, the indie ambient-rock band of five has played for audiences in North America and Europe. Jets Overhead is currently on a cross-Canada tour in support of The Dears. The Victoria BC band will join performers Amy Millan, Arkells, The Duhks, Emma-Lee, Hawksley Workman, Jason Bajada, The Mountains and the Trees, Ruby Jean and the Thoughtful Bees, Saukrates, Spiral Beach, Stef Lang, Terri Clark, USS and Winter Gloves. These artists will have the opportunity to showcase their unique sounds to American and Canadian music supervisors and film industry delegates at the 34th Toronto International Film Festival. Live performances run daily at the Hard Rock Cafe, 279 Yonge Street, between 1-5 p.m.
About: The Canadian Music Café, an initiative developed by the Canadian music industry, is presented by Radio Starmaker Fund and is collaboratively produced by the Canadian Independent Record Production Association (CIRPA), the Canadian Music Publishers Association (CMPA), the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA), the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), and in partnership with the Toronto International Film Festival. We thank our marketing partner OMDC (Ontario Media Development Corporation) for their support.
eas and perspectives that lead to exciting creative and cultural discourse through film. Media queries and interviews, contact: Planet3 Communications Ltd – Joanne Smale/Leanne Plummer
T: 647.346.4101, E: info@planet3com.net
SPOTIFY - Guardian: In Sweden, where Spotify has been running the longest, Magnus Uggla – well-established since the late 70s – has withdrawn his music from the service. On his blog he said that, after six months on the site he’d earned “what a mediocre busker could earn in a day”.
Regarding his record label, Sony Music, he says “after suing the shit out of Pirate Bay, they’re acting just like them by not paying the artists”. When he found out that Sony had 5.8% equity in Spotify he wrote: “I would rather be raped by Pirate Bay than fucked up the ass by (Sony boss) Hasse Breitholtz and Sony Music and will remove all of my songs from Spotify pending an honest service.”
As labels taking equity in new services becomes commonplace (the majors are currently in the process of doing it with BskyB and VirginMedia for their soon-to-be-launched music services), the issue of how to compensate the artist is a problem that won’t go away and needs to be resolved.
MILES - Guardian:Â Since Columbia/Sony reissued its 50th anniversary box set of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue a year prematurely in 2008, it feels as if we’ve already been celebrating this transformational moment in the evolution of 20th-century music for a long time.
However, Kind of Blue was first released in August 1959 – so for those keen on sticking to precise dates, its official anniversary has arrived. Another good reason to celebrate is this month’s publication of The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the remaking of modern music – Guardian journalist Richard Williams’s illuminating personal essay looking at the record’s impact on jazz, pop and contemporary-classical music.
I didn’t hear Kind of Blue for another six years after its original release, but when I did it was obvious that this was a jazz record different from anything I’d heard before, including the wayward leanings of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. A significant indicator was that it appealed to people who weren’t even jazz fans. When Kind of Blue was playing, those who expected heart-on-sleeve vocals, sumptuously swelling strings roaring operatic arias tended to ask with genuine fascination, “What’s that?”.
As is now part of jazz folklore, the New York sessions that produced this remarkable album were completed in a handful of takes over just a few hours, with a minimum of compositional materials. Davis, guided by faith in the powers of his band, knew he was on to something revolutionary, and the outcome has supported that conviction ever since.
KING OF POP - Guardian: Years before Michael Jackson agreed to a 50-date residency at London’s O2 Arena, the singer was considering a similar run of shows in Las Vegas. According to reports this week, Jackson was working with artists not just on costumes, sets and an accompanying hotel – but on a gigantic Michael Jackson robot roaming the Nevada desert.
Plans for the Las Vegas concerts began in October 2005, just months after the King of Pop was acquitted on child-molestation charges. Fashion designer André van Pier, a long-time friend of both Jackson and Princess Diana, led the work. According to PageSix, his costume designs included “space-age”, solar-powered fabric that changed colour in reaction to stage lights.
The team’s sci-fi ambitions didn’t stop there. Van Pier, partner Michael Luckman and artist Timothy Patterson made plans for a towering Michael Jackson robot, 50ft high and visible from Las Vegas’s McCarran airport. The robot would wander in the desert as an advertisement for Jackson’s show. “Michael’s looked at the sketches and liked them,” Luckman told the New York Daily News in 2007.
Funding, however, was a problem.
JACKSONS BROS – ShowBiz411: Michael Jackson’s death has been something of a godsend for Michael Jackson’s brothers. Before Michael died, the brothers filmed a one-hour pilot for A&E that was supposed to include some kind of reunion of them with Michael. But Michael never agreed to it, didn’t do it, and died before it could be discussed again.
But Hollywood blog Showbiz 411 tell reports that A&E has approved going forward with a series of further episodes that will show the Jackson brothers grappling with Michael’s death and their own lives. The pilot—which may include at least a reference at its end that Michael has died–will be aired on A&E within the month,
UKELELE GAL - Globe & Mail: Canadian folk-pop songstress Shelley O’Brien is reviving the small stringed instrument – and riding the revival all the way to
a festival in Finland.
ONLINE MUSIC – MocoNews:The more I think about it, the more I see themusic start-ups space as a dog that won’t ever bark..err…sing.
TheMySpace-iLike deal—and the price that iLike got—is a perfect example of what will continue to shape all of the online and mobile music startups. As I see it, there are endemic structural and cultural reasons for it.
The first part, something that has borne out over the last few years, is obvious: that margins in music downloads are horrible for anyone without iTunes scale
(and even that’s not growing rapidly), and that music labels are the choke point for most of the startups in the download space. Then, the other part about ad-supported music startups that we all instinctively know: too little ad money sloshing around for too many startups and the economics of ad rev share don’t work out well. Plus, there are too many interested parties trying to leech off money at every stage of the value chain for this to ever scale.
CAREER BLOOPERS: News that Bob Dylan is to record a Christmas album seems certain to destroy the legendary singer’s artistic credibility. In tribute, The Independent has compiled a list of the top ten disastrous rock’n'roll career moves.
JAZZ FANS – New York Times: Over the last week or so, as Woodstock commemoration reached its happy zenith, the jazz world has been rumbling with a more panicked sort of nostalgia. What set it off was an Aug. 9 column by the critic Terry Teachout — headlined “Can Jazz Be Saved?†— in The Wall Street Journal. A longtime advocate of jazz, Mr. Teachout weighed its cultural advances against its popular decline, reaching the conclusion that “it’s no
longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.â€
Jazz has had more than its share of hand-wringers, and so this Chicken Little lament felt wearily familiar. But Mr. Teachout came armed with data from Arts Participation 2008, a recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. Conducted in partnership with the United States Census Bureau, it found that only 7.8 percent of adults in this country claimed to have attended a jazz performance last year. The figure reported in previous years — 1982, 1992 and 2002 — was closer to 10 percent. A demographic breakdown showed steady upticks among respondents 55 and over, and a downward trend for everyone else. (Attendance also slipped for art museums, classical concerts, the ballet and the theater.)
BROADCAST NEWS: Astral Media will adopt France’s NRJ brand starting August 24, re-branding their French-language “Radio Energie†stations in Quebec. Besides Montreal’s CKMF-FM (94.3) & CHIK-FM (98.9) in Quebec City, the new NRJ stations will also be launched in Drummondville, Gatineau, Rimouski, Rouyn Noranda, Saguenay, Sherbrooke, Trois Rivieres, and Val D’Or.
CHEQ 101.3 in Sainte Marie, QC received has received approval to relocate to 101.5 and increase power from 4,677 watts to 26,000 watts (100,000 watts Max. ERP). This will enable them to expand their french language Country format into the Quebec City region:
JAY ALBRIGHT , the US radio consultant, is hosting a panel at the CCMA conference in Vancouver next month, and she’s asking Country broadcasters to
send her voice tapes and promos to use in her presentation. But, there’s the kicker, the best bit of audio wins $500 greenbacks. Send audio to albright@usa.net
Talk about 15 minutes of fame: “Joe the Plumber†Wurzelbacher has traded in his plunger for a microphone, guest-hosting the one-hour daily show “Eye on Toledo†show Toledo, Ohio’s WSPD-AM (1370). The Toledo Blade newspaper reports Wurzelbacher railed about Congress and Obama policies during his first show, saying at one point, “Obviously you’re not going to take the congressmen out behind the woodshed and beat them up, but when is enough enough? … How much control do you want to give the federal government?â€
The Swedish vodka company Absolut believes the British radio station Absolute Radio is taking advantage of their name, so they have filed a trademark infringement lawsuit. Absolut Vodka’s parent company alleges the general public would have difficulty differentiating between a radio station and a vodka brand. RadioInfo
