SXSW OnDemand on the believer's site

http://believermag.com/exclusives/?read=article_derby2

this a great article and encompasses many of my own mixed feelings about sxsw and music conferences and shows and music in general. one day, i will throw off the shackles of the band profile and write like this.

best buy controversy

the following comes from the you love/hate it clearinghouse that is pitchfork

Best Buy to Indies: Drop Dead

Mairead Case reports:
On January 24, Best Buy announced its latest promotion: a sale on a handful of albums from "left of the dial indie heroes," such as the Arcade Fire, Cat Power, Danger Doom, Antony & the Johnsons, Atmosphere, New Pornographers, and Broken Social Scene-- all listed at the obscenely low price of $7.99. Yes, that's cheaper than every other store on the planet, including iTunes. In fact, it's cheaper than distribution wholesale.

How can Best Buy get away with that? Isn't that illegal or something? Well, no. Welcome to the wonderful world of co-ops. Co-op campaigns are deals in which labels exchange money or extra CDs ("cleans") for prominent placement in stores, bulk initial orders, sale pricing, and advertising presence. Co-ops exist everywhere, from megastores to Mom and Pops alike. In other words, whenever you see some Next Big Thing featured at the end of an aisle, nine times out of ten, the label paid for that artist to be there.

This isn't intrinsically a bad thing. However, when co-op money is used to lower prices as substantially as Best Buy has, it's independent record shops that suffer the blow: Given the recent plunge in album sales over the past five years, these stores are already struggling. And while it may seem dramatic to say that something like this could make these kinds of stores extinct, the danger is very real. For many, it will be the final straw that puts them out of business.

It's no surprise, then, that Best Buy's "Artists Outside the Mainstream" program has inspired a lightning-quick backlash from small stores and non-participating labels. Tongues are lashing at Saki Store, the blog home of indie distro Carrot Top Distribution and Carrot Top Records (Handsome Family, Antietem, the Coctails, Archer Prewitt). On January 24, CTD, Ltd. President Patrick Monaghan posted a screed lambasting Best Buy and the labels involved in the program. His post inspired a heated discussion that spread across the web, with label executives and store owners joining the fray.

"I don't really see any way you can blame the customer," Monaghan told Pitchfork. "Hell, what decision is a consumer supposed to make, assuming they actually want to pay for their music, when faced with a $7.99 vs. $13.99 CD? I also don't think you can blame Best Buy. You can't shame the sociopath, so what good does it do to try? In my humble opinion, the blame falls on the labels and bands who are participating in this co-op advertisement deal."

Monaghan continued, "It's a question of extreme pricing and sale. If there is no indie retail to help build new bands, we are left with MySpace, the unfiltered Internet, and ad/TV/movie placement to introduce people to new bands. Retail would be left to the Best Buy/Starbucks axis. That's not too appealing of a scenario to me."

Mac McCaughan, Superchunk/Portastatic frontman and co-owner of Merge Records, responded point-blank: "Obviously, Merge's job is to get our artists' records in as many stores as possible, and make them available to as many people as possible who want to buy them," he commented on Saki Store. "Someone who discovers an artist because the 'popular' record is on sale at Best Buy will then hopefully be driven to find out more about the band. [Then,] they'll have to get the back catalogue at a store that sells mostly music."

According to the labels involved in "Artists Outside the Mainstream", Best Buy never mentioned the $7.99 price plan when discussing the program. The promotional paperwork specified only print circular placement, special positioning, and sale pricing, but no disclosure of how low that sale pricing might be.

In this sense, the labels, prevented from price-point negotiations under 2002 price fixing legislations, were truly blindsided. As Secretly Canadian's Nick Blandford wrote to the label's retailers and distros, "To say that [the price] was a shock to us is an understatement. Before approving the program, we specifically confirmed with ADA, Secretly Canadian's exclusive distributor, that Best Buy would not receive any sort of discount."

Matador president Gerard Cosloy told Pitchfork, "I don't deny for a second that using hot indie titles as a loss leader is a total sucker punch to mom and pop record stores. But without diminishing the significance of such an event, cool record stores should have something else up their sleeves besides using Best Buy as the bogeyman. We've used Best Buy for years, but the vast majority of our time and energy has been devoted to selling records through independent retailers. To date, we've yet to do any instores with Best Buy or any exclusive titles with a chain store or non-music retailer, and we continue to come up with specific releases [like the 99� Cat Power seven-inch and Interpol remixes] that you can't purchase anywhere other than indie retail."

So how do artists feel about the situation? "Artists have never complained to us that their record was in a chain store or on sale at a chain store," McCaughan told Pitchfork. "However, artists have often complained if they couldn't find their records in a chain store."

McCaughan was blunter on the Saki Store blog, arguing that "if [Merge] announced to our bands, especially bands that sell a lot of records, that their CDs would only be available at the cool stores and no longer at any chains, the roster of artists that Merge fans love would evaporate. If you don't think that's true, then you're living on a different planet."

"In any event," Cosloy told Pitchfork, "it should be stressed that [Matador] is pretty circumspect about which titles we choose to put into a co-op program at the chain level. Unless an artist's sales history, touring, press or airplay justifies such a thing, you won't see us trying to place 30,000 CDs on the shelves of your favorite appliance retailer."

Although the $7.99 promotion has ended, and most of the "Artists Outside the Mainstream" titles are now selling for a sensible $12.99, the principle remains: Don't take your local independent record stores for granted.

shameless plug + shameless plug 2

forgot those seminars about how to turn your blog into a moneymaker. just take your publication's blog and pimp your band! big trouble is in big trouble at the cabooze tonight. doors at 8:30 pm, music at 9:30 pm, cost is $5. you must have been born on or before this date - feb. 23, 1988 - to get in. people born in '88 are 18?! that's ridiculous! also appearing: the new primitves in their regular thursday night slot.

no guests, no trivia, just 45 minutes of pure, unadulterated muso-hipster instrumentals.

if you don't want to go, fine. be that way.

and secondly: neighborhoodies has started a brand new separate music website called amp camp which is looking pretty sweet. they've got lots of hot indie titles, a free mp3 every day, plus you can write reviews of cds and contribute to the site. i met the dude (michael) from neighborhoodies last summer at intonation in chicago and he was super-pumped about this little venture and it's great to see it come to fruition. i suggest you visit every day.

ela seeks bassist for april tour

hey kids. i just talked to bill caperton from ela (and askeleton) and ela's hitting the road from apr 5-30 with say anything and they need a fill-in bassist because my brother's in college right now. so post up a comment if you are or know a bassist/guitarist who can do some good work. their website is elamusic.net and also www.myspace.com/ela.

jay-z is for the geniuses

i always though that jay-z was not my kind of rapper. from back in the day (which was a wednesday, by the way), i thought his money, guns, hoes thing was not for me, but damnit if the way he puts his lines together isn't stunning. couple that with great taste in beatmakers, and you can make a pretty damn amazing mix of fantastically thumping tracks to bump in your benzos, jeeps and regals.

1. public service announcement (interlude) from the black album
2. '03 bonnie & clyde (feat. beyonce) from the blueprint 2
3. dirt off your shoulder from the black album
4. the watcher 2 from the blueprint 2
5. hola hovito from blueprint
6. n**** what, n**** who from vol. 2 ... hard knock life
7. 99 problems from the black album
8. streets is watching from streets is watching
9. a dream (feat. faith evans and notorious b.i.g.) from blueprint 2
10. lucifer from the black album
11. guns & roses from the blueprint 2
12. takeover from blueprint

musical competitions

does anybody else find the notion of musical competitions a little weird? i just got a press release talking about the three-time national flatpicking champion. and there's the blues guitar competitions. five time winner! it just seems like the kind of thing that's not really a contest. keeping score when it comes to music seems a little like going to a professional basketball game where they don't. i know that there's a grand history of competition w/r/t to classical music in terms of auditions and things like that. there's the shred-off at the end of the movie crossroads, where ralph macchio ironically beats the pants off steve vai by returning to his classical roots after eschweing them for most of the picture. it just goes to show you: soul may be great, but it can't beat steve vai. for that you need fireworks.

but take freestlye or dj battles. there's a certain camaraderie there and i think off-the-cuff freestlye battles can be immensely entertaining if they're good, but it seems like when you make them institutional it loses something. is it just the inherent juxtaposition of rules and combat?

the international songwriting competition. of course, some songs are better than others, but it seems wrong to then extrapolate that out to a contest. symptom of our american desire to quantify everything? desire to have some authority tell us what's good for us?

happy!

happy valentime's everybody. and also happy 3,000 hits on the pulse music blog. now we join the elite company of ricky henderson, tony gwynn, pete rose and nap lajoie.

olympics opening ceremony - music related

kind of. anybody watch any of this? i didn't get to catch it, but king kaufman has a very perceptive point in his salon column today:

But you know who I really missed? Björk. The Olympic Opening Ceremonies have to be the only event on the planet where you find yourself thinking, "You know who'd fit in perfectly right here? Björk."

bellwether

so in putting together stuff for the hot ticket i wrote on missing numbers this week, jimmy peterson dropped by and was kind enough to leave copies of both missing numbers discs and the last bellwether album, seven and six. i already own it, but i haven't listened to it in a while and so i'd jsut like to take a moment to call your attention to the amazing track "i thought that you were dead." first of all, the sound of the recording is amazing. both eric luoma and jimmy send their vocals through a scratchifier that makes eric sound like he's about to cry and jimmy sound like he's about to kill you, but here it's just the absolutely right thing to do. sometimes, i think songs begin as fantastic ideas and as a writer you struggle with how to flesh it out into a full song; the beauty here is that i think luoma recognized that this song didn't really need anything more than it already carried in its melody. bellwether is a band that's known for its melancholia, its forlorness, its windblown songs; but this is a standout even in a catalog of standouts. maybe it's the touch of humor that goes along with the admittedly grim central thread. "i thought that you were dead/ and so did your employer/ we cleaned out your desk/ with a box by the door/ i thought that you were dead/ so we opened up your mail/ we had a sale/ sold your clothes and your car." the basic plot follows the protagonist's overreaction to not knowing where his beloved is. it's something we've all gone through; sitting by the phone or maybe looking out the window obsessively as we wait for somebody to come back home. as the minutes stretch into hours, we start coming up with all kinds of ridiculous scenarios about what's happened and what we'll have to do now that things have changed so drastically. but then they come home, and everything's fine. it might seem a picayune occurence, but luoma uses it to limn what's really at the core of a long-term relationship: the interdependence, the way you take each other for granted until something threatens the status quo. in the end, it's the best kind of happy-sad song, making you fearful of the loss of things you love and glad you have them at all in the first place.

Ted Leo Signs to Touch and Go

from pitchfork. this is just super news. leo's absolutely one of my favorite musicians. now if he would just come to the twin cities, i could interview him.

Ted Leo Signs to Touch and Go

Kati Llewellyn and Amy Phillips report:
Following last summer's Lookout! Records meltdown, several of that label's artists have been forced to find shelter elsewhere. Mary Timony recently signed to Kill Rock Stars, and it was announced last evening that Ted Leo has inked with Touch and Go. So now he'll be rubbing elbows with !!!, TV on the Radio, Calexico, Quasi, Dirty Three, and the like, instead of a bunch of pop-punk bands.

In a press release, Leo said, "As sad as I am that circumstances have forced a move from Lookout! Records, I'm insanely happy and thankful to be able to make that move over to Touch & Go. T&G is a label that has provided me, personally, with amazing music for 25 years; over those years, I have become friends with many of their artists and staff, and it's an honor to now be a real part of their ongoing ruling-ness." Awwwww.

"T&G's history is my history, like Lookout!'s history is my history, like [Leo's first label] Gern Blandsten's history is my history -- American Punk Rock, True Believers, the Real Deal," he continued. "In a world that seems hell-bent on driving itself further and faster down the shitter every day, these things remain not just important, but the absolute core of our endeavors."

Lookout! wrote on their website, "All of us here at Lookout Records wish Ted Leo & Co. the best with their new label."

So no hard feelings.

Pitchfork spoke to Leo earlier today, and he added, "I felt like there was not only a comfort level with Touch and Go, but that when it all came down to it, honestly, it really was just of those things that felt like it just made the most sense as the next step in a logical progression."

Leo is tentatively aiming for a fall release of his T&G debut. "I have close to a pretty solid amount of songs that would constitute a record, but I feel like I have some more ideas and I don't know if just because I have the right amount of songs that they should necessarily be the songs that come out on the next record. For the first time in my life, I actually want to give myself a little bit of time to make sure that I feel like it's the right batch of songs to put out."

When we spoke with Leo last month, he was putting the finishing touches on songs for a musical tentatively titled Red Bananas. "I actually played some of the songs in New York this last Sunday night," he said. "Actually performing them a little bit gave me a little more confidence in them, so you know, I feel good about that."

Leo said there's a chance that the Red Bananas songs will show up in his set when he and Pharmacists head out on the road in March. That tour now includes a three-day SXSW stint and a Coachella performance.

Buzzy British PJ Harvey-ish band the Duke Spirit were recently added as the opening act on Leo's March tour. Their debut album, Cuts Across the Land, will be released in America on March 7.

ariel pink pulls a jackie chan

this guy's so d.i.y. he does his own stunts, too, apparently. got this from his pub today. if you're a band, it might be fun. his disc is kooky, although i think it's a little forcedly so. i guess he's also narcoleptic.

Be Ariel Pink's Backing Band for a Day

February 2, 2006 – Paw Tracks artist Ariel Pink announced today that he’s inviting local musicians to perform with him onstage.

“You will get to be my back-up band – for a day,” said Ariel Pink.

On his upcoming tour, Ariel will perform the first half of his show solo, and the second half with his band of the day. The first band in each touring city to e-mail Ariel Pink’s tour publicist Katy Martineau (katy@fanaticpromotion.com) will win the coveted spot to play with Ariel Pink. Ariel asks local bands to arrive by sound check so they can practice before the show, and to bring their own instruments and amplifiers. Drummers are invited, but beware, you will have to compete with Ariel Pink’s mouth, which will provide the drumming for his solo set.

“The element of surprise will keep me from falling asleep onstage,” said Ariel Pink.

Ariel Pink (b. Ariel Rosenberg, June 1978) is an L.A.-based home taper who for years “fell out of bed onto [his] eight-track analog cassette Yamaha MT8X.” He eventually wore down the unit, which succumbed, and Yamaha no longer makes it. “I now use whatever I can get my hands on,” he laments, meaning cheap, scrounged-up equipment. “I can’t spend money on gear, because I don’t have any.” He was influenced by the DIY ethic of R. Stevie Moore, with whom he subsequently became long-distance pals. Ariel has a great pop sensibility, and plays the “standard rock line-up of guitars, keys, bass, and vocals.” Ariel has been in bands, but records by himself. His personal estimate: 200-300 master tapes since 1995, comprising of over 500 songs.

Musicians can find copies of Ariel Pink’s three Paw Tracks releases “The Doldrums,” “Worn Copy,” and “House Arrest” at local and online music stores. The 2006 re-issue of ‘House Arrest’ just received an A- review in Spin Magazine.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti:
* w/ Belong
02/10 Los Angeles, CA Echo Lounge*
02/11 San Francisco, CA Bottom of the Hill*
02/12 Portland, OR Berbati's Pan*
02/13 Seattle, WA Chop Suey*
02/16 Fargo, ND – Aquarium*
02/17 Minneapolis, MN Entry*
02/18 Chicago, IL Schuba's*
02/19 Detroit, MI Magic Stick
02/20 Toronto, Ontario The Boat
02/21 Montreal, Quebec Zoobizarre
02/22 Allston, MA O'Brien's Pub
02/23 Wallingford, CT Wallingford American Legion
02/24 New York, NY Knitting Factory*
02/25 Philadelphia, PA The Khyber*
02/26 Baltimore, MD Salisbury College
02/27 Durham, NC Duke University Coffee House
02/28 Atlanta, GA Drunken Unicorn*
03/01 Baton Rouge, LA Spanish Moon*
03/02 Houston, TX*- The Proletariat*
03/03 Austin, TX Emo's*
03/04 Dallas, TX Hailey's*
03/06 Tucson, AZ Solar Cultural
03/07 San Diego, CA Casbah

the blog returns to music. and there was much rejoicing.

so the current is starting up the request form for mark wheat's second annual "greatest love songs of all-time" show, which will air on valentine's day. but, really, who cares about love songs? danny siegelman's presenting the first annual "greatest break-up songs of all-time" online that same day, and i'll bet you anything if you weighed all the break-up songs out there against all the love-songs, the break-up songs would be the equivalent of the fat kid getting on the see-saw. i voted for pedro the lion's "bad diary days" because, holy jesus, that song gives me break-up chills every time i hear it. it's a phenomenally incisive look at the way that a situation can just go south without you ever seeing it. horrifying.

while we're on the topic: "the scientist" by coldplay. it was overplayed, yes. coldplay is definitely a little on the cheesy side, yup. but dammit, that's what you need in a break-up, am i right? on a purely volumetric scale, this song has produced the greatest quantity of personal waterworks for me of any song ever. it's not even a close second for "this year's love" by david gray, which is probably second. i guess "this year's love" is probably a love song, but it gets to me, too.

i'm trying to come up with some local songs that have kicked my heart around its chest cavity. "afterthoughts" by bellwether. "that one" by p.o.s. "broken toes" by love-cars. "i don't know if it's helping" by ela. oh buddy. that song is fan-frigging-tastic for the old break-up moments. anybody else?

oh, here's the link to the current's page with the thing about the stuff:

the current