Search Results for: alt-rock

The going rate for downloading songs from online music services like Apple’s iTunes Music Store, MusicNet, Pressplay, and Rhapsody is about $1 a pop. Yet the economics of recorded music sales haven’t changed much since the vinyl era – despite the fact that digital files cost very little to produce and distribute. So how much of your buck makes its way back to the artists? Not much, though it’s clearly a better deal than they get from piracy. The Site’s Cut – 40% The biggest chunk of your dollar goes to the online music provider. This explains why sites like… Read more »

Dashboard Confessional and Jack Johnson played acoustic, and Beck and Coldplay celebrated Christmas, but otherwise KROQ-FM’s annual Almost Acoustic Christmas was a two-day, 20-act festival all about rocking. And the sold-out event was certainly crammed with rock and roll moments, particularly the announced live debut of Audioslave (they played a secret club show the night before), and an amusing rendition of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” orchestrated by Beck and the Flaming Lips and featuring Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, Johnson and a horribly off-key Juliette Lewis. (Click here for photos from the show.) Audioslave were the talk… Read more »

Nineties alt-rock lives as a new tour launches this weekend. The New World Disorder Tour features co-headliners The Gin Blossoms and Spin Doctors, with Seven Mary Three and Sponge. Expect to hear all the classic Gin Blossoms hits like “Hey Jealousy” and “Till I Hear It From You,” and watch out for four releases from the band this year, Dusted, (their first pre-A&M Records release that had only been available on cassette until now), New Miserable Experience Collectors Series (an expanded 2-CD version with bonus tracks, demos and outtakes), plus a couple of solo ventures, The Poppin’ Wheelies from singer… Read more »

The man of constant sorrow should have plenty of cause to celebrate, though Brandy might be kind of crabby. After 63 weeks on the Billboard 200 albums chart, the “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack will levitate to #1, beating out the R&B crooner, who seemed headed for a chart-topping debut. Last week, O Brother, which has sold over 4 million copies since its December 2000 release, jumped from #15 to #2 after being graced with a Grammy for Album of the Year. While the album will move up on the chart with sales of 160,000 copies, it sold around… Read more »

When the Eels debuted in the mid-Nineties, being a tortured artist in the slippery world of alternative rock implied some level of ironic distance. God forbid that an alt-rocker directly admit to having feelings – at least not without a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Eels frontman E does his share of winking, but his real-life tragedies – within a two-year period, he lost his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer – have kept the singer and songwriter more honest than your average Nineties moper. In 1998, E dealt head-on with his personal loss on the Eels’ stunning album, Electro-Shock… Read more »

Wind-Up Records, the independent powerhouse that broke multiplatinum rockers Creed, has renewed its U.S. distribution pact with Bertelsmann-owned major label group BMG Entertainment. The two-year deal extends a distribution pact inked when chairman Alan Meltzer launched the label in early 1997. Wind-Up since has grown to become the second-largest indie label behind teen-pop juggernaut Jive Records, thanks in large part to Creed, which has sold more than 21 million records during the past five years. Meltzer hasn’t ruled out cashing in on that success and expanding the company’s reach by doing a larger equity deal with a major, but he… Read more »

The music industry finally received the holiday gift it had been hoping for this week, as the album charts got a formidable one-two punch from alt-rock superstars Creed and the perennially popular “Now That’s What I Call Music” compilation series. “Weathered” (Wind-Up), Creed’s follow-up to the platinum blockbuster “Human Clay,” sold nearly 900,000 copies its first time out, according to SoundScan data for the week ended Nov. 27. Those numbers made “Weathered” the biggest bow since ‘N Sync’s “Celebrity” shifted 1.9 million out of the gate last summer. Nipping at Creed’s heels was the eighth installment of the “Now” series… Read more »

Retailers have seen a groundswell in demand for music with patriotic themes in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, sending record labels scrambling to keep the supply coming. That fervor helped to drive Columbia Records’ benefit compilation “God Bless America” to No. 1 in an otherwise quiet week for music sales. Nearly 181,000 copies of “God Bless America” headed out the door in the week ended Oct. 21, according to data compiled by SoundScan. Columbia parent Sony Music said a “substantial portion” of proceeds from the release, which includes tracks by Celine Dion, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, will… Read more »

Rumors of teen-pop’s death have been greatly exaggerated, as genre standard-bearers ‘N Sync showed convincingly by posting the second-best debut-week sales numbers in history. Nearly 1.9 million copies of the superstar quintet’s Jive release “Celebrity” flew from retail shelves in the week ended Sunday, according to data compiled by SoundScan. That’s about a half-million short of the group’s record-breaking sales week with its prior LP “No Strings Attached,” which bowed in March 2000 and has sold 10.6 million copies nationwide to date. It’s more than enough, however, to top 2001’s second biggest bow, the Dave Matthews Band’s “Everyday” (RCA). The… Read more »

D12, Eminem’s original Detroit rap crew, opened at number one with its debut release, Devil’sNight. The disc was produced by Eminem and prominently features the rhymes of the controversial hip-hopster. D12 (short for the Dirty Dozen) is the first group on Eminem’s Interscope-distributed Shady Records. “We made a pact years ago,” says Eminem. “Whichever one of us gets signed comes back for the rest.” For the week ending Sunday, Devil’s Night sold 371,000 copies, according to SoundScan. The numbers were significantly lower than the 500,000 million retailers predicted and the 1.76 million first week enjoyed by Eminem’s last solo effort,… Read more »