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Every band dreams of the lucky night it’ll be discovered by a music promoter or favorite record label. Overnight you’ve got a hot record, radio stations everywhere playing your songs and your band becomes a household name. It’s the classic musician’s fairy tale. But it is a fairy tale and, for every new artist who is discovered by a major record label, there are thousands who aren’t. For the rest of us, pursuing a career in music is hard. Now, proposed new royalty rates for Internet radio threaten to make it harder. You see, our Americana band Tangleweed was “discovered”… Read more »

Some of the world’s biggest names in music were all about Saving Our Selves this weekend. SOS, of course, referring to the campaign being touted Saturday across the globe at the seven-continent, 24-hour Live Earth concert extravaganza, a worldwide shout-out to individuals, political leaders, corporations and every other entity capable of helping put a stop to the environmental scourge that is global warming. In a partnership with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and other U.S.-based and international organizations, Live 8 executive producer Kevin Wall put together a bill that included the Police, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica,… Read more »

A British band has funded its first album entirely via a new Web site which allows up-and-coming acts to bypass record labels and gives fans the chance to buy into their success. Gilkicker, a four-man guitar band from the southern English city of Portsmouth, raised the 15,000 pounds ($30,000) they needed to make their debut album within 10 days of new music site www.slicethepie.com going live. “We told a few people on Myspace and told a few friends to look and told them they could invest in us,” said Sam McCarthy, the band’s 25-year-old singer and guitarist. “It was mainly… Read more »

Pete Wentz was treated to dinner a few months ago by Lyor Cohen, the renowned rap promoter and U.S. music chief of Warner Music Group. Wentz, 28, is the eyelinered heartthrob and bassist of punk band Fall Out Boy; but this dinner was in celebration of the hit single just released by another band, Panic! At the Disco, which records on Wentz’s own label, Decaydance. “He asked me, ‘What do you want out of life, Pete?’” Wentz says. His answer was flip: business cards. The next day he received a stack of cards listing his name and a new title:… Read more »

Times are tough for the bangs-‘n’-guyliner set. Leading practitioners Marilyn Manson and My Chemical Romance are feuding, everyone is being labeled “emo” (and subsequently besieged by laughably uninformed nightly news reports), and Pete Wentz is dating Jessica Simpson’s sister. And now, as if things couldn’t get any worse, spooky-ooky outlet Hot Topic is ditching “dark and foreboding” for “lighter and brighter” in an attempt to halt a three-year slide in sales. “The desire is not to make the store ‘not gothic-y,’ it’s merely to reflect what’s going on in the music scene. Our store design has always reflected the music… Read more »

It was a good, flatulent, slur-filled and sexist-gag-soaked run, but the bad boys of radio appear to be living on borrowed time. On Tuesday (May 15), XM shock duo Opie and Anthony were slapped with a 30-day suspension for last week’s gag involving a homeless character discussing his desire to sexually assault Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, first lady Laura Bush and the Queen of England. “Nobody in radio thinks they’re a shock jock; they’re entertainers. But if [the genre] isn’t dead, it’s certainly had a storm warning,” said Tom Taylor, editor of Inside Radio, citing last month’s firing of… Read more »

NEW YORK, NY — Since the turn of the millennium, the recording industry has been singing the same blues song with the same refrain: CD sales are down, and paid downloads are not picking up the slack. But as a new report from eMarketer shows, while CD sales will continue to decline sharply, the music industry as a whole is healthy, and growth in many other areas will more than make up for the shortfall. That’s great news for marketers. The growth will come from online and mobile music, the live concert industry and the licensing of music for public… Read more »

For all the talk about Linkin Park killing off nü metal on the upcoming Minutes to Midnight, it’s rather puzzling that the first sound you hear on the album is the crackle of a needle hitting a record. After all, one of the, uh, tenets of the genre was the head-bopping DJ – think guys like LP’s Joe Hahn or Limp Bizkit’s Lethal – the dude responsible for, literally, putting the needle on the record (and for appearing out of place in all the press photos). So was co-frontman Chester Bennington kidding when he told MTV News back in September… Read more »

Verizon really didn’t want to see Akon “Smack That.” The communications company scrapped its partnership with the 25-year-old rapper Friday after a video was released that shows him simulating sex onstage with an underage girl during an Apr.12 concert in Trinidad. According to various accounts, 15-year-old Danah Alleyne thought she had won a dance contest when she was invited to dance with Akon, but soon found out that first prize was a close encounter with the Konvicted rapper. The Trinidad Express reported that Akon got seven women to come up and dance with him, promising that the best of the… Read more »

First off, I’d like to thank everyone for the overwhelmingly positive feedback I received for the first edition of “Bigger Than the Sound.” There were a whole lot of really great comments made about the column – from your basic “this guy/MTV sucks” to the more advanced “this is my least favorite kind of pseudo-journalism” – but this was perhaps the best of the bunch: “For a bad, bad man he’s got some wack witeboy p—y taste in music.” – ILX member félix pié, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 17:41 If I knew how to work this Web site, I would… Read more »