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Listen to "The Secret History of Rock" on our YouTube site!
Episode 26 Now available!
As I write this, Burlington, Ontario's, Walk Off the Earth's version of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" has been viewed 107,497,452 times since it was first posed in January. It's the most popular cover ever posted on YouTube. That doesn't include the 2.5 million views of their performance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
And there's much, much more:
TV music marketing gone very, very wrong. (Nice find by special correspondent Brent Chittenden)
Something for anyone who likes Kings of Leon, Phoenix and maybe even Foster the People. Try to overlook the unnecessarily Auto-Tuned vocals on the first track. But that's just me...
It wasn't a particularly good week. Okay, it was kinda awful.
With just one new album in the top ten and with the #1 record selling less than 10,000 copies (guess who?), there are many sad industry people today. This is the first time in 15 months that we've had a week like this.
The good news is that sales are still pacing 6% ahead of last year. Physical CDs are still tanking by 7% while digital is +30% over 2011.
Adele's 21 is back at #1 in Canada for the 34th non-consecutive time, claiming top stop by selling just 9,200 units. And despite the hype, the Silversun Pickups new album finished out of the Top 10, selling just over 3,100 copies.
Just to underscore how dire physical music sales have become, you can make the Top 200 in Canada by selling 200 records.
This is a track from This is PiL, due in stores later this month.
For many, the great hope of the original Napster and its descendents was that freed of the shackles imposed by radio, video channels and record labels, people would be free to discover good music. Now that the masses could choose music beyond what they were fed, they'd discover that there was more to life than the mindless pop of Top 40 radio or the watered down rock of Creed.
Guess what? Didn't happen. People continued to like mainstream pop and rock in roughly the same proportions as they did before the chains on their listening options were taken away.
More than a decade after Napster, the biggest selling and most traded songs on P2P networks are still mainstream pop and rock. Only the names have changed.
"Well, then," goes the argument, "just wait until streaming services really take off! Then people will realize that there's more to life than Justin Bieber!"
Er, not so fast.
As people become more comfortable with compressed MP3s and listening to music through crappy speakers and shitty ear buds, the concept of high-fidelity sound is being shoved aside.
Increasingly, sound that is "good enough" is just fine. I know people who are quite happy with the sound they get from built-in laptop speakers.
Yet there are still people who believe that to be experienced properly, music has to sound good. I know I should have to say that, but given the decline in the public's apparent need for high fidelity, I think it needs to be stated.
Here's a fine article about great sound and how achieving it is equal parts science and art.
First, it's not the music that endangers sight. It's the haircut.
The Optometrists Association in the UK says that the trend of allowing strands of hair to dangle over one eye is a recipe for amblyopia, which is what doctors call "lazy eye." From The Telegraph:
"If a young emo chap has a fringe covering one eye all the time, that eye won't see a lot of detail," Mr Andrew Hogan [of the Optomestrists Association] said.
"And if it happens from a young age, that eye can become amblyotic."
From what I can tell, this is the first proper doc done on Freddie. Queen fans will love it.
I stumbled across this site that details the cassette culture that still thrives in Africa. And yes, the tapes are available for purchase.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 3:21PM