“We had trouble clearing the cha-chunk from ‘Law & Order.’ I had to call Dick Wolf. He actually said, ‘That’s not my call. I’ll try.’ And we got it, but it was ridiculously expensive. It was $5,000 a note, and it’s only two notes!”
zoya:
Here’s a 20-year old Anthony, fixing something on The Hype Machine when we were supposed to be watching a movie.
What I love about our site is that it didn’t start out as a company looking to make a product. Anthony made it for himself, by himself, because he wanted to find album reviews from people he could trust, and he thought other people might find that useful, too. It was a subdomain on his personal site, which was otherwise just GYBE! photos and articles on “Booting FreeBSD 5.0 on a Sun Machine Over the Network.” He made the back end, and he made the front end, and drew the first logo, and he answered every single email that first year.
This is why I take the attacks on us personally, and why I run the risk of being serious on the internet when I talk about HM. Because it’s my friend’s site, and he made it for all the right reasons: because he genuinely loves music, and he loves reading what other music fans have to say, and he knew that technology could make all of this easier. Have you ever known a person who just lives for music, and he’s got all these friends he’s met at shows or on music message boards, and they tip each other off about awesome new bands, and he just wants to make sure that everyone else can have this opportunity to fall in love with sound? That’s Anthony, and that’s why The Hype Machine exists.
msg:
Photos from last week’s Whitest Boy Alive concert at Bowery Ballroom
Erlend Øye’s stage presence makes his incredible music so much better.
Vimeo Sued By Capitol Records Over Lip Dubs
I roared with a belly laugh when I read this headline in bed earlier today. Could Capitol Records truly be this misguided? Do they not realize that if you were to sort Internet brands by those most emblematic of creativity — not piracy — that Vimeo would line up at the top? Lip-dubbing is harmless and perfectly fun, and ultimately will define the aesthetic of an Internet generation. Other than for some petty legal jockeying towards a greater strategy can I imagine why this record company would try to sink such a potentially valuable lifeline — Lip-Dubbing and Vimeo create tremendous relevance and usefulness for their catalog!
If anything better underlines my point it’s an email I received from Sean Nelson, the frontman of the band Harvey Danger, whose song Flagpole Sitta we’ve now infamously lip-dubbed:
That Flagpole Sitta video made me incredibly happy, just when I thought there was NOTHING that could make me listen to that song again. A thousand thank you’s.Capitol, you’re a bunch of goof-balls. This lawsuit is the tactical equivalent to pooping on someone’s birthday cake.
I, for one, am willing to boycott Capitol artists unless they reconsider, and I implore other labels to pivot and spur conversations with Vimeo in order to determine a simple process to give people access to copyrighted music for personal video that is satisfactory for all. Preemptive strikes simply won’t do anymore!
Please reblog, or honk, if you agree.
Their business model is dying and they’re doing their best to make it worse. Via Zoya and NY Mag:
The top-selling record of 2000, ‘No Strings Attached’ by *NSYNC, sold 9.93 million copies. The top-selling record this year, Taylor Swift’s ‘Fearless,’ is likely to sell a quarter of that. As of this past June, with the closing of Virgin Megastore in Union Square, there is no major record-store chain in New York City.
Last.fm Scrobbles coming to a radio near you on October 5
CBS is taking Last.fm to the HD radio airwaves on October 5, crowdsourced music trends and all. The company revealed in a press conference Thursday that Last.fm will take over CBS’ HD broadcast stations in four major cities across the US—Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco—though listeners in other markets will also be able to tune in via Last.fm’s website as well as CBS Radio.
The broadcast, which will be the same in all cities and online, will feature songs from the aggregated music charts from the social music site, effectively bringing the “wisdom of crowds” to the masses via HD radio.
Great, great show last night - Kings of Convenience w/ FEIST @ Bowery Ballroom. Thanks, Meg!
