According to The New York Times, Jammie Thomas of Brainerd, Minn., got caught in the Recording Industry’s net. She “shared” 24 songs on a file-swapping site and now faces a penalty of $222,000, thanks to a federal jury in Duluth.
The jury verdict, which called for $9,250 in damages for each of the 24 songs involved in the trial, came after brief deliberations.
In a statement after yesterday’s decision, the RIAA said, “The law here is clear, as are the consequences for breaking it.”
I’ve seen a lot of stupidity in my day, but this ranks high on the list.
I’m stoked because I just discovered Leftover Salmon’s Red Rock’s show from 7/28/07 on Live Downloads. I’m listening now and the band–with Jeff Sipe back on the drum kit–sounds incredible.
I also see that LOS is busting out two more year-ending shows in Denver and Boulder.
The pre-sale allotment of tickets went in minutes yesterday, which leaves this Saturday to scramble for tix.
Listen to “Highway Song” from the band’s Red Rock’s show.
Top-selling British rock band Radiohead said its new album, In Rainbows, will initially be available exclusively on the band’s Web site, with fans choosing the price they are willing to pay.
The plan, announced on Radiohead’s Web site last night, appears set to challenge numerous aspects of established music-industry business models.
Radiohead hasn’t made its music available for sale on iTunes, apparently because the band wants to sell only full albums and not let users pick and choose songs.
Radiohead’s Web site didn’t explicitly say that no record company is involved in the process, but a person familiar with the situation said the process of creating, manufacturing and selling the album was being done without any record label’s involvement.
In Rainbows will be available on Oct. 10th from Radiohead.com. Pre-orders are being taken now.
[UPDATE 10.11.07] I offered Radiohead three pounds, or about six American dollars for the album. Yes, it’s less than the standard fare, but I’ve never purchased an album from Radiohead before. So they earned a new customer, and I’m willing to bet I’m one of many. I have a feeling this “name your price” approach is going to make them a ton of cash. Hopefully, Radiohead will release the sales figures for all to see at some point.
[UPDATE 10.16.07] According to USA Today, some Radiohead fans are pissed about the sound quality offered on these tracks. Tracks are encoded at a bit rate of 160 kbps, lower than Radiohead’s earlier albums but higher than a standard iTunes track download. Roger Wade, 42, of Portland, Ore., who has not ordered the download, is still unhappy with the band on both counts. “This honor-system gimmick has turned out to be sloppy at best and dishonest and devious at worst. It’s common knowledge that 192 kbps is the accepted minimum bit rate among nearly everyone who even knows what a bit rate is.” Uh, what’s a bit rate?
Outlaws’ lead guitarist and vocalist Hughie Thomasson passed away at his home outside Tampa earlier this month.
According to Wikipedia, Thomasson’s signature voice and style of guitar playing were defining characteristics of the band’s sound. Thomasson’s guitar sound was characterized by the use of the Fender Stratocaster played in a quasi-country style mixed with fluid, often quick blues runs. Known as “HT” he was nicknamed “FLAME” and is in the Fender Hall of Fame.
In October 1975, Outlaws performed a short set at the Record Plant, a recording studio in Sausalito to promote an upcoming show at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco. Thirty two years later the band still sounds good to my ears.
“There Goes Another Love Song” and five other tracks, including “Green Grass and High Tides” are available for download at the band’s website.
Heather Browne wrote about a number of bands at Monolith Festival–Brian Jonestown Massacre, Art Brut, Earl Greyhound, Spoon, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kings of Leon, Hot IQs, etc. She also has some nice things to say about White Rabbits.
We saw these guys on Saturday afternoon on the indoor WOXY.com stage with about 12,482 people all crammed into a very small space. It was hot and I couldn’t get any pictures worth crap. But I loved the sounds emanating from the White Rabbits. The band had a disproprotionately high number of short guys wearing dapper suits in it, and I thought that it was fronted by Fred Savage at first, which was awesome.
Thankfully, I got to see this group at SXSW in Austin last March. NME called White Rabbits the third best band at South By last spring. Pretty high praise. Maybe third best “emerging” band. Whatever the case, I’m listening to Fort Nightly, the debut record from White Rabbits for the first time today.
Obscure Sound says this ska-influenced indie release “will most likely be considered as one of the breakthrough debuts of 2007.”
The NYC six-piece writes great songs that merge rhythmic intensity with grandiose melodrama in a seamless and inventive package.
White Rabbits moved from Columbia, MO to a shared living/performance loft space in Brooklyn last year. Say Hey Records CEO Aaron Romanello saw the band perform when they first moved to New York. He signed them and hooked them up with producer Chris Zane (Shy Child, Asobi Seksu, Les Savy Fav).
MySpace is a place for music discovery. It took me awhile to get past some of the gaudy graphics, but when I finally did, I realized this is where musicians place “ads” for themselves and also interact with fans.
Not everyday, but frequently enough I happen upon an artist I find particularly intriguing. It happened earlier this summer with St. Louis bluesman, Boo Boo Davis. And it happened last night when I clicked over to Larkin Grimm’s page on MySpace. Her music is somehow soothing to me, but what I truly enjoyed was reading her lyrical bio.
Larkin Grimm was born in Memphis, Tennessee four years after Elvis died. Her parents were members of a community of energy healers called The Holy Order of MANS. When this cult disbanded, the Grimm family moved to the Appalachian Mountains so that Larkin’s father could devote himself to the practice of learning old time fiddle tunes and her Mother could carry on her mission of bringing light to the world through singing hippie values to the children of her hillbilly friends. It was a sweet existence. The water was pure. The air was clean. The food was delicious. There was a spirit of oneness in that Appalachian valley, but soon the exhaust and consumption of the nearby cities began to creep up into the mountains and Larkin, nearly a grown woman, took off with bitterness and anger in her heart trying to find the source of this pollution, to search and destroy. She charmed her way into elite institutions of higher learning – Yale, Harvard, and Brown – and she was mega grossed out by the “education” they were selling. So she hitchhiked across Alaska, staring down bears and grizzly old men, she ducked in and out of communes and cults of many kinds, she sang songs to hipsters in fashionable cities, she spent days locked in mental institutions and in jail cells, fell in and out of love, in and out of consciousness, in and out of sobriety and society, just searching for the answers. And every time she thought she knew the answer, she wrote a song about it, and sang the song until she realized she didn’t really know. And Larkin is somewhere searching still, and if you believe in her, someday soon she will find the answer and sing it for you. !
I picked up The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter on iTunes yesterday. It’s Ritter’s fifth album and his latest release on V2 Records (August 21, 2007).
The singer-songwriter from Moscow, Idaho began writing songs while attending Oberlin College. He eventually changed his major from neuroscience and graduated in 1999 with a self-created American History through Narrative Folk Music major. His work has been compared to Bob Dylan’s and Leonard Cohen’s. I also hear Bright Eyes’ and Harry Chapin’s influence.
According to The New York Times Sunday Magazine, the above clip of Paul Potts made Rick Rubin cry. Rubin, a legendary producer, is now co-head of Columbia Records, a Sony-owned label. Paul Potts is one of Rubin’s first projects at Columbia.
The feature reveals some interesting things about Rubin, like the fact that he’d never heard of Simon Cowell before. Even better, Rubin has never gone to work in an office, nor will he now. I love how exceptional talent simply redefines boundaries in the pursuit of more elegant solutions.
“We discovered a different Woody Guthrie in the archives from the one everyone thinks they know. Woody Guthrie is seen by most Americans, if they know him at all, as a Dust Bowl troubadour, a political activist and a hobo from the ’30s. You wouldn’t think he could write lyrics about flying saucers, Ingrid Bergman and Christ for president. But he did, and that gave us the nerve to come up with music that’s different from what everyone expects.” -Billy Bragg
There’s an article in today’s Sunday Times about Woody’s daughter, Nora, 57, and her efforts to find new collaborators to breathe musical life into some of her father’s 2400 unpublished lyrics.
Guthrie said that the success of the Mermaid Avenue albums with Bragg and Wilco whetted her appetite for more. Since then, she’s invited punk band The Dropkick Murphys, kelzmer band The Klezmatics, German cabaret outfit Wenzel, Delta bluesman Corey Harris, Texas campfire singers Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and classical musician David Amram to compose new music for her dad’s songs.
Currently writing with Guthrie are Lou Reed, jazz bassist Rob Wasserman, cabaret satirist Nellie McKay, folk rapper Michael Franti and the alt-country artist Jay Farrar (formerly of Wilco).
The Times also notes that a new live recording–The Live Wire: Woody Guthrie in Performance 1949–will be released this week on CD. This historical recording was captured by Peter Paul Braverman, a student at Rutgers, owned a wire recorder — a device that magnetized sound onto stainless steel wire. On a whim he lugged his equipment to Fuld Hall in Newark on a December evening in 1949 to check out a folk singer he had just heard about. With a few dozen other listeners, Mr. Braverman heard Guthrie’s wife, Marjorie, lead her husband through give-and-take interviews about his childhood in the Oklahoma Territory, his Dust Bowl migration to California, his work on the Bonneville Dam project in Washington State and his current life in New York.
