BoD Deejaying Debut

It went like this “Hello, do you want to DJ with grubby legend Andrew Wk?” and from our shocked silence they started offering us booze and disco biscuits. And then it was so.

All the info is on here:

PUSH first birthday flyer

Long Tail author Chris Anderson on Free Music

Ahead of his new book ‘FREE’ the Wired Editor-in-Chief has been doing a lot of blogging and this set of stats are pretty succinct:

How much of Apple’s iPod $4 billion in annual sales should be credited to the libraries of “free” MP3 that created demand for gigabyte storage devices? How much of MySpace’s $65 billion estimated value is due to the free music bands put there? How much of the $2 billion concert business is driven by P2P file sharing?

The Long Tail blog

Z-Rock: Flight of the Conchords-meets-Spinal Tap

Music and comedy is a tough mix; very few television series and movies about bands are very funny. I don’t know whether this is because rock n roll is, itself, one giant parody or we all take ourselves too seriously.

There are some moments of obvious genius – Spinal Tap is one of the funniest movies of all time, Adult Swim’s heavy metal cartoon Metalocalypse is devilishly amusing and Flight of the Conchords has reinvented the game with its Bowie-songs-versus-radio2-gallows-humour.

However, Z-Rock looks pretty damn funny too. The series, which will air later this year on IFC, follows a band of Sabbath worshipping heavy metal guys who moonlight as a Wiggles-esque Saturday morning kids party act. The party has, in fact, played for the kids of Robert DeNiro and Michael J. Fox.

In the show the band members play fictionalized versions of themselves, exaggerating their actual experiences — including a pitched rivalry with other New York-based children’s musicians — pursuing the recording contract that long eluded them.

“There were always hot moms,” Mr. Cassata, 30, the band’s drummer, said wistfully over a recent lunch of steamed broccoli and seared tuna, alongside his bandmates at a theater district restaurant.

Paulie Z, 28, interjected: “They were all wealthy, good-looking and in shape. I don’t speak for anyone in the band but myself, because I don’t know what skeletons are in their closets. But I definitely took advantage of some of the nannies.”

NY Times

Girl Talk says it’s “fair use”

http://www.suckapants.com/BLOG/girltalk5.jpg

You sample some of the biggest artists in music on this record. How concerned are you about getting sued by one of them?

I feel morally sound that we shouldn’t be sued — I feel like the music’s transformative; it doesn’t negatively impact anyone. And there’s a thing called Fair Use that protects work like that. It’s definitely a concern, especially with the increased level of press this album is getting, but I feel sound about it and I think there’s a whole academic and legal movement supporting more creative and open exchange of culture and ideas.

Source NYmag.com

Doesn’t mean it’s actually a good record tho.

Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Gone

Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong have cancelled their debut album.

How often does THAT happen?

The band’s manager, Raye Cosbert [who is also Amy Winehouse's manager] told NME.COM that he suggested to the band that they shelve the album because they had recorded it too early in their career. He said it did not represent them as a band now.

Cosbert said that the band agreed with the notion after it was suggested to them. The band’s label, Vertigo/Mercury, have agreed to release the newly-recorded album when it is recorded. The new album should be released in early 2009.

NME

“…the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying”

“If we end up with 20 years of Tory government, it’ll be The Pigeon Detectives’ fault.”

The Independent has called time on “mortgage indie”. In a wonderfully cussing article, they talk about those festival mid-slot acts as “indie landfill”, amid what is essentially it’s a right ol’ rant, written in words we would have cobbled together…

“As in every musical era, one style dominates the hearts and minds of our nation’s youth; it dictates their fashion sense, their relationship with their parents and, quite possibly, their personal-hygiene regimen. These days, it’s indie that’s the cholesterol in the veins of popular culture, and we need to start thinking about a crash diet.

You know who they are, these smooth-chinned strummers, with their smart-arsed, self-admiring band names almost invariably prefaced by the definite article: The Kooks, The Courteeners, The Holloways, The Rascals, The View, The Wombats, The Automatic, The Pigeon Detectives, The Hoosiers. Their turgid, tuneless banalities use all the oxygen between ad breaks on XFM; they mop up the soggy midday slot on the main stage. Indie is the 30-year-old genre that gave us The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Blur and Arctic Monkeys. But in that period it has also produced Ocean Colour Scene, Menswear and Joe Lean and The Jing Jang Jong.

John Niven was an indie fan in the 1980s, an A&R man in the Britpopping 1990s, and is now the author of Kill Your Friends, a sadistic satire of the record industry of which he was once an enthusiastic member. “..It’s such a ball-less, soulless, generic whitewashed indie sound. You could probably take a member from each band and throw them together in a new group and no one would be able to tell the difference. They’re completely interchangeable. Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying. They’re abysmal.”

[...] For many acolytes of the original indie scene, the saddest by-product of its decline is the state of the NME, formerly their paper of record. The organ’s journalists were once so passionate about the integrity of the genre that they threatened a schism over the inclusion of too much hip-hop on their pages; now it, too, has become a corporate entity.

“I recently saw an interview with Conor McNicholas where he was talking about ‘growing the brand’,” Niven recalls. “The editor of the NME using the expression ‘growing the brand’! It’s hardly Nick Kent sneaking out of the office to run down Carnaby Street and score smack, is it?”

VC: $$$

Media companies raised US$586m in 2Q08, an increase of 23%, according to the National Venture Capital Association and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. VC dollars are still rolling in – $$$$.

Techcrunch (a posible AOL/News Corp target itself) says:

Software is still the biggest sector attracting VC funds ($1.3 billion), followed by biotech ($1.1 billion), but both those sectors are seeing a slowdown in investments (down 19 percent and 14 percent year-over-year, respectively). The only sectors that saw increases was energy (up 102 percent year-over-year to $1.2 billion) and media (up 23 percent to $586 million).

Source

The Pirate’s Dilemma in video form

The executive producer of Heroes and some of the guys from Current TV have booked up with piratical evangelist Matt Mills, to turn his book into a tv show. The book’s ok but if you watch the above you’ve pretty much garnered everything it has to say. However, if you wanna get the book for free, you can download it from thePiratesDilemma.com.

Wired to launch in the UK

Rather excitingly, Bored of Dictators’ favourite not-as-tech-as-you’d-think magazine Wired, has totally revealed it’s to launch a UK edition from early 2009. This is fantastic news and an interesting finger to magazine naysayers who think the web is killing the magazine biz, with the double irony of the bulk of the mags content being about the interweb.

More details on Media Guardian.

Racist Republicans?

God bless America. Oddly found this on Perez Hilton?!

Apparently this wasn’t the only one of it’s ilk on sale at the republicanmarket stall…

There were other pins that weren’t necessarily conveying the positive, inclusive, united front that has been portrayed during the convention. One said, “Press 1 for English. Press 2 for Deportation” and another, “I will hold my nose when I vote for McCain”