Articles and Interviews from our editorial staff.
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: When you hear the word ‘image’ you may think of a pretty picture or the manufactured persona of someone who is famous for being famous. But if you say ‘Baron Wolman image,’ suddenly you’re talking about beauty, truth, and iconographic permanence.
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Got a new product to announce? Then have a launch party! Got a cause, a business, a candidate? Launch party! But what’s the recipe? You line-up these ingredients: venue, food, alcohol, DJ, band, singers, photographers, videographers, and ink-slingers like me. Stir together and serve chilled.
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Some of today’s rock music has excitement, power, and a terrific touch of sinful intent. But in addition to those things, Punk music had danger. By looking back, can we look forward to a rock resurgence?
NEW GEAR: Inventor and iOS app developer Alex Smith of Alkex Instruments is back with his latest foray into MIDI controllers, with his ‘Ball Beats’ MIDI step sequencer product. Unlike his somewhat failed stab at creating a wood and knobs controller for virtual instruments earlier this year, this new product looks polished, and has a boutique coolness…
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Smoothly written and dynamic, Sean Wilentz’ book is full of insight, commentary, and historical perspective about songwriting’s greatest poet. Like his subject, the work is reflection and refraction of fact, fancy, and fable.
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Storytellers are to be cherished and Clark Terry should be on a pedestal for his thoroughly entertaining autobiography. Brimming with life, love, music, and great characters, this book is as much a history of the twentieth century as it is a history of his ninety years (and counting!) .
MuseWire COLUMN: Not a musician, yet a giant of jazz. Undiplomatic, but an ambassador of American culture. Often impolite, but always truthful. Unequaled, yet a champion of equality. And that just touches the surface of Norman Granz, producer of more music than one might think humanly possible. Social justice made great strides in the United […]
MuseWire REVIEW: With so many XLR to USB adapters now available on the market, it’s tough to decide upon which interface will be the best bang for the buck. The Shure x2u XLR to USB Adapter has shot out in front of the pack, acting not only as a pocket-sized adapter that can turn any […]
MuseWire COLUMN: You may think of spoken word recordings as esoteric or antiquated, but in Jacob Smith’s new book they have a different purpose: to illuminate the roots of today’s society. When NASA launched the Voyager missions during 1977, the two spacecraft contained gold-coated phonograph records and music from around the globe. Among the recordings: […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Rock and roll allows for a wide range of styles, including music that shocks listeners, attacks social conventions, intimidates casual onlookers, and angers the vast majority of people. A band called Foul Play accomplishes all of those things. Fortunately, they are quite good. And very funny. It is eleven-thirty on a Thursday night […]
MuseWire REVIEW: Mysterious goth band The Catholic Comb created a disturbing smoky concoction in 2005 and then apparently remained underground. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them, either, but now that I know, I’m a convert. Sometimes a good album goes unnoticed. For a while. This one came to me purely by chance. I say by […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Larry John McNally uses emotion like a paintbrush when creating songs. You may not know his name, but you’ve heard his work performed by Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Aaron Neville, Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, Jennifer Warnes, Atlantic Starr, Average White Band and more. When a songwriter emphasizes emotional truth in his songs, […]
MuseWire COLUMN: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln quoted this basic concept of unity versus isolationism in his famous speech to the Republican Convention of 1858. 600 years later, Admiral Spock, as he lay ill onboard the Starship Enterprise, uttered with his dying breath, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs […]
COLUMN: Well, it began as what appeared to be yet another anti-Apple fanboy rant about Steve’s passing – he’s sick again, Apple is doomed, etc. — not unheard of in this era of fake news, junk news, and mis-read signals about celebrities and their antics. But word was soon confirmed from Apple that Steve Jobs […]
REVIEW: From his smooth writing style to his commitment to interviewing nearly every possible source involved with the material, there’s a lot to like about Joseph Vogel’s new book on the King of Pop. In fact, considering the poor quality of much that has previously been churned out on this topic, I think a lot […]
REVIEW: Singer and professional vocal coach Teri Danz decided to put her own private lesson plan into a book with accompanying CD. The results cover less than fifty pages but singers will find something valuable on every page. You can sing, right? You hit all the notes just perfectly, you’re never short of breath, and […]
REVIEW: Playing together since 1986, Dennis Davison and Jonathan Lea have now done the impossible: they have created an original Christmas album that still rocks (well, folk-rocks, anyway). Plus, it covers all the emotions that surround the season, not just the traditional upbeat ones. That the album does so at all is deserving of a […]
REVIEW: Music of the avant-garde is for those who are open to outrage, shock, conceptualized art, and boundary-pushing ideas. If you fit in that category, you will enjoy these tales of pioneers wrestling with the 1960s triumphs of their tragedies. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.
MuseWire COLUMN: Until a few days ago, Nektar was nothing more than a puzzling footnote to me. According to everything I had read, this band was a standout progressive rock outfit in Europe during the nineteen seventies. Not making it big in the United States, their fame remained underground to many stateside music lovers, including […]
Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Buddy Holly. Songwriter. Rock and pop star. Not a one-hit or two-hit wonder, but a 27-hit wonder, all in about 18 months of worldwide fame. Born September 7, 1936, died February 3, 1959, but his songs will live until there is no more music.
REVIEW: Hearing one of the softer tracks from this album playing in my studio, a visitor dismissed it as “NIN lite.” I hear it as something much more complicated: “NIN expanded to include the invasion and conquest of modern classical music.” A chameleon alters its appearance to blend into its surroundings. A load-bearing wall supports […]
REVIEW: If his name sounds familiar, you are probably already a fan of rockabilly. But even if that genre’s blend of rock and country ain’t your thing, these songs are so much fun that you might become a Burnette-ette by the time you get halfway through the album’s dozen hip-shaking tracks. Perhaps you feel you […]
REVIEW: Before seeing the singer perform live, this album sat around the studio for a few months. After playing it a couple of times at various volume levels, the urge to write about it became too palpable to pass up. While several tracks leave me unmoved, the ones that work are propulsive, powerful and possessed […]
REVIEW: Noisemakers unite! Calling all anti-composers and radical music theorists! That was the idea of a group of wildly unpredictable academics and stars of the experimental music world back in “the sixties.” Cage, Oliveros, Neuhaus, Reich, Budd, Foss and dozens more appear in this collection of pieces originally published in the eleven unusual (and now […]
ARTICLE: You already know that pitching songs to music supervisors can be a good thing. In fact, everyone else also knows it, from players and songwriters to publishers and managers. That’s part of the problem. Too many people involved with music are aware of the excellent reasons for making a pitch, including money, exposure, money, […]
REVIEW: Back in the early 1990s, Randy Poe authored a book entitled “Music Publishing: A Songwriter’s Guide.” Several revisions, editions and rewrites later, Poe returned with “The New Songwriter’s Guide to Music Publishing” (Writer’s Digest Books, 157 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1582978048, $18.99) and I am here to tell you that it’s terrific, informative, helpful, and friendly. […]
MusicIndustryNewswire COLUMN: Quick, take this test: Which of the following names do you recognize? Eddie Kramer. Elliot Scheiner. Matt Forger. Ken Allardyce. Michael C. Ross. Rafa Sardina. Joe Chiccarelli. Brent Fischer. Time’s up. Pencils down. Anyone have some answers? (Anyone, anyone, Bueller. . . ?) Whether or not you can identify those names, it’s a […]
MuseWire COLUMN: It’s eleven o’clock at night and I am being driven down a pleasant tree-lined residential street in Van Nuys, one of the three dozen cities in a section of Los Angeles called the San Fernando Valley. Or just “The Valley,” as it is called. As in “Valley Girl,” the Frank Zappa hit song […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Not in my house! How many kids have heard that phrase from an outraged parent who is nearly apoplectic over the latest sonic creation of artists in rock, pop, rap, modern country, goth, death metal, etc.? From the Andrew Sisters’ “Rum and Coca Cola” to recordings by The Fugs, Cee-Lo, Prince, NWA, Ornette […]
MusicIndustryNewswire COLUMN: Some songs sound special. There are recordings where there are licks that are tasty and satisfying every time you hear them. Recordings with such a powerful groove that you dance even if you’re sitting down. Recordings where the atmosphere or the feel is unique or even majestic, and the songs never lose their […]
MuseWire COLUMN: By 1984 I had become gravely concerned (of course along with other key executives) about the profitability of Capitol-EMI’s U.S. labels. I met with Bhaskar Menon, then Chairman of EMI Music, and told him we needed to re-start a distributed labels program. The concept of distributed labels, of course, was not new; indeed, […]
MuseWire COLUMN: For the first twenty years of rock ‘n’ roll, brand names were not often associated with band names. The prevailing view was that corporate sponsorship represented crass commercialism. But by the time of The Rolling Stones 1981 tour, things had changed. Jovan, manufacturer of Musk, was prominently featured in most aspects of the […]
MuseWire REVIEW: “Dhana” is a European born blonde diva and lead singer of dance rock group “TaxiDoll.” In this, her first solo release, “Confessions of a Lily Rouge” (Fly Me To The Moon Music), Dhana delivers a potent concoction of electronic pop and emotive balladry, with sonic characteristics reminiscent of Dido, Tori Amos, Natalie Imbruglia […]
MuseWire COLUMN: The old “Bait and “Switch” trick has been around as long as human beings have slobbered on themselves into sentience. This trick is especially rampant in two fields: Sales and Marketing. So you can imagine my surprise as I’ve watched the ol’ “Bait and Switch” rear its head in none other than the […]
COLUMN: There are friendly battles between many organizations in the music industry. Competition brings that out. There are also some interesting love/hate relationships. You know, like when companies want to fight Apple, but only when they’re not trying to get into bed with them. So it is interesting when an organization can bring together such […]
REVIEW: The four piece group “B and Elephants” delivers innovative yet passionate progressive world music comprising fundamentally of Spanish folk and Classical Indian styles embedded in a dreamy and fresh psychedelic rock constant. B&E appear to be an unusual phenomenon, referring to themselves as ‘Psychedelic ethnic acoustic rock.’ A distinctive continental tone is produced by […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Ahh, the Stupor Bowl, that great annual montage of violent sports and commercials. Sixty minutes of football, obliterating nearly four hours of running time. Sixty-eight commercials, obliterating all vestiges of credibility and good taste. True, there were some fine-looking spots and some good laughs in some of the others. But by and large, […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Part of a continuing series on the history of Capitol-EMI Music. One of the themes I pursued with Bhaskar Menon (then head of EMI Music) in the early 1980s was the logic of forming a separate distribution company that would operate autonomously (but in close coordination with) Capitol-EMI’s labels. “It makes complete sense […]
REVIEW: While the concept of a music keyboard with a computer inside isn’t entirely new, the folks at Austin, Texas start-up Music Computing think they might have invented the new sweet spot in bridging the gap between the notebook and controller crowd and the people who won’t use anything other than a Yamaha Motif or […]
MuseWire COLUMN: This note is about what I have come to characterize as the entropy or misalignment of how information gets transmitted in the music and film businesses. I will define what I mean by this, and then illustrate it with two examples. I will conclude with a brief theoretical sketch of how and why […]
MuseWire COLUMN: You cannot teach someone to write good song lyrics. That’s just how I feel. And yet, I kind of changed my mind after reading “The Art of Writing Great Lyrics” by Pamela Phillips Oland (Allworth Press, 260 pages, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-58115-093-3). First, she has the idea that a friendly attitude and a tell-all […]
MuseWire COLUMN: At the end of the previous post in this series we left the Koppelman regime “in full affect.” It was a truism that at Capitol-EMI during the late 1980s – early 1990s, every six months or so something dramatic would happen (this maxim still pertains). Thus, even as Koppelman came to dominate the […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Imagine a world in which you receive money every time your music is played. There are firms that appear to be working to make this dream a reality. Representatives of Soundmouse, Landmark, ASCAP and APM spoke about the intriguing possibilities on a panel presented by the California Copyright Conference. Titled “Digital Recognition Technologies: […]
MuseWire Column: While I tend to cheer for whatever team is competing against the USC Trojans, I have to admit that the University of Southern California campus is magnificent, as is their annual Institute on Entertainment Law and Business, co-sponsored by the USC Gould School of Law and the Beverly Hills Bar Association. The event […]
MuseWire COLUMN: When BMI announced they were teaming with Digital Hollywood to present a day-long conference entitled “Content, Copyright & Commerce,” a few thoughts popped into my head. First, it seemed that the title was a brilliant and concise description of where we stand in the evolution of the music industry. Second, while the business […]
MuseWire COLUMN: The history of Capitol-EMI in the late 1980s – early 1990s is one of constant turmoil and upheaval. Management devised, attempted to implement, and then discarded different strategies as it tried to respond to the dynamics and exigencies of a rapidly-changing market for the origination and delivery of recorded music. A. Joe Smith […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Yesterday, a new Austin, Texas, start-up opened its virtual and physical doors with a new line of music instruments, Intel-based PCs, and accessories for both Mac and Windows-based notebooks. Music Computing, Inc., headed by former Open Labs guru, Victor Wong, and a bunch of his fellow mad-men, debuted over a creaky, static and […]
MuseWire COLUMN: Unlike the USA, music lovers in Europe are likely to embrace multiple genres and styles. As international music artist Anand Bhatt puts it, “The tastes of music buyers in Europe aren’t as dependent on what’s piped through major media. They’re much better at thinking for themselves, and therefore they make more eclectic choices […]
MuseWire COLUMN: The title of this article is the same as the title of a book that should be owned by every songwriter and music publisher. That book is: “Music, Money and Success: The Insider’s Guide to Making Money in the Music Business,” Sixth Edition, by Jeffrey Brabec & Todd Brabec (Schirmer, $24.95, 524 pages, […]
MuseWire COLUMN: The answer to that question is “no” because we all hear differently. This is not a big deal for most situations in life, but it can be critical in the music industry. Your music moves you. My music moves me. But do we like each others sounds, and why? Every time a song […]