Wilco Crowdsources Fan Videos For Its US Tour

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Wilco Is Touring The US & Europe In Support Of Its Eight Album, "The Whole Love". And YOU Can Be Part Of It All.

Wilco is currently touring the United States, and the band has taken a novel approach for bringing its shows to life.

The Illinois-based alternative rockers are asking fans to submit videos of all the cities they’re going to tour. The idea is that these will be projected behind the band when its playing live.

These videos can be uploaded to the band’s Vimeo page (Wilco Fan Video Project), and the band is specifically interested in “footage of settings and places that really say something about the area, its people and/or history, geography, whatever.” Wilco is on the road in support of its eighth studio album, “The Whole Love”.

This is similar to something LCD Soundsystem did recently, when the band asked fans to upload footage of clouds shot from airplane windows to use as the backdrop of its final show at Madison Square Garden.

The Return Of MySpace

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

MySpace Will Relaunch Later This Year. Justin Timberlake Is The Creative Director Of The Site Now.

MySpace was one of the hottest assets in the social networking scene until Facebook toppled it in 2008. But even then, MySpace managed to retain a loyal following among musicians that appreciated how easy it was to have their own work hosted online for all to sample. Yet, platforms like Bandcamp and Soundcloud began depriving MySpace of even these. Defeated, MySpace was finally bought by Specific Media in June for a pittance of its former value ($35 million).

And now, after a couple of months of silence Specific Media has announced the relaunch of MySpace. This time around, the focus will be on beating services like Spotify and iTunes. The launch campaign that has been planned will feature a wealth of celebrities and brands acting as promotional partners. Justin Timberlake (who owns a stake in the company) will be the site’s creative director. Timberlake has often expressed his belief that MySpace still has the potential to be the place where “fans can go to interact with their favorite entertainers, listen to music, watch videos, share and discover cool stuff and just connect.”

When it was at its height, MySpace managed to have 70 million unique visitors each month in the United States alone. Even today it gets about 20 million monthly visitors.

Yet, it remains to be seen what impact can the rebranded MySpace have in a scene dominated by services and apps like Spotify, Bandcamp and Turnatble.fm. Even YouTube is a threat to it nowadays – many people who fled MySpace actually went to the popular video sharing service, and opened up their own channels there.

So, what do you think? Is it possible for MySpace to stand in the limelight back again, or has the service basically had its day? Sound off in the “Comments” below, I’d love to know how you feel, and whether you’re giving the “new” MySpace a look when it finally comes around.

REM Break Up

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

REM (1980-2011)

After a three-decade career and fifteen studio albums (some as transcendental as “Out Of Time” and “Automatic For The People“), the fathers of alt rock have decided to disband for good.

Today, the following message was posted on the band’s website:

“To our Fans and Friends: As R.E.M., and as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we have decided to call it a day as a band. We walk away with a great sense of gratitude, of finality, and of astonishment at all we have accomplished. To anyone who ever felt touched by our music, our deepest thanks for listening.” R.E.M.

Michael Stipe later elaborated:

“A wise man once said–‘the skill in attending a party is knowing when it’s time to leave.’ We built something extraordinary together. We did this thing. And now we’re going to walk away from it.

I hope our fans realize this wasn’t an easy decision; but all things must end, and we wanted to do it right, to do it our way.

We have to thank all the people who helped us be R.E.M. for these 31 years; our deepest gratitude to those who allowed us to do this. It’s been amazing.” Continue reading →

Groovebug – Like Flipboard, But Only That For Music

Posted on September 21, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Name: Groovebug
URL: http://www.groovebug.com

Groovebug is based on a great idea, namely doing for music videos what Fipboard does for social network feeds. In case you’ve been locked in a cupboard for the last couple of months, Flipboard is an iPad app that can take care of collecting all the information that is otherwise distributed all over your favorite social sites, and have it presented as a magazine. This magazine can include everything from pictures to videos, and it can be flipped using the kind of hand gestures that make one feel like a character out of Star Trek.

Well, Groovebug does pretty much the same, but only that for the music you love. Groovebug takes a good look at your iTunes library, and then it uses what it finds there to assemble the pages of a magazine 100% suited to your tastes.

Groovebug is mainly powered by YouTube and The Echo Nest, with a custom aggregation engine also being used in order to retrieve these videos that are going to be displayed. The Echo Nest, incidentally, is one of the hottest new names around – it’s a music intelligence platform that is employed both by heavy-hitters like Spotify and Rdio. Continue reading →

Jonas Brander (Restorm) – Interview (Part 2)

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Part 2 of the excellent interview with Jonas from Restorm. Enjoy, and share!.

PART II

MUSIC & YOU

When did you become interested in music? What was the first album or single you ever purchased?

I became interested in music just when my brain started to work inside my mother’s belly. She often sang to me, that’s why I wanted to stay inside and they had to cut her open to get me. It was really comfortable. Since this day I often became angry and could channel all this emotion with Sonic Youths “Daydream Nation”.

Are you in a band yourself, or have you been in a band in the past? Is there a clip on YouTube or elsewhere we could watch?

The most people working at restorm.com are playing in bands or have a really strong passion for music. I have various projects. The main project at the moment is a German rap project and is called son kas. Continue reading →

Jonas Brander (Restorm) – Interview (Part 1)

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Believe me, you’re surely not wanting to pass on this interview with Jonas Brander from Restorm, the platform for licensing music online I reviewed last month on MusicKO. I praised the service quite extensively back then, and the conversation I was fortunate enough to have with Jonas simply exemplifies the way of thinking of those with the vision and the skill to create revolutionary digital services.
You can read Part 1 of the interview below. Part 2 (“Music & You”) is right here.

Full Name: Jonas Brander
Age: 25
Startup: restorm.com
Position: media & communication

PART I

THE STARTUP

Tell us a little about your startup. How was it conceived? What are its most distinctive features in your opinion?

We built an artist-based music platform that offers solutions for the challenges of the music industry. There should be one place for everyone who loves music, one meeting point where artists, labels, promoters, media representatives and music lovers can connect to share their music, offer gigs and tickets or talk about music.

At the moment we focus to build professional and completely free tools to help artists to earn more money and create more attention while saving time. For example restorm.com allows bands and labels to sell music directly to their fans. It only takes a few minutes to set up a personal download shop, which can be embedded on their homepage or on Facebook. 90% of all sales go directly to the artists. Another feature is the connect tool that allows you to synchronize Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Soundcloud, Youtube and large Eventdatabases with each other at once. With the so-called Minipage you can embed the entire restorm.com profile anywhere on the web. Just to mention a few of our tools.

What was the original launch date?

restorm.com was launched in 2007, but it had another focus back then. Our CEO Philippe Perreaux became the main shareholder of the company in 2008 and in the course of this change we had a big personal and conceptual shift towards the vision we represent now. So the real starting point was at the end of 2008. The following two years were mainly programming to get a unique profile and stand out from other music platforms.

What has been the response so far? In which countries has it been more successful?

Since we have a clear profile, the feedback has been really good. For example, just recently there was a huge survey from a university and the biggest German independent music association. They analyzed 13 music platforms in eight categories and restorm.com won far in front of well-known services such as Bandcamp, Spotifiy or Soundcloud.

As we started in Switzerland its consequence was that we first had the most members in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. But since we are available in five languages and have a global approach, we daily get more and more bands form all over the world. So this discrepancy should be history soon. Continue reading →

Playing For Change Cover Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground”

Posted on September 16, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

Playing For Change

Playing For Change is a collective devoted to bringing music and arts education to underprivileged children in the furthest corners of the world. It became a global phenomenon on the strength of its first release, a cover of “Stand By Me”.

And to mark the very first Playing For Change day ever, this collective has now recorded a cover of Stevie Wonder’s classic track “Higher Ground”.

This is the clip. It features the joint talent of vocalist Clarence Bekker (from the Netherlands) and percussionists from countries as distant as Mali, Senegal, Brazil, Colombia and Jamaica. A 21-string West African bridge-harp is also in evidence.

September the 17th has been designated as the annual Playing For Change day, and the theme of the first one is “Power To The People”. It’s supported by no other than Yoko Ono, and the aim is to raise $250,000 to be able to subsidize the collective’s operations for 2012. Music festivals and personal celebrations have already been announced in all five continents in support of this special day.

The Bear Season (Uruguayan Independent Artist)

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Emilio Pérez Miguel

The Bear Season: Ale Nario, Fela Magnani, Santiago de Souza, Dave Lazar, Manuel Curiel and Álvaro de León.

You know what? I’ve had it with these stuffy folks at Oxford. They’ve sold us a language that’s nowhere as limited as they’ve always claimed. They’ve shown us nothing but these sides of words they wanted us to see. Period. Take the verb “shock”, for instance. I’ve recently become aware such a verb isn’t as one-dimensional as they have told us all our lives. It’s dawned on me that it’s equally possible to be shocked positively and negatively, that you can be shocked both in good and in bad ways. Hesitant? Read on…

Definition of “something that shocked me in a bad way”: the day a friend gave me a copy of Anal Cunt’s “40 More Reasons to Hate Us” album as a birthday present, on the ostensible grounds that I love collecting rare CDs. As if that wasn’t bad enough, at around that time this wondrous friend had the chance to buy Led Zeppelin’s “Remasters” for the price of a single CD and add it to his personal collection, and he chose to buy a studio album by Wang Chung instead.
Despite the fact that I changed my address twice and that now I sleep ensconced in the middle of an underground labyrinth, I still have nightmares from time to time.

Definition of “something that shocked me in a good way”: the day I listened to The Bear Season’s debut EP (“Do It“) for the first time. Despite being Uruguayan, the guys sounded so Californian that I couldn’t help thinking if they had long blonde hair and big breasts then they’d be Athena Lundberg.
They’ve always been one of these bands I was more than eager to feature on MusicKO, but for some intricate reason or the other (like being busy listening to Pixie Lott’s debut album) I could never get around to doing it. Until now. Continue reading →

MusicKO

We Built This City On Rock & Roll

Monthly Archives: September 2011