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The Grammy Travesty Continues: Commentary from John Santos
Source:
The Latin Jazz Corner by Chip Boaz
In April 2011, the National Academy Of Recording Arts And Sciences announced the elimination of 31 Grammy Award categories, claiming that the scaling down process made the Grammy Award more important. With the disappearance of categories like Latin Jazz, Traditional Blues, Classical Crossover, Cajun, Hawaiian, and more, artists around the world couldn't disagree more as they anticipate the devastating effect upon their careers. The official telecast of the Grammy Awards is about two weeks away, and unfortunately, NARAS continues to ...
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NAMM Slam 2012: Can 92,000 Be Wrong?
Source:
Moses Supposes
Generally NAMM is described by me as a 100,000 square foot Guitar Center with about 70,000 people playing Stairway to Heaven.
Not this year. Aside form a record breaking 92,000 attendees, NAMM has grown with the times, expanding from mere trade show to conference, power broker meet-n-greet.
Up until last year, had an aspiring artist asked me, “Why should I go to NAMM, I'm not a retailer, or a sound engineer?" I might have had little to disagree with. But ...
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Are Club Owners Totally Lost?
Source:
Seattle Jazz Scene
This article by Dave Goldberg is making it around the internet. While the writer makes it specific to LA, it is the current model for a lot of jazz clubs throughout the country. WHY LA CLUB OWNERS ARE TOTALLY LOST AND SOME ADVICE FOR THEM FROM A PROFESSIONAL MUSICIAN by Dave Goldberg AS I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR GIGS LATELY, I've never seen so many free and low paying gigs. Well the economy is bad, so I can understand that a ...
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Do Music Critics Still Matter? It Depends on Which Critic...
Source:
Digital Music News
Back in the days of scarcity, I needed magazines like RollingStone and SPIN. I cared if the Source gave an album five mics, simply because it was impossible to preview everything (or sometimes, anything). But that's all over now, and it's a memo the LA Weekly is getting in bold type. And, the reason why they killed album reviews entirely.
Yet the LA Weekly bow-out is less about the death of the critic, and more about a ...
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Sopa Opera and the Anti-Music Media Bias
Source:
Moses Supposes
With piracy affecting all areas of commerce, why does it seem like only the music biz is whining? Well, because the main-stream media is only “reporting" about them and ignoring the massive extra-music industry support for SOPA. But why? Is SOPA really such a huge threat to media outlet's revenue that they would sell-out on a Bill that is designed to keep themselves alive? The other day I read a story about how the e-book trade is being rifled by ...
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How National Tour Packages Are Ruining Music and Artist Discovery
Source:
HypeBot
Guest post by Nick Hardy, first published on Sinizine.net. I grew up in Memphis, Tenn. and was involved in the punk scene from my first Rancid tape stolen from my high school. I had my crappy ska band and many of my friends had just as horrible punk bands. During the mid 90's Memphis was booming with amazing punk and indie shows coming through venues like Barristers, The Antenna, New Daisy, The Map Room...the list goes on. You could bet ...
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The Mainstream Music Establishment Wants You to Think You're Not Good Enough
Source:
HypeBot
This year the mainstream music establishment was preoccupied with letting the indie/DIY community know they were “Not Good Enough." In fact, some gatekeeping factions of even the DIY/Indie community seemed to reinforce this theme (more on this later). Who's A Grammy Darling? The rumblings started in February at The Grammys when Esperanza Spalding won Best New Artist over better known names like Mumford and Sons and Justin Bieber. So much so, A member of Bieber's Army hacked her Wikipedia site ...
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Why Labels Hate the Idea of Simplifying Copyrights...
Source:
Digital Music News
Copyright simplification could have monumental implications for the music industry, not just for startups, but also for preservationists, producers, artists, and fans. The only problem is that some of the most powerful companies in this space absolutely hate the idea.
The latest example involves copyrights surrounding recordings, which enter this byzantine and confusing terrain if the song was recorded before 1972 (at least in the US). That's when sound recording copyrights were federalized, and shifted from a mish-mosh of individual ...
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