In an all digital world, vinyl records continue to make quite the comeback since the trend started to take hold in 2006. As a percentage of albums purchased, vinyl records share of sales continues to grow. Yet when you put it in the broader context of all digital consumption and downloads of single tracks, vinyl represents less than 5% of all sales. From Statista:
So how big is vinyl’s comeback really? Should we all dust off our old record players to prepare for the analog future of music? According to Luminate’s 2022 Year-End Music Report, LPs accounted for 43 percent of album sales in the United States last year, which is quite substantial. Factoring in streaming and downloads of single tracks, however, that number drops to less than 5 percent of album equivalent music consumption, which puts things in perspective.
Before the Smashing Pumpkins were, well, The Smashing Pumpkins, they were a band out of Chicago trying to find their sound and looking to catch a break. This video (about 60 minutes in length) is from 1988 and was apparently filmed for a local Chicago cable access show (aka shows filmed out of people’s basements and broadcast on local cable before YouTube. Kids, ask your parents about it or go watch Wayne’s World) Pulse Basement Live. The sound of their music in this video is noticeably different than the sound that they developed in the later 1990s on albums like Siamese Dream, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and Adore. I can hear and feel the influence of 1980s bands like The Smiths in some of the earlier songs in the video. It feels like in real time, you are seeing them test new sounds and try to figure out what their sound should be. Really amazing time capsule video of one of the more influential bands of the 1990s.
It all started with “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles. This may not seem like much, but back in the early 1980s, MTV was an earth shattering shift in the music and pop culture landscape. We had never, ever seen anything like this before. And over the years from its debut through to the mid-late 1990s, MTV set the trends and made or broke music/pop culture stars. For me, the show 120 Minutes was a must watch. For others, Yo! MTV Raps was the vanguard. And all of that started with these few hours. What an amazing time!
The inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, died earlier this week. From the NY Times:
In these digital days, it may be hard to appreciate how radically Lou Ottens changed the audio world when, in 1963, he and his team at Philips, the Dutch electronics company, introduced the cassette tape.
“As the story goes, Lou was home one night trying to listen to a reel-to-reel recording when the loose tape began to unravel from its reel,” Zack Taylor, who directed the 2017 film “Cassette: A Documentary Mixtape,” said by email.
Mr. Ottens was in charge of product development at the Philips plant in Hasselt, Belgium, at the time.
“The next morning,” Mr. Taylor continued, “a frustrated Lou Ottens gathered the engineers and designers from the Philips audio division and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.”
The cassette was a way to play music in a portable fashion, something not easily done with vinyl, and to record it conveniently as well. Artists started using cassettes to record passing ideas. Bootleggers used them to record live concerts for the underground market. Young lovers used them to swap mix tapes of songs that expressed their feelings.
Soon record labels began releasing entire albums on cassettes and automakers were installing cassette players on dashboards.
Another portable technology, the bulkier 8-track cartridge, was introduced in the same period, but cassettes, smaller and recordable, quickly doomed those devices, and also cut into the vinyl market.
NY Times
To me, the juxtaposition of Mr. Ottens, an engineer from the Netherlands, and the up and coming urban rappers from NYC (and other cities) who used and embraced his invention to distribute their music, for the exact reasons that Mr. Ottens was frustrated with other formats of the time, can not be understated.
The importance of Mr. Ottens’ creation across the globe is staggering, if you really think about it, especially in the context of the birth of rap music in the 1970s and the ability of the kids of a certain generation to make mix tapes as a method of expression.
Over the past several years, there has been a renewed interest in cassette tapes. Modern artists today regularly offer up their albums in the cassette format (vinyl too!). While cassettes clearly are not as popular today as they were ‘back in the day’, it seems obvious that the format will never really go away.
Live Aid, which took place on July 13, 1985 for a global audience of 1.9 billion people, was a massive, bi-continental pop concert created to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. It was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, leader of the Irish new wave band The Boomtown Rats. Geldof was spurred to philanthropic action after seeing a BBC report in October 1984 that featured footage of starving children. His first thought was to make a charity single.
Of course, Live Aid wasn’t just about fundraising. It also had to be a great show—or else why would people bother to watch it in the first place? As it happened, the day was filled with memorable performances on both sides of the Atlantic. The consensus pick for Live Aid MVP is Queen, whose 21-minute Wembley set included “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “We Will Rock You,” and “We are the Champions.” Mercury “strutted and preened, carrying his microphone on a metal pole that he treated as a vaudevillian’s cane, an air guitar, and, of course, a phallus,” The New York Timeswrote of Mercury’s performance. “He was a rock star playing a rock star, leather-lunged and imperious but also grinning to let everyone share the joke … For 21 minutes, Freddie Mercury undeniably made the world his stadium.” In 2005, Queen’s Live Aid set was voted the greatest rock gig in history by a panel of music industry experts.
The diversity of the acts that performed during the Live Aid concerts in Philly and London was a downfall of the event, but it was not for a lack of trying. While it was an important day for artists like Run-DMC, other larger black artists such as Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Prince declined to participate. Hindsight is 20/20 and I am sure there were things that could have been done to get a more diverse palette of artists to perform. The impact that the event had on Run-DMC was real and was an important opportunity to expose a worldwide audience to the emerging ‘hip hop’ genre of music.
As a teenager in the middle of high school when this event took place, I will never forget spending that Saturday watching the concert unfold. It was an amazing thing to witness live and I only wish I could have been there in person in Philadelphia.
This is a question that I have pondered off and on over the many years I have been listening to music, and a question that the folks on the Polyphonic YouTube channel documented in a video essay . There is something about Mr. Young and his vast influence on the music world that is really hard to pin down.
From my perspective, my favorite work from Mr. Young’s illustrious career is his solo albums – specifically “Harvest”, “Harvest Moon”. What people forget is that he is from Canada, even though he had a massive influence on United States politics, history, music, and popular culture.
Similar to Johnny Cash – whom I never really appreciated until he was gone – I do make sure to fire up a set of Neil Young songs every once in awhile just to enjoy the unique sounds and cadence of his music.
Image source: Butcher Billy on Behance (link below)
From artist Butcher Billy, a fantastic collection of ‘pulp’ comic book cover illustrations honoring Freddie Mercury. Each one depicts a comic styled illustration themed off of one of Queen’s classic songs or lyrics.
A beautifully restored version of the quintessential Queen performance at LiveAid in July of 1985. If you are curious, you can see a comparison of the original video and the new one just to see the improvement.
From Chief Mouse, the person who did the restoration:
Fixed the line interference issues, microphony or however you want to call it. This Queen performance deserves to be viewed at its best, so naturally I did my best to bring this project to fruition. Also included the introductory parts. The audio is BBC FM broadcast for everything except for ending of CLTCL, WWRY (I like the loud audience in the DVD mix) and ITTWWC due to feedback and technical issues.
Chief Mouse
Queen has been receiving a lot of love recently as a result of the release of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rami Malek’s Oscar nominated winning performance portraying Freddie Mercury, and I think it is well deserved. Queen is one of the great bands in rock and roll history that were never fully appreciated.
Both of these fine journalistic institutions kinda missed the musical boat on this one by not including a Spotify playlist of each of these lists. So, in about 20 minutes I was able to pull together the Spotify playlist for many of the songs from the NPR list, with a few additional songs from the Billboard list added for good measure.
While the Macarana was included in the top summer songs of 1996 by both Billboard and NPR, I refused to include it in Spotify playlist just on principle.
So sad about the news of Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys losing his fight with cancer. The Washington Post, of all places, (The Washington Post!) pulled together one of the best tributes I’ve seen yet:
A Tribute to Adam Yauch, Composed Entirely of Beastie Boys Lyrics
Born and bred Brooklyn U.S.A. They call me Adam Yauch, but I’m M.C.A. Like a lemon to a lime, a lime to a lemon I sip the def ale with all the fly women (1) I’m not James at 15 or Chachi in charge I’m Adam and I’m adamant about living large (2) I’ve got more rhymes than I’ve got gray hairs And that’s a lot because I’ve got my share (3) Now what do we have here, an outlaw and his beer I run this land, you understand, I make myself clear. (4) M.C. for what I am and do the A is for Adam and the lyrics; true so as pray and hope and the message is sent and I am living in the dreams that I have dreamt (5) I wish for peace between the races Someday we shall all be one (6) That’s right y’all Don’t get uptight y’all (7) I’m out and I’m gone I tell you now I keep it on and on. (8)
Awesome video from my friends at Twink. Twink is a toy piano band and the brainchild of my former colleague at Lycos, Mike Langlie. Watch and listen…its addictive and catchy!
OK, so I’ve been using the free version of Spotify on my desktop since I got my invitation and have been impressed by the service…especially the playlist sharing and the overall social element of the service. However, I have not yet taken the plunge and forked over the $10/mo ($120/yr) for the upgraded/unlimited plan.
My logic has been that using a service like Pandora satisfies my music need to discover new albums, artists, and songs since I can listen to songs I’m familiar with and it also enables me to discover new music similar to what I’m familiar with. Plus, when I look at my music purchase history these days, I generally buy 8-10 MP3 albums a year which is roughly equivalent to the Spotify annual cost plus I already have several thousand songs already in my personal music library. In essence, it’s been:
MP3’s I Purchased/Owned + Pandora = Musically Happy Steve
So for example, on Pandora, I have a Say Hi (To Your Mom) Pandora station (based on the awesome Seattle band of the same name) and, as with my other stations, regularly “Thumbs Up” several songs per session. Now, this plug in takes that curated list that has been compiled over time and puts it in your own Spotify playlist.
For those of you Spotify users, here is the link to the aforementioned playlist – Say Hi Favorites
I can now pump all the songs I’ve ever “liked” via Pandora into Spotify. I can discover new songs, albums and artists by discovering shared and public playlists. No decisions have been made yet, but Spotify is moving to the head of the class really really quickly.
I’m a little bothered that here in the NYC area, it seems that every other ad on TV has either Vampire Weekend’s “Holiday” or The Drum’s “Lets Go Surfing” as its backdrop music. In reality, the songs are being used for Honda, Tommy Hilfiger, and Volkswagen. The sad thing is that I really like both of these songs but now, when I listen to the radio, I don’t know if the station is actually playing the song or airing an ad.
Caught this article on Techcrunch about how the band Arcade Fire teamed up with Google, Google Chrome and Google Streetview to show off what HTML5 can do as part of a Google Chrome Experiment. After typing in your childhood home address, a “modular” video of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used to Wait” starts playing that includes a guy running through streets with a hoodie on. And after a few minutes, the video brings in Google Streetview and Google Earth aerial views of your childhood neighborhood and then uses those visuals as the backdrop for the video. Its really cool and an intensely personal way to connect you to the video/song and the band.
Here is my video using my childhood home in Boston as the address. Â NOTE: Be sure to only have this browser open. Its a very processor intensive app and video.
This is an interesting mash up. Spotisquare brings together Foursquare and Spotify and it enables you to attach a song to a location/check in, thus enabling you to put some personality to your Foursquare check ins. They have a mobile app at m.spotisquare.com . Obviously, a big issue is that Spotify is not readily available in the USA. And do we really need another task to do when checking in using Foursquare?
For the second time, I’m sending back your Ink’d in-ear headphones.
For the second time, they have #failed in the same manner – one of the earbuds stopped working.
On your site and in your customer service correspondence, you imply that your products can withstand “extreme listening”. My listening demands call for me to pull them out of my pocket, plug them into my Droid, put them in my ears, and listen when I commute to my job in NYC. I’ll concede that NYC can be a zoo sometimes, but it’s not like my usage patterns of your product is anything close to extreme. With both Ink’d products that I have returned, one of the earbuds on the headphones has failed and I can only hear audio out of the other earbud. In the first instance, my assessment was that the root cause was a frayed connection of the cable to the jack. For my most recent instance, I’m really not sure what is happening that is causing the earbud to fail.
I’ll be honest here, I’m a little frustrated with your products, especially being that I’m not doing anything “extreme” when using your headphones. One time I can understand, but two times is troubling.
But wait, there’s more! I was in Best Buy the other day, looking at replacement headphones to purchase. I happened to overhear two women who were also looking at headphones, where one of them was saying that her current headphones (which were in her hand) had failed. When I looked down at them, they were distinctively Skullcandy. I struck up a conversation with them and we compared notes. The issue she had experienced was exactly what I have experienced, in that the cable connection to the jack had frayed and caused the audio and headphone to fail.
I don’t know if it’s a problem with the Ink’d line or a broader issue with your in-ear headphones, but I would look long and hard at how these are produced and figure out where the defect is. I wanted to like your products, really I did. But I’ve lost my patience. And it appears the woman I spoke with in Best Buy did too.
MTV has released an online video site that houses all the videos that have ever run on the network (we won’t talk about its name – MTV Music or Music Television Music – or the fact that these days MTV is anything but Music Television).
The Most Popular area, which as of today looks like a retro 1980’s top video list with video “classics” like Dire Straits Money for Nothing, aHa’s Take on Me, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or – wait for it – Toto’s Africa.
Good lord, what is going on in our world? One hit wonders from the 1980’s having reunion tours. Really bad bands having reunion tours. Fake bands having reunion tours. It’s a trend and a buzz that will not subside!!
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