Tag Archive for 'Guns N’ Roses'

Musical Musings

With 2008 and all the music that came with it steadily speeding away in our rear view, I got to thinking a lot about what we did and didn’t see last year in the musical world, and what’s coming. When it comes down to it, 2008 was largely defined by some of the musical trends we saw, the continuing struggle over DRM and the ever growing attempts to market, brand and distribute music in ways that utilize multiple media and social platforms.

Musically, there was a greater push towards mash-ups (AmpLive Interview) and punk fueled Indie rock. Bands like Fall Out Boy and Bloc Party among many others kept driving guitars, sometimes melancholy lyrics and music that’s in your face in terms of pace at the forefront of the radio mainstream. Hip-Hop continued its usual pond-like trend: scum on the surface, beautiful water underneath with “artists” like T.I., T-Pain and Flo-rida topping the charts while rappers like Akrobatik, eLZhi and Black Milk continued struggling to boost their word of mouth. The line between Hip-Hop and Pop was continually blurred as radio Rap brought in more Rock and World music sounds into their songs.

We saw Kanye West rebound from a personally disastrous year to re-vamp his sound with 808s and Heartbreak, and we saw Guns ‘N Roses dig themselves out of a nearly 20 year grave to release the much anticipated Chinese Democracy album, something that many fans thought they’d never hear. Of course, most fans expected to hear either a new Eminem album (Relapse) or the long awaited and highly anticipated Detox album from Dr. Dre, and they got neither.

The DRM battle raged on in 2008, and in even just the beginning weeks of ’09 we’ve seen a nice movement in the area. For most of 2008, the IFPI (2) and the RIAA battled downloaders, both large and small, in court. Looking for lost compensation, they took to trial serial filesharers and spent massive amounts of time and money scaring college kids into settling out of court for fear of an expensive and punitive sentence against them. In the end, these efforts were largely useless, and in my mind, a joke, as they claimed to be fighting for the artists, while we all pretty much know how little the labels show the artists from individual song downloads.

The record industry spent months wringing their hands over lost profits and ways to control music that they long ago lost almost all control over. You have to wonder if, looking back now, they aren’t thinking of all their recent efforts as merely shutting the barn door after all the animals already escaped. And the change in tune has been brisk… Now, just two weeks into ’09, Apple has announced one of the broadest and most accessible withdrawals of DRM and price restructuring of MP3s in years. The four major labels have helped produce this movement, and it shows the increasing power of the consumers in the music marketplace. Once tied to hard copy formats like CDs with an average price table, consumers this year found diverse and creative ways to obtain their music, forcing the hand of the labels to recognize that DRM is not what the people want. How this lack of DRM will effect iPod sales or iTunes downloads remains to be seen. The launch of the App Store on iTunes also took music mobile with an incredible number of music related apps (and a few apps that are just plain incredible) designed for the iPhone.

The idea of Take Away shows and having artists perform live in unconventional venues took off. Nine Inch Nails picked up on Radiohead’s experiment with a free download format of an album, but they’ve taken it a step further now by offering over 400 GB of HD video footage from their concert tours up on torrent streams for fans to remix and create DVDs. This fan interaction has become tantamount to bands in the last year with MySpace including music, and a large number of acts going from conventional websites to social networking platforms.

And while these social networking sites and the bands that use them were beginning to become increasingly entwined, musicians were getting in the mix as well, literally. Late in 2008, MixMatchMusic officially opened its doors to musicians from all over the world to create, upload, collaborate and work with stems to broaden the ways people approach making music. With the DemoGod award at Demo ’08, a write-up in the San Francisco Chronicle and the ever-popular RemixSarahPalin.com, this vision of worldwide musical collaboration and the power of mixing and matching steps closer to being a full-fledged reality. (MixMatchMusic)

So what’s next? With the DRM barriers falling, the new foundations of band and fan interaction being laid and Web 2.0 casting a wider net over the ‘net, music in 2009 could be anyone’s game. Personally, I’m just waiting for The Detox… And now a moment for the outstanding musicians we lost this year, Bo Diddley and LeRoi Moore, among others.

Bands and Brands: A New Era of Partnerships in the Music Industry

In this day and age – with the unprecedented level of access to information that people have through the internet and other means – consumers are not nearly as gullible as they used to be. Consumers are not only bombarded with advertising from every angle and have to find a way to filter through it, but they have also become jaded to a degree with traditional sales and advertising methods. I know I have.

One thing I’ve found interesting in this new climate is the tricky ways that some of the big players are partnering up to try to reach this new breed of audience. Big name sponsors like Coca-Cola teaming up with shows like American Idol come as no surprise, but then there are some unlikely marriages that make me think “um…weird” at first, but ultimately make a lot of sense.

As the music industry gets repeatedly dismantled and reinvented, all sorts of interesting partnerships are popping up. For example, Guns N’ Roses and Dr. Pepper? Allegedly, Dr. Pepper is going to great lengths to bully encourage GNR to release Axl’s much anticipated “17-year-in-the-making belabored masterpiece, Chinese Democracy, in 2008” according to the official press release. Free soda for everyone in America…There is even a blog dedicated to this thing. The writers at Tiny Mix Tapes made some interesting observations, including the following:

1. Dr Pepper is shamelessly trying to tap into the music blogosphere with this campaign.

2. Anyone who posted about this offer is a fool and are playing right into Dr Pepper’s hands.

3. We’re fools.

Guess that makes me one too.

Liquor companies have long been reaching their tentacles into the music industry, with tour sponsorships and what not. But what about a specific liquor brand partnering with a specific band? Like Bacardi and Groove Armada? The English electronic music duo, is (according to Wikipedia) “best known to the music listening public for producing music that have featured in numerous media including advertising campaigns, movies and computer games” so they are no stranger to collaboration.

It seems that now the rum peddlers are increasingly establishing themselves in the dance music space. Jeff Macdonald, global brand director for Bacardi, says “This heralds a new era for ‘bands and brands’ and promises to set a precedent as to how both artists and brands can reap the rewards of a mutually beneficial relationship.”

I’m curious to see if this begins to happen on a smaller scale as well, with unsigned independent artists. As the MySpace/YouTube generation of musicians find fame online, will they also find ways to partner with smaller brands?