I have nothing against MP3s — for one thing, it would be like arguing with the wind, and the convenience of sorting through the 11,345 songs on my iTunes is unbeatable. All I have to do is think of something to hear it. But there’s also no denying the compromise in fidelity caused by all that convenient compression. Wondering just what gets lost in the format change, I spent a week listening to music on vinyl, CD and iTunes (AAC files at a low bit rate, 128 — “kinda shitty,” says the office iPod jockey). I used a pair of  Thiel CS1.6 tower speakers — great bass — but the results were similar with the bookshelf speakers I use every day.

I started with one of my favorite records of the year, LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver. (more…)

Here are a few of the records you won’t be shopping for in the next week or two: Mariah Carey, Madonna, Green Day, Mary J. Blige, Eve, Usher and Nicole Scherzinger. Some of these — like Green Day and Madonna as well as the Coldplay, U2 and Eminem albums that retailers, labels and fans had on their wish lists — were never really likely to come out this year. But except for Usher, the rest had release dates set for the weeks before Thanksgiving weekend — traditionally the kickoff for holiday shopping. They’ll either arrive in December (Blige) or sometime next year (Scherzinger, Carey, Eve), but what’s usually superstar season in the record business is shaping up as one of the slowest periods in a long time.

It’s slow all over, with The New York Times reporting this fall as one of the worst retail periods in decades. But if sweaters and flat-screen TVs aren’t selling, it’s not because they aren’t in the stores. This year, an unusual number of big releases have drifted further and further back on the calendar, and while of course it’s a gamble to put what is still, after all, an artistic endeavor on a schedule, it’s also strange to release three singles in a four-month period and turn up on magazine covers with no album in sight, which is the case with Pussycat Dolls singer Scherzinger, whose solo debut was slated for October, then November, then December and now February. What’s going on? (more…)

It took six minutes. First I had to install the Amazon MP3 Downloader, a simple three-click process that dragged on longer than it should have because the page loaded so slowly. Then came a free song to show me how easily it worked (”Energy,” by the Apples in Stereo, though I thought I was going to get to choose any song when I pushed the button). And then I bought the number-ten downloaded album on Amazon’s new MP3 service, Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. This was loaded directly onto my iTunes in high-quality MP3s, with no Digital Rights Management restrictions. Because its forty-four minutes are split across just five tracks, it cost me $4.45.

The same album costs $11.99 on iTunes, though how long before that price drops? (more…)

On October 1st, Radiohead announced that fans could pay a price of their choosing for the new In Rainbows. Three days later, the verdict in the first RIAA suit against an illegal downloader to actually go to trial came in, and Jammie Thomas, a thirty-year-old single mom of two, was socked with a $220,000 judgment for sharing twenty-four tracks. Early estimates had Radiohead buyers paying an average of $10 for the album, or $1 per song. Thomas will have to pay $9,250 per song.

Radiohead and Jammie Thomas are symbols of the same thing: how directionless the industry as a whole has become. Whatever it turns out to be, Radiohead’s move played in the media as a death knell for the major labels, as Trent Reznor and Madonna immediately announced they would follow suit and find new ways to release their music. It’s unclear how many other bands could dump their labels, and it’s worth noting that all three of these artists are bigger touring than album acts these days, and they got to that level with years of record-company support. It’s also interesting that the best business mind in the bunch — that would be Madonna — simply switched conglomerates, from no-longer-a-superpower Warner Bros. to no-longer-called-Clear Channel Live Nation.

What is a label for? (more…)

“I always felt that the musician’s job, as I experienced it growing up, was to provide an alternative source of information,” Bruce Springsteen told Rolling Stone three years ago, on the eve of the Vote for Change Tour. As the war in Iraq drags on with no end in sight and no hope for anything resembling peace, rock & roll is doing just that.

Springsteen and John Fogerty have both just released new albums that draw some of their strength from a direct return to their early music, and have something else in common as well: They both address the war in Iraq. Springsteen and Fogerty were born just four years apart — Springsteen in 1949 and Fogerty in 1945 — but by the time Springsteen put out his debut in 1973, Fogerty’s Creedence Clearwater Revival had just called it quits. Both are artists who — from the start — were able to be at once current and out of step, looking backward to shape their styles, Fogerty to Fifties rockabilly and Springsteen to Sixties R&B-driven rock.

Fogerty’s Revival — the title a clear nod to his rapprochement with the CCR sound — slaps at George W. Bush explicitly, using rock & roll as weapon. (more…)

Since details about VMA-night fights are still coming to light, Rock Daily isn’t quite done with the Vegas fiasco we covered exhaustively earlier this month. Here’s Joe Levy’s take:

It’s hard to say exactly which was a stranger moment at the MTV Video Music Awards: a short shot of the Foo Fighters with Serj Tankian on vocals flailing away at the Dead Kennedys’ “Holiday in Cambodia” — a twenty-seven-year-old snotty punk put-down of American consumerism — or Justin Timberlake chastising MTV for the second time in one night for not playing enough videos by declaiming that we don’t need more “Simpsonson reality television.” Both said plenty about how strained, odd and useless the VMAs have become: The attacks now come from within.

Was it a good idea to stage the show in a Vegas hotel and run the red carpet through the casino, a place Lord knows how many MTV viewers (to say nothing of underage performers like Chris Brown and Rihanna) aren’t legally allowed to enter? What about shrifting off the most interesting performers — Kanye West, Timberlake, the Foos and Fall Out Boy (who, whatever you think of them, at least swung for the fences like they believed the occasion was important and tuning their guitars wasn’t) — to “fantasy suites,” cutting to them for only a minute or so at times as bumpers before commercials? And who let Alicia Keys onstage wearing Gene Simmons’ boots, Diana Ross’ leggings and Jimi Hendrix’s headband? (more…)

In the third week of august, a new Britney Spears song surfaced briefly online, a ballad so negligible it may have been a demo. It was surprisingly stripped of digital processing, leaving Britney’s voice completely exposed, and it soon disappeared, only to be replaced by the first single of her comeback campaign, “Gimme More.” This was business as usual, with the same mechanized Ann-Margret purr she’s used from the beginning and lyrics that equate the gaze of the crowd and the cameras with sex. Is it too unkind to point out it sounds just like Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” but without the hooks? And is it even unkinder to point out its intentional provocations weren’t nearly as shocking as the ballad that had leaked a week before?

What made that ballad so can’t-look-away strange was hearing a vocal free of Auto-Tune, the pitch-correction software that defines pop music today. You know the sound of Auto-Tune, at least pushed to its limits, when it produces the vocoder-like robotic vocals of T-Pain’s “Buy U a Drank”and other summer ubiquities such as Rihanna’s “Umbrella” or Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.” All of them deploy the digital effect that comes when vocals are tuned too tight, a quavering disco-cyborg melisma that’s become the keynote of so much of the Top Forty.

Auto-Tune is infamous for making possible careers that would never exist without it, allowing the turd polishing (as producers call it) that can turn well-packaged mediocre singers into stars. (more…)

Fountains of Wayne and Imperial Teen formed on opposite coasts in 1995, when pop-smart bands raised on punk and indie rock could still shoot for the radio and record sales. In the last twelve years, they’ve each made four albums – five if you count Fountains of Wayne’s odds-and-sods collection with their cover of Britney’s ” . . . Baby One More Time” and Imperial Teen’s live disc. Imperial Teen’s great subject is bohemia, befitting a band with roots in San Francisco. New Yorkers Fountains of Wayne are suburban at the core. One band writes about men with lipstick and girls who try to get what they want. The other writes about people with jobs and tends to be unsettled and entranced by girls who try to get what they want.

Thirty years ago, bands like these would make one or two albums and dissipate in five years. Today, they can push into a second decade, surviving on soundtrack and TV money when it comes, working day jobs when it doesn’t. Which is why each has only gotten better over time, grappling with the challenges of getting older and pursuing pop dreams that have transformed into art projects. “Used to stop at the red light,” Imperial Teen remember in “Room With a View,” a song from their new The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band that celebrates the place they come together to dream, their rehearsal space, “and now we go to the gym.” As for Fountains of Wayne, their one hit – “Stacy’s Mom,” from 2003 – turns teen spirit upside down: a song by two guys pushing forty, imagining a teenager turned on by a mom pushing forty. (more…)

We all have our opinions on why the music “industry” is sliding on CD sales. This is my question to you: Has anyone mentioned MTV’s lack of video play as a possible cause for a slide in the music biz? MTV is on almost every cable network in the US. It could still reach kids instantly if they used this as a medium. — KingLeer

I’m sure someone’s mentioned it. Everyone certainly bitches about it. Of course, MTV cut back on video play ten years ago or more, long before CDs sales fell lower than Britney’s panties, and it didn’t kill the business then, so it’s hard to attribute the slide to just that. And I’m doubting that pumping videos 24/7 on MTV will solve the problem. (You know file sharing and digital copying is the real problem, right? And also, in case there are any Boy Scouts reading this, it’s wrong and illegal!) The problem here is that MTV is in the business of selling advertising, not selling music. They can draw more eyeballs with The Hills or Pimp My Ride than they can with Justin Timberlake or Lil’ Wayne videos. So that’s what they program. Some people say the real problem is the music itself. That if there were a great artist now — a new Cobain, or Tupac — then people would buy CDs again. But if there were a new Cobain or Tupac, wouldn’t he just screw his record company and leak his music online the way Lil’ Wayne does? Just asking.
(more…)

New Van Morrison album?”

No, actually, it’s The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3.

“Huh. Guess that means there were more good Van Morrison albums the last few years than I knew.”

Well, yes. Or at least more good songs. Though you’re forgiven for not noticing. In the last twenty years, Morrison has released eighteen albums on eight different labels, and that includes a skiffle set with Lonnie Donegan and a clunker with Jerry Lee Lewis’ sister, Linda Gail. It was hard to believe Morrison himself kept up with his output, except that he handpicked the tracks for the two CDs of Volume 3 personally.

Volume 3 sums up the career of a great artist who long ago embraced the work ethic of a journeyman. It takes as its model not the visionary Celtic soul music Morrison invented in the Seventies, but the straight blues and R&B he learned from in the Fifties. These days, Morrison vocalizes like a horn player –- dancing above or around the melody, clustering short phrases in staccato repetitions, drawing out beauty notes longingly – and when his albums work, they’re like old Blue Note blowing sessions: relaxed affairs in which masterful players would solo over dressed-up blues changes and ballads, catching fire occasionally and generating warmth throughout. If Bob Dylan in the last few years has strived for music that re-creates the transformative effects of his original inspirations, Morrison simply wants to cut material that shows the same effortless command as the records that he grew up on. On covers of “Georgia on My Mind” and “Lonely Avenue” or remakes of “Gloria” with John Lee Hooker and “Tupelo Honey” with Bobby “Blue” Bland, he doesn’t want to extend the tradition, just stand alongside it.

He does plenty of that on Volume 3, though there are a few duds. Blame Van for leading each CD with a softheaded collaboration (Tom Jones and the Chieftains), and it’s a shame he skips crotchety statements of purpose like “I’m a Songwriter” (”Get the words on the page/Please don’t call me a sage”) for the soporific lyricism of “The Healing Game.” But the cuts liberated from compilations — particularly a duet with Carl Perkins on “Sitting on Top of the World” from an otherwise dull Sun Records tribute and a minor-key guitar blues called “Blue and Green” lost in a Katrina-relief set — are real finds, just the stuff that greatest-hits collections were made for. One is lighthearted, full of sunshine and good whiskey, the other pulses with the darkness that comes when the whiskey isn’t working. Download them now. See what you’ve been missing.

Hip-hop is dead. This news was delivered late last year by Nas in a single of the same name. It was then confirmed in June by USA Today,which reported a thirty-three percent drop in CD sales this year. “They say the market share’s down,” notes T.I. on his new album. “Tell the label relax, and ain’t no need to stress shit/Yeah, just cut the check and I’ll handle the rest.”

The anxiety that hip-hop is in decline is nothing new to anyone who lived through Hammer Time, but this is different. Rap is a good decade further along from
its beginnings than rock & roll was in the mid-Seventies, when punk began to reinvigorate guitar music, and it is certainly suffering the pains and worries of middle age. With smart hip-hop producers focusing on twenty-second blips that would make for successful ring tones — ringtone sales are rising faster than album sales are dropping — both the artists and the audience are thinking smaller.

But not KanyeWest. In a handful of recent cuts, Kanye sidesteps hip-hop orthodoxy, soaking up beats and strategies from, of all places, the indie-rockmainstream. There’s “Stronger,”the first single from his upcoming Graduation, where he lifts the robo-disco hook from Daft Punk’s “Better, Faster, Stronger”; there’s “Drivin’ Me Wild,” which he produced for Common’s latest, and on which he brought in Lily Allen to sing the hook; and there are two tracks on his mix tape Can’t Tell Me Nothing that find him bitching about media coverage over the groove from Peter, Bjorn and John’s “Young Folks.” Another Graduation track samples Seventies German art rockers Can.

Best, though, is “Us Placers,” from the Can’t Tell Me Nothing mix tape and credited to CRS, a group featuring Lupe Fiasco,Kanye and Pharrell Williams. The music — hesitant piano chords, spare pulse,mournful vocal — is a loop of the title track of Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser. Yorke sings about disappearance as an act of defiance. “The more you try to erase me,” goes the chorus, lifted whole for “Us Placers,” “the more that I appear.” Lupe’s verse lays out the false promise of materialism. Kanye spins thoughts about reality TV and celebrity. Pharrell jumps from greenhouse gases, cooking cocaine, God’s will and the Virginia Tech shootings, bringing things back to fame and notoriety. The Yorke loop has an emptiness that the rappers occupy completely. Each brings something wholly new to the other, trading self-effacement and self-possession back and forth until there’s no difference between the two. For this 3:53, hip-hop isn’t dead, and neither is rock. They’re quietly invincible.

Photo: Barket/Getty