It's worth noting that much of the top-5 songs in the past 10 - 15 years have all been written by the same tiny handful of songwriters.
Obviously Max Martin tops this list, and has been writing #1's since at least 1997. He has dominated the pop charts even more in the past decade. He has either written or co-written most #1 pop songs you can think of for the past 5 years. He also produces the songs he writes for the singers that release them. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, P!nk, Kelly Clarkson - every single one of them had a #1 with Max Martin in the past few years - and some (Timberlake) since the beginning of their careers.
Whenever I hear that a song by Katy Perry is a "dis track" against Taylor Swift I just go "They're written by the same guy!" In fact he might be suggesting these tracks to specific artists with that kind of press in mind.
Martin himself might be single-handedly responsible for the actual stats this article outlines.
And when it's not Max Martin, it's one of his protegés, e.g.: Dr. Luke.
Nerdist Under The Influence Radiolab Serial (when it's back) My Favorite Murder Reply All Crimetown Talk Nerdy To Me 99% Invisible Science Vs. Oh No Ross and Carrie Here's The Thing Spark
I still routinely check out a few more every few months. Behind the Liner Notes, Song Exploder, BBC's The Inquiry, the Allusionist, etc. etc. etc.
I had a question regarding the frequency with which we hear about China being a major source of "state-sponsored" advanced persistent threat (APC) hacking. Many news outlets have referred to "Unit 61398" as a source for much of these attacks and data thefts.
Should we take Chinese hacks seriously as a threat? Do you feel it's an issue that will ever be resolved?
So now that the labels own the website, what will they do with it?!
They have a crappy reputation for shutting down sites which actually function pretty well in terms of giving consumers what they actually want, and then never reviving them again.
Wouldn't it make sense for the labels to operate these things? Why don't they? It's been over 15 years now.
This has actually been around since at least 2006.
Russian spam operation EvaPharamacy have been using this approach to turn public servers they don't own into free hosting for all of their rogue pharmacy sites.
You can read a pretty detailed description of this here:
The people who run EvaPharmacy (criminals, in my opinion, but also in others' opinion) do a lot of destructive things to your server while installing their proxy hosting / DNS software on your server, and they leave no trace of any files at all.
I first learned *about* programming when I was 10 (1977) by reading a small paperback book about the Basic language. I wrote on paper with pencil to learn some very rudimentary programming. I didn't learn on a real computer until 1979 or 1980 - at my junior high school - and that was originally using an Atari 400 or 800. We also learned on an IBM card reader connected to a university unix server using only a wide-carriage printer as the output, no screen at all. I also learned on a Tandy TRS-80 and an Apple IIe. The first language I learned: Basic, on an Atari computer. The 2nd: Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIe. I remember being taught some very preliminary machine language / assembly at that time as well but that was from fellow students. It never stuck with me.
I didn't own a computer for most of the time I was most interested in programming one. When I was really eager to learn programming the most (say 1981 - 1984), my parents couldn't afford one and they felt it was a frivolous purchase. It wasn't until 1994 that I dove into programming seriously. That ended up being Perl and Oracle PL/SQL that I learned and used extensively at that time.
I'm seeing a lot of dismissive comments in here about what labels allegedly do and how much easier it will be for an artist to do it themselves. Also a lot of hyperbole about "if they're getting ripped off, how come they're so rich"?
Let's say you are a good songwriter and performer, and you've shelled out your own money to record a handful of songs to a reasonable enough quality that a consumer would buy it if they heard it. You have no management. You have no agent. You have confidence and this product that you've agonized over. You don't want to go the major label route. You my distrust labels of any sort. You possibly have a deep dislike for the RIAA.
To get on iTunes, you used to have to be signed to a label of any sort who would represent your recordings so that iTunes would add it to their catalogue. That was from whenever iTunes started to around 2005 or so. That has been loosened somewhat so now an artist can go to CDBaby, who still require a CD of your work before doing so, and will only represent one (1) song to iTunes.
Once that song is actually in iTunes, now what? It doesn't just show up on the front page. In fact depending on which country you're from, you won't automatically show up in other countries on iTunes thanks to 100+ year-old physical distribution laws.
But what do you do? You can't simply persuade iTunes to feature your product on their service, not on your own. They have a staff who essentially act like retail used to: they "front rack" products. They do this based on the pedigree of the recordings coming in and a considerable amount of marketing push from the majors. I'm not privy to that major label process, but I can tell you there are thousands of indie artists who are having a very hard time getting any kind of meaningful exposure via iTunes without that same attention and manpower.
Tunecore - a sort of ex-major label A&R and promotions collective - will represent a completely independent artist but they still essentially only seek out artists with some kind of touring career already in place. They promote to iTunes essentially like a major label would.
It is also not that easy to sell your music - even if you're really good - without a lot of physical effort on your part. Touring. Actually pressing CD's and making them attractive and inexpensive enough that even one person would be intrigued to buy one. I don't know many people who buy CD's at all, and that includes at shows. They'd sooner buy a T-Shirt, so the artist also has to make sure they get good at shirt manufacturing. (Something few musicians assume they should know anything about.)
If your goal is just to write and perform music and possibly make a little bit of cash for fun, sure. You don't need a label. If you want to have a career at it, you may not need a label but you will need lots of other representation. Managers, agents, promoters, etc. You'll still need some financial backing to get a world class recording, and at that point you still need to answer the question of how you'll be properly exposed on iTunes. It is not nearly as easy or straightforward as many of these commenters are indicating. To have a genuine certifiably successful career? Labels are still good at that, they've just lost their taste for putting three albums worth of nurturing effort to get there. Your first album has to hit. Otherwise they will just move on. That wasn't always the case.
Comparing marketing options for a new, unknown artist who is bewildered as to what to do with their brand new music career without labels and an artist like Robert Fripp who started touring in 1966, and has released several dozen albums on a variety of internationally distributed record labels and built up a loyal audience spanning over 40 years now is (to put it mildly) apples and oranges. Same goes for Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. Name me an artist that has succeeded on par with these artists in today's climate without a label, and I'll be interested to hear about it. Even Trent Reznor's attempt to marke
Speaking as someone who used to work in the retail industry, and the overall music industry, but now work in the tech industry, I think you're missing the importance of what you're interpreting his point-form items to mean.
> I'm lazy and impatient.
Aren't these precisely the reasons for two of the most crucial ingredients which all of the large scale entertainment industries are utterly failing to add to their product?
Convenience and ease of use.
People can order coffee at drive-throughs now. Why? It's convenient, and enough people were lazy and impatient enough that they didn't want to have to park, get out of their car, enter the actual coffee shop, line up, wait, choose from a menu either during or after that wait, order, wait some more for the coffee or other items to be made and delivered to them, pay, get a receipt, return to their car, and get back on the road. A drive through is far more convenient.
If the coffee shop / drive through example had never existed, an entire traffic infrastructure would arguable not exist today. Drive throughs are considered an innovation that was a direct response to customers who were impatient and busy, and who one could argue right now are lazy for using them. But they're considered an innovation.
The *IAA members who currently produce the CD's, DVD's and Blu-Ray discs in their current state lack this kind of innovative thinking. They fail to understand that convenience - especially in an era where a ton of information is very easily available - is a crucial ingredient in their product.
FBI warnings, several delays involving intro animations, menus or warnings, plus copyright notices, then trailers and previews are a nuisance. Then add in:
* DRM * Regional coding * Territorial restrictions for a given release * Territorial delays in release or a complete lack of release in one or more territories * The whole "back to the vault" scenario.
These are all considered annoyances, and hindrances to consuming the product people actually wanted to buy, and these are precisely the things that are causing people to avoid purchasing their products, but they refuse to remove them. I think it would be a huge wake-up call for even one studio to try releasing a product with at least one of these hindrances removed (but preferably all of them.) I also personally believe that restricting a work from being released in a different territory due to it not yet having a specific licensing agreement is a ridiculous concept in a world that has something called the Internet. iTunes doesn't let me buy some of my favorite artists because they aren't licensed to be released in my country. Of course I'm going to download them any way I can. (I do order physical CD's for exorbitant prices as well, but I'm probably a really rare consumer in this case.)
Even when studios do include a "bonus digital copy", it's restricted, and only available for a preset amount of time. If you try to use that copy past that time, you're out of luck. That's a stupid, stupid idea. I won't always want a new movie to remain on my iPod, and I will more than likely wish to use that feature far further in the future than they will allow. I don't know anyone who uses that feature, and I doubt I would ever choose it over ripping my own copy of the DVD I own so that I can play it the way I want.
As a programmer, "lazy" leads to better code over time because a program or script eventually does more things either I or my clients wanted it to do. As a former retail worker, "lazy" means we had to work harder to make sure people could get what they wanted more immediately, or find things out faster, especially when a store was very busy.
"lazy" and "impatient" are what labels and movie studios should be wanting to address in a way that produces a better product. Recorded music and films are the two biggest industries that resist this approach consistently, and then blame the consumer when they complain about it.
This reply is one of the most clearly-worded criticisms of the RIAA's prosecution, and I wish it could be applied to all the other cases which have gone before and are still before the courts.
I think it's crucial that they specifically talk about the fact that this individual did not profit from the sharing of this handful of files, and that it is unlikely that he, on his own, was singularly responsible for the sharing of those files to specifically "millions" of people, directly leading to "billions of dollars of lost revenues".
I wrote an article recently about "RIAA Math", researching just what kind of activity an individual would have to engage in to share a small number of files enough times, consistently, with zero failure or network downtime to make this kind of punitive or statutory damage claim worthy of being awarded. I used the pending damages case regarding Jammie Thomas-Rasset, which has been posted here many times. (Short answer: for the $1.92 million they claim she is on the hook for, she'd have to share all of the infringing copies for 444 days straight, no downtime, sharing to a grand total of nearly 58,000 individuals, and that's assuming that every single person actually downloaded the entire song.)
They key piece is that this guy was not personally profiting from this. He downloaded them for personal use. Even if we assume he burned copies for a handful of his friends, that is still not a "profit" engine, and even if it were, those profits would never amount to what the RIAA is claiming.
I'm intrigued to see the outcome of this, much as I am with the Thomas-Rasset case.
Boy this is a hard topic to discuss without feeling like you're inadvertently supporting one side or the other.
I'll just preface this by saying this is a topic that has interested me for many years, but especially in light of 9/11, etc. I do not pretend to be any kind of expert on this (who could?)
So:
Source? (other than Fox News, of course)
I was all set to say "how could you have missed all these news quotations saying the he wants to blow up Israel?!?!" But after doing some digging: It turns out that this is the first time I've heard anyone make a genuine distinction between what CNN / FOX / etc. keep quoting and what was actually translated from his original speech:
Our dear Imam (referring to Ayatollah Khomeini) said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.
Now: I am not supporting this guy (I can't overstate this), nor am I in support of Iran's totalitarian government, but it does appear that the press seem to have reinterpreted his speeches in words that will rile up Western populations.
His argument seems to be a common one from that region:
- Israel is a state and government which he and many others do not recognize, but which Western governments do. - Israel as a state was created by Western governments following WWII and placed in what used to be known as Palestine, thus his (and many others) continuous reference to "occupied Palestine." - He considers the state to be a fiction, and wants the Islamic world to work together to remove that state from the region, essentially returning it to the Palestinians.
I could only find this translation regarding his statements about the Holocaust:
The illegitimate Zionist regime is an outcome of the Holocaust... a political and power-seeking network claimed to be the advocate for one group of the victims, and sought reparations for their blood. [This network] ruled that the survivors of this particular group of victims must receive compensation - and part of this compensation was to establish the Zionist regime in the land of Palestine. On this pretext, they attacked Palestine and, after massacring the [indigenous] people and driving them from their homes, they occupied their homeland and created the Zionist regime - in order to ensure that no regional power would emerge in the Islamic lands except for the West, [because] Islamic civilization and culture have the dynamic potential to threaten their interests, which were based on oppression and thirst for power. These principles and philosophy comprise the Zionist regime.
So again: I don't see in that quote that he's "denying" the holocaust. (And yes: I know it's out of context, and it's from Wikipedia) He's saying that an "outcome of the Holocaust" was that they made these claims for reparation and compensation, and that they achieved this (the creation of Israel within Palestinian land) via less-than-acceptable means.
The fact that you clarified this particular oft-misquoted statemen
I recognize that this is possibly an extremely naive thing to suggest, but what if NASA were to be either co-owned by private investors, or sold outright to a private company?
Is there a reason that NASA still needs to be a Government operation?
Given that the key inhibitor to NASA being taken seriously as a "space exploration" organization has been the dire lack of funding over the past three decades, wouldn't it make sense to turn it into a seaparately operated, non-national, extremely well-funded company, with more than enough money to support the kinds of projects that they're describing?
I also understand that initially NASA did have ties to the military, but that for one reason or another it was agreed that they would not be a military organization. I'm not sure if selling the company would put it in danger of becoming one or not.
It couldn't hurt to ask. I imagine if either Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, etc. etc. etc. were in a position to co-own or otherwise play a part in their fiscal support, and there were no legal barriers to do so, NASA could flourish and this wouldn't be a recurring argument every year or so.
Aside: It bothers me that this lack of funding has made it that much easier for Apollo Landing deniers to grow in numbers.
Several colleagues of mine pointed me to this story and I just have to say: the labels - again - still don't get it, and they apparently never will.
I can understand why some artists create full length works. Few can argue that an album like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or The Beatles' "Abbey Road" work very well as complete pieces. The reality is: how many current artists are making albums that consistent? I can think of only three that actually make the cut for me: Queens of the Stone Age, The Mars Volta and until lately Nine Inch Nails. With only that last example, their audiences are not earning them in the tens of millions in sales. The only artists which are are the artists which are responsible for this massive audience shift away from album purchases!
Britney Spears is the veritable poster-child for why albums are failing: even if you are a die-hard fan, you really only want two songs, at most perhaps five, from any of her full length albums. That says: you don't want to spend $15 - $20 for a complete CD / $9.99 per digital album download. You prefer to purchase individual tracks. (That and: you'd probably still prefer they cost around $0.49)
On the other hand, if their audience are "classic rock fans", I still don't see the point. If you're a Led Zeppelin fan, you likely already have all the remastered reissues and re-re-re-issues you care to spend any money on in the first place. (And the Beatles re-re-re-re-masters are coming out imminently as well, marking something like the eighth time those have been re-issued of re-packaged in one way or another.)
That well has run dry. Why they don't face this fact is confusing.
I know that individual tracks aren't going away, and I know that digital sales on their own aren't necessarily resulting in booming profits for any of these labels, but my point is: as someone who has been a voracious consumer of music since 1979, I see utterly no legitimate business case for this "new" format, and it baffles me completely that any major label would seriously consider this as the saviour of their industry.
I would have been far more excited to hear that they decided on a $0.40 per single purchase price for new artists - big marketing campaign or not - rather than this ridiculous additional format. That or that they finally decided to give the artists more of a cut of the digital download price, since printing, shipping and manufacturing costs are of course greatly reduced for any digital download format. (Not saying it doesn't still take a creative team to create artwork, but there is no shipping, and no printing involved.)
I've already made a few wagers: I give this two and a half years at best before we see an unsurprising news story claiming that this did not significantly improve any digital music sales for anyone.
What a waste of money already. They still have a full year before they even release the first one.
I've been reading the news from seven or eight newspapers using one or another form of software for my Palm device since 1995 (no joke), and now that I'm moving to a blackberry (soon) I'm looking for something similar to do this. I much prefer reading these editions, and it often means I can grab more recent news at work for my transit commute home.
The problem is: none of the major papers ever do any QA on their "mobile" editions. The BBC news site is now nearly completely unreadable. You get the headline, and a teaser, but the link leads either to a broken page or a page featuring only a single paragraph of most stories. The New York Times suffers from similar broken links. The CBC's mobile site no longer loads in anything but a cellphone browser.
If they can't get that right (and I agree: the "mobile" version of most sites is not likely to be a high traffic section) what makes them think anyone will trust them to get this setup out the door smoothly?
It would be trivial to properly QA their existing mobile / low fi versions and promote that as another convenient way to read the news. Instead they abandoned it.
Further reporting of this, especially from Canadian news outlets, go into much further detail regarding this aspect of the court judgement.
The Globe And Mail have a particularly good quote from one of the Facebook reps:
"It's certainly beyond his resources, and we have no illusions about getting all of the money," Mr. Schnitt said.
"We're going to get whatever we can. To the extent that he has resources, we're going to try and seize them."
Mr. Schnitt said he mainly hopes the case will act as a deterrent. "[The ruling] sends a message to spammers and would-be spammers," he said.
"We hope this demonstrates the extent to which we're going to expend resources and pursue people to protect users from spam."
They certainly *will* get this company shut down, and then (assuming they find Mr. Guerbuez, who most news stories claimed was notoriously difficult to find,) they'll go after him.
You make a record on the other hand and when it's played on the radio (the equivalent of free-to-air TV distribution) you don't get any money;
That's actually incorrect. If you were the songwriter, you *do* get paid. It's called a performance royalty, and it's collected by organizations like ASCAP, BMI, Sesac, etc. Each country has their own version of these (those are all American performance rights organizations, Canada's is SOCAN.)
If labels would be able to charge radio stations to play their music (something highly unlikely to happen, by the way) I believe CD prices would likely fall.
Totally incorrect. The two are unrelated, and not handled (at least not directly) by the labels themselves. If you are an artist, and you get signed by Warner Bros., your songs, by default (if you wrote them, and you agree to their default contract regarding the publishing of your songs) will be administered via Warner Chappell Publishing, Warner's publishing wing. If you wrote the song, and it gets played on the radio: an organization known as BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) or MediaBase will monitor the airplay, and depending on when it was played, in what city, with what size audience, and how many times: you get paid. So does (if you're smart) your own publishing company, which you can set up to handle your songwriting publishing separately from that of your label. (Publishing is the gluiest and most obscure part of the whole industry, but it's arguably where all the real money gets made in a recorded work.)
Radio stations pay groups like ASCAP what is referred to as a "blanket license" so that they are allowed to play whatever music they want. ASCAP (takes it from there in terms of making sure the money goes where it's supposed to.
None of this, sadly, affects the price of CD's. Labels have always had a different excuse every time for why the price of CD's remains comparitively higher than it should be.
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P.S. By the way, performance rights orgs also pay the artist whenever they or other artists perform their songs live. When U2 sang a version of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" during their Zoo TV tour in 1993, Lou Reed made more money than he did off his previous album's sales. Apparently the same was true of Neil Young when Pearl Jam sang "Rockin' In The Free World" during their 2000 world tour. They played it every night and Young made a considerable amount of profit from it due to it being a very high-gross tour.
You also get paid if your song is placed in an ad and airs on TV or Radio. It's less than if the whole song played on radio, but you get the idea. Many artists are making a lot more money by making a deal with an ad company to have their song appear in a 30 second TV spot than they would ever make off album sales. (The Gap and Apple are two very notable company which licenses tons of songs from up and coming artists, as well as some well known ones.)
People (especially this retail support organization) seem to forget that Prince gave away copies of his last cd with every ticket sold to see his live show as well. That was two years ago and there was some debate over whether these CD's counted as "copies sold" from a Billboard chart point of view. I seem to remember Prince saying in an interview at the time that he didn't care whether it meant he got on a chart, that it was good for exposing the music, period.
Retailers fail to innovate and then complain when an artist does. I don't get it.
It's not their right to profit from his CD's, it's their privilege. If they were smart, rather than not carrying the cd, they should offer a deep discount on it. The newspaper thing is a one-off, it's not like every single copy of every daily paper is including a copy.
They should also keep in mind that if Prince can afford to do this out of his own pocket, imagine competing for the same amount of advertising dollars from him. Why isn't any single retail operation thinking this way?
They wonder why the major retailers are suffering. They keep front-racking the same crap against which Prince knows he has no chance of competing. (He's not 17 nor is he female and hot, he's 50 and an accomplished musician with a serious history, something no label or retailer cares to promote.)
Further: Not everybody who gets that paper is going to be a Prince fan. So his market penetration isn't going to be to his main target audience, though probably many fans will shell out for the paper. (Keep in mind he just sold out several dates in the UK at the O2 Arena, with several more still on sale.)
I challenge any retailer to claim that they could sell as many cd's as this giveaway would total. I really doubt they'd care to. They wouldn't rack it with the same exposure as Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake or Rihanna. It's not in their best interests to do so.
I haven't shopped at a brick-and-mortar retail store for my music in several years now and it's crap like this that makes me feel like it's probably just as well. Music retailers don't care about talent, they care about widgets. They should be the ones coming up with stunts like this (or the labels and their marketing divisions.)
I'm sick of hearing retailers complain whenever someone does something purely musical like this. Sure it's a stunt but it shows he wants the music to get out there, which is more than I could say for any label or retailer these days.
Remember also that in 1996 the CRTC unsuccessfully attempted to pass similar legislation regarding all content on the internet.
I hate the CRTC. They have effectively ruined everything regarding broadcast and digital technology.
The CRTC are also are a big reason that Tivo doesn't exist as a service in Canada.
Sure, nice, fine: we get to hear that extra bit of Nelly Furtado (produced in America, by American musicians and producers, for an American label) and friggin' Nickelback. But can we download TV shows in iTunes? Nope. Movies? Nope. Can we get actual HBO anywhere? Nope. Up until mid-last-year there was also no satellite radio. The only reason we have it now is that they created several Canadian stations, literally none of which anyone I know even listens to at all.
But we DO get endless reruns of Corner Gas on multiple tv stations. And we have ET Canada now. Which is nice... I guess... (Cheryl Hickie notwithstanding.)
The CRTC is run by a bunch of 70-year-olds who still probably think Burton Cummings is "hit-worthy." I wish to god they would go away. If it actually led to greater talent discovery and exposure, then I'd be all for it. As it stands the truly good Canadian artists get absolutely no airplay anywhere. CRTC has outlived their usefulness if these are the kinds of battles they're choosing to fight, using my money.
Everybody seems to be missing a pretty crucial point here:
If I'm a bank, and I am based in the US (say: CitiBank, or Wells Fargo, both of whom have been victims of numerous phishing attacks) and if I am the victim of an international gang who phishes my customers: guess who I have to go to to investigate? Usually the FBI and / or the SEC. If the criminals behind the phishing attack are found to be in a country other than the US, *usually* INTERPOL gets involved so they can then point me (or the FBI / SEC) to the appropriate foreign law enforcement groups.
If the company was based in the UK, the process would be exactly the same: Scotland Yard + INTERPOL + foreign law enforcement = arrest someone in Poland, usually with links to Romania / Russia / Ukraine.
This should be shocking to precisely nobody. What are we supposed to do: ignore it? "Oh well they're all the way over in Poland, now we'll NEVER find out who did it."
Don't be so hair-trigger about what is and is not appropriate. If you're getting defrauded, there are tons of international avenues available for the investigation of this crime.
Please note that when the issue is the creation or sales of weapons of mass destruction, all of the above seems to go right out the window (history has at least two examples now.):)
Actually, couldn't that be used as a good way to trace the spammers?
Yes and no. The SEC has successfully prosecuted several groups involved in these pump and dump schemes (this tactic is internationally illegal, not just in the US. It's a manipulation of the stock market.) The issue is actually tracing each individual purchase of these stocks once it's been connected, verifiably, to a spam run. This is partly why spammers seem to repeatedly spam the same stocks for years on end. It makes it harder to verify that a transaction was fraudulent.
Their days are numbered though.:) The SEC may be slow, but they eventually find and successfully sue these assholes.
You will notice that without fail: they are money losers. The odds that you *might* actually make money are directly proportional to how soon you know they will hit a certain threshold. ie: very slim. They go up very briefly, then plummet like a rock for the long term.
It bugs me that nobody has piped up about the legitimacy of that report. What it fails to take into account are (specifically) the timing of the trades, and the long term result versus the short term. Long term will always mean you lose, without fail.
It's important to note that in most cases the stocks being spammed are not even real companies. They're paper companies that exist solely to have stock and be pumped and dumped. It's a further illegal manipulation of the market. The SEC needs to do a lot more to fight this kind of crime but (naturally) they don't have the staff to do so.
Luc Doucet (anything from him, the guy is a genius.) Emily Haines (lead singer from Metric.) Emm Gryner's new one is tremendous The Dears Be Good Tanyas
I think I'd agree that Sam Roberts is one of the best bands out there. He's beginning to do pretty well (especially live) in the US and UK.
In my opinion the last truly good Tragically Hip album was maybe Fully Completely, with honorable mention for Day for Night. Past that they have bored me to tears, including live. Which is sad.
People need to move on from the Tragically Hip though. This is not 1989.
Slashdot Mirror
The actual link to the motherboard story is this one:
https://motherboard.vice.com/e...
This post links to a totally different article.
It's worth noting that much of the top-5 songs in the past 10 - 15 years have all been written by the same tiny handful of songwriters.
Obviously Max Martin tops this list, and has been writing #1's since at least 1997. He has dominated the pop charts even more in the past decade. He has either written or co-written most #1 pop songs you can think of for the past 5 years. He also produces the songs he writes for the singers that release them. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Maroon 5, P!nk, Kelly Clarkson - every single one of them had a #1 with Max Martin in the past few years - and some (Timberlake) since the beginning of their careers.
Whenever I hear that a song by Katy Perry is a "dis track" against Taylor Swift I just go "They're written by the same guy!" In fact he might be suggesting these tracks to specific artists with that kind of press in mind.
Martin himself might be single-handedly responsible for the actual stats this article outlines.
And when it's not Max Martin, it's one of his protegés, e.g.: Dr. Luke.
This ransomware has actually previously been defeated (April 2016), and a key generator tool was released:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...
fyi
Nerdist
Under The Influence
Radiolab
Serial (when it's back)
My Favorite Murder
Reply All
Crimetown
Talk Nerdy To Me
99% Invisible
Science Vs.
Oh No Ross and Carrie
Here's The Thing
Spark
I still routinely check out a few more every few months. Behind the Liner Notes, Song Exploder, BBC's The Inquiry, the Allusionist, etc. etc. etc.
Woops! Advanced Persistent Threat = APT.
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Hello Brian. I'm a long time reader and fan.
I had a question regarding the frequency with which we hear about China being a major source of "state-sponsored" advanced persistent threat (APC) hacking. Many news outlets have referred to "Unit 61398" as a source for much of these attacks and data thefts.
Should we take Chinese hacks seriously as a threat? Do you feel it's an issue that will ever be resolved?
Thanks
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So now that the labels own the website, what will they do with it?!
They have a crappy reputation for shutting down sites which actually function pretty well in terms of giving consumers what they actually want, and then never reviving them again.
Wouldn't it make sense for the labels to operate these things? Why don't they? It's been over 15 years now.
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This has actually been around since at least 2006.
Russian spam operation EvaPharamacy have been using this approach to turn public servers they don't own into free hosting for all of their rogue pharmacy sites.
You can read a pretty detailed description of this here:
http://pharmalert.zoomshare.com/1.html
The people who run EvaPharmacy (criminals, in my opinion, but also in others' opinion) do a lot of destructive things to your server while installing their proxy hosting / DNS software on your server, and they leave no trace of any files at all.
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I first learned *about* programming when I was 10 (1977) by reading a small paperback book about the Basic language. I wrote on paper with pencil to learn some very rudimentary programming. I didn't learn on a real computer until 1979 or 1980 - at my junior high school - and that was originally using an Atari 400 or 800. We also learned on an IBM card reader connected to a university unix server using only a wide-carriage printer as the output, no screen at all. I also learned on a Tandy TRS-80 and an Apple IIe. The first language I learned: Basic, on an Atari computer. The 2nd: Turbo Pascal on an Apple IIe. I remember being taught some very preliminary machine language / assembly at that time as well but that was from fellow students. It never stuck with me.
I didn't own a computer for most of the time I was most interested in programming one. When I was really eager to learn programming the most (say 1981 - 1984), my parents couldn't afford one and they felt it was a frivolous purchase. It wasn't until 1994 that I dove into programming seriously. That ended up being Perl and Oracle PL/SQL that I learned and used extensively at that time.
I'm seeing a lot of dismissive comments in here about what labels allegedly do and how much easier it will be for an artist to do it themselves. Also a lot of hyperbole about "if they're getting ripped off, how come they're so rich"?
Let's say you are a good songwriter and performer, and you've shelled out your own money to record a handful of songs to a reasonable enough quality that a consumer would buy it if they heard it. You have no management. You have no agent. You have confidence and this product that you've agonized over. You don't want to go the major label route. You my distrust labels of any sort. You possibly have a deep dislike for the RIAA.
To get on iTunes, you used to have to be signed to a label of any sort who would represent your recordings so that iTunes would add it to their catalogue. That was from whenever iTunes started to around 2005 or so. That has been loosened somewhat so now an artist can go to CDBaby, who still require a CD of your work before doing so, and will only represent one (1) song to iTunes.
Once that song is actually in iTunes, now what? It doesn't just show up on the front page. In fact depending on which country you're from, you won't automatically show up in other countries on iTunes thanks to 100+ year-old physical distribution laws.
But what do you do? You can't simply persuade iTunes to feature your product on their service, not on your own. They have a staff who essentially act like retail used to: they "front rack" products. They do this based on the pedigree of the recordings coming in and a considerable amount of marketing push from the majors. I'm not privy to that major label process, but I can tell you there are thousands of indie artists who are having a very hard time getting any kind of meaningful exposure via iTunes without that same attention and manpower.
Tunecore - a sort of ex-major label A&R and promotions collective - will represent a completely independent artist but they still essentially only seek out artists with some kind of touring career already in place. They promote to iTunes essentially like a major label would.
It is also not that easy to sell your music - even if you're really good - without a lot of physical effort on your part. Touring. Actually pressing CD's and making them attractive and inexpensive enough that even one person would be intrigued to buy one. I don't know many people who buy CD's at all, and that includes at shows. They'd sooner buy a T-Shirt, so the artist also has to make sure they get good at shirt manufacturing. (Something few musicians assume they should know anything about.)
If your goal is just to write and perform music and possibly make a little bit of cash for fun, sure. You don't need a label. If you want to have a career at it, you may not need a label but you will need lots of other representation. Managers, agents, promoters, etc. You'll still need some financial backing to get a world class recording, and at that point you still need to answer the question of how you'll be properly exposed on iTunes. It is not nearly as easy or straightforward as many of these commenters are indicating. To have a genuine certifiably successful career? Labels are still good at that, they've just lost their taste for putting three albums worth of nurturing effort to get there. Your first album has to hit. Otherwise they will just move on. That wasn't always the case.
Comparing marketing options for a new, unknown artist who is bewildered as to what to do with their brand new music career without labels and an artist like Robert Fripp who started touring in 1966, and has released several dozen albums on a variety of internationally distributed record labels and built up a loyal audience spanning over 40 years now is (to put it mildly) apples and oranges. Same goes for Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead. Name me an artist that has succeeded on par with these artists in today's climate without a label, and I'll be interested to hear about it. Even Trent Reznor's attempt to marke
Speaking as someone who used to work in the retail industry, and the overall music industry, but now work in the tech industry, I think you're missing the importance of what you're interpreting his point-form items to mean.
> I'm lazy and impatient.
Aren't these precisely the reasons for two of the most crucial ingredients which all of the large scale entertainment industries are utterly failing to add to their product?
Convenience and ease of use.
People can order coffee at drive-throughs now. Why? It's convenient, and enough people were lazy and impatient enough that they didn't want to have to park, get out of their car, enter the actual coffee shop, line up, wait, choose from a menu either during or after that wait, order, wait some more for the coffee or other items to be made and delivered to them, pay, get a receipt, return to their car, and get back on the road. A drive through is far more convenient.
If the coffee shop / drive through example had never existed, an entire traffic infrastructure would arguable not exist today. Drive throughs are considered an innovation that was a direct response to customers who were impatient and busy, and who one could argue right now are lazy for using them. But they're considered an innovation.
The *IAA members who currently produce the CD's, DVD's and Blu-Ray discs in their current state lack this kind of innovative thinking. They fail to understand that convenience - especially in an era where a ton of information is very easily available - is a crucial ingredient in their product.
FBI warnings, several delays involving intro animations, menus or warnings, plus copyright notices, then trailers and previews are a nuisance. Then add in:
* DRM
* Regional coding
* Territorial restrictions for a given release
* Territorial delays in release or a complete lack of release in one or more territories
* The whole "back to the vault" scenario.
These are all considered annoyances, and hindrances to consuming the product people actually wanted to buy, and these are precisely the things that are causing people to avoid purchasing their products, but they refuse to remove them. I think it would be a huge wake-up call for even one studio to try releasing a product with at least one of these hindrances removed (but preferably all of them.) I also personally believe that restricting a work from being released in a different territory due to it not yet having a specific licensing agreement is a ridiculous concept in a world that has something called the Internet. iTunes doesn't let me buy some of my favorite artists because they aren't licensed to be released in my country. Of course I'm going to download them any way I can. (I do order physical CD's for exorbitant prices as well, but I'm probably a really rare consumer in this case.)
Even when studios do include a "bonus digital copy", it's restricted, and only available for a preset amount of time. If you try to use that copy past that time, you're out of luck. That's a stupid, stupid idea. I won't always want a new movie to remain on my iPod, and I will more than likely wish to use that feature far further in the future than they will allow. I don't know anyone who uses that feature, and I doubt I would ever choose it over ripping my own copy of the DVD I own so that I can play it the way I want.
As a programmer, "lazy" leads to better code over time because a program or script eventually does more things either I or my clients wanted it to do. As a former retail worker, "lazy" means we had to work harder to make sure people could get what they wanted more immediately, or find things out faster, especially when a store was very busy.
"lazy" and "impatient" are what labels and movie studios should be wanting to address in a way that produces a better product. Recorded music and films are the two biggest industries that resist this approach consistently, and then blame the consumer when they complain about it.
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I can't believe they didn't include any of the Atari 400 / Atari 800 ads.
You could learn geography, or French. (Always followed by some version of Space Invaders or Missile Command.)
Alan Alda was a spokesman for a period of time.
Yeeesh...
I think in hindsight Atari obviously spent slightly more on TV advertising than product R&D, but I could be wrong.
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This reply is one of the most clearly-worded criticisms of the RIAA's prosecution, and I wish it could be applied to all the other cases which have gone before and are still before the courts.
I think it's crucial that they specifically talk about the fact that this individual did not profit from the sharing of this handful of files, and that it is unlikely that he, on his own, was singularly responsible for the sharing of those files to specifically "millions" of people, directly leading to "billions of dollars of lost revenues".
I wrote an article recently about "RIAA Math", researching just what kind of activity an individual would have to engage in to share a small number of files enough times, consistently, with zero failure or network downtime to make this kind of punitive or statutory damage claim worthy of being awarded. I used the pending damages case regarding Jammie Thomas-Rasset, which has been posted here many times. (Short answer: for the $1.92 million they claim she is on the hook for, she'd have to share all of the infringing copies for 444 days straight, no downtime, sharing to a grand total of nearly 58,000 individuals, and that's assuming that every single person actually downloaded the entire song.)
They key piece is that this guy was not personally profiting from this. He downloaded them for personal use. Even if we assume he burned copies for a handful of his friends, that is still not a "profit" engine, and even if it were, those profits would never amount to what the RIAA is claiming.
I'm intrigued to see the outcome of this, much as I am with the Thomas-Rasset case.
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(Former Music Industry Employee And Pundit)
Boy this is a hard topic to discuss without feeling like you're inadvertently supporting one side or the other.
I'll just preface this by saying this is a topic that has interested me for many years, but especially in light of 9/11, etc. I do not pretend to be any kind of expert on this (who could?)
So:
I was all set to say "how could you have missed all these news quotations saying the he wants to blow up Israel?!?!" But after doing some digging: It turns out that this is the first time I've heard anyone make a genuine distinction between what CNN / FOX / etc. keep quoting and what was actually translated from his original speech:
Source: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel (Oct. 26, 2005)
Now: I am not supporting this guy (I can't overstate this), nor am I in support of Iran's totalitarian government, but it does appear that the press seem to have reinterpreted his speeches in words that will rile up Western populations.
His argument seems to be a common one from that region:
- Israel is a state and government which he and many others do not recognize, but which Western governments do.
- Israel as a state was created by Western governments following WWII and placed in what used to be known as Palestine, thus his (and many others) continuous reference to "occupied Palestine."
- He considers the state to be a fiction, and wants the Islamic world to work together to remove that state from the region, essentially returning it to the Palestinians.
I could only find this translation regarding his statements about the Holocaust:
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel#Statement_on_Holocaust_Remembrance_Day
So again: I don't see in that quote that he's "denying" the holocaust. (And yes: I know it's out of context, and it's from Wikipedia) He's saying that an "outcome of the Holocaust" was that they made these claims for reparation and compensation, and that they achieved this (the creation of Israel within Palestinian land) via less-than-acceptable means.
The fact that you clarified this particular oft-misquoted statemen
I recognize that this is possibly an extremely naive thing to suggest, but what if NASA were to be either co-owned by private investors, or sold outright to a private company?
Is there a reason that NASA still needs to be a Government operation?
Given that the key inhibitor to NASA being taken seriously as a "space exploration" organization has been the dire lack of funding over the past three decades, wouldn't it make sense to turn it into a seaparately operated, non-national, extremely well-funded company, with more than enough money to support the kinds of projects that they're describing?
I also understand that initially NASA did have ties to the military, but that for one reason or another it was agreed that they would not be a military organization. I'm not sure if selling the company would put it in danger of becoming one or not.
It couldn't hurt to ask. I imagine if either Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, etc. etc. etc. were in a position to co-own or otherwise play a part in their fiscal support, and there were no legal barriers to do so, NASA could flourish and this wouldn't be a recurring argument every year or so.
Aside: It bothers me that this lack of funding has made it that much easier for Apollo Landing deniers to grow in numbers.
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Several colleagues of mine pointed me to this story and I just have to say: the labels - again - still don't get it, and they apparently never will.
I can understand why some artists create full length works. Few can argue that an album like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" or The Beatles' "Abbey Road" work very well as complete pieces. The reality is: how many current artists are making albums that consistent? I can think of only three that actually make the cut for me: Queens of the Stone Age, The Mars Volta and until lately Nine Inch Nails. With only that last example, their audiences are not earning them in the tens of millions in sales. The only artists which are are the artists which are responsible for this massive audience shift away from album purchases!
Britney Spears is the veritable poster-child for why albums are failing: even if you are a die-hard fan, you really only want two songs, at most perhaps five, from any of her full length albums. That says: you don't want to spend $15 - $20 for a complete CD / $9.99 per digital album download. You prefer to purchase individual tracks. (That and: you'd probably still prefer they cost around $0.49)
On the other hand, if their audience are "classic rock fans", I still don't see the point. If you're a Led Zeppelin fan, you likely already have all the remastered reissues and re-re-re-issues you care to spend any money on in the first place. (And the Beatles re-re-re-re-masters are coming out imminently as well, marking something like the eighth time those have been re-issued of re-packaged in one way or another.)
That well has run dry. Why they don't face this fact is confusing.
I know that individual tracks aren't going away, and I know that digital sales on their own aren't necessarily resulting in booming profits for any of these labels, but my point is: as someone who has been a voracious consumer of music since 1979, I see utterly no legitimate business case for this "new" format, and it baffles me completely that any major label would seriously consider this as the saviour of their industry.
I would have been far more excited to hear that they decided on a $0.40 per single purchase price for new artists - big marketing campaign or not - rather than this ridiculous additional format. That or that they finally decided to give the artists more of a cut of the digital download price, since printing, shipping and manufacturing costs are of course greatly reduced for any digital download format. (Not saying it doesn't still take a creative team to create artwork, but there is no shipping, and no printing involved.)
I've already made a few wagers: I give this two and a half years at best before we see an unsurprising news story claiming that this did not significantly improve any digital music sales for anyone.
What a waste of money already. They still have a full year before they even release the first one.
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I've been reading the news from seven or eight newspapers using one or another form of software for my Palm device since 1995 (no joke), and now that I'm moving to a blackberry (soon) I'm looking for something similar to do this. I much prefer reading these editions, and it often means I can grab more recent news at work for my transit commute home.
The problem is: none of the major papers ever do any QA on their "mobile" editions. The BBC news site is now nearly completely unreadable. You get the headline, and a teaser, but the link leads either to a broken page or a page featuring only a single paragraph of most stories. The New York Times suffers from similar broken links. The CBC's mobile site no longer loads in anything but a cellphone browser.
If they can't get that right (and I agree: the "mobile" version of most sites is not likely to be a high traffic section) what makes them think anyone will trust them to get this setup out the door smoothly?
It would be trivial to properly QA their existing mobile / low fi versions and promote that as another convenient way to read the news. Instead they abandoned it.
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Further reporting of this, especially from Canadian news outlets, go into much further detail regarding this aspect of the court judgement.
The Globe And Mail have a particularly good quote from one of the Facebook reps:
They certainly *will* get this company shut down, and then (assuming they find Mr. Guerbuez, who most news stories claimed was notoriously difficult to find,) they'll go after him.
It may take a while, but they'll do it.
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That's actually incorrect. If you were the songwriter, you *do* get paid. It's called a performance royalty, and it's collected by organizations like ASCAP, BMI, Sesac, etc. Each country has their own version of these (those are all American performance rights organizations, Canada's is SOCAN.)
Totally incorrect. The two are unrelated, and not handled (at least not directly) by the labels themselves. If you are an artist, and you get signed by Warner Bros., your songs, by default (if you wrote them, and you agree to their default contract regarding the publishing of your songs) will be administered via Warner Chappell Publishing, Warner's publishing wing. If you wrote the song, and it gets played on the radio: an organization known as BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) or MediaBase will monitor the airplay, and depending on when it was played, in what city, with what size audience, and how many times: you get paid. So does (if you're smart) your own publishing company, which you can set up to handle your songwriting publishing separately from that of your label. (Publishing is the gluiest and most obscure part of the whole industry, but it's arguably where all the real money gets made in a recorded work.)
Radio stations pay groups like ASCAP what is referred to as a "blanket license" so that they are allowed to play whatever music they want. ASCAP (takes it from there in terms of making sure the money goes where it's supposed to.
None of this, sadly, affects the price of CD's. Labels have always had a different excuse every time for why the price of CD's remains comparitively higher than it should be.
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P.S. By the way, performance rights orgs also pay the artist whenever they or other artists perform their songs live. When U2 sang a version of Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" during their Zoo TV tour in 1993, Lou Reed made more money than he did off his previous album's sales. Apparently the same was true of Neil Young when Pearl Jam sang "Rockin' In The Free World" during their 2000 world tour. They played it every night and Young made a considerable amount of profit from it due to it being a very high-gross tour.
You also get paid if your song is placed in an ad and airs on TV or Radio. It's less than if the whole song played on radio, but you get the idea. Many artists are making a lot more money by making a deal with an ad company to have their song appear in a 30 second TV spot than they would ever make off album sales. (The Gap and Apple are two very notable company which licenses tons of songs from up and coming artists, as well as some well known ones.)
People (especially this retail support organization) seem to forget that Prince gave away copies of his last cd with every ticket sold to see his live show as well. That was two years ago and there was some debate over whether these CD's counted as "copies sold" from a Billboard chart point of view. I seem to remember Prince saying in an interview at the time that he didn't care whether it meant he got on a chart, that it was good for exposing the music, period.
Retailers fail to innovate and then complain when an artist does. I don't get it.
It's not their right to profit from his CD's, it's their privilege. If they were smart, rather than not carrying the cd, they should offer a deep discount on it. The newspaper thing is a one-off, it's not like every single copy of every daily paper is including a copy.
They should also keep in mind that if Prince can afford to do this out of his own pocket, imagine competing for the same amount of advertising dollars from him. Why isn't any single retail operation thinking this way?
They wonder why the major retailers are suffering. They keep front-racking the same crap against which Prince knows he has no chance of competing. (He's not 17 nor is he female and hot, he's 50 and an accomplished musician with a serious history, something no label or retailer cares to promote.)
Further: Not everybody who gets that paper is going to be a Prince fan. So his market penetration isn't going to be to his main target audience, though probably many fans will shell out for the paper. (Keep in mind he just sold out several dates in the UK at the O2 Arena, with several more still on sale.)
I challenge any retailer to claim that they could sell as many cd's as this giveaway would total. I really doubt they'd care to. They wouldn't rack it with the same exposure as Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake or Rihanna. It's not in their best interests to do so.
I haven't shopped at a brick-and-mortar retail store for my music in several years now and it's crap like this that makes me feel like it's probably just as well. Music retailers don't care about talent, they care about widgets. They should be the ones coming up with stunts like this (or the labels and their marketing divisions.)
I'm sick of hearing retailers complain whenever someone does something purely musical like this. Sure it's a stunt but it shows he wants the music to get out there, which is more than I could say for any label or retailer these days.
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Yikes. :(
Remember also that in 1996 the CRTC unsuccessfully attempted to pass similar legislation regarding all content on the internet.
I hate the CRTC. They have effectively ruined everything regarding broadcast and digital technology.
The CRTC are also are a big reason that Tivo doesn't exist as a service in Canada.
Sure, nice, fine: we get to hear that extra bit of Nelly Furtado (produced in America, by American musicians and producers, for an American label) and friggin' Nickelback. But can we download TV shows in iTunes? Nope. Movies? Nope. Can we get actual HBO anywhere? Nope. Up until mid-last-year there was also no satellite radio. The only reason we have it now is that they created several Canadian stations, literally none of which anyone I know even listens to at all.
But we DO get endless reruns of Corner Gas on multiple tv stations. And we have ET Canada now. Which is nice... I guess... (Cheryl Hickie notwithstanding.)
The CRTC is run by a bunch of 70-year-olds who still probably think Burton Cummings is "hit-worthy." I wish to god they would go away. If it actually led to greater talent discovery and exposure, then I'd be all for it. As it stands the truly good Canadian artists get absolutely no airplay anywhere. CRTC has outlived their usefulness if these are the kinds of battles they're choosing to fight, using my money.
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Everybody seems to be missing a pretty crucial point here:
:)
If I'm a bank, and I am based in the US (say: CitiBank, or Wells Fargo, both of whom have been victims of numerous phishing attacks) and if I am the victim of an international gang who phishes my customers: guess who I have to go to to investigate? Usually the FBI and / or the SEC. If the criminals behind the phishing attack are found to be in a country other than the US, *usually* INTERPOL gets involved so they can then point me (or the FBI / SEC) to the appropriate foreign law enforcement groups.
If the company was based in the UK, the process would be exactly the same: Scotland Yard + INTERPOL + foreign law enforcement = arrest someone in Poland, usually with links to Romania / Russia / Ukraine.
This should be shocking to precisely nobody. What are we supposed to do: ignore it? "Oh well they're all the way over in Poland, now we'll NEVER find out who did it."
Don't be so hair-trigger about what is and is not appropriate. If you're getting defrauded, there are tons of international avenues available for the investigation of this crime.
Please note that when the issue is the creation or sales of weapons of mass destruction, all of the above seems to go right out the window (history has at least two examples now.)
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Yes and no. The SEC has successfully prosecuted several groups involved in these pump and dump schemes (this tactic is internationally illegal, not just in the US. It's a manipulation of the stock market.) The issue is actually tracing each individual purchase of these stocks once it's been connected, verifiably, to a spam run. This is partly why spammers seem to repeatedly spam the same stocks for years on end. It makes it harder to verify that a transaction was fraudulent.
Their days are numbered though.
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That was a highly misleading article.
I recommend checking out the following monitors:
http://www.spamstocktracker.com/
http://www.crummy.com/features/StockSpam/
You will notice that without fail: they are money losers. The odds that you *might* actually make money are directly proportional to how soon you know they will hit a certain threshold. ie: very slim. They go up very briefly, then plummet like a rock for the long term.
It bugs me that nobody has piped up about the legitimacy of that report. What it fails to take into account are (specifically) the timing of the trades, and the long term result versus the short term. Long term will always mean you lose, without fail.
It's important to note that in most cases the stocks being spammed are not even real companies. They're paper companies that exist solely to have stock and be pumped and dumped. It's a further illegal manipulation of the market. The SEC needs to do a lot more to fight this kind of crime but (naturally) they don't have the staff to do so.
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I'd also add:
Luc Doucet (anything from him, the guy is a genius.)
Emily Haines (lead singer from Metric.)
Emm Gryner's new one is tremendous
The Dears
Be Good Tanyas
I think I'd agree that Sam Roberts is one of the best bands out there. He's beginning to do pretty well (especially live) in the US and UK.
In my opinion the last truly good Tragically Hip album was maybe Fully Completely, with honorable mention for Day for Night. Past that they have bored me to tears, including live. Which is sad.
People need to move on from the Tragically Hip though. This is not 1989.
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