Posts tagged: record labels

On my birthday, two days ago, Anders Manga released X’s & The Eyes, his fifth studio album on Vampture Records. The first single “There Will Be Blood” is doing well on the European charts already. I swear I am moving back to Europe one of these days, just for the music.

In the United States-based events department, Anders Manga will be kicking off the U.S. tour with a co-headlining show at Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia with a band called KHZ. Some people erroneously seem to believe that the regular Dracula’s Ball event is not happening this year, but it absolutely is happening. The record label Dancing Ferret Discs, also managed by Dracula’s Ball promoter DJ Ferret, will be shuttering its doors in November, but the events will continue. Hope that clears up any confusion.

Go check out the Anders Manga show and more, if you are in the Philly area. It is important to support creative people who actually come out of the scene.

Anders Manga’s Fall 2008 tour will also come through a number of other cities, including my current home in Hollywood at Bar Sinister and my old stomping grounds in Washington, DC at Spellbound. You can check out some party shots at the Spellbound venue in DC in our exclusive gallery, featuring a cavalcade of Blue Blood and BLT contributors, including Dancing Ferret recording artists Ego Likeness. You can also peruse our exclusive photo gallery of party shots of yours truly and Forrest Black carousing with Anders Manga.

Read more Blue Blood » | 1 Comment »

Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.

When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?

Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.

Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, …

Read more Blue Blood » | 18 Comments »

Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.

The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:

” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.

Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”

Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.

For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets …

Read more Blue Blood » | 6 Comments »