Wired pointed me to a fascinating, funny study on which body part is sung about most often.  The study was conducted by two visual artists, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, as part of a project named Fleshmap .  The bodyparts vs. song segment of the project has been named "Listen ." (Some NSFW imagery there) Despite what Mr. Mix-a-lot would like to see - namely, the supremecy of the booty - it's the eyes that are sung about the most accross all genres.  From the post...

"Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body," reads one sentence of the project's manifesto. "Verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry and religion are distilled to their basic elements." By presenting those elements in such an intuitive way, Viégas and Wattenberg bring data to life graphically, so that it can be grasped in seconds.

So, what do the results tell us? Across all of the categories, the eyes are most frequently mentioned body part (Hall & Oates, "Private Eyes" ), with the exceptions of hip hop, which places a firm emphasis on the posterior (Sir Mix a Lot, "Baby Got Back" ) and blues (Louisiana Red, "Keep Your Hands Off My Woman ") and gospel music (The Gospel, "Put Your Hands Together" ), which are respectively focused on the keeping off of one's hands and the clapping or raising of one's hands.

As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least. There are plenty of other data points to peruse. It's nice to know that 23.64 percent of hip hop songs refer to the behind, while 11.83 percent of rock songs talk about eyes.

The Wall Street Journal - not normally your first stop for music news - has picked up an interesting story.  It seems that Buckcherry - the hard rock band best known for their hit "Lit Up" (I love the cocaine, I love the cocaine) - had a song form their upcoming album leaked online and were quick to complain about it.  However, the webmaster of torrentfreak.com tracked the IP address of the leaking computer back to the band's manager.  At first glance it seems like espionage - the band's manager leaks a potential revenue-earning song for free on the Internet.  However, it appears that the leak may have been the best thing to happen to that song and the manager, well, he might just be the next big thinker in the music industry. From the article...

While entertainment companies decry filesharing, they nevertheless frequently use it as a tool to market music or gauge the popularity of their offerings. Radio stations use information on which songs are most trafficked online when deciding what to play. And it is increasingly common for musicians and their record companies to give away some or all of an album online before its commercial release, albeit usually through their own Web sites, rather than through filesharing services.

After "Too Drunk. . ." appeared on the Internet early last month, Buckcherry wrote in a July 3 MySpace posting that "we hate it when this s- happens, because we want our FANS to have any new songs first." In that post, the band provided a link that allows fans to download a copy of the song, and soon after posted a music video on its Web site. A July 22 news release from Atlantic quoted the band making the same complaint.

The song quickly gained traction on the Internet, and some tech-savvy fans grew suspicious that the leaked song and the complaints had been a successful exercise in generating publicity.

Full Article

So there you have it.  A bold new marketing strategy that intentionally leaks songs.  It's so contrary to what we've seen over the past few years, it may just work! 

Remember nostalgia?  Think about it, nostalgia is one of our most base and ever-present emotions.  Thinking about times past not only serve to increase their effect on us, but also greatly inflate their worth ("I used to be able to throw a baseball over a mountain! I swear!")  Music is often the trigger for nostalgia.  I can't hear any track of The Smashing Pumpkins' "Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness" without thinking of talking to my 8th grade girlfriend.  I can't hear Smash Mouth and not think of the embarrassing clothes I wore in high school.  I can't hear Lily Allen and not think of last summer.  So it's no surprise that bands a few years past their prime are cashing in on their nostalgic influence.  From Yahoo News...

When guitar-rock band Built to Spill announced its fall tour in May, fans took notice. That's because rather than a typical jaunt around the country promoting a new album, the three-month trek will find the band performing its 1997 release, "Perfect From Now On," in its entirety throughout the United States and Europe.

It's the latest in an ever-increasing list of tours and performances of the ilk, joining recent and upcoming experiments from Sonic Youth , Liz Phair , Slint , Echo & the Bunnymen , the Stooges, Public Enemy , Tortoise and Sparks. And those in the know say it's having a positive impact on the bottom line.

Full Article

What a fun idea.  I would pay a high price to hear some of my favorite bands from the mid-to-late 90's perform their classic albums sans-"new stuff" and I'm sure I'm not alone.  Hopefully this trend will continue and I can one day find myself, well past thirty years old, screaming the lyrics to all my favorite Smashing Pumpkins jams from my childhood.  Oh, to be young again! 

DRM is a fickle creature.  On the one hand, it prevents music from being illegally shared.  On the other hand, it often screws the people who pay for it.  Thus was is the case developing over at Yahoo, who have shut down their DRM'd music service.  However, those who paid to legally download songs are now finding themselves in a pickle, unable to transfer the songs they legally purchased to different programs.  Have no fear (maybe), Yahoo claims it will reimburse customers in some way.  From Wired...

When Yahoo announced that it would follow Sony Connect and MSN Music into dissolution by terminating its DRM-ed music store , customers of the store and media analysts were understandably irate. But we can all take some comfort in Yahoo's vague offer to reimburse those who were unfortunate enough to have paid for PlaysForSure DRM-ed downloads from the Yahoo Music service, although details remain scarce.

"You'll be compensated for whatever you paid for the music," Yahoo spokeswoman Carrie Davis told InformationWeek . "We haven't said exactly what we will do, but we will take care of our customers."

Songs purchased from Yahoo Music will continue to play on computers after the service goes offline on September 30th, but cannot be licensed to new computers or devices after that, meaning that they'll eventually become unplayable.

FULL ARTICLE

So there you have it.  If you were once a customer of Yahoo's music service, you may be in store for some sweet, sweet cash. Or a lame voucher or something.  Keep an eye out. 

Word just leaked out that a new Chris Brown track is actually a jingle made for Wrigley Chewing Gum.  The track, "Forever," is an extended version of a song Wrigley plans to use in chewing gum commercials airing soon.  But did you know that this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened?  In fact, I have a little story about. 

I was living in London a few years back when I heard something familiar on the radio.  It was the McDonalds slogan "I'm lovin' it, " except it wasn't at the tail end of an ad.  It was a full song.  To my surprise, the DJ claimed the track was by none other than Justin Timberlake (or 'Trousersnake' as the tabloids over there referred to him).  I did a little a digging and it turned out that Timberlake had recorded the single and released it only in England.  It was co-opted by McDonalds and is, I believe, still used to this day.  Whether Timberlake recorded the track specifically for McDonalds I do not know, but isn't it strange enough to learn that the man behind one of the best-known slogans in America is also one of the best-known singers in America.  Here is the video for proof. 

UPDATE: The video won't play on Indaba, but you can see it HERE . 

Punk(ish) singer Avril Lavigne is about to get a whole bunch richer.  The Canadian pop-rocker has wracked about $2 million in YouTube revenue from plays on her videos.  Her video for "Girlfriend" currently holds the number 2 spot on YouTube's most viewed list with a staggering 92,585,577 views.  That's almost 1/3 of the US population (although I get a sense that many a 14 year-old boy may have watched more than once).  Either way, according to PaidContent.org , this entitles Lavigne to around $2 million in shared revenue. 

Avril Lavigne is set to score a big pay day thanks to YouTube revenue. Her Nettwerk Management CEO Terry McBride told MusicTank’s Face To Face With The Millennials in London today: ”There’s about a $2 million cheque waiting for her for all her YouTube plays .” The YouTube video for Lavigne’s Girlfriend track is nearing a mammoth million views after a coordinated fan campaign . Next up, Nettwerk is targeting the Far-East: “We will start a Mandarin website (for Lavigne) with Mandarin ads and we will make a ****load of money , because 40 percent of her intellectual property value comes from Asia.”

Course language aside, it sounds like McBride certainly knows the online distribution game.  Or maybe it's just that people enjoy watching music videos.  A quick glimpse at YouTube's most viewed listing shows a majority of the clips on there are music videos .  It's nice to know that YouTube, briefly thought to be a revenue drain for musicians, is now showing itself capable of generating significant cash flow.  When God shuts one window (CDs) He open another (The Internet). 

And now, for old time's sake, here is the video that made a rich girl even richer. 

Great news for my mom and anyone else who grew up loving The Beatles, a lost interview has been discovered in a garage.  From the BBC...

For 44 years a canister of film had been stored in a damp garage in South London; unopened, unloved and almost thrown away. But, finally, somebody took a look inside - and realised they had unearthed a piece of pop history. This is the story of a lost Beatles interview - which is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday for the first time since it was originally recorded.

The nine-minute interview took place in the studios of Scottish Television on Thursday, 30 April, 1964. It was thought to have been recorded on a tele-cine machine in London, and stored in a can, now rusted with the passing of decades. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the fragile film has survived at all.

Click To Listen

BitTorrent, the service that allows you to illegally download, well, anything could get a young man in quite a heap of trouble.  From an article on ArsTechnica...

The MPAA has won a jury conviction for criminal copyright infringement, opening the doors to many more cases like it in the future. A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove for both felony copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday. Dove, the last remaining administrator of EliteTorrents.com who did not plead guilty, now faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case goes all the way back to 2005, when investigators raided EliteTorrents and shut the site down with the help of the MPAA. At the time, EliteTorrents was one of the most popular Bit Torrent trackers around and had gained notoriety for making available prerelease movies like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Search warrants were served on 10 people in the US and the site admins immediately faced criminal charges.

FULL ARTICLE

I post this here not to debate the merits of jailing someone for leaking copyrighted material, but to warn anyone out there - and, let's face it, there are a lot - to be careful what uploads you make available through services like BitTorrent.  Good thing Indaba is 100% legal! 

A journalist at The Independent has declared the live album dead!  Say it aint so!

Well, apparently it is.  It's no secret that the live album as an art form is not what it used to be.  As the author notes, back in the day a live album could send a relatively unknown musician into the stratosphere of stardom (See: Peter Frampton).  These days though, we rarely see a live album that isn't accompanied by a live DVD.  And, as the author also notes, these live DVDs rarely have the magic of a show when you take the images away.  Thank God for the Internet!

It is time to say farewell to some of the greatest albums ever made, albums that made careers, defined genres, and celebrated the raw power of music. Because the live album, once a rite of passage for every act of substance, is dead.

Yes, some bands may still make live albums: Muse, in particular, have released three live sets in a career of just four studio albums, but they are the exception. And just as there is no such thing as radio with pictures – it becomes television – then the live DVD is different from the live album. The visuals overwhelm the music, the spectacle takes over, and the sound loses its primacy.

Read the Full Article

Though I write for them occasionally, Metro - the free daily newspaper distributed on the New York Subway - isn't really a great paper for music news.  However, today they ran a nice article taking a look at the various mixtape-influenced sites on the Internet.  They discussed three sites in particular - seeqpod, muxtape and fuzz - giving each a short description and highlighting their various pros and cons.  Now, I'm friends with Muxtape creator, Justin Oullette, so, naturally, I tend to think his is the best out there, but Metro does present some downsides to the super-simple design and functionality.  It is difficult to find specific songs since the site is so personalized and it can be tough to gauge what tunes might be on a given muxtape thanks to fanciful names.

Seeqpod, on the other hand, is all about searching.  It hunts the Internet for the songs you tell it to find.  I think perhaps the author of this article has a rather loose definition of "mixtape" though, since seeqpod is more of a music search engine along the lines of G2P or TheHypeMachine.  Fuzz is somewhere between the two. I'm sure, too, that they left many sites off the list, a testament to how fun the idea of online mixtapes are. 

Anyway, go give the article a read if this at all interests you and play with each site to find the one - or none - best suited to your needs.  By the way, you can catch my Muxtape at Streeter.Muxtape.com.  Have a great weekend, everyone and, no matter how you do it, listen to more music.