The Fortress

This is just stuff i think about. mySpace through its saturation and its little music widgets really threatens, i think, to turn the music world upside down.

Consider a partially hypothetical situation

MySpace offeres a "band page" for free to which you can upload songs for listening pleasure of a potential 50-million-plus audience.

For $5/mo you get unlimited uploads and the ability to sell your music downloads via myspace. You charge $1.00 -- more or less -- and myspace gets a 10-cent cut.

If you, the band, play the social networking game right, you may have a moneymaker here such that you don't need a record label for major success.

If anybody is going to do it, my money is on -- of all people -- MySpace.

They now support video and audio sales/downloads.

With the combination of a delivery medium and a ready audience of 50 million users, they just might be a threat.

OH.... 24 Hours is a Fox show. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox. He also owns MySpace. Wow. So he's got content, delivery and a ready customer base. Nice.

SWEET BABY ZOMBIE JESUS, this is too good...

NIN and the Bauhaus are playing the Marcus Amphiteatre on 2 July.

Tickets go on sale April 8th.

Gotta go..... Gotta go.... Gotta go....

Hah! Another Christmas CD. As a teenager, my Die Kreuzen record was a companion to the rest of my growing punk collection. Die Kreuzen was Milwaukee's seminal punk band from the '80's. Their self-titled début album featured raspy screaming, shrieking and frantic, crazy fast guitar work. The lyrics definitely expressed the type of teenage alienation found in the punk scene of that time. Their second album, October Files, was quite a bit different. In one word: mellow. Distorted guitars still graced the songs- but much, much more mature and serious. They kept on going down the mellow, mature route through the rest of their career. This is all to say that their repertoire is varied. And that makes for an interesting assortment of covers.

My brother in-law likes to give me interesting CD's for X-mas. This year I got "The Sexual Life of the Savages - Underground Post-Punk from Sao Paulo, Brazil"
It is surprizinly fresh and energetic. The first half of it seems like it could be from the late eighties anywhere in Europe. There are bands that sound a lot like Joy Division and early Cure. About the second half or so, some Latin percussion creeps in. The songs begin to sound more like early Red Hot Chili Peppers.
According to the CD booklet, all of the bands are long since defunct - too bad!