As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it’s a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music — except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture.Alternative rocker Damon Krukowski • Discussing how his 90s-era bands, Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi, have struggled to make any money of note from Spotify and Pandora. In fact, in the most recent quarter, “Pandora paid a total of $64.17 for use of the entire Galaxie 500 catalogue,” he explains, which splits to roughly 33 cents per song per member for the entire catalog. Krukowski’s in an interesting spot — one where the band he’s best known for has a cult audience, but perhaps not one large enough to sustain a high number of listens. Which is no fun for the band, because they need 47,680 listens on Spotify — or 312,000 plays on Pandora — to earn the equivalent earnings they’d get from one album sale.
Because we need a mental health break: Longtime readers might know that we’re big on both of Bradford Cox’s musical projects, Deerhunter and Atlas Sound, and the new Atlas Sound is straight-up technicolor. His older albums under the solo moniker had a very insular bedroom-pop feel. But this is different. “Terra Incognita” is the sound of a guy taking his small idea into a big studio while keeping the idea small. Perhaps this big studio might match the level of success the project has this time around.
Want to get attention for your music? Find a clever way to get noticed on YouTube. And make sure it involves iPhones. And possibly subway cars. That’s what the four dudes of NYC band Atomic Tom did, and it’s worked out pretty well for them in the last two days (200,000+ views). If we were these guys, we’d probably just ditch the instruments altogether and keep doing stuff like this, because they’re insanely good at it.
That sounds familiar. We can’t quite place it. … it has that “one of the best indie-rock songs of the last decade” sound to it. Wait, did this company totally rip off Fleet Foxes and think that nobody would notice? Bastards. source
Fleet Foxes classic watered down for Spanish soccer commercial
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