Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: You say you want to make money in the music business and you don’t care how. Let’s see if you’re ready. Greedy? Check. Ruthless? Check. Predatory? Check. Okay, you just might be well-prepared to screw artists by putting on a music [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: In blending soul, R&B, gospel, and rock, Solomon Burke had the ability to reach from the stage and shake listeners to their very core. The might and majesty of Burke is honored in this updated version of a review of his [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: David William Kearney is a guitar slinger who will happily do axe-battle with you using blues, R&B, or rock. He’ll take on all comers with sweet toned ballads or psychedelic frenzy. And as this long-lost nineteen-ninety-eight article shows, the man has [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Joke book or important guide to the music industry? Author and compiler Jeffrey Weber believes it is both. One thing is certain: you will laugh, wince, howl, grimace, and laugh some more. Two musicians walk into a bar. One doesn’t order [...]

Music Industry Newswire Column: Playing in rock bands, creating soundtracks for motion pictures and television, and writing modern classical music would be an impossible combination for most people but composer/performer Jocelyn Pook is succeeding in all of these arenas. Jocelyn Pook does not hear sound [...]

Music Industry Newswire REVIEW: Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington’s music is not often discussed alongside the work of Igor Stravinsky, Bela Bartok, and Arnold Schoenberg, but Reed College professor David Schiff convincingly makes a case for comparing and contrasting the creativity of each of these composers. [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: The sound of threatening and dangerous music almost changed forever with the genre-bending tracks from White Zombie. They blazed briefly, but the economics of their situation caused an implosion and music is the loser.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: After several visits to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, the primary reactions were trepidation and consternation. The building itself is quite impressive but the well-packaged contents of the RARHOFAM are often silly and ultimately insignificant.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: His name was Paul Atkinson and he played electric guitar. He made music in the most inventive of the British Invasion bands, The Zombies, whose gorgeous harmonies, infectious hooks and intriguing jazz-pop blend made huge sellers of ‘She’s Not There,’ ‘Tell Her No’ and ‘Time of the Season.’

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: When you hear the word ‘image’ you may think of a pretty picture or the manufactured persona of someone who is famous for being famous. But if you say ‘Baron Wolman image,’ suddenly you’re talking about beauty, truth, and iconographic permanence.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Got a new product to announce? Then have a launch party! Got a cause, a business, a candidate? Launch party! But what’s the recipe? You line-up these ingredients: venue, food, alcohol, DJ, band, singers, photographers, videographers, and ink-slingers like me. Stir together and serve chilled.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Some of today’s rock music has excitement, power, and a terrific touch of sinful intent. But in addition to those things, Punk music had danger. By looking back, can we look forward to a rock resurgence?

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Smoothly written and dynamic, Sean Wilentz’ book is full of insight, commentary, and historical perspective about songwriting’s greatest poet. Like his subject, the work is reflection and refraction of fact, fancy, and fable.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Storytellers are to be cherished and Clark Terry should be on a pedestal for his thoroughly entertaining autobiography. Brimming with life, love, music, and great characters, this book is as much a history of the twentieth century as it is a history of his ninety years (and counting!) .

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Not a musician, yet a giant of jazz. Undiplomatic, but an ambassador of American culture. Often impolite, but always truthful. Unequaled, yet a champion of equality. And that just touches the surface of Norman Granz, producer of more music than one [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: You may think of spoken word recordings as esoteric or antiquated, but in Jacob Smith’s new book they have a different purpose: to illuminate the roots of today’s society. When NASA launched the Voyager missions during 1977, the two spacecraft contained [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Larry John McNally uses emotion like a paintbrush when creating songs. You may not know his name, but you’ve heard his work performed by Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, Don Henley, Aaron Neville, Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, Jennifer Warnes, Atlantic Starr, Average White [...]

REVIEW: From his smooth writing style to his commitment to interviewing nearly every possible source involved with the material, there’s a lot to like about Joseph Vogel’s new book on the King of Pop. In fact, considering the poor quality of much that has previously [...]

REVIEW: Singer and professional vocal coach Teri Danz decided to put her own private lesson plan into a book with accompanying CD. The results cover less than fifty pages but singers will find something valuable on every page. You can sing, right? You hit all [...]

REVIEW: Playing together since 1986, Dennis Davison and Jonathan Lea have now done the impossible: they have created an original Christmas album that still rocks (well, folk-rocks, anyway). Plus, it covers all the emotions that surround the season, not just the traditional upbeat ones. That [...]

REVIEW: Music of the avant-garde is for those who are open to outrage, shock, conceptualized art, and boundary-pushing ideas. If you fit in that category, you will enjoy these tales of pioneers wrestling with the 1960s triumphs of their tragedies. Or perhaps it’s the other way around.

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Until a few days ago, Nektar was nothing more than a puzzling footnote to me. According to everything I had read, this band was a standout progressive rock outfit in Europe during the nineteen seventies. Not making it big in the [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Buddy Holly. Songwriter. Rock and pop star. Not a one-hit or two-hit wonder, but a 27-hit wonder, all in about 18 months of worldwide fame. Born September 7, 1936, died February 3, 1959, but his songs will live until there is no more music.

REVIEW: Hearing one of the softer tracks from this album playing in my studio, a visitor dismissed it as “NIN lite.” I hear it as something much more complicated: “NIN expanded to include the invasion and conquest of modern classical music.” A chameleon alters its [...]

REVIEW: If his name sounds familiar, you are probably already a fan of rockabilly. But even if that genre’s blend of rock and country ain’t your thing, these songs are so much fun that you might become a Burnette-ette by the time you get halfway [...]

REVIEW: Before seeing the singer perform live, this album sat around the studio for a few months. After playing it a couple of times at various volume levels, the urge to write about it became too palpable to pass up. While several tracks leave me [...]

REVIEW: Noisemakers unite! Calling all anti-composers and radical music theorists! That was the idea of a group of wildly unpredictable academics and stars of the experimental music world back in “the sixties.” Cage, Oliveros, Neuhaus, Reich, Budd, Foss and dozens more appear in this collection [...]

ARTICLE: You already know that pitching songs to music supervisors can be a good thing. In fact, everyone else also knows it, from players and songwriters to publishers and managers. That’s part of the problem. Too many people involved with music are aware of the [...]

REVIEW: Back in the early 1990s, Randy Poe authored a book entitled “Music Publishing: A Songwriter’s Guide.” Several revisions, editions and rewrites later, Poe returned with “The New Songwriter’s Guide to Music Publishing” (Writer’s Digest Books, 157 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1582978048, $18.99) and I am here [...]

MusicIndustryNewswire COLUMN: Quick, take this test: Which of the following names do you recognize? Eddie Kramer. Elliot Scheiner. Matt Forger. Ken Allardyce. Michael C. Ross. Rafa Sardina. Joe Chiccarelli. Brent Fischer. Time’s up. Pencils down. Anyone have some answers? (Anyone, anyone, Bueller. . . ?) [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Not in my house! How many kids have heard that phrase from an outraged parent who is nearly apoplectic over the latest sonic creation of artists in rock, pop, rap, modern country, goth, death metal, etc.? From the Andrew Sisters’ “Rum [...]

MusicIndustryNewswire COLUMN: Some songs sound special. There are recordings where there are licks that are tasty and satisfying every time you hear them. Recordings with such a powerful groove that you dance even if you’re sitting down. Recordings where the atmosphere or the feel is [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: For the first twenty years of rock ‘n’ roll, brand names were not often associated with band names. The prevailing view was that corporate sponsorship represented crass commercialism. But by the time of The Rolling Stones 1981 tour, things had changed. [...]

Music Industry Newswire COLUMN: Let’s say you want to make some money in the music business. Let’s also say you have no scruples about how you get the cash as long as it looks somewhat legit. There are many dark alleys down which you can [...]

COLUMN: Since I started managing a music publishing company, many songwriters, singers, bands, managers and composers have sent me e-mails asking about decisions they need to make in their careers. One of the most common questions is “Should I sign a non-exclusive agreement with a [...]

COLUMN: There was a strange shift in the cosmos in 1999. “That’s when ‘mp3′ first overtook ‘sex’ as the top search term on Yahoo,” notes Tim Quirk of Rhapsody. And why was that change taking place? Because there was “a new piece of software written [...]

LOS ANGELES, Calif. /Music Industry Newswire/ — Sleek beats and eerie melodies highlight ‘We All Love Bright Shiny Things,’ the new album from Jonny Harmonic, now on iTunes from Golosio Publishing (www.golosio.com). Harmonic is a mystifying musician no one has ever seen. “The guy comes [...]

COLUMN: People have been sharing my music ever since I released my first album in 2002. True, I offered free tracks from “Grin Groove” to DJs, producers and remixers, but those efforts garnered publicity that led to revenue. Plus, it introduced “The G-Man” to other [...]

LOS ANGELES, Calif. /Music Industry Newswire/ — With hooded figures dancing under a full moon, spectral guitarists torturing their instruments, and large-suited men manipulating stomp boxes, amplifiers and mixing boards, the latest video from FookMovie (www.fookmovie.com) is an explosion of color that matches the sound [...]

COLUMN: From chestnuts to carols, games to sleigh races, and loose translations to loose women, there are some interesting facts about the sounds of the season. Recording artist and commercial music composer Scott G presents some eyebrow-raising information about the most familiar and famous holiday music of all time.

COLUMN: Three personal managers of independent artists outline pathways for success in an increasingly competitive marketplace “An artist’s music must be something I love,” stated Jennifer Yeko of True Talent Management. “It has to be music I want to hear in my personal life as [...]