First up this week, let’s start with the campaign to get ‘Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead’ into the charts after death of Margaret Thatcher. Due to the mighty power of the internet like most other song campaigns it has worked with the song charting at number 2. Although, there has been a lot of controversy over whether it was right for BBC to play it on the chart show or not with the final call coming earlier in the week saying they would play a snippet of it [which lasted 7 seconds] instead of the full song. Was that wrong of the BBC? There is no offence language in it so it has not been banned officially, I personally think they should have played it, there is way too much censorship going on with songs these days for radio anyway though so I guess it was inevitable the song would not get played in it’s entirety.
Line of Best Fit reported last week that vinyl sales are up, reaching their highest point in 16 years. Physical sales of music have been falling and are down around 5%, mainly due to decline in CD sales. Though the sales of vinyl’s is up with $177 million being made from the sale of the 12″ and 7″ versions of music last year. Jack White’s Blunderbuss was reportedly the biggest selling vinyl album of 2012.
A collaboration between The Strokes‘ guitarist Nick Valensi and former frontwoman of The Distillers, Brody Dalle was confirmed this week. They’ve been working together in the studio this week and Dalle posted a picture of Valensi on her Instagram which sparked plenty of comments with many suggesting a full album.
It was Coachella over the weekend and as usual I was ridiculously jealous that I yet again am not there, maybe one year I will make it. It always seems to have a really good line up and it always has good weather, I can’t really imagine a festival with perfect weather all weekend but I’ve definitely seen some amazing bills over the past couple of years. Did you go to Coachella or watch the performances online and who were your stand-outs?
Finally, a really brilliant read for all wannabe music journalists/reviewers appeared online in Billboard this week written by Michael Azerrad, a music writer and author. The writer talks about how saturated the world of music writing is these days with so many people reviewing albums and singles online, he feels that some writing may have lost it’s magic and is not as well respected as it once was when the only reviews you would see were in the magazines such as NME and Melody Maker. He also talks about column inches being squeezed when it comes to reviews in print with an album review maybe only stretching to 3 or 4 sentences in magazines which can leave people a little disappointed as that little space does not really give you much space to write about the sound of the album at all. I completely agree with him about firstly the distinction of criticism [writing a review] and music journalism [getting out there and getting information for features pieces on bands etc] and that music journalism isn’t really at a brilliant standard at the moment with most magazines not really producing brilliantly written content and the over saturation online means that there can only really be a few gems in all the other writing. It’s something I feel really strongly about wanting to be a music writer myself, I write about it now on here and I would love to write for an actual publication where I get paid for my words at some point and I know I’m not of the level of some music writers right now but I’d like to think that all the practice I get writing on here is making my writing a lot better and something worth reading. Read all of what he had to say here.
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Mixtape Couture 