Posted by walter | March 9th, 2008 | 9:42 pm
Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and the families of the other Beatles have reached an agreement with their record labels to make music from the Beatles available for download on the iTunes music store. According to UPI, McCartney has reached a $400 million agreement with iTunes for the distribution of the Beatles’ back catalog.” (via CrunchGear)
There’s currently no time-frame listed to say when songs from The Beatles will be made available on the iTunes Music Store or other music services.
Tags: iTunes, Paul McCartney, The Beatles
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Posted by walter | August 7th, 2006 | 11:43 pm
Hawthorne Heights (myspace) has left Victory Records on “anything but amicable” terms. As reported at UpBeetMusic and PastePunk and originally posted on a blog entry on Hawthorne Height’s myspace, they are leaving the label due to irreconcilable differences with the CEO of Victory Records, Tony Brummel. Not only that, they acuse the man of having a giant ego and robbing them of thousands of dollars of album royalties. Now they’re suing.
With this news, it’s hard to know how to respond and help out the bands you love. I’d certainly recommend doing what you can to help out bands on Victory Records including Hawthorne Heights, Spitalfield, Bayside, June, The Junior Varsity, Streetlight Manifesto, and The Forecast. But if you want to show them some love, you should probably go to their shows and buy the merch there, otherwise they may never see one cent that you spent on them.
Tony Brummel has made the news before for famously not selling music from any Victory artists on iTunes despite strong customer demand. I found a few articles in a quick search of Google: a (supposed) email from Tony, a slam, and a well-thought response to his statements. Oh, and before you try to defend his reasoning, realize it had nothing to do with DRM, and everything to do with wanting cash advances, a percentage of iPod sales revenues, more expensive song prices, and other considerations from Apple in exchange for offering Victory’s music library. Yup, this guy has an ego, so you can understand how the bands could have a problem with it. Taking Back Sunday had problems before now.
Back to the topic at hand, read on for the full post from Hawthorne Heights’ blog…
The REAL Manifesto
Due to recent events we have decided to leave Victory Records. Our departure is anything but amicable. We have decided to leave Victory, in part due to the actions of the man who sits at the head of the label, Tony Brummel. Tony Brummel is a man that cares more about his ego and bank account than the bands themselves.
Many of you are familiar with the greed driven letters sent out by Mr. Brummel: his manifesto calling rock supporters to arms and virtual declaration of war on hip-hop and Ne-Yo done under the guise of a band message; as well as the street-team letter which instructed people to re-arrange our CDs, putting them in higher visibility areas in stores. Unfortunately, the head of street-team, Abby Valentine, who understandably resigned following the incident, took the fall for this. At the time of the letters we were branded as racists by some, all over a letter we did NOT write, targeting a genre which we have NOTHING against whatsoever. Because of these letters, our second album debuted at ..3 on the charts, an incredible feat, which would normally be cause for joy, but now is tainted much like Barry Bonds statistics.
When questioned about the letters Tony was more upset that we had told the press that he actually wrote the letters (not us) because he was more worried about rumors surrounding Taking Back Sunday and Thursdays exoduses being justified than the credibility and reputation of his current biggest band.
Couple these letters with him threatening the head program director at Q101 in Chicago for putting the new Taking Back Sunday song into rotation to the point in which the program director pulls Saying Sorry from rotation and you can see why we would more than question whether or not the head of our label cares about us or his own ego more.
Tony is a man whose greed knows no bounds. After selling more than 1.2 million copies of The Silence In Black and White and If Only You Were Lonely, we have never seen a single dollar in artist royalties from Victory Records. Tony will claim that we have not recouped, a term used by those in the music business which means the label has spent more money in advertising than has been made by CD sales. In fact questionable accounting practices are the culprit and we are in fact owed substantial amounts of money much like audits from Taking Back Sunday, Thursday and Atreyu have uncovered.
You may be wondering, why now? Why did they wait three years before saying something? Why did they sound happy in that interview??? Like being in an abusive relationship, we let certain things slide as we were afraid, as many of the bands on Victory are, to stick our neck out for fear of being beaten, in this case represented by the threat of not being promoted as has been the case with certain bands on the roster. Were done being abused. The reasons stated above represent the final straw in a huge pile of hay that broke our backs.
Undoubtedly Tony will proclaim that we are ungrateful and our success was due solely to his promotional efforts. In reality, promotion is only a portion of the equation in a bands success. Even then, in our case especially, promotional efforts can be attributed to the hard work of the band and staff at Victory, many of whom recently resigned or were fired due to differences with Tony. Non-stop touring, dedicated fans and songs (we challenge Tony to sell over 1 million blank CDs) account for the rest of the equation.
Weve accomplished more in three years than most bands do in a lifetime and for that we are extremely grateful and consider ourselves very fortunate. Our situation with Tony Brummel is indicative of issues that all bands on Victory Records encounter on some level or another.
We have decided to remove ourselves from the negative situation so that we can continue to do what we love best and focus on writing and playing music to people that care about what we have created.
Hawthorne Heights
Tags: Hawthorne Heights, iTunes, Victory Records
Posted in Music, News | 1 Comment »
Posted by walter | July 28th, 2006 | 7:26 pm
iTunes and Facebook have teamed up to provide free “back-to-school” music samplers. The good news is this works for any member of Facebook including alumni (muahaha). New samplers will be released weekly.
All you’ve gotta do is join the Apple Students group and click on the add at the top of the group page. It’ll then message you a code to use in iTunes (when you’re in the music store, look for the “Redeem” link part way down the left side of the page) that’ll let you down the 25 songs for the week.
It appears this promotion will be going through the end of September.
The sampler for this week, “Alternative,” includes songs from The Early November, Cartel, My American Heart, Grandaddy, 30 Seconds to Mars, and more. See the full list at the Apple Students group on Facebook.
Tags: Facebook, iTunes
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Posted by walter | June 4th, 2006 | 12:48 pm
Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of articles about the Russian music site AllOfMp3.com. AllOfMp3.com is a music download site similar to iTunes or Napster wherein users pay a certain price in order to download digital copies of songs and albums. Whereas iTunes, Napster, and similar services generally charge $1 per song, AllOfMp3’s price blows away the competition at prices of $0.03 per minute of song (generally $0.10 – $0.20 per song).
Woah! A four minute song for $0.12? Hook me up?!
So how come more people don’t use this service? Actually, a lot of people do. It was recently ranked second in popularity in Britain behind only iTunes, and it’s been gaining popularity elsewhere in the world as well. With these kind of prices, its newly unveiled music store software called allTunes which makes purchasing/downloading fairly easy (though still more difficult than the iTunes music store and less feature-filled than Napster), and it’s popularity… where’s the explosion? Where’s the commercials? The fanclubs?
Heck, I’d join the fanclub if it cost as much as a couple songs. The price is everything, but the price happens to be the problem. The dirty not-so-secret with AllOfMp3 is: it’s probably illegal. The AllOfMp3.com entry at Wikipedia gives a description of the service along with a rundown of some of the legal problems.
Let me summarize for you. For every song you spend at AllOfMp3, approximately zero cents goes to the artist. They don’t pay royalties, they don’t pay record labels, they don’t really pay anybody. I have no idea where they get the songs from, but basically you’re paying them to make you a copy of a digital file. Your favorite bands get screwed. They’ll go broke if you buy your music from this site.
If you don’t mind buying music from the back alleys of Russia, though, this site is your sweet sugar daddy.
As an example of the sick deal you get at this site, here’s what $10 can buy you:
• Panic! At the Disco – A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out (full album)
• Koyaanisqatsi – Soundtrack (if you’ve never seen the movie this soundtrack is from, you should — minimalism at its best)
• The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (full album)
• George Winston – Forrest (full album)
• Jimmy Eat World – Stay On My Side Tonight (EP)
• five miscellaneous singles
And two cents left over! To buy the same on iTunes you’d have to spend approximately $55. Can you see why people like it?
To close this out, though: even though the store has great prices, buying music from Russian pirates will end up destroying the bands you love. Probably. If you like good music that isn’t Britney Spears. Y’know, smaller artists, smaller labels, smaller budgets.
Support the bands you love.
Update: The US government is threatening to keep Russia from joining the WTO if they don’t shut down allofmp3.com.
Tags: allofmp3, iTunes, napster
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