Category Archives: News

By Anahad O’Connor – NY Times

DJ AM, a high-profile disc jockey who was as famous for his much-chronicled relationships as he was for his creative scratching and mixing on the celebrity club circuit, was found dead on Friday evening in his apartment in Manhattan, the police said.
The police said his body was found in his seventh-floor apartment in SoHo about 5:30 p.m. after friends had tried unsuccessfully to reach him for days. The chief police spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said the police did not suspect foul play. [Read More]

by Greg Sandoval – CNet News

Over the years, Michael Robertson, the man who founded pioneering digital music service MP3.com, has never hesitated to make a prediction about the sector’s future.

“It’s not a business,” Robertson has told me often in the past about ad-supported music sites. Frankly, in the past, I didn’t pay much attention. I do now.

The man who has fought more high-profile battles with the record industry than anybody in technology, and whose experience in digital music is nearly unmatched, has never appeared more prescient. He told me two years ago that ad-supported music sites would perish. The licensing fees required them to pay a penny, or some fraction of that, each time a service streamed a song to a user’s computer, and that was too high to sustain a business. And now just look at the sector. It’s a mess. [Read More]

By David Cotner – The Village Voice

After 20 years of being and becoming an institution, Warp Records is nearly impossible to sum up in one weekend of shows or one box set, no matter how extravagant. And yet the label—alternately christened Weird and Radical Projects or We Are Reasonable People—thus observes its two-decade anniversary in September, weathering changes in fickle music fashion and surviving the 2001 death of co-founder Rob Mitchell. Justifiably, they’re celebrating with both a multi-night, multi-venue, multi-media birthday party (much of it free, all of it aurally cataclysmic) and, for those who prefer objects to experiences, the Warp20 collection, whose size and breadth rival both Arthur C. Clarke‘s lunar monolith and Ace Hardware‘s common doorstop. [Read More]

By Elizabeth Dwoskin – The Village Voice

Mark Farese is a man with two feet and 1,400 pairs of sneakers. In his New Jersey basement, plastic shoeboxes line the floor in rows and stack up in six-foot-high walls. The boxes, custom-made for him in Japan, bear his nickname: “The Mayor.”

There’s a similar consistency inside the boxes. Almost every one contains a variation on the same product: Nike’s Air Force 1, the basketball shoe that the company introduced in 1982. [Read More]

By Vibe

  (New York NY) – InterMedia Partners, in partnership with its portfolio company Uptown Media Group along withBlackrock Digital today announced the purchase of the assets of Vibe and Vibe.com, the preeminent brands for hip-hop & R&B lifestyle and culture.  Founded in 1993 by Quincy Jones and Time Warner, Vibe has been an iconic brand for 16 years, responsible for setting trends among hip hop and mainstream culture. InterMedia is buying Vibe on the heels of the recent June shuttering of the magazine. [Read More]

By Bonnie Rosenstock – Chelsea Now

Urban Art. Street Art. Mural Art. Aerosol Art. Spray Art. Guerilla Art. Tag Art.  Call graffiti what you will — but there’s no denying it’s a big part of life in NYC (whether we realize it or not). That sentiment was expounded by painter/photographer Shell Sheddy.
Sheddy, who prefers to be called “an art activist,” is the curator of “GRAF: Reading the Writing on the Wall; images of the L.E.S. 1968 to present,” an overview of this contentious art form (currently showing at the Tompkins Square Park Library Gallery). [Read More]

By Nancy Dillon & Frank Lombardi – Daily News

Spike Lee‘s tribute to Michael Jackson is moving from Fort Greene Park to Prospect Park because big crowds are expected.

After the director announced plans for a celebration on Aug. 29, what would have been the King of Pop’s 51st birthday, some officials and community leaders pressed for a bigger venue. [Read More]

By TimeOut NewYork

On a hot, sticky night in 1988, the three 19-year-olds who made up De La Soul were getting nervous. The trio was about to play its first-ever gig, at an Irving Plaza dance party called Payday, and the main act—Stetsasonic, Tommy Boy Records’ big draw—hadn’t shown up. But even as the band waited in the wings, its troupe of dancers clutching giant cue cards with lyrics written on them—De La Soul knew it was onto something special. “I remember that night clearly,” MC Posdnuos (Kelvin Mercer to his mom) says today. “Being nervous and like, Wow, is this gonna go over well? But then we look into the crowd, and D.M.C. [of Run-D.M.C.] is in the front row! It was just amazing.” [Read More]

By Ben Detrick – The Village Voice

With his pink wardrobe, adoption of retro video-game character Sonic the Hedgehog as a spirit animal, and languid verses, Charles Hamilton was a newcomer built to thrive in a rap environment that has learned to tolerate a splash of DayGlo whimsy. The 21-year-old was cute and contempo and sensitive, but retained enough Harlem arrogance to escape being ostracized as a total pussy. After signing with Interscope Records in the summer of 2008, Hamilton spent the next year exuberantly building a reputation as an underdog smartass: He released several mixtapes, blogged with regularity, Twittered 50-some times a day, and reveled in the real-time furor he was able to create as a hip-hop fameball. [Read More]

By Julie Shapiro – The Villager

Bar owners seeking licenses will once again face tougher restrictions under a bill passed by the state Legislature this summer. 

The bill strengthens the 500-foot rule, which applies to bars and clubs if there are three or more existing liquor licenses nearby. The new legislation was prompted by a court ruling last November, which weakened the 500-foot rule and gave bar owners more leeway in neighborhoods that are densely packed with bars. [Read More]

By Ben Sisario – NY Times

A few months ago a peculiar item called “Favorite Recorded Scream” began to trickle into New York City record stores. Pressed on 12-inch vinyl in an edition of 500, it has little on its red cover except a list of 74 songs, each linked to a Manhattan record shop. [Read More]

By Deborah Sontag – NY Times

AS the peacock-blue Cadillac with the gold trim and fur lining spun on a giant turntable in the Stax Museum of American Soul Music here, Al Bell, the final owner of the late, great record label, chuckled. Decades before 50 Cent with his customized Rolls-Royce and Akon with his tricked-out Lamborghini, there was Isaac Hayeswith this pimped-out ride, an over-the-top gift from Stax to its over-the-top star, who wore slave chains like emancipatory bling across his bare, buff chest. [Read More]

By Jon Pareles – NY Times

Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains, N.Y. . He was 94.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation and his family announced. [Read More]

By Roberta Smith – NY Times

With their first public artwork in Manhattan, which went up at the northwest corner of Houston Street and the Bowery on July 17, the Brazilian brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who call themselves Os Gêmeos, bring graffiti art to its Rococo phase. Which is to say that their fantastic, epic mural, on a concrete wall about 17 feet high and about 51 feet long, is light and frothy, a dream of happiness with an underlying chord of melancholy. And everything in it is exquisitely fine-tuned and detailed, a dazzlement of effortless technique that sustains long bouts of close looking. It will remain up until March. [Read More]

By Josh Chamberlain – Village Voice

In 2001, longtime hardcore reggae fan Hidetsugo Haji faced a dilemma. He wanted to be a part of the “real thing,” but he lived in Japan, which lacked some basic pieces: a ghetto, for example, and the everyday struggles that come with such blatant economic disparity, not to mention the extraordinary opportunity to look such inequality in the face and overcome it. But thanks to dancehall reggae’s vibrant cassette-tape circuit, buoyed by live dancehall sessions and soundclashes between famous sound systems like Stone Love, Bass Odyssey, and Killamanjaro, he knew where to go. [Read More]

By Leo Standora – Daily News

ABoston Universitygrad student was ordered to pay four record labels $675,000 Friday for illegally downloading and sharing songs on the Internet – but he’s not singing the blues.

“I’m disappointed, but I’m thankful it wasn’t millions,” saidJoel Tenenbaum, a 25-year-old doctoral student in physics. “To me it sends a message of ‘We considered your side with some legitimacy.'”

If the verdict stands after a planned appeal, Tenenbaum said he’ll file for bankruptcy to cut his losses.
[Read More]

By EV Grieve-NY Press

According to some photos posted on EV Grieve, the former Mondo Kim’s spot in the East Village will become a new karaoke joint. What with the expansion of UCB into the EV, frat boys are going to have more and more places to spend their time. Oh, East Village,will you ever be able to survive this?

By Melena Ryzik-NY Times

LAST Sunday, under a slowly revolving disco ball, a dance floor in Brooklyn was jumping. The German D.J. Losoul spun techno and house, and the crowd — many in it wearing sunglasses — moved, two-stepping and twirling with arms raised. Toward the end of the party, when he let a single beat crescendo for several minutes before abruptly cutting it off, the crowd cheered — and then booed. The fun was nearly over, and it was barely 9 p.m. [Read More]

By Ben Sisario-NY Times  

LAST summer a sad but hopeful question made its way through Brooklyn: Where will the Pool Parties go?

It was the third year of concerts in McCarren Park Pool, the disused 1930s public swimming hole on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border, and they had begun to feel like an institution. Each Sunday afternoon the shows drew thousands of the young and fashionably dressed, yet the buzz-kill of mortality hung over them: McCarren was destined to become a real pool again, so the parties needed to find a new home. But where? [Read More]

By Debra Alban-CNN

Michael Jackson was an international superstar, and many in the black community herald him for breaking down racial barriers in the music industry.
Michael Jackson was one of the first black global superstars.

“Michael Jackson made culture accept a person of color way before Tiger Woods, way before Oprah Winfrey, way before Barack Obama,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton. “Michael did with music what they later did in sports and in politics and in television. And no controversy will erase the historic impact.” [Read More]

By Richard Perez-Pena-NewYork Times

Vibe, one of the nation’s leading popular music magazines, is closing immediately, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Word was broken early this afternoon by the Web site dailyfinance.com and spread to other music and media news sites. The spokeswoman, Tracy Nguyen, said the Vibe staff would be formally notified in a meeting at 2 p.m. She said she did not know how many people would be laid off as a result of the closure. [Read More]

By Sarah Stern –NewYork Press

Brooklyn Vegan is reporting that Studio B is set to close by the end of July. The Greenpoint club, located at 259 Banker St., has already switched management once this year, opening a rowdy rooftop area that has angered sleepy neighbors. News of the closing of the popular venue has sparked a venomous exchange online, as commenters search for someone to blame for the demise. [Read More]

By Bloomberg News-NY Times

The Universal Music Group, owned by Vivendi, and other record labels were awarded $1.92 million on Thursday in the retrial of a Minnesota woman accused of swapping music over the Kazaa Internet service.

The federal jury in Minneapolis said the woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, 32, of Brainerd, should pay $80,000 for each of the 24 songs that were posted on the site so others could download them. [Read More]

By Ben Sisario -NY Times

The sounds of the Velvet Underground echoed in the Virgin Megastore in Union Square on Sunday afternoon, as bargain-hunting passers-by and hard-core music shoppers poked through what few items remained at the last large-scale record store in New York City. [Read More]

By Swindle Magazine

Mike Giant’s career is the result of genuine curiosity and decades of drawing for five hours a day. He’s been—and remains—a world-class graffiti writer, tattooist and illustrator with his REBEL8 line. He’s made zines, skateboard designs, animations, prints, collages and stacks of interesting artist and company collaborations. He travels all over the world, rides his bikes, practices mindfulness, smokes a gang of weed, and is a fully tattooed goofball that one can bring to dinner parties. [Read More]

By Fact Magazine

Rvng Intl. , the New York label responsible for killer disco re-edits from the likes of Tim Sweeney, Lovefingers, Greg Wilson and Mock & Toof this week brings us the new project from Andre Bumrocks and Jason Convict!, Purple Brain.

Like JD Twitch’s RVNG punk “memoir”  60 Minutes / 10 Inches of Fear, Purple Brain’s self-titled offering is a vinyl + CD package. There’s a 7″ housing two new edits from Purple Brain,and a mix CD of rare-as-hen’s-teeth disco, freakbeat, drone, boogie, horrorcore and other shit that you’ll never, ever find yourself on vinyl. We’ll let RVNG explain in more depth: [Read More]

By Charly Wilder- The Village Voice

Tropicália in Furs, a hole-in-the-wall Brazilian record shop in the East Village, is the kind of place New Yorkers worry will disappear from the city forever. A tiny alternate universe where Technicolor dots bounce off glossy LP covers by Os Mutantes, the Cramps, and Martha Reeves & the Vandellas, it’s never crowded or empty, and the same affable connoisseur is always behind the counter. [Read More]

By DumboNYC

A collaboration by a group called 303 Collectives (named for the studio number at 135 Plymouth Street in Dumbo) painted the Water Street wall (between Jay and Pearl Streets) over the Memorial Day weekend. I spoke with Craig Anthony Miller (aka Cam) yesterday, who was kind enough to speak about how it got started and the images in the painting while traveling in his car. 303 artists include Cam, Demon 202, Tron, John Breiner and One 9 (who wasn’t there for the painting). [Read More]

By Sean Joseph-amNY

They work long hours and have to put up with rain, sleet, snow and hail — but unlike postal workers, they have to do it while hanging on the side of a building.

New York’s mural artists are hardly a vanishing breed — this boutique business is still a big draw among companies looking to stand out amid the city’s sea of billboards and hanging mesh ads. [Read More]

By Metro

They might play the hottest dance clubs from Paris to Ibiza and Tokyo to Milan during the weekends, but on school nights, wunderkind tech-house DJs The Martinez Brothers spend their time hanging in their parents’ basement in Monroe, New York. [Read more]

By Matt Harvey & Jamie Peck-NYPress

With the June 9 release of its latest album (and first for local indie Matador) quickly approaching, Sonic Youth—one of the most influential New York rock bands of all time—seems to be coming home to roost. 
Not only is the group putting out records with a small, New York–based label, but its members have spent the past week skulking downtown—below Delancey Street even!— and making it known that despite having a few decades on the kids making today’s noisy rock music, they’re still a force to be reckoned with. Without further ado, this week’s all–Sonic Youth “Bash Compactor.”  [Read More]

By Ernest Barteldes-NewYork Press

In the spring of 1994, a jazz aficionado named Mitch Borden started the West Village–based Smalls Jazz Club, an after-hours basement where musicians and fans came together to celebrate the music they loved. Back then, things were quite different:There was a $10 cover charge and a loose BYOB policy.The music went on pretty much until the sun came up—a laidback scene quite different from other mainstream jazz venues in Manhattan. For starters, patrons not only brought six-packs from the neighborhood deli but also brought pizza, Chinese food or whatever munchies they could get.

But that was then. These days Smalls has a full bar and heftier cover charge, but the spirit remains. [Read More]

By Ryan Nakashima(AP)-Yahoo news

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – In 2004, when MySpace was still getting going, recording label executive Courtney Holt noticed that musicians were using the Web site to connect more intimately with their fans, through detailed blogs and behind-the-scenes photos. So Holt arranged to meet MySpace’s founders.

“I remember going into his office when we were very small,” said MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, “when most other companies wouldn’t pay attention to us.” [Read More]

By Jonathan Melber_The Huffington Post

A few days ago, the Associated Press announced that Obama’s famous HOPE poster amounts to copyright infringement. The artist behind the poster, Shepard Fairey, has never hidden the fact that he based his iconic creation on a photograph he found through Google. The AP thinks it owns the copyright to that photograph, since Mannie Garcia was freelancing for the AP when he shot it. With posters sold out, a special edition in theNational Portrait Gallery, and major exhibitions in New York and Boston, the AP wants in on the windfall. [Read More]

By Fact

The World of Arthur Russell, put together by Soul Jazz Records in 2004, is generally regarded as the best available Arthur Russell compilation. Since its release, the New York composer/cellist/singer/producer has gone from cult legend to media sensation, culminating in the release last year of doleful but affectionate documentary Wild Combination. Now, after a couple of years spent out of print we’re pleased to announce that it’s being re-issued on both CD and 3xLP. [Read More]

 By Jim Farber-Daily News

The cry of “Queens is in the house!” just gained new resonance.

Last night, the undisputed kings of Queens hip hop, Run-D.M.C., were inducted into music’s most exclusive house: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They’re only the second hip-hop act to make the grade (Grand Master Flash earned the inaugural nod in 2007). [Read More]

By Cortney Harding-Billboard(NewYork)

During the past two years, one 29-year-old Bay Area music fan reckons she’s spent about $200 on music.

She gets most of her music for free from blogs and BitTorrent trackers, but one recent release struck her as cool enough to get her to lay down her credit card. That album, a deluxe reissue of theBeastie Boys album “Paul’s Boutique,” cost more than she spends on music in most years. 
[Read More]

By Patrick Arden-Metro

East Harlem’s 116th Street has long been lined with Mexican vendors selling tacos and quesadillas for a couple of bucks apiece.

But since last fall, vendors claim, the city has targeted them, routinely pouring bleach on food served without a permit and levying $1,000 fines. Most pay without complaint, they say, because their undocumented status makes them vulnerable. [Read More]

by Greg Sandova-Cnet news

SpiralFrog met its end just days ago, and already, operators of other ad-supported music services are rushing to put distance between their business models and that of the doomed site.
“The concept was good, but the management, board (not all), and execution were poor,” wrote Robin Kent, the former CEO of SpiralFrog who went to work as an adviser to Qtrax, one of SpiralFrog’s competitors. “It was obvious to anyone…it wouldn’t survive.” [Read More]

By Joseph Alexiou-NewYork Press

The red and black walls of Demask, a high-end fetish wear boutique on Orchard Street, are lined with racks of leather straps, latex jocks, corsets, bodysuits, butcher aprons and other buckles, prongs, chains and kinky accessories. 

But according to the Antoinette, the store’s manager, who can be found most days and evenings at the counter, Demask is experiencing the economic slump in its own peculiar way. [Read More]

By Randy Kennedy-The NY Times

Back in the day, Cope2, a Bronx graffiti legend as big as a linebacker, usually found himself in proximity to police officers only when they were tracking him in the metallic darkness of a subway yard or when they finally caught up to him and hauled him in. [Read More]

By Vanishing Newyork

Along with frozen yogurt joints, the East Village has been overwhelmed by ramen noodle shops. Ramen shops are the new banks–one on every corner. And now another one is coming…to the corner long occupied by Love Saves the Day. [Read More]

By Beatportal

Warp Records, one of, if not the foremost label in the world of electronica, is celebrating its landmark 20th anniversary this year with a host of parties across the globe. [Read More]

By  Coolfer

Before the BusinessWeek.com article by Douglas MacMillan on consumers’ use of streaming services as substitutes for purchasing, I was the only one (as far as I know) to point out this harmful downside to free, ad-supported services.

In December 2008, I wrote that streaming services are not a boon for record labels because of two key reasons. First, they are a poor way to monetize recorded music assets. Here’s what I wrote in December: [Read More]

By Fact

The number of classic records released by Island is ridiculous. Career-defining albums from Nick Drake, John Martyn, Tom Waits, King Sunny Ade, Tom Tom Club, Pulp, Roxy Music, The B52s, Sly & Robbie, The Slits, Grace Jones, DJ Shadow, Portishead – the list literally goes on and on. And on.  [Read More]

By LINDA HOBBS-VIBE

Many rappers claim to work hard, but none seems to have had more energy to get busy like the late rapper Tupac Shakur. And to prove it, the deceased emcee is slated to drop another (you read right) album that was reportedly done to smooth over the West Coast’ tension with the East. 

In 1996, Pac teamed up with Boot Camp Click to work on the album, which will be called One Nation. The project was one of the rapper’s ways of showing media he wasn’t a bully, during the height of his beef with the Notorious B.I.G. After his murder September of that year, the album was shelved for years. A.E.G. has since acquired the rights of the 18-track project. 

One Nation features appearances by Tha Outlawz, Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Greg Nice, Big Daddy Kane, and the Notorious B.I.G. 

It’s scheduled to be released March 20, through iTunes.

By JEN CARLSON -Gothamist

So just where was artist Yoshimoto Nara tossing back a few before his arrest in February? Prior to getting arrested for drawing some smiley face graffiti on the L platform, he was at Niagara bar in the East Village. He adorned the place with original artwork on the walls there, too, but the owners didn’t try to arrest him, instead they put it under plexiglass to preserve it.

By ABBY GOODNOUGH –NYTimes

BOSTON — This may be the only place in America where Shepard Fairey, the street artist whose omnipresent portrait of Barack Obamahas become a touchstone, is not fully feeling the love.

Mr. Fairey appeared in two municipal courts here this week to fight a cascade of vandalism charges accusing him of pasting his work on public and private property from the Back Bay to Roxbury. While this is not his first encounter with the police — Mr. Fairey has been arrested more than a dozen times for posting his art on whatever surface catches his eye — it appears to be his biggest legal tangle to date. [Read More]

By Scott A. Rosenberg-amNewYork

They’re big, heavy and cumbersome. The sound crackles and pops. They’re relics of a bygone era.

So what is it about the vinyl record – admittedly a truly iconic item – that caused sales to nearly double in 2008? [Read More]