DAILYSESSION

By Laura Sydell – NPR

It has been almost 10 years since Napster helped launch a revolution that turned the music industry on its head, allowing file-sharing fans to swap music on the Web. Record labels have blamed this phenomenon for a steep drop in CD sales.

Consider this: In early 2000, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached was on top of the Billboard album charts, selling nearly 2.5 million CDs in its first week. Now the bar has been lowered. Last year, it took only 1 million CDs for Lil’ Wayne to reach the top of the charts. [Read More]

By Will Glovinksy – The Villager

*In the hotbed microcosm that is Washington Square Park, it is rare that something changes with little fanfare. But that is what appears to have happened with skateboarders in the park. 

“There has been a significant decrease in skateboarder activity,” Gil Horowitz, leader of the Coalition for a Better Washington Square Park, declared. 

Horowitz, who can see the park from his apartment windows, wants to protect both the new granite benches — appealing targets for trick skaters — and senior-citizen parkgoers, who have complained about aggressive skateboarders who, they say, dart through crowds. Horowitz once described skaters as his group’s number-two concern after drug dealers, but now they seem to have made themselves scarce, at least while the sun shines. [Read More]

By Heidi Patalano – Metro

In mainstream culture, Bob Marley has long been credited as the progenitor of reggae, but before we can even ask, the Jamaican genre’s true father corrects the misconception.

“I’m the inventor of the word reggae,” boasts Frederick Hibbert, better known as Toots, the leader of Toots and the Maytals.

Calling from Kingston, Jamaica, his patois so thick it requires several relistens to the recording of our conversation, he says, “Bob Marley was older than me, but he didn’t create the word reggae.” [Read More]

By Mog

When an artist is on a major label, it can seem like they have to go walkin’ in artistic no-mans-land sometimes, especially when you read reports that the new album you’ve been hearing about and clamoring for is getting shelved. This is what happened in 1999 to Q-Tip’s record Kamaal The Abstract , the intended follow-up to his first solo outing, Amplified. And like most shelved albums, it leaked out there and became one of the famous lost albums. But recently, someone decided it was the time for the album to see the light of day and it is being released on September 15. You should hear it, just to see what all the fuss is about. The album leans more to the jazz/funk end of the spectrum with an almost spoken word vibe. That vibe feels like musical poetry (in that it tries to push you) and just like poetry, its not for everyone. [Read More]