Punk(ish) singer Avril Lavigne is about to get a whole bunch richer.  The Canadian pop-rocker has wracked about $2 million in YouTube revenue from plays on her videos.  Her video for "Girlfriend" currently holds the number 2 spot on YouTube's most viewed list with a staggering 92,585,577 views.  That's almost 1/3 of the US population (although I get a sense that many a 14 year-old boy may have watched more than once).  Either way, according to PaidContent.org , this entitles Lavigne to around $2 million in shared revenue. 

Avril Lavigne is set to score a big pay day thanks to YouTube revenue. Her Nettwerk Management CEO Terry McBride told MusicTank’s Face To Face With The Millennials in London today: ”There’s about a $2 million cheque waiting for her for all her YouTube plays .” The YouTube video for Lavigne’s Girlfriend track is nearing a mammoth million views after a coordinated fan campaign . Next up, Nettwerk is targeting the Far-East: “We will start a Mandarin website (for Lavigne) with Mandarin ads and we will make a ****load of money , because 40 percent of her intellectual property value comes from Asia.”

Course language aside, it sounds like McBride certainly knows the online distribution game.  Or maybe it's just that people enjoy watching music videos.  A quick glimpse at YouTube's most viewed listing shows a majority of the clips on there are music videos .  It's nice to know that YouTube, briefly thought to be a revenue drain for musicians, is now showing itself capable of generating significant cash flow.  When God shuts one window (CDs) He open another (The Internet). 

And now, for old time's sake, here is the video that made a rich girl even richer. 

Great news for my mom and anyone else who grew up loving The Beatles, a lost interview has been discovered in a garage.  From the BBC...

For 44 years a canister of film had been stored in a damp garage in South London; unopened, unloved and almost thrown away. But, finally, somebody took a look inside - and realised they had unearthed a piece of pop history. This is the story of a lost Beatles interview - which is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday for the first time since it was originally recorded.

The nine-minute interview took place in the studios of Scottish Television on Thursday, 30 April, 1964. It was thought to have been recorded on a tele-cine machine in London, and stored in a can, now rusted with the passing of decades. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the fragile film has survived at all.

Click To Listen

BitTorrent, the service that allows you to illegally download, well, anything could get a young man in quite a heap of trouble.  From an article on ArsTechnica...

The MPAA has won a jury conviction for criminal copyright infringement, opening the doors to many more cases like it in the future. A federal jury convicted 26-year-old Daniel Dove for both felony copyright infringement as well as conspiracy, the US Department of Justice announced on Friday. Dove, the last remaining administrator of EliteTorrents.com who did not plead guilty, now faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case goes all the way back to 2005, when investigators raided EliteTorrents and shut the site down with the help of the MPAA. At the time, EliteTorrents was one of the most popular Bit Torrent trackers around and had gained notoriety for making available prerelease movies like Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Search warrants were served on 10 people in the US and the site admins immediately faced criminal charges.

FULL ARTICLE

I post this here not to debate the merits of jailing someone for leaking copyrighted material, but to warn anyone out there - and, let's face it, there are a lot - to be careful what uploads you make available through services like BitTorrent.  Good thing Indaba is 100% legal! 

A journalist at The Independent has declared the live album dead!  Say it aint so!

Well, apparently it is.  It's no secret that the live album as an art form is not what it used to be.  As the author notes, back in the day a live album could send a relatively unknown musician into the stratosphere of stardom (See: Peter Frampton).  These days though, we rarely see a live album that isn't accompanied by a live DVD.  And, as the author also notes, these live DVDs rarely have the magic of a show when you take the images away.  Thank God for the Internet!

It is time to say farewell to some of the greatest albums ever made, albums that made careers, defined genres, and celebrated the raw power of music. Because the live album, once a rite of passage for every act of substance, is dead.

Yes, some bands may still make live albums: Muse, in particular, have released three live sets in a career of just four studio albums, but they are the exception. And just as there is no such thing as radio with pictures – it becomes television – then the live DVD is different from the live album. The visuals overwhelm the music, the spectacle takes over, and the sound loses its primacy.

Read the Full Article

Though I write for them occasionally, Metro - the free daily newspaper distributed on the New York Subway - isn't really a great paper for music news.  However, today they ran a nice article taking a look at the various mixtape-influenced sites on the Internet.  They discussed three sites in particular - seeqpod, muxtape and fuzz - giving each a short description and highlighting their various pros and cons.  Now, I'm friends with Muxtape creator, Justin Oullette, so, naturally, I tend to think his is the best out there, but Metro does present some downsides to the super-simple design and functionality.  It is difficult to find specific songs since the site is so personalized and it can be tough to gauge what tunes might be on a given muxtape thanks to fanciful names.

Seeqpod, on the other hand, is all about searching.  It hunts the Internet for the songs you tell it to find.  I think perhaps the author of this article has a rather loose definition of "mixtape" though, since seeqpod is more of a music search engine along the lines of G2P or TheHypeMachine.  Fuzz is somewhere between the two. I'm sure, too, that they left many sites off the list, a testament to how fun the idea of online mixtapes are. 

Anyway, go give the article a read if this at all interests you and play with each site to find the one - or none - best suited to your needs.  By the way, you can catch my Muxtape at Streeter.Muxtape.com.  Have a great weekend, everyone and, no matter how you do it, listen to more music. 

Anyone who has laid down a track at some point in their life knows how frustrating recording can be.  Any little imperfection is cause for doing the whole track over again.  I remember being in a studio and having to record a drum track over and over again because at some point in the song my stick would hit one of the rims.  It's worse for guitar players, who hace six strings of tiny mistakes to make.  Well, not anymore.

Matt pointed me to a New York Times article about a new kind of computer software that will take the work out of sounding pitch perfect.

MUSICIANS who want to create note-perfect digital recordings of their performances may soon have a powerful tool to help them: a computer program designed to correct mistakes in their piano riffs or guitar accompaniments as easily as software now fixes the red eyes in digital photographs.

The new software is precise enough, for instance, to reach into an audio file and change any one of the six notes in a guitar chord without changing the sound of the other notes, said Peter Neubäcker, inventor of the program and founder of Celemony Software, the Munich company that will sell it.

The software, called Direct Note Access, will be released in the fall and cost $399.

Part of me hates this program for taking yet another step in the 'you don't need to be good to sound good' direction, but then I remember all that time in the recording studio and I feel better about it.  What do you guys think? 

Ask any Guns n' Roses fans what they've been waiting well over a decade for and they'll let you know it's not a reunion tour, it's an album.  Namely, "Chinese Democracy," the oft-mentioned, never completed album Axl Rose has been working on for, oh, about 13 years.  One fan finally had enough of waiting and somehow snagged 9 tracks from the album and posted them on a rock site Antiquiet.com. 

I always said that the more that Axl and Geffen jerked around trying to figure out how to release this finally finished album that we’ve all been waiting over 13 years for, the greater the chances would be that it would slip out of a pressing plant or office somewhere and wind up in the hands of some ***hole with a blog. So… Hey, I told you so.

There you have it.  Said blogger has released the tracks into the ether and their only an illegal download away.  I personally haven't downloaded or listened to them but I'd be surprised if they weren't amazing.  It's easy now to think of Axl Rose as an arrogant ass - and, to a degree, he is - but one quick trip through any of G n' R's albums ("The Spaghetti Incident," notwithstanding) will be a quick remind of just how good that band was.  Whether you choose to steal it or wait for its release, it will be interesting to see what 13 years of work can do to an album. 

Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero.  Haven't we heard enough about this?  NOPE!  The franchise is taking a big swing at rival Rock Band by releasing their own "full band" version of the game: Guitar Hero World Tour.  Formerly, Guitar Hero was just about rocking an axe, but then Rock Band came along with their fancy microphone and drum kit, offering a game more geared towards groups of people and parties.  The big story - besides that fact that the Guitar Hero drumset has cymbals - is the instruments (the guitar specifically).  Fans of the game await the release of instrument designs like nerds await the new version of Firefox.  Here is a non-exclusive look at the new set of instruments that will be hitting living rooms shortly.  From the IGN review of the game:

It's not just about playing classic songs either. World Tour lets you become the rock star in every way possible -- from playing the tunes to making the music itself. I got my first look at the next game in the hit franchise and there's no doubt about it: I'm impressed. Neversoft and Activision didn't sit on their laurels and pump out a cash-in sequel. There's so much new here that it's tough to decide where to begin.

If you've ever wondered if America is a prude nation, wonder no more.  Why?  Ask yourself this: can you imagine Laura Bush composing a song in which she sings about having 30 lovers?  Or perhaps Nancy Regan releasing a track in which she compares someone's lethal love to Afghan heroin?  Of course not.  But in France, well, that just happened. 

First Lady and mega-babe, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is releasing an album in which she sings about love and sex, namely, the two instances mentioned above.  Of course, singing about sex and drugs is nothing exceptional when it comes to pop music, but the fact that the first lady of a major nation is doing it is somewhat noteworthy.  Can you even begin to fathom what would happen in this country (America, for our foreign users) if something like this were to happen.  If the record even managed to get released there's probably be a Congressional hearing and establishment of a panel of moral decency. 

Well, it seems that once again our Continental brothers and sisters have shown themselves to be a bit more on the liberal/forgiving/artistic side than we New Worlders.  Interestingly, nobody has mentioned anything about the album being good or not.  For all the hype, the disc could be full of garbage tunes, after all.  And I think when you look at the track record, French pop music pales in comparison to American pop music.  We may not have a singing First Lady but we do have Michael Jackson.  We're Number 1ish!

Say what you will about corporate sponsors and selling out, it certainly has its perks.  Bonnaroo, the big festival taking place this weekend down in Tennessee, has hooked up with AT&T who will be broadcasting some of the bigger acts on the web.  Live.  For free.  Wired has the schedule:

Friday (1:30 to 11:00)

Drive By Truckers
Fiery Furnaces
Umphrey's McGee
Bluegrass Sessions
The Raconteurs
TBD
Les Claypool
Metallica

Saturday (1:45 to 11:30)

Two Gallants
The Wood Brothers
Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
Ozomati
Gogol Bordello
Against Me!
Iron & Wine
Cat Power
Mastadon
Ben Folds

Sunday (1:00 to 11:30)

The webcast schedule for Sunday has not been posted yet, but here's my guess based on the Bonnaroo schedule:

Rogue Wave
Ladytron
Aimee Mann
Broken Social Scene
Death Cab for Cutie
Widespread Panic

So make sure you Tune In and catch some amazing music.