UYRL

Who says major labels don’t get the internet? Eminem’s sixth studio album will come with three digital applications including a “browser skin, blog spider and augmented digital art competition.”

The ‘E-Lapse skin’ comes as a Firefox plug-in or a web-based browser skin, which flips every letter ‘E’ viewed through the browser backwards; while Eminem images and videos replace banner and video ads. It’s worth having a look at here: www.e-lapse.net. Or check this e-lapsed image for a general idea.

Web page filters and translators have existed for several years. Have a look at http://rinkworks.com/dialect/ the Dialectizer to see an old school favourite which translates web pages into Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, and Pig Latin. The Eminem Firefox skin also replaces video ads on any web page with Eminem images and videos: effectively a rap artist ad blocker.

The augmented reality (AR) digital art competition offers fans the chance to create 3D visuals on their screens using a printout, a webcam and some online tools. It’s a pretty sophisticated competition (not necessarily always a good thing) but one which should identify the hardcore fans - which in the age of high end boxsets replacing CD income is what every self respecting established artist should be aiming for nowadays.

Finally the spider blog will sit alongside these two apps, acting as an activity hub for fans and tracking Twitter posts Flickr images and other online chatter around the release. Polydor UK is behind all this, together with UK firm Outside Line.

Over the sparse acoustic-guitar chords of her debut, this 23-year-old trains her cute, cracked voice on a string of often disappointing men — there's the restless Kierkegaard fan, the perpetually late heartbreaker, the one who left those telltale hairs on his pillow. The Borneo-born Avi gives much of the album a warm, old-jazz feel, but flat lyrics like "I shed tears I couldn't dry" make several of the songs sound like woodshedding material.

I actually think the possibilities of making a living in art today are as good, or perhaps better, than ever before primarily because of the communication tools that we have online and the ability to develop relationships with the audience. I think the juice is in the do-it-yourself area of a sole-proprietor musician or a band or a writer on their own or with a publishing company, trying to figure out how they can penetrate the market, make a living, and break through the noise without all the traditional trappings, because all of that is pretty much gone for most people. The opportunity is really in the redefinition of how you go to market with music on a much smaller scale and develop a user base. That’s really where the action is.

From the recorded music side, the reality of the past 50 or 70 years is that a few percent of the people involved in recording ever made any real money off the records. Just a few percent! And if you made any money at all, it was through your songwriting or your touring or your merchandise, or something else that you came up with to provide you with a living. So on one hand, things are not all that different than they’ve ever been, in that you’re not going to make a ton of money making recordings and you never were. The reality is nobody is going to take care of you—you have to do it yourself or you have to form a small team around you to help.

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of live, interactive experiences enabled by communications technologies—the smart phone, the internet, the broadband connections that we have—where you can create musical experiences between you and a relatively small group of people. Everyone is saying that the concert can’t be digitized, so at the moment that remains a reasonable way for people to make a living where the majority of your income comes from touring. And if you think about interactive experiences that can be created—virtual living room tours, behind the scenes events, having people participate in writing parties or creating music on the fly to suit the audience that you happen to be connected to—I think there are a number of wildcards in there where people have begun to experiment with mapping the live experience onto a communications network. There’s a long way to go there and there’s a lot of opportunity, especially as you see the iPhone and the Google phone and some of the devices from Nokia and others that are giving you video-enabled computers connected to the internet in the palm of your hand. That allows for the distribution of content at a very high level and interaction with your audience that you really never had before, on that one-to-one level or one-to-a-few level. And by making it mobile, you’re getting away from your fan having to be sitting at a desk in front of a computer. As people begin to write for that platform and that potential, I think we’ll see a lot of innovation.

And you can monetize that. I think people will pay for access to artists that they enjoy, and they will help support artists that they respect if they know that most, if not all, of the money is going directly to the artist rather than to the combine. If you have 5,000 fans willing to pay $20 a year for access to your music and the ability to participate and interact with you, there’s a nice pool of money for you to make a living off of. If that blows up to 100,000 people, you’ve got tremendous potential there.

What is your definition of success? That definition tends to be all over the place, but what do you need to sustain yourself in order to focus on your art fulltime? Can you live on $60,000 or $80,000 or $100,000? Probably. Can you make that kind of income writing music, performing regionally, licensing your music into various outlets? Yes, you can. If you focus on creating a career at that level, it’s entirely possible and many people are doing it using the tools that we have today. Instead of chasing the brass ring, you’re just basically trying to be a middle class artist making a middle class income. If you’re realistic about your expectations, you can make a living and spend most of your time focused on your art, whether it’s writing or performing or recording or drawing or painting of photography. It’s certainly possible—way more possible than being famous was ever going to be. You need to think through that because it’s really probably the only opportunity that most people are going to have in this environment—keep reasonable expectations and build up a little business around yourself that’s not grand scale but human scale.

One of the things that I think is holding a lot of this back is it’s very difficult to license music for global consumption. You’ve got to figure out who the rights holders are at every country, there’s often a publishing side and a recorded master side, there may be multiple writers, and the control that has dominated the industry for so long is holding us back. I think it’s something that people need to pay attention to: How can copyright law better serve artists in the digital age and what the digital age will bring?

The record companies have felt the pain of the changes in the marketplace ahead of the publishers. And you can see that the record companies are beginning to change their approach and they’re more willing to experiment because their revenue is down 50% and they’re absolutely scared to death. The publishers are following behind that curve and in my opinion are the larger road block in making deals than the record companies are. So having publishers look at their record company friends and what they’ve gone through and avoiding that is really key to remaining relevant.

With all of these interaction opportunities and non-traditional distribution opportunities, if we had better licensing, easier licensing, more transparent licensing, a more global approach, potentially everyone could make more money. If we stick to the laws the way they are and the sort of country-by-country rights, people who are in that camp will have a disadvantage against new artists who decide to open up their rights with a Creative Commons approach or perhaps another blanket licensing approach. If it becomes easier to license new music from new composers than it is the old composers, guess who’s going to win?

After a successful year on the market, adding user-friendly product components that dramatically improve front and back office operations for publishers of books and ebooks, today Financial Softworks, LLC, announced the release of DashBook 3.0 - with new features and functions designed to handle sales tracking and complex royalties for the music industry. Sales of published and produced music, from major label media to indie self-produced downloads, can now be properly tracked and accounted for using DashBook 3.0.

For the first time in the publishing business, a single, easy to use, product has been designed to support contact management, sales tracking, back office operations, product inventories, shipments, royalty calculations and customized reporting - all in one affordable system. Designed to give small and mid-sized publishers the power of applications costing tens of thousands, a single desktop version of DashBook 3.0 starts at $249 — with no recurring monthly charges.

Gaining a reputation for providing real value in affordable software that makes complex calculations both simple and fast, DashBook 3.0 enables the import of data from a variety of sources, allowing for quick and easy set-up of products, contacts, orders and royalty arrangements.

Sheri Gormley of Virtual Tales & Promotions wrote: “Virtual Tales is a 100 percent royalty-based small press, so we needed a financial program with maximum flexibility in assigning royalty percentages - not just for printed works but also for eBooks and eSerials. Our royalty percentages vary between print and e-versions of the same title, and we also have to factor in payments for authors and co-authors, editors and co-editors, etc. We tried a number of financial programs for publishers and found that DashBook gave us the most flexibility. It was also extremely easy to use and is very affordable. DashBook helped us convert our complicated, manual royalty calculation process into a fully automated system. We no longer dread the end of each quarter because calculating royalties is now a breeze.”

DashBook 3.0 — now for books, ebooks and music — automates and simplifies the complex processes and calculations that take up too much of your time.

DashBook frees you up to Do What You Love!

For more information, and to download a free trial of DashBook 3.0, click on www.dashbook.com or call toll free 877-DASH-877.

Track List:
1 She Has Funny Cars
2 Somebody to Love
3 My Best Friend
4 Today
5 Back to Me
6 3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds
7 D.C.B.A. 25
8 How Do You Feel?
9 Embryonic Journey
10 White Rabbit
11 Plastic Fantastic Lover

Blink-182 is back for an extensive tour of North America – 50 dates in all – during which they will be headlining arenas and amphitheaters, beginning July 24 in Las Vegas.

The three piece band won’t stop until they hit Atlantic City on October 3.

The reunion tour is to feature other big names as opening acts, most notably Weezer, but also including at certain points throughout the tour Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, All-American Rejects, Taking Back Sunday, Asher Roth and Chester French.

“The lineup was designed to be impressive“, says Blink-182 manager to Billboard.com – though it’s doubtful that the band needed such a star studded lineup to move tickets.

Tour dates are currenty set as follows:

July 24: Las Vegas (the Joint)
July 28: Vancouver (GM Place)
July 30: Calgary, AB (Saddledome)
July 31: Edmonton, AB (Rexall Place)
Aug. 1: Saskatoon, SK (Credit Union Center)
Aug. 2: Winnipeg, MB (MTS Centre)
Aug. 4: Milwaukee (Marcus Amphitheater)
Aug. 6: Boston (Comcast Center)
Aug. 7 Quebec City, QC (Colisee Pepsi)
Aug. 8: Montreal (Bell Centre)
Aug. 9: Wantagh, N.Y. (Nikon Theater at Jones Beach)
Aug. 12: Hershey, Pa. (the Star Pavilion)
Aug. 13: Cincinnati (Riverbend Music Center)
Aug. 14: Pittsburgh (Post Gazette Pavilion)
Aug. 15: Chicago (First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre)
Aug. 16: Omaha, Neb. (Westfair Amphitheater)
Aug. 18: Minneapolis (Xcel Energy Center)
Aug. 20: Indianapolis (Verizon Wireless Amphitheater)
Aug. 21: Buffalo, N.Y. (Darien Lakes Performing Arts Center)
Aug. 22: Detroit (DTE Energy Music Theatre)
Aug. 23: Toronto (Molson Amphitheater)
Aug. 25: Holmdel, N.J. (PNC Bank Arts Center)
Aug. 27: Saratoga, N.Y. (Saratoga Performing Arts Center)
Aug. 28: Camden, Pa. (Susquehanna Bank Center)
Aug. 29: Hartford, Conn. (New England Dodge Music Center)
Aug. 30: Washington, D.C. (TBD)
Aug. 31: Wantagh, N.Y. (Nikon Theater at Jones Beach)
Sept. 2: Cleveland (Blossom Music Center)
Sept. 3: St. Louis (Verizon Wireless Amphitheater)
Sept. 4: Kansas City, Kan. (Capitol Federal Park at Sandstone)
Sept. 6: Denver (Fiddlers Green Amphitheater)
Sept. 7: Salt Lake City (David O. McKay Events Center)
Sept. 10: Seattle (White River Amphitheater)
Sept. 12: Sacramento, Calif. (Sleep Train Amphitheater)
Sept. 13: Mountain View, Calif. (Shoreline Amphitheater)
Sept. 14: Santa Barbara, Calif. (Santa Barbara Bowl)
Sept. 16: San Diego (Cricket Wireless Amphitheater)
Sept. 17: Irvine, Calif. (Verizon Wireless Amphitheater)
Sept. 19: Phoenix (Tempe Beach Park)
Sept. 21: Albuquerque, N.M. (Journal Pavilion)
Sept. 23: Dallas (Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion)
Sept. 24: Houston (Superpages.com Center)
Sept. 26: West Palm Beach, Fla. (Cruzan Amphitheater)
Sept. 27: Tampa, Fla. (Ford Amphitheater)
Sept. 29: Atlanta (Lakewood Amphitheater)
Oct. 1: Charlotte, N.C. (Verizon Wireless Amphitheater)
Oct. 2: Virginia Beach, Va. (Verizon Wireless Amphitheater)
Oct. 3: Atlantic City, N.J. (Borgata Events Center)

After a string of incidents that resulted in rapper DMX being convicted of various felonies, the rapper served 90 days in jail and has now been released.

Earl Simmons/DMX was released from a Phoenix jail on Thursday on a $10,000 bond.

The rapper’s lawyer reports that he was in good spirits upon his return to life outside of jail, and that he has not yet left Maricopa county.

Glenn Allen, the lawyer, told the Associated Press of DMX: “He’s extremely happy that’s he’s home. We look forward to being able to handle his case with him out of custody.”

The case that needs to be handled is one that involves an aggravated assault charge against the rapper, stemming from the incident in which prisoner DMX threw a tray of food at a prison guard.

He and his lawyer will be courtside once again on May 19.

With all of the recent publicity, DMX should really make a new album and give his buddy Scott Storch something to do.

The nineties are making a comeback, after all.

The rapper has actually scheduled several appearances to “let his fans know that the DOG is back,” beginning tomorrow night in Phoenix.

Since my mind acts randomly, I looked up what the deal was the Plug Awards for 2009. It gives me a chance to rant about the pointlessness of award shows. As it turns out, there is no Plug Awards for 2009. No announcement was made and the website hasn't been updated since March 2008. It's now May. Safe to assume its a victim of the economic downturn?

I guess there's no point of having a corporate-sponsored, indie rock award show when you can't make it big, flashy, self-centered and overblown. Then you can't get name acts to play in front of banners that pimp out computers and energy drinks. So when the dollars aren't there, indie rock won't get their props. Proves that the Plug Awards were about $$$.

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