While the music and movie industry giants have been busy trying to save us from ourselves with brutal and overreaching copyright laws, a new report called “The Sky is Rising” has appeared on the scene. It shows that the entertainment industry’s legislative battles aren’t so much a fight for survival, but rather a cold-blooded profit-maximization strategy cloaking itself in the language of emergency as legislative strategy.   “For years now, the legacy entertainment industry has been predicting its own demise, claiming that the rise of technology, by enabling easy duplication and sharing — and thus [...]

… or what we refuse to talk about when we talk about Lana Del Rey.   With all of the attention surrounding Lana Del Rey’s forthcoming album Born to Die (which has leaked and will be released on Tuesday), Chris Burlingame of Another Rainy Saturday points out that the endless discussion around her existence, while almost all unflinchingly brutal, seems to ignore a major elephant in the room: sex.   Setting aside Del Rey’s unquestionably disastrous performance on “Saturday Night Live,” the article takes a look at why so many of the most vicious insults [...]

In the age of the digital download, when artists and record labels are scrambling to figure out how to get music fans to actually pay for music, the Flaming Lips just did what they always do: they got weirder. They’ve rarely let a wild idea go unchecked, unrecorded or unreleased. And they did it all on a major label.   Given a rare chance to pick the ever-wondrous brain of frontman Wayne Coyne, Crispin Kott of PopMatters shares wisdom from the “psychedelic soothsayer” that is both entertaining and insightful. Read the full interview to find [...]

“Ideas are the number one best thing going. And when ideas come to us we don’t really create an idea, we just catch them, like fish. No chef ever takes credit for making the fish. It’s just preparing the fish.   So… you get an idea, and it is like a seed. And in your mind, the idea is seen and felt, and it explodes, like it’s got electricity and light connected to it and it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant, you know the idea. In an [...]

by Luke James of Fàshiön   In January of 1980, in a move engineered by one Malcolm McLaren (a swindler of no fixed ability), Adam Ant was thrown out of his own band. Adam turned up to a rehearsal and, starting with drummer Dave Barbarossa, one by one the band told him they were leaving. Right, said the future highway dandy, I’m leaving but I’m taking the name with me. Outside a dog began to bark … Bow wow wow, it went.   I was thrown out of own band in Brum in 1977. It [...]

Musician Dan Bull, whose letters to Lily Allen and Home Taping is Killing Music videos both become huge hits on YouTube, had his entire first album available on MegaUpload. When it was shut down recently, all his links pointing to his album, scattered all over the web, no longer worked.   And so he made this video, which, like all of Dan’s creative commentary about the business of recorded music, is pretty awesome.       Tweet

For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.   Why is this? Kurt Anderson has written a piece for this month’s Vanity Fair that points out this phenomenon that is strikingly obvious, yet very curious when you really stop to think about it.   “Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated [...]

Totally unruffled by the MegaUpload raid, those wacky kids at The Pirate Bay are soldiering on toward the future. The site announced today that users can now download physical objects — sort of — from a new content category called “Physibles.” These are digital designs to be used with 3-D printers to recreate physical objects.   “We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will [...]

In the winter of 1970-71, the Doors hibernated inside their rehearsal studio in West Hollywood to create L.A. Woman. Recorded and mixed in only two weeks, the album was an instant commercial and critical success upon its release the following April, with three smash singles and Rolling Stone hailing it as the band’s bluesiest and best effort. Unbeknownst to everyone, it would be their last as a unit, with Morrison dying under mysterious circumstances in Paris that July.   This month, Rhino Records is issuing a 40th-anniversary edition of L.A. Woman, complete with long-lost outtakes [...]

Sonic Vista Studios plays host to many of the world’s top artists, including Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, Taio Cruz, Swedish House Mafia, the Ting Tings and of course, Andy Taylor himself. Where better to pen a new tune than an island like Ibiza where inspiration is around every corner? Henry Sarmiento is the professional in paradise who runs this joint, and Essential Ibiza recently caught up with him to get the lowdown on his experience and inspirations.   READ THE FULL INTERVIEW: “Making Music Sonic Vista Style” – Essential Ibiza Tweet