Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me (RIP blogs)

<3

yeah, when you have a popular meme, Google sends you a check like ASCAP

loooooool

i wonder how many people illegally DL'd this album and are listening to it regularly (and how this compares w/ 7,000 who purchased it).

10,000? 20,000? 6,000,000?

what is money

what the fuck can a unicorn spend a dollar on

Do I have to take a picture of myself kissing my copy and send it to the tumblr to prove my dedication? Just wondering guys.

are you a unicorn?

kissing my copy

eating it would show tru dedication

whiney in all seriousness if you have not already translated that stuff into cold hard cash then you need to either 1) hire a manger working on spec or 2) hire me because if I were in your shoes right now the next 3 months of my rent would already be paid

hipster unicorns

Stuff Hipster Robocops Like

i wonder how many people illegally DL'd this album and are listening to it regularly (and how this compares w/ 7,000 who purchased it)

bigchampagne has those #s I think though you have to pay to see them. I think it's like 10:1 which leads labels to say "we'd be selling all those records if it weren't for the damned internet!" which obv isn't true; not everybody who takes something they can get for free would necessarily buy it given the absence of the free option. my own (again, thin-air based) guess is that sales would maybe be approx. twice what they are across the board w/o the internet, but maybe not, because the internet has increased the amount of exposure indie acts can get - it's a complicated q & there's pretty much zero point in imagining how things might have shaken out otherwise - without the internet, practically no-one would have heard of jn at all

all you have to do is believe

the "big" indies -- Sub Pop, Matador, Merge, etc. -- are at least somewhat profitable, right?

i imagine that would be the case with merge, at least

but maybe not, because the internet has increased the amount of exposure indie acts can get - it's a complicated q & there's pretty much zero point in imagining how things might have shaken out otherwise - without the internet, practically no-one would have heard of jn at all

yeah otm. i feel like it's difficult to pinpoint buying a record as like a definitive moment anymore, too: people might download first and buy later; buy some of it on itunes; go see her next time she's in town; buy the next lp or whatever.

well yeah but in fairness if the album sales could approach the amount of exposure, it'd be good times for artists - it's not like the # of people downloading translates into Newsome selling out the Hollywood Bowl or anything

hey she sold out Harvard!

http://thequietus.com/articles/03830-joanna-newsom-have-one-on-me-album-review

Excellent review by Petra Davis in The Quietus. Sorry for going off topic lulzx

I know Insound is doing pretty well. Moving plenty of vinyl there. I also work at a CD/record store where business is based off of used items mostly, and that model is not like it was but its still holding its own.

Thanks to Amazon presence as well.

What someone should do is print up 500 copies of some weird folk record they made, sneak a few into stores around the world, and then spend the next 20 years planting rumors about this "lost" album's purported greatness but particularly its elusiveness. Maybe every few years coax a few friends to form bands "influenced" by said "lost" record/artist. And then, 20 years down the line, when the price of this ultra rare artifact hits the roof, occasionally auction one off anonymously to pay for your retirement.

Virtually foolproof, I say, though it doesn't take into account the giant asteroid hitting or its impact on vinyl sales.

yes Josh but who's to say such efforts haven't already been undertaken, without success, countless times?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vashti_Bunyan

Philips records not exactly specializing in editions of 500, ksh

more like "released with a pretty massive promo budget & muscle & enough copies printed up to find their ways into many hands later"

Why must you shatter his crystal palace

http://ladyofspiders.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/wgart_-art-d-domenich-unicorn.jpg

this thread is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. rap it up, folks.

Philips records not exactly specializing in editions of 500, ksh

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.)

Yeah, you're right. No idea why I thought Diamond Day was a small run thing initially.

it wasn't a limited run, but nobody bought it because there were a million other great albums released that year that were better.

What someone should do is print up 500 copies of some weird folk record they made, sneak a few into stores around the world.

Does this happen?

Does this happen?

no because if anybody sells 500 copies of anything they immediately repress

of course I have that 30 copy run of unavailable-elsewhere cassettes I just gave to two Croatian distributors in '98 but fortunately nobody's gotten wind of that yet

no because if anybody sells 500 copies of anything they immediately repress

― Lee Dorrian Gray (J0hn D.), Wednesday, March 3, 2010 9:39 PM

As a child who worked in sweat shops, I can say J0hn is right.

The following year, having no idea how to approach professional record companies and being convinced they would be uninterested, Fahey decided to issue his first album himself, using some cash saved from his gas station attendant job and some borrowed from an Episcopal priest. So Takoma Records was born, named in honor of his hometown.[5] One hundred copies of this first album were pressed [6]. On one side of the album sleeve was the name "John Fahey" and on the other, "Blind Joe Death"—this latter was a humorous nickname given to him by his fellow blues fans. He attempted to sell these albums himself. Some he gave away, some he sneaked into thrift stores and blues sections of local record shops, and some he sent to folk music scholars, a few of whom were fooled into thinking that there really was a living old blues singer called Blind Joe Death. It took three years for Fahey to sell the remainder.

well yes but

Following a 1994 entry on Fahey in Spin magazine's spin-off Alternative Record Guide publication, Fahey learned that he now had a whole new audience, which included alternative US bands Sonic Youth and Cul de Sac, British comedian and writer Stewart Lee and the avant-garde musician Jim O'Rourke. Byron Coley published a large article called "The Persecutions and Resurrections of Blind Joe Death" (also in Spin magazine) and at the same time a two-cd retrospective called The Return of the Repressed all combined to kick-start Fahey's career. Suddenly new releases started to appear in rapid succession, in parallel to the reissue of all the early Takoma releases by Fantasy Records.[4]

How does that take away from Mr. Que's bit?

SORRY ITS NOT 20 YEARS JOHN ONLY 3

THREAD RUINED

Didn't Bill Drummond claim/write in "45" that he used to press up fake-band singles and mail them to the NME or whatever from random countries, trying to inspire trend stories of a "Greenland scene" and stuff like that?

Hobbies...

Anyway, what this thread needs at this point is less talk about unicorns and more talk about unifauns!

"Said the unifaun to his true love's eyes..." Here Peter gets especially sad and tragic (and it's only the beginning of the song!). 'Unifaun' is supposed to be a pun, a cross between 'uniform' and 'faun' - the 'faun' brings in the mythological element, while the 'uniform' brings in certain military associations. Patriotic lament over the fate of one's country? Whatever it might be, the subject of the song is evident from the beginning line: a tragic statement of Britain's current state, a lamentation over the enormous, unbridgeable gap between the romantic past and the corrupt present...

impressions of disc 1: i moderately dig this.

impressions of disc 2: "in california" / "jackrabbits" / "go long" = a++ fantastic sequence

btw which of her older songs does jackrabbits sound *identical* to melodically at bits? at around 0:35 or so (I believe, I can't check)

Clam Crab Cockle Cowrie?

disc two is the least dense with hooks, i think? (though the second half of disc three is the nearest to hard work - i don't know. i haven't had a chance to listen to this outside of work, and that is the one i play least. "sweet appraising eye of the dog / blink once if god / blink twice if no god" is a little too far for me to feel comfortable forcing on other people.) but yeah i'm surprised how much of it i remember on later playthroughs.

i am loving how plinky-plonk a lot of the piano is.

can anyone point out the kate bush song that 'easy' actually sounds like around the 'there is a life in the river / there is a river filled with light' bit?

i'm at the point with a lot of songs where a lot of the deliberately skewed bits are starting to register for themselves rather than as disruptions. eg.

'who asked you if you wanted to be
lo-o-~ved by me
who died and made you
in charge of who gets to love who'

(or whatever; n.b. 'loved' is like seventeen syllables long for this to scan, which it still barely does)

-- moments like this are starting to register on their own merits, and not as 'oh. she just did a thing'