There’s an old joke in Hollywood: How do you become a producer? You say, “I’m a producer.” It’s basically the same with indie music labels. Starting one requires little more than saying it exists and then behaving accordingly. But starting one, and running it well are different animals altogether. And

I fell in love with compilations when I was 17. My parents owned a small rental house, and one of the tenants that vacated it left behind a basket full of tapes and CDs. One of them was a compilation from Fat Wreck Chords, a small Bay Area record label.

Occasionally, I teach self-marketing workshops for musicians. The thing most folks that show up want to know is how to get press coverage. My top answer is always the same: “send out a press release.” Reporters are mavens and information-junkies, but we’re not omniscient. And if you’re not marketing your

  The first time I saw Kelvin Underwood perform was an experimental hip hop open mic in Ashland. Most of the other emcees played beats from their phones and lazily rhymed about weed. He came on stage with a massive Japanese taiko drum, and complex, polyrhythmic flows so sociopolitically savage

  Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian pop tart of “Call Me Maybe” fame, wrote more than 250 songs for her 2015 album, Emotion. That’s a pretty furious pace for someone that can’t even decide whether or not you should call her. Though he’s still a few songs short of  the

  In 1969, The Doors’ lead drinker Jim Morrison told Rolling Stone that he didn’t think the band of the future would be a band at all. “I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electrical … like an extension of the Moog synthesizer — a

I never cared for emo. Even just a few chords from bands like Dashboard Confessional, or Saves the Day, caused me to slip into some absurd macho stereotype of a high school football coach complete with the overwhelming urge to grab the band venting their inner turmoil by the ears

When describing a band, lounge, is kind of a dirty word, a term that’s most commonly employed to mean corny. Background. Elevator. But like all genres, it can be used for good or evil. It’s just that in a modern context, lounge is most commonly used for evil. But the

A few years back I attended a panel at SXSW entitled: “album release strategies for the future.” It had the prerequisite discussions of social media and internet strategy for looking forward. But what I found odd was that it only seemed to focus on albums whose production was still rooted

In his book, How Music Works, David Byrne of Talking Heads devotes a chapter to his theories on how the physical space in which music is performed in influences the music being created, as it encourages or discourages certain styles through acoustics and aesthetics. For example: the lush reverbs of