HeadCount supporters the Dave Matthews Band topped the Associated Press's list of the decade's 50 biggest concert tours, selling 11.6 million tickets for $529.1 million ("based on data provided to the trade publication Pollstar by concert promoters and venue managers"). Other top moneymakers include Celine Dion, Kenny Chesney, Bruce Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones.

Phish squeaked onto the list at #49 – between Barbra Streisand and James Taylor – with receipts of $116.7 million from 2.6 million tickets. Phish were off duty for more than half the decade, however, so doubling that figure would have kicked them up to #15, replacing Metallica.

The Dave Matthews Band's Grammy-nominated Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King also came in at #5 on Apple's list of the best-selling iTunes albums of 2009 (AKA iTunes Rewind 2009). The Kings of Leon, though, topped the albums chart with Only By the Night (right above the Twilight soundtrack album and Lady Gaga) The Kings' "Use Somebody" also rated #10 on the download store's singles list, which was topped by the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow" and Flo Rida's "Right Round," a song I have never heard. And finally, the Fray's The Fray made #7 on the albums list.

I love hearing but I hate earplugs. It's a predicament I'm sure is shared by most of the live-music community. I've tried to wear those fluorescent pieces of foam that constantly fall out, prevent you from talking to friends, and make it seem like you're listening underwater. I usually decide that Jake Cinninger's guitar solo is more important than my long term hearing and pull those bad boys out of my ears.

But you've also probably experienced ringing in your ears hours after a concert. That's called tinnitus and it's the perception of sound when there really isn't any. According to the American Tinnitus Association, more then 50 million people in the U.S. have some form of tinnitus.

"It's a phantom auditory sensation like phantom limb pain when an arm is cut off, and you feel pain in that missing limb," said Richard Salvi, a leading tinnitus expert and director of the Center For Hearing and Wellness at the University at Buffalo in New York. "Much the same seems to happen when you have tinnitus."

Concerts typically have a sound level of about 110db, which is considered unsafe.

Plenty of earplugs won't fully compromise the music, with some costing well over $100 a pair. Fortunately, a friend recently turned me on to Ear Love, very affordable earplugs (about $16 a pair) that are also comfortable, visually subtle, and lower sound levels by 20db without losing much quality. They also come in various colors in a nifty carrying case.

Metallica's Lars Ulrich, who suffers from tinnitus (what a surprise), has been spreading the word about preventing ear damage.

"If you get a scratch on your nose, in a week that'll be gone," Ulrich said. "When you scratch your hearing or damage your hearing, it doesn't come back. I try to point out to younger kids ... once your hearing is gone, it's gone, and there's no real remedy."

So I've decided my New Year's resolution isn't about losing 20 pounds or only eating organically (not bad ideas, actually). I'm giving my ears some love instead.

Animal Collective's Joshua Dibb, AKA Deacon, hopes fans will kick in funds – and soon! – for his early-January trip to an amazing African festival. Dibb has been invited to Mali's annual Festival in the Desert, which takes place smack in the middle of the Sahara, in Essakane. It's a heavy trip combining local economics, politics, and simple injustice.

To make the journey, Dibb needs to raise $25,000 for Temedt, a Bamako-based human-rights organization resisting the ongoing slavery of the Tuareg people based in Essakane. Problem is, Dibb has less than three days to fulfill his commitment through pledges that can be made on Kickstarter. A book and music, to be published by Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label, will document his trip through field recordings, his concert performance, writing, and photos. No pledge is too small, and every penny will go directly to Temedt. Patrons will receive everything from email updates to autographed deluxe editions of a CD, book, and memorabilia collected during his journey.

Animal Collective recently topped British retailer HMV's "poll of polls" survey for their January album, Merriweather Post Pavilion

As Christmas, New Year's Eve, and a host of other wintery holidays invade our homes with annoying music, pine needles, Grandma's perfume, and loving yet judgmental relatives you see only a few times a year, one substance in particular helps most of us get through December relatively unscathed: alcohol.

While seeing a typically shy co-worker tape mistletoe to his belt buckle and dance on a desk during the office party may lead you to believe the U.S. is among the world's top drinkers, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's latest data on liters per capita alcohol consumption around the world should remove the beer goggles from that assumption. Turns out the U.S. has some stiff competition.

So drink up, America! Aside from being incredibly rich, there's no reason Luxembourgers (which are not Cristal-infused Whoppers) should be drinking us under the table. At least not during the holidays.

There's a strange phenomenon any true Phish fan is familiar with: When you hear a Phish song outside the usual context, on television or at a stadium or in a store, it stops you in your tracks and sometimes puts a lump in your throat. I've gotten up and danced to "Guyute" on The Weather Channel, even though I don't even like "Guyute." And when Madison Square Garden started playing "Tweezer Reprise" before the second period of each Rangers game this season, I felt like my life had truly reached its full circle zenith.

With that in mind I share something that will choke up even the most hardened among you: "Backwards Down the Number Line" on "Good Morning America"'s Three Words segment.

Happy Holidays.

Click below to view:

Phish on Good Morning America\'s Three Words Segment

They may be one of the spacier, more experimental, and more mystically inclined bands on the improv-rock circuit, but Santa Cruz instrumental quintet STS9 also have their feet planted firmly in consensual reality.

On their tenth album, Ad Explorata, released earlier this month on the group's own 1320 label, STS9 blends vintage analog electronics with a conspiratorial back story perfectly suited for a classic "X-Files" episode or a Thomas Pynchon novel. There's an Alice in Wonderland element to it, too, insofar as their adventure began the day keyboardist David Phipps's young daughter, Aya, began spinning the dial of a shortwave radio in the band's studio. An atmospheric tour de force, Ad Explorata offers delicate interstellar transmissions, impish premonitions, and the occasional skull-cracking beats.

As the band prepped for a Denver New Year's Eve run (and subsequent tour) that kicks off with the first acoustic STS9 show to date, we spoke to David Phipps (bringing up the rear in this photo) about how the band, with the help of its audience, does what it can to make the world a better place in which to explore the eternal mysteries of music, magic, and Mayan prophecies.

HeadCount: How did STS9 decide to make doing good works such a large part of its identity?

David Phipps: We felt like we’re really lucky. We get to be artists and people support our music. We've been given a one-in-a-million kind of life, and we’ve always felt that since musicians have a platform for social activism, it's the artist's responsibility to use it for the greater good.

When did your philanthropic activism begin?

Phipps: The first official philanthropy we did was several years ago through Conscious Alliance. Fans would donate food at a show and get a free limited-edition poster. But there was never a collective decision to donate profits to charities; we just figured out ways to bring charity into what we were doing already. All of our charity relies on the direct participation of the fan base. We donate a dollar out of each ticket we sell; so in a way, it’s not even our money being donated. We're collecting and converting our fans' money to those goals. As we worked with Conscious Alliance and this dollar-a-ticket thing, we began focusing on a variety of different charities for two or three years. Last year, though, we decided to put it all toward one thing — the most significant thing we could make happen. We settled on trying to build a house in a year with the Make It Right Foundation.

How does the band decide which causes to support?

Phipps: It's collective. One of the things we supported was my brother, Allan Phipps. He teaches at South Plantation High School in South Florida, where he started a solar race-car team with his students called the Solar Knights. They compete nationally and actually won the championship last year on wheels we bought for their car, which featured STS9 logos. So that's been near and dear to me. And Santa Cruz, where we live, actually went bankrupt last year. So we worked with Mariposa's Art, which organizes after-school art and music programs for at-risk youth. It’s very close to home. We can see the results of our work while also seeing what happens when nobody does anything. My brother’s race team budget consists entirely of outside donations now. The school system doesn't support it.

Have you decided where you'll concentrate your support in 2010?

Phipps: Not yet. Our goal for Make It Right is to donate $150,000 to build an entire house. We just broke $100,000 in early December, and we’re really proud of that, so we’re going to stick with it until we reach our goal. We did a remix project for Peaceblaster, and we'll probably do another one for Ad Explorata. But the dollar-per-ticket we get from our fan base provides most of the money we donate.

How has the band dealt with health care over the years. What are your thoughts on the issue as a working musician?

Phipps: We’re pretty much on our own. Not all of our members are in the full health-care system, with doctor visits and everything else. I have a family, so I am, but it’s one of the biggest wastes of money in my life. What’s out there right now doesn’t really meet my needs or align with my views on preventive care. So I think I'm right in line with everybody else who believes it’s a crazy situation that needs to be addressed, and I'm looking forward to seeing what I can move into with my family over the next year. I lived in Japan for eight years and they have socialized medicine. So an ambulance, CAT scans, and three days in a hospital after a bike wreck cost about $320. You can’t even look at an ambulance for that money in this country.

I heard you were doing something different with your street team to market Ad Explorata.

Phipps: Our manager runs the street team and marketing, and we use a company called Cornerstone. From what I’ve heard, it's really cool. The grassroots street team sends out promotional materials and report back with pictures of them hanging posters or placing CDs and flyers, and it's all collected on the website. It’s a way of getting in the thick of promoting the album as a fan, and it seems to work well. We try to stay up to date with what we do — we’re on Twitter now. It’s easy to be nimble and adapt when we’re our own bosses and not following some corporate marketing plan.

Have your thoughts about file sharing evolved since your open letter on the band's online forum, the Lowdown, a few years ago?

Phipps: Most definitely. I was a young, naïve, freaking-out parent-to-be when I wrote that. My viewpoint changed even a short month after that. For the most part, I ran the website and the Lowdown from the early days of the band. And the Lowdown especially, back in the day, was a couple of hundred people including personal friends. When I wrote that letter I was addressing what I perceived as a close circle of fans of the band and obviously was naïve in thinking that would stay in the forum. Our band is incredibly successful in the live concert arena. And whether the music is shared legally or illegally, it ultimately does help our organization bring more people in to buy concert tickets. I gave up on the idea that an album should sell however many thousand copies as a measurement of success as long as more people come out to concerts. Every time we go to a city we sell out more venues than we did before, and we play in better slots on festival line-ups all the time, so our band is still moving forward. We’re not being cheated in our careers. A lot of artists need to take that perspective. It’s part of the music industry's changing landscape. I still take a lot of pride in spending a lot of time making music, and I don’t value that music as worth zero. I don’t value it as something that should be priced at free.

"The Genesis of Ad Explorata," which came with my review copy, tells a long and nearly unbelievable story about how the band's interest in shortwave-radio numbers stations led to a friendly cryptographer sending you off to find a military bunker in the Big Sur backwoods. You found some mysterious documents, pictures, a knife, and a patch containing the mysterious symbol featured on the album cover. It turned out that the symbol was associated with a black ops unit that gathered intelligence via satellites during the Cold War and that their motto was "Ad Explorata, Forward Into the Unexplored." Is that all true?

Phipps: It’s incredibly true.

How did it influence the album?

Medeski Martin and Wood were really big when we were coming up. They were in their funky acoustic paradigm, before it got too avant garde, and I almost went that direction. Then I got a Juno 106, went full overboard into synthesizers, and never turned back. Over the last year and a half or so I've really gotten into modular synthesizers, where each function has its own module – like the Keith Emerson wall of patch cables. I've been collecting vintage gear and reconstructed synthesizers made by young engineers who draw from that era's schematics and rebuild the equipment in this boutiquey niche. You have to hurry up to get in line to wait eight months for it to be finished. It's super fun and rewarding. A lot of the sound on Ad Ex came from that. The vintage gear seeded a lot of our creativity over the summer. At the same time we were researching some of the clues we had gotten from our Big Sur expedition. And [guitarist] Hunter [Brown] is on a lot of different conspiracy websites. He's probably tagged by the FBI for what he reads online. That was kind of the vibe throughout the creation of this album. It went really fast compared to anything we’ve done before.

Since finishing the album, however, we’ve been getting ready for the Axe the Cables acoustic show, and we haven’t plugged anything in for power for the last month and a half and I've just been playing piano. We’ve never done an acoustic show, but after we decided to we started rehearsing and a lot of our old songs sounded really good just on piano and acoustic guitar, with Zach [Velmer] playing drums with brushes. It’s a very peaceful, mature sound, and super fun for us to play. We already had a small batch of slow, cinematic songs we wrote for the soundtrack to a totally bizarre little indie film called All God's Children Can Dance. So we’ll be debuting more new acoustic songs than live versions of Ad Explorata songs. It’s the first night of our three-night Denver run in a nice opera house. It’s probably not going to be the last acoustic show we do, and it's very inspiring.

Who’s the fellow on the cover of Ad Explorata?

Phipps: I'm not sure if I'm allowed to tell the whole story. Hunter took the picture in Tokyo. He was walking down the street and felt ice hitting him in the head. He turned around and saw this guy in a taxi cab. No, I really can’t tell this story.

Has STS9 nailed down plans for December 2012 yet?

Phipps: No comment as of yet, but we are planning toward 2012. We feel that even the story that came out of Ad Explorata is just the season premiere of something that will run through 2012. I can’t say anything more than that. We’re very mysterious these days.

I was excited that Chase Bank was going to do something positive with some of their post-"crises" windfall profits. The financial giant organized Chase Community Giving, a Facebook contest to give away $5 million to charities. An application allowed nonprofit organizations to compete for votes in two rounds; the top 100 vote getters win $25,000 and become eligible for up to $1 million more. The winning organizations were announced late last week but a few organizations are crying foul. I happen to work for one of them, Students for Sensible Drug Policy. SSDP and the Marijuana Policy Project were both noticeably absent from the list of winning organizations yet are confident they placed in the top 100. However, neither received a disqualification notice nor saw the total number of votes they earned.

Two days before voting ended, Chase removed the vote counters that appeared on each organization's page, thereby making it impossible to know exactly where any organization stood on the final day of voting. So how do these organizations know they were in the top 100? SSDP's good friends at the National Youth Rights Association (NYRA), who made it into the first round, kept track of the leaders. NYRA's Executive Director, Alex Koroknay-Palicz explained the situation to the New York Times:

“For the most part, the organizations Chase picked were exactly the organizations we expected to win, because we had spent a lot of time and effort tracking it,” Mr. Koroknay-Palicz said. “So the biggest surprise was SSDP and a couple of pro-life groups, as well as the organization called the Prem Rawat Foundation, didn’t make it, because they had been doing pretty well.”

According to the leader board he created, Students for Sensible Drug Policy collected 2,305 votes through Dec. 9, when organizations no longer could track their votes or see who had voted for them. The Marijuana Policy Project had 1,911 votes, and Justice for All had 1,512.

SSDP was unofficially in fourteenth place two days before voting ended, so it's hard to imagine that we wouldn't make it in the top 100. Chase is unwilling to explain whether groups were disqualified or how the winners were finally determined.

This suggests that Chase decided the appropriate organizations to award their money to. It also implies that non-winners didn't have the public's support. Since most Americans support legalization, it's really no surprise that organizations working on the issue would have make it in the top 100.

Although Chase neither donated money to SSDP nor would explain what happened, they've had no problem providing our banking services for more than three years. Not any more. The organization is boycotting Chase.

What was achieved, or not, in Copenhagen?

The Copenhagen Accord's goal is laid out in Article 2:

2. We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and as documented by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with a view to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity. We should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-emission development strategy is indispensable to sustainable development.

Judging the accord almost solely on the basis of its domestic political implications, The New York Times declares a victory for Obama, who "may have improved his chances for passing global warming legislation in the Senate by forging an interim international agreement here that puts both rich and poor countries on a path to curtail greenhouse gas emissions."

Details of the Accord remain to be worked out before it becomes binding. The target for the global temperature reduction mentioned in Article 2 will not have to be met until 2020 – several election cycles from now. The Senate climate legislation mentioned above is a long ways away from being passed. The United States still refuses to sign the 1997 United Nations-sanctioned Kyoto Protocol agreed to by 187 nations.

The Copenhagen Accord, on the other hand, works outside the United Nations. Obama cut a deal that would put the United States, India, China, Brazil, and South Africa at the center of climate control -- leaving Europe out of the deal altogether. With no central authority, such as the UN, to monitor these countries' promises, the whole accord resembles something of a big handshake deal among these countries.

What do the experts think? Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, takes an extremely negative view on the proceedings:

Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli , which some accepted and others denounced. After the fact, the United Nations has argued that the document was generally accepted, though for most on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
...
Obama’s decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries. Some will view this as pragmatic, reflecting the difficulty of getting agreement with 192 UN member states. But it is worse than that. International law, as complicated as it is, has been replaced by the insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing word of a few powers, notably the US. America has insisted that others sign on to its terms – leaving the UN process hanging by a thread – but it has never shown goodwill to the rest of the world on this issue, nor the ability or interest needed to take the lead on it.

From the standpoint of actual reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, this agreement is unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions. Who will take seriously the extra costs of emissions reduction if they see how lax others’ promises are?

Ed Millbrand in the UK's Guardian sees the glass half full, however. He blames China for not agreeing to 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050, or on 80% reductions by developed countries – although China could merely have been taking the fall for other developed nations. He sees hope in the international consensus acknowledging the science behind fears of climate change, and likes the idea that billions of dollars may soon trickle down from rich countries to poorer countries to ameliorate the effects of such change. In the end, he writes, that anything was done at all must be regarded as an accomplishment, particularly in the current economic climate.

The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot. We would never have had targets from so many countries, the engagement of leaders, and the agreement on finance without this sort of mobilisation.

HeadCount will add a full-time, salaried position early next year to work in our New York City office. Candidates must be passionate about both music and grassroots organizing, dedicated, self-motivated, creative and ready for a true adventure. Most importantly, he or she must bring a unique set of skills and demonstrate a clear ability to be an essential member of our team. This can include any combination of marketing, communications, artist relations, digital media, grassroots organizing, sponsorship sales, fundraising or nonprofit management experience. Recent college graduates with relevant extracurricular activities or professionals with 1 to 4 years of work experience are encouraged to apply. Salary, title and responsibilities will be determined based on the qualifications of the most outstanding candidate. To apply, please visit www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZDH2QDV.

Today is the last day to vote for the best Phish-related and political poster art of 2009, as HeadCount hosts elections in conjunction with The Mock Show. The Mock Show is an exhibit and market for poster art to be held in Miami on December 30 featuring the work of Jim Pollock, Jeff Wood and many other top visual artists. Proceeds from the sale of David Welker event posters and t-shirts will benefit HeadCount. To order, visit the Mock Show order page. To vote on the best posters, visit the HeadCount poster election page.