Summer Starts with Summercamp
The festival season officially kicks off, as it does every year, with the annual moe. and Umphrey’s mecca that is the Summercamp Festival. Tiny Chillicothe, IL (population: 6,000) will double in size for the weekend as moe., Umphrey’s McGee, Les Claypool and the illustrious Willie Nelson bring some of that downhome, grassroots spirit that have…
Walk a Mile in No Shoes: DMB and TOMS Pair Up for Summer Vagabond Tour
The Dave Matthews Band is headlining the TOMS Shoes Vagabond Tour 2009 to help meet the company’s goal of giving away 300,000 pairs of shoes in 2009. As TOMS founder and Chief Shoe Giver Blake Mycoskie wrote on his blog, “It’s so neat to have one of the most influential, progressive, forward-thinking, change-making bands in…
Can Artists and Readers Help PASTE Stick It Out?
Print media is engaged in the fight of its life, having already suffered major casualties like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Rocky Mountain News. Unfortunately for music fans, venerable alt-rock monthly Paste may be next. Advertisers have tightened their belts, and in turn Paste has tightened theirs, instituting salary cuts across the board, elimination of all…
Agriculture Blog War: Perfect vs. Good
The words “battle” and “organics” aren’t usually keeping one another company in a sentence, but there is a battle over organics brewing over at Huffington Post. Two food/ag/blog heavy hitters, Chelsa Green‘s Makenna Goodman and Stonyfield Farm CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg are engaged in a blog vs. blog about the organic movement. On one side, we…
Pay For What You Get
With the ever-decreasing success of physical record sales and the onslaught of digital free-bees and bonus material for many artists’ new releases, marketing departments are stretching the proverbial limit nowadays. Even huge artists with worldwide exposure like U2 and Dave Matthews Band are experimenting with new ways to promote new albums in a dynamic marketplace…
Too Big to Fail, Round 2?
The looming behemoth that is the Ticketmaster/Live Nation merger just got one step closer. Over half of Ticketmaster’s lenders have approved the deal, and despite much protest over antitrust concerns, a Justice Department investigation into the merger and millions of concertgoers who have learned to shake their head at anything that would make the ticketing…
Music City Council
Be forewarned, aspiring young pedal-steel virtuoso with your sights set on the the Nashville skyline — you just might end up becoming a politician. Well, not quite… but the Nashville Mayor Karl Dean has tapped Emmylou Harris, Kix Brooks and Jack White (the Michigan native with a million bands has lived in Nashville for years)…
Wilco Streams new Album
One of our favorite HeadCount partner bands, Wilco, has a new album creatively titled "Wilco (The Album)" due out on June 30th. For those of you who can't wait, the band is streaming the entire album on their website right now. Enjoy, and you should probably save that album art as your computer wallpaper and blow it up…
A Concert Series to Fight AIDS in Africa with O.A.R. and More
You’re probably familiar with the (RED) brand, or at least have seen it at the Gap or at Starbucks. It’s a simple business model, devised by Bono and and ONE/DATA founder Bobby Shriver where products people already buy are turned “(RED)”, and when someone buys a (RED) version of that product, a portion of it…
Yusuf Islam (Formerly Known as Cat Stevens) Hitting the Late Night Circuit
When Yusuf Islam, known to many as Cat Stevens (his given name is actually Steven Demetre Georgiou, but he changed his name after a conversion to Islam in 1979) will be making the rounds on television this week. For the first time in ages, it will be because of his music. Islam will be performing…