Meg, 1/2ALIVE’s resident photographer. ©Nilina Mason-Campbell
A post from Nilina Mason-Campbell. It’s Vancouver B.C theme week for me this week! I spent much of last week up in B.C. with but one question on my mind: is Vancouver, BC the next Portland? It seriously seems to be a city on the verge of exploding. There are [...]

Although it would be impossible to give someone a well concocted taste of Portland’s incredibly rich music community in one weekend, the peeps at PdxPopNow! have been baking up a 3 day FREE and ALL AGE festival for several years now that comes mighty close. It always features some of the cities most acclaimed [...]

Last summer I enjoyed Mexican food and beers while Roy Christopher threw some questions at me. Upon reading the result of that discussion now it doesn’t feel so much as an interview as it is two friends discussing the state of “things” over a drink. As Roy writes “Dave’s ideas about the state of the [...]

Portland bands have to pay a third party, Sonicbids, to apply for a slot at this year’s MusicFestNW [this may have been the case last year too.] You’d think after the debacle with the CMJ conference where folks paid Sonicbids to enter the lottery and apparently no one from CMJ bothered to listen to the [...]

Richard Nash from Soft Skull Press sent out a link to this speech by Mike Shatzkin on “The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers,” calling it “dead-on.” There are certainly some key insights here: the vertical arrangement of publishing online (as opposed to the horizontality of old-school publishing), acknowledgment of the file as the [...]

Starbucks continues to struggle and is now looking to “examine all aspects of our business that are not directly related to our core” according to this article. This means that the first decision was to let go of Ken Lombard, the unpopular head of Starbuck’s entertainment division. That wasn’t unexpected, I covered this earlier this [...]

Chuck Klosterman weighs in on the decline of the music business but more interestingly chooses to focus on where did the money go - as in if the music biz is down $4 bil who is spending how much on what?
Even if you know nothing about the music industry, you probably know this: People don’t [...]

Stop stealing music motherf*^%#er. Will Ferrell and Heidi Klum as imagined in the movie Music Fans vs The Music Industry.
I wasn’t inclined to pitch in about the story of EMI hiring an ex-Google exec to overhaul its global digital strategy. I figured it was a non-story - record labels are in trouble, have been for [...]