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 [...]

Coachella Pic ©Justin Kent
Todd Berry writes: In 2007, MusicFestNW began using SonicBids to accept applications for showcases, a move that spurred some controversy around Portland and the greater Northwest, and they are continuing to use SonicBids for this year’s festival. Personally, I think it’s disheartening to see MFNW head in this direction, but as a [...]

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 [...]

Grand Theft Auto IV sold 6 million copies in its first week at $60 a pop in the USA. Globally it brought in $500 million. That outstrips all of the first weeks music CD sales from top artists since 1991. Here’s the top 5 list of those week one sales in units not dollars:
1. ‘N [...]

The thinking shed
I suppose it was inevitable. The same day the Gang of Four news broke I received a letter from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) asking me to comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The IFPI has every right to ask me to comply with the law as it [...]

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 [...]