Phil Collins vs. The Ultimate Warrior
Seriously. I don’t even know what to say about this one.
Take Me Home
In the Air Tonight LIVE
Since this is the best Phil song ever, I figured it deserves another shot.
Genesis - Misunderstanding
This one makes the cut on Phil’s beard alone.
Independent labels, tired of being treated like second-class citizens at the bargaining table, have banded together to become a “virtual fifth major” label, and they’ve already started signing deals. Separately, each independent is tiny; together, they could form the largest label in the world.
Finally, a reason to buy “major label” music again. I encourage everyone out there to support this new venture. From what I can tell, this deal only covers digital downloads, but with the current digital marketplace being what it is, I think this is huge. eMusic is currently the only big online music store that sells unprotected MP3s. They are apparently the 2nd biggest store next to iTunes, but they are still pretty far behind. Plus, they have a more limited catalog and a monthly subscription model which I think turns some people off.
This new joint company, called Merlin, has just signed a deal with Snocap, the same company that will allow bands to sell their music through Myspace.
A host of indie giants like Epitaph, Ministry of Sound, Beggars Group, and Domino have formed an agency called Merlin to serve as a one-stop shop for dealing with digital downloads, allowing indies to sell MP3 downloads on sites like MySpace. The formation of the agency was announced at the annual MidemNet music conference in France, as was a subsequent deal Merlin signed with MySpace to sell MP3 downloads using MyStore, the service powered by Snocap.
“The form of copyright apartheid currently being applied to the value of independent rights is unacceptable,” CEO Charles Caldas said in a statement. “Merlin will enable independents around the world to participate in new licensing and revenue models on competitive terms and give new services more direct access to their repertoire. Together we are bigger than the largest major.”
Today I came across a new site called iJigg. It’s like Digg for music. Visitors to the site can listen to songs and vote for ones they like, post comments on individual songs and even embed a song in their own website (or sites like Myspace).
What’s cool about this is that there doesn’t seem to be any limit on the amount of songs you can post. So far we have all of Clearing the Channel and a couple songs from Subdivisions, and we’ll be posting more soon. We get a lot of requests from people who want us to change the songs on our Myspace profile so they can add the song to their page. Everyone wants a different song and we have a limit of four, so inevitably we can’t please everyone.
But now you can go to iJigg and grab the HTML code for any song you want and add it wherever you want. And while you’re there you can vote for all of our songs and help push us up to the Most Popular list so other people can find us.
For anyone who hasn’t bought Subdivisions yet, have a listen to the lead-off track “Circles”:
For those of you who are wondering here’s an update on what we’ve been up to:
For the past six months or so our main focus has been writing new music for a future release. As of right now we have six songs together along with several half written songs that will either be made into future classics or shit sandwiches. For our own enjoyment we’ve tentatively titled some of the finished songs after inside jokes (as we usually do) like our song “I made Ripper Cry.” This title comes from an incident on our 2002 tour when Jamie made our tour manager Ripper cry. It’s a longer story then that but if I told you it wouldn’t be an inside joke anymore (plus its not that interesting). If you were at any of our last few shows you may of heard the song as well as “Novelty” which were the first post “Clearing the Channel” songs to be put together. While these two aren’t a very far departure from the past music we’ve assembled, other songs like “Greenlight” go in a bit of a different direction. More then ever before we’ve really been experimenting with looking at the writing process differently. This includes not only rethinking song structure but also the instrumentation in the band. Not all of our “experiments” have worked out but others have. A good example of this would be one of our half written songs where instead of playing guitar Tony plays keyboards. Nothings final yet but if our thought process continues down this path you can certainly expect some new sides of the band to be shown with our next release.
Stay tuned for more news on the writing process as we head into the studio in 2007.
Have you checked us out on Flickr lately? Probably not. You’re lazy and distracted by the modern world we all live in… just like us.
Here’s what you’ve been missing:
We’ve been holed up in our rehearsal space for the past couple of months working on new material. These are some not-very-good photos, taken somewhat-haphazardly after a rehearsal session on Dec 11, 2006.
These photos show the progression of the TV we used to create the cover of our album, "Clearing the Channel".
These are contact sheets from a photo shoot we did in NYC prior to the release of our self titled album.
View some more awesome sets here.
Here’s some other cool stuff you can do with Flickr that you couldn’t do on our site:
First of all, let me say that there will be very little music on these lists. (Actually none.) 2006 was a pretty bad year for finding new music (for me at least). I’m sure there was some really good stuff put out last year, but I didn’t come across it and I didn’t spend a whole lot of time looking.
Having said that, I am not restricting any of my lists to things that were actually released in 2006. If I saw/heard/read them for the first time in 2006 (or late 2005 in some cases) they are eligible for my list. I make the rules around here and that’s how I’m gonna roll.
With that said, here are my “Best of 2006″ lists (in no particular order). Feel free to add your own or make fun of mine in the comments. I was gonna comment on each thing, but this is already way late as it is. There are a few things that I’ll probably devote an entire post to, but for now here’s the full list. Everything here is highly recommended so check it out if you have the time.
There are a ton of new services and applications popping up on the web these days. I tend to check a lot of them out in case it’s something that would be useful in promoting Sinch. It’s how I originally came across sites like Myspace, PureVolume, Flickr, and Frappr.
I recently found a new site called Grupthink that’s pretty interesting. Members can post questions — anything from “Who is your favorite comedian?” to “Do you adhere to, or identify with, any particular belief system/religion?”
As you might expect, in trying it out I decided to post a Sinch-related question:
I spent a little time adding the songs from Clearing the Channel and our self titled album, and at some point decided I would come back later and finish it. I went back to find that none of the songs had been voted on and the #1 answer with a grand total of 6 votes is now “Who is Sinch?”
I’m sure most of you have an opinion on what our best songs are, so I figured I’d post it here and see if we can get some real answers. Head over to Grupthink and pick your favorites.
Once you create a free account you can add new answers (if your favorite song isn’t there yet) and you can post your own questions. If you add any new questions to the site, post them in the comments so we can all get in on the action.
It’s interesting the way the voting works. You can actually vote for every song if you want to. By default they will be ranked in the order you vote on them (first vote being your #1 favorite), or you can reorder your votes on the right side.
A UFO was sighted at Lephalale, where it was described as a strange object “on an orange cloud, singing like a million turbines” - hitting the earth with a bang at 04:33 on Saturday.
Further news reports will probably say that this was simply a meteorite. Do not believe them.
When the UFO hit the ground the low-lying clouds went orange.
“It was so exceptional that I started crying. I wished my children and grandchildren could have seen it. I had not been drinking and I was in full control of my faculties,” she said.
2007 has arrived and once again I tell myself, “This is the year.” I never really have a clear idea of what I think it’s the year of. It’s just the year.
Maybe we’ll sweep the Grammys. Or maybe we’ll play 5 shows on 5 continents in 5 days. Or maybe we’ll just drive a van into a brick wall. Who knows? I certainly don’t. What I do know is that something will happen and if you stay tuned here at Sinch.net (and the still-sorta-new-but-not-really-fully-realized-yet Sinch.tv), you can come along for the ride.
Hopefully everyone survived 2006 without too much of a hassle. (These guys didn’t.) We managed to coast into 2007-town on fumes, but we’re getting gassed up and ready to get back on the road. (Metaphorically speaking. We don’t actually have touring plans yet. And I apologize for how stupid that was.)
Anyway, this should be one for the books. Or, I should say, one in which we (maybe) actually release a book. You’ll have to wait and see exactly what that means (we’re still not totally sure yet either).
In all seriousness we do have some stuff planned for this year, most of which will be able to be enjoyed by everyone, no matter what part of the world you live in (as long as you have access to a computer).
SinchCast will be back in some form or another. Sinch.tv will be getting some more content. We have some new music we’re working on. And those are just the first 3 things. There’s at least 1 more after that. At least.
So, let’s close out 2006 with a little piece of good news:
This week, “Identity Theft” reached #2 on the LoudCity charts for 525.com Power Tracks! And this isn’t some chart with 200 bands you never heard of and then us at #2. We beat out bands like Tool, Breaking Benjamin, Nonpoint (they’re not fucking around this time) and plenty of others I’m sure you’ve heard of. It’s not Billboard or anything like that, but we’ll take what we can get.
Request Sinch on 525.com and help us take over this chart. I’m sending them some more music so feel free to request some other songs as well.
