I’m looking at the half year BuzzAngle report where the rock format is #1 in both Album Sales, with 14.3%, and also #1 in Physical and Vinyl, and #2 in Digital Alum Sales and #1 in Song Sales, but when it comes to Audio Streams…it’s dwarfed by Hip-Hop/Rap, which has 24.4% to rock’s 6.9%. Even […]

The internet killed the music business. That’s right, it wasn’t only about recording revenues, it was about UBIQUITY! Walk into an exec’s office in the nineties and MTV was on. That’s what broke Dre big, rap too, sure Jimmy got Snoop and Dre on the cover of “Rolling Stone,” but even though that rag is […]

There were billboards on Sunset Boulevard. It’s hard to fathom the music business, it’s hard to fathom Los Angeles, if you weren’t there in the seventies. The dream had died, Nixon was elected, Tom Wolfe named it the “Me Decade” and at the advent of the next decade Reagan legitimized greed, the boomers grew up, […]

“Tommy: A Bluegrass Opry” Sometimes the best entertainment is free. “Tommy” was not an immediate smash, but it was in my house. It was led by the exquisite single “Pinball Wizard” during the winter of ’69, which got little airplay and was not worth buying as a single since you knew the double LP was […]