Tedium Highlight in Music industry: Why Beck stepped in it by doing an ad with the NFL. 

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Tag results: Music industry

Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too

Pondering “You Get What You Give,” the one-hit wonder recorded by a guy smart enough to realize that it would be a one-hit wonder. It’s a survival story.

Cassingle Culture

Why the single version of the cassette didn’t feel as worthy of a purchase as, say, a 45. Or, perhaps, even a digital download.

Tuned Out

Why children’s radio—a format once important enough that Disney undermined a competitor to dominate the radio dial—has largely disappeared from the airwaves.

Floppy Copy Classics

A few copy-protection schemes, of varying levels of success, you’ve possibly run into over the years. Don’t lose your code wheel.

Sell Out With Me, Oh Yeah

Musicians selling out isn’t really that big a deal anymore—except when it’s done really poorly, as in the case of Beck’s odd NFL ad that made Neil Young mad.

Repetition, In Four Parts

Pondering the issue of repetition in four different ways, in an effort to not repeat myself. Ever feel like you’re repeating yourself? Read this.

Rock Of Age$

Why the superfan will become ever more important to the music industry over time, or why $1,200 box sets exist despite appealing to only a few people.

Life After Death Metal

For people who have spent their youth touring the world in death metal bands, trying to transition to normalcy is where things get tough.

Compact Disc Duality

The DualDisc format, which combined CDs with DVDs, led a fleeting and ephemeral existence, despite a heavy push from the music industry. What happened?

Virtual Crate Digging

Being a collector of physical media (mostly vinyl) in the digital age changes the experience to some degree. Much of it comes down to the all-knowing algorithm.

Members Only

Pondering the surprising number of musical acts that have official members that don’t actually play an instrument or sing. You know, like Coldplay.

Unsettled

Ticketmaster pulled a fast one on the concert-going public by making it impossible to redeem free tickets in a class-action settlement. We should boycott.

Mystic Knights of the Movie Soundtrack

How Danny Elfman's Oingo Boingo permeated popular culture, especially in the early '80s, thanks in no small part to the rise of movie soundtracks.

Literal Dad Rock

How a famed guitarist best known for working with Frank Zappa and King Crimson scored a hit with his daughter, mocking his semi-successful music career.

Ban The Box

The defining debate of the early compact disc era centered around the longbox, a wasteful form of packaging pushed by retailers and paper manufacturers.

Primitive Streaming Gods

Lessons from the music industry’s initial consumer-hostile reaction to the Napster saga. Going from $16 CDs to unlimited streaming is really hard.

Behind By A Century

What it’s like to experience The Tragically Hip’s catalog for the first time, as a complete outsider, in 2017. Long story short: The U.S. really missed out.

Hide And Seek

For a while, hidden tracks were everywhere, especially during the CD era. But thanks to streaming music, there’s nowhere to put them. Is that good or bad?

Let’s Lock Information Down

DRM, one of the internet’s dark arts, was already in the works—complete with epic patents—years before the existence of Napster gave it a business case.

Sing Your Heart Out

From 8-Track to Laserdisc to CD+G to ISDN lines to YouTube, the different technologies that made karaoke possible. (Alcohol helps, too.)
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