6 posts tagged “music”

Gold record

There was a time when a "Gold Record" meant that you had sold a certain number of vinyl albums. Of course, that has changed. I was curious what it means in this digital age.

These awards from the Recording Industry Association of America now include other music formats.

GOLD means 100,000 Internet downloads or 500,000 albums, CDs, ringtones or singles. (Do they still make singles?)
   
PLATINUM means 200,000 Internet downloads or 1,000,000 albums, CDs, ringtones or singles.

Multiplatinum 400,000 Internet downloads or 2,000,000 albums, CDs, ringtones or singles.  

DIAMOND means 10,000,000 albums, CDs, or singles - No ringtones or downloads. I'm OK with no ringtones, but downloads seems a pretty legitimate format by now.

Great for causing arguments amongst your friends, comes this list from Amazon of the 100 greatest indie rock albums of all time -

1.   Bee Thousand  by Guided by Voices
 2.  In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel
 3.  Spiderland by Slint
 4.  Exile In Guyville by Liz Phair
 5.  Imperial f.f.r.r. (Deluxe Edition) by Unrest
 6.  Slanted & Enchanted by Pavement
 7.  If You're Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian
 8.  Surfer Rosa by Pixies
 9.  Either/Or by Elliott Smith
10.  Bakesale by Sebadoh
11.  69 Love Songs Volume 1 by The Magnetic Fields
12.  Daydream Nation by Sonic Youth
13.  Michigan by Sufjan Stevens
14.  We Have the Facts and We're Voti… by Death Cab For Cutie
15.  I See A Darkness by Bonnie "Prince" Billy

see the other 85 on the list

Dylan

Start a kid out early on the musical road by reading him Forever Young. 

It's a children's book based on the Bob Dylan song from 1974 with illustrations by Paul Rogers.

The main character is a musician/activist who walks through the lyrics and life situations to go along with them.

For parents, there are lots of Dylan bits hiding in there (most explained in an endnote) - DA Pennebaker can be seen filming the peace march, Edie Sedgwick & Joan Baez and others are, he passes Greenwich Village clubs that Dylan frequented in the 1960's, the cover of the Freewheelin' album pops up...

The Recording Industry Association of America claimed a big victory when they got their first and only win over a piracy suspect in a jury trial ten months ago. (Bet you thought they had already won a bunch of cases - no, most people settle for a lower amount.)

A Duluth jury ordered alleged song swapper Jammie Thomas to pay a ridiculous $222,000 for sharing 24 copyrighted songs! How does someone make THAT calculation?

Unfortunately, that victory emboldened the RIAA’s legal strategy of pursuing individual file-sharing suspects. It also may cause other defendants to question whether or not they should bring their cases to court. That's a second victory.

Well, there's some hope for Ms. Thomas and others - according to a post on Wired‘s Threat Level blog, the district-court judge who heard the civil case, raised the possibility of a mistrial. He says he may have erred in telling the jury that Ms. Thomas was liable for copyright infringement as long as she was “making copyrighted sound recordings available” on KaZaA, no matter if the RIAA could prove that other network users had actually downloaded any of the tunes. That may be in conflict with a binding precedent from the same court.

One fear for the RIAA comes from the fact that they are rarely able to furnish any proof that particular songs have been downloaded illegally, so the judge's perhaps incorrect instruction to the jury serves them well in NOT having to prove that a defendant's files were ever actually shared.

Mainimage

My lifelong friend, Dan Grigsby, has been doing music forever. From our basement bands and acoustic pairings, to his professional life of the past few decades as a producer and recording engineer.

He has been playing percussion with the Native American music band Ghosthorse. Ghosthorse is Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Charley Buckland and Dan.

The band and their album Ksa are nominated in ten categories in this year's Native American Music Awards, and starting August 4th, the voting is open to the public.

Please give a listen to some of their music online, and if you like it, vote for the group in the Tenth Annual Native American Music Awards.

Here are the categories and the numbers of the Ghosthorse listings in each category:

E. Debut Artist of The Year - #11 Ghosthorse – KSA
F. Debut Group of The Year - #4 Ghosthorse – KSA
I. Flutist of The Year – Tiokasin Ghosthorse
M. Best Instrumental Recording - #6 KSA – Ghosthorse
S. Best Producer – Dan Grigsby
U. Record of The Year - #27 KSA - Ghosthorse
W. Song/Single of The Year - #47 Prayer – Ghosthorse
X.  Songwriter of The Year -  #62 Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Charley Buckland, D. Grigsby
Y. Best Spoken Word Recording - #6 KSA Ghosthorse
CC. Best World Music Recording - #9 KSA Ghosthorse

Ghosthorse music is available at:
CDbaby
iTunes
www.ghosthorse.biz
myspace.com/GhosthorseKsa 

Look within this cloud for new music...