Wednesday, June 06, 2012

Music Notes: New Bob Mould Album & Tour, Amanda Palmer Raises $1 Mil; IUMA Revived;

Veteran rockers are back on the road and a newer artist has raised a record-breaking bundle of cash online in this edition of Music Notes:

* Bob Mould has announced a new set of tour dates, as well as more details on his new album. The new release, "Silver Age," will be released Sept. 4th on his new record label, Merge. Mould's website say the 10 new tunes on the album are "in the punishingly loud melodically sparkling pop/rock vein of the Sugar catalogue being reissued on Merge July 24."

The cover of Bob Mould's new album, "Silver Age."

Speaking of the Sugar releases, this is the 20th anniversary of the band's "Copper Blue," and Mould and his band (Jon Wurster and Jason Narducy) will be performing the album in its entirety, as well as songs from other Sugar albums, Hüsker Dü tunes, and selections from Mould's solo albums, depending on the date.

The Bob Mould tour comes to New York on September 7th with a gig at Webster Hall.



* Like many musicians these days who split from major labels, Amanda Palmer set up a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for her new album. Unlike most of them, however, Palmer (who now seems to be calling herself Amanda F*cking Palmer) not only exceeded her funding goal but blew it out of the water. Instead of raising $100,000, the campaign raised over one million dollars (from close to 21,000 different backers). She passed the initial $100,000 goal on the campaign's first day, and raised a Kickstarter record $379,000 in two days.

What's the money being used for? For one thing, manufacturing and promotion. And artwork: Palmer says she's "been working in secret with OVER THIRTY visual artist friends of mine... to create a massive explosion of song-inspired album art, in all different kinds of media."

As with any Kickstarter campaign, people can choose to contribute a variety of dollar amounts, and get progressively more valuable goodies as the amount increases. (Palmer's campaign was distinctive for offering nearly two dozen donation amounts and accompanying goodies.) If you just want the MP3 version of the new album (which is what I chose), the cost is only $1.

It's baaack: The Internet Underground Music Archive returns!

* Before MP3.com, eMusic, etc., the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA) was the place to discover new music with licensed downloads. As a "GigaOm" article notes, "the site also struggled to pioneer a business model for online music, and eventually shut down in 2006, with hundreds of thousands of songs going offline – until now." (At one point, IUMA was actually bought by eMusic, which is still going today.)

Jason Scott, the man behind Textfiles.com, eventually rescued IUMA by uploading a large portion of it to the Internet Archive, Archive.org. Browse through IUMA and take a trip back in time, musically speaking. To learn more about IUMA's history, read Scott's description here, which includes a link to a CNN video on IUMA (from 1994!).

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