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 Harry Manx and Kevin Breit ~ In Good We TrustEven if Harry Manx and Kevin Breit weren’t two of the best guitar players on the planet, a recorded collaboration between the pair of them would be news. With their brand-new debut album for Stony Plain Records, the pair of them have created “In Good We Trust,” a collection of 11 songs that ooze sensuality, dark blues, playful humour, and astonishing instrumental virtuosity. Oh, wait a minute? You don’t know Harry Manx and Kevin Breit? Missed them, somehow? Okay, here’s a quick recap: His years in India, and his mastery of the mohan veena (a 20-string modified slide guitar, developed by Manx’s mentor Vishwa Mohan Bhatt) influenced his accomplished slide guitar work, Harry’s deep affection for the blues and his laid-back vocal style led him to a career as a solo artist, with stunningly enthusiastic response from festival audiences in Canada, the U.S., Europe and Australia. Along the way he recorded his first album, “Dog My Cat,” in 2000, and followed it with “Wise and Otherwise” in 2001. Three more releases (“Road Ragas,” “west eats meet” and “Mantras for Madmen”) have followed. Kevin Breit lives in a small Ontario country town, but almost every Monday night — for more than 10 years — he has packed some of his many guitars and driven to the Orbit Room, a tiny club in the middle of Toronto’s Little Italy. “That gig grounds me,” he says, acknowledging that there have been times, on extensive world-wide tours with Cassandra Wilson or Norah Jones, that he’s had to get a substitute for the gig. “I remember once, in Brazil, looking at my watch and thinking, ‘heck, I’ve got to get ready for the Orbit Room’ before I realized where I was.” His studio work and tours with Wilson and Jones may have ramped up his fame, but he has become a first-call recording guitarist for literally hundreds of other artists. He seems to have particular empathy for women singers — recent sessions for Molly Johnson, Holly Cole, Rosanne Cash, Serena Ryder, Rita Chiarelli, Janis Ian, k.d. lang and Natalie MacMaster have added to a lengthening discography and pay tribute to his skills. To prove his versatility, he’s also recorded with Ian Tyson, Marc Jordan, Amos Lee and the Guess Who. He also leads at least three bands (at last count!), The Sisters Euclid, Folk Alarm and Supergenerous, and there are at least 15 CDs in the Now, five years on, the magic is still there. Says Kevin: “Originally, we planned a slide guitar album with Harry and my friend in California, Greg Liesz. Then, at the last minute, Greg got sick and couldn’t make it. But the studio was booked, tickets purchased, so we went ahead. At first, we thought we’d leave spaces for Greg to fill later — but, to be honest we just couldn’t leave an invisible hole. So we all decided to leave that idea for another time. “We played for four days. Two or three takes of each tune at the most. It came together so well; Harry and I are a symbiotic team. And this was double the fun that we had five years back.” IN GOOD WE TRUST: This new CD has four songs written by each of the musical partners, plus one co-write and Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” and a dark traditional ballad “Death Have Mercy”. Manx handles the vocals, with Breit contributing backups. No bass, no drums, no horns — just the sounds made by two amazing players and the multitude of stringed instruments they brought to the studio with them. Harry Manx and Kevin Breit share a degree of commitment as well as musical excellence. Trust in good is well placed. And this CD is proof. Footnotes: * Harry’s unique cigar box guitar, which is featured on the artwork for “In Good We Trust” has a special autograph on it: Bruce Springsteen’s. Springsteen heard Harry’s version of “I’m On Fire” and, after the show, expressed interest in the instrument as well as offering a ringing endorsement of his playing — and Harry’s version of the song. ** Kevin Breit pronounces his name as “bright.” His twin brothers, Gary and Garth, are both musicians; Gary is the long-time keyboard player with Bryan Adams’ band Update: In addition to the new release with Kevin Breit, last month Harry won the Canadian Blues Award, presented by CBC's Saturday Night Blues.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - After centuries singing the gods' praises to traditional instruments, classically-trained Indian musicians are experimenting with African drums, pop lyrics and digital mixing in the search for new audiences. "Musicians now need to have a global appeal," said singer Anoushka Shankar, daughter of globally famed sitar player Ravi Shankar. "It's an age of classical experimentation." India's classical traditions date back to the oldest religious scriptures and rituals, and most forms of classical music have been practised and sustained by "gharanas", music schools which have each developed a particular style. But while the music has survived largely intact its audience has been shrinking in the face of a burgeoning pop industry. "There is a wider variety of music in India, so we can see instrumental music now having lyrics, having some elements of popular music to make it globally recognised," Grammy-nominated Shankar said. "Classical music is good but you need to be educated about it to actually understand and enjoy it. Not many people in India know so many intricacies," said 32-year-old Ramesh Khanna. Amaan Ali Khan, one of India's leading exponents of the sarod, a versatile stringed instrument, and a fan of fusion and lounge music, says the new styles are a boon. "Mild flirtation with music is not bad. A complete musician should know and do all kinds of music," he said. "People have started accepting experimentation with music. The fact that we can see so many fusion albums out for sale is because it's being accepted by the masses," Khan, son of the legendary sarod player Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, added. The music industry says the new techniques are grabbing market share. "Indian classical fusion music now has a market of its own," Anand Srinivasan of EMI Virgin said. "People are more listening to the home-grown talent and there is a clear shift away from western lounge or fusion music heavyweights." "Any change is a change for the better. Indian music to attract this generation needs to evolve, but it's essential to retain the 'Indianness'," said Rahul Sharma, a santoor player.
Despite the release of a study by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research which suggests that the number of purchases per iPod sold of songs from Apple's iTunes Store (for it's no longer only music; there are films, TV episodes and music videos there too) are not accelerating, there are some indicators that there's still room at the top for digital music. After analysing thousands of credit and debit card transactions of 4,000 people (a statistically valid sample) over 27 months, Bernoff concluded that people do not, over time, accelerate their purchase of online music. Instead, the number of songs sold per iPod (which might be a good approximation - although you don't need an iPod to buy from the iTunes Store) has held steady, averaging about 20 per player. "The iPod is not necessarily a machine for generating revenue for the music industry," Bernoff noted in his report. "If iPod owners continued to purchase music tracks throughout the lifetime of their ownership, one would expect to see iTunes sales growing at a faster rate than iPods," he concluded. The problem with his negative conclusion is that accelerating growth in downloads does seem to be what's happening. Says who? Says Michael Constantinos, a graduate at Johns Hopkins university, who has graphed the growth of music downloads from the iTunes Store using publicly-available data from Apple. It shows a remarkable exponential trend (see http://cmichae.acm.jhu.edu). His estimates, made in February, suggest that Apple will pass the 2bn songs mark some time next February, and that the announcement of 1.5bn downloads, made in September, was "pretty much on schedule". But Bernoff says sales from the store have slowed since January. Can both be right? Perhaps. January is traditionally a time when downloads from the store leap, because everyone is taking advantage of the iTunes gift vouchers that they got for Christmas. Thus downloads (from all music sites) first exceeded physical singles sales in the last week of 2004 - the end of the first year that the iTunes Music Store (as it was) was open in the UK. Expect more of the same this year; for 2006 also saw the first song to reach No.1 purely through digital downloads (Gnarls Barkley's Crazy). But Bernoff's analysis couldn't spot voucher purchases, which bump up the January downloads volume. That makes the rest of the year look quieter, followed by a leap at the end as more people get broadband and vouchers, and download songs. Recorded music is a seasonal business, as the rash of TV adverts for dire "Best Of" CDs indicates. The iTunes Store isn't going away, and nor are its customers. But Bernoff's research does indicate consumer reluctance to commit to downloads. Perhaps that's because one can often buy the physical CD for the same, or even less, on Amazon than the iTunes Store. In which case the problem is simply one of price. But that's not a problem for Apple - it's one for the record labels. Will they ease their pricing to encourage us online? The signs, it must be said, aren't encouraging.
"This album is about exchanging ideas," Young told CNN in a live interview last week on the steps of Warner Bros./Reprise Records in Burbank. "It's about getting a message out. It's about empowering people by giving them a voice. I know not everyone believes what I say is what they think, but red and blue is not black and white. We're all together. It's a record about unification."
DAYLIGHT AGAIN is expanded with four previously unreleased bonus tracks including a demo version of "Might As Well Have a Good Time" plus "Raise A Voice," "Feel Your Love," and "Tomorrow Is Another Day."
Toshiba said it would sell its stake for about $179m and complete the deal by September. One of Japan's major music and entertainment companies, Toshiba EMI is currently controlled 45% by Toshiba, with the rest owned by EMI. Toshiba accepted an offer from the EMI Group as 'the music content business today is less relevant to other businesses within the Toshiba Group,' it said in a statement. Toshiba EMI primarily handles domestic artists but also sells albums in the lucrative Japanese market for some of EMI's top acts - including The Beatles. Toshiba has been focusing increasingly on its energy operations and in October completed the purchase of US nuclear power plant maker Westinghouse from British Nuclear Fuels for $5.4 billion.
The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang trek, which re-captured the top-grossing tour ever title from U2's Vertigo, was the top grossing tour of 2006, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore. The Stones, which began the tour in the fall of 2005, sold out arenas in America, stadiums all over the world and then stadiums in America before calling it a year in late November with a tally of about $437 million.  Independent Record Labels Join Forces To Create World Independent Network
3. TAKE YOUR MEDICINE Some of these guidelines
may seem excessive or harsh; some are simply common sense reminders.
But a key ingredient to successful business management
is the ability to be ruthlessly objective: to clearly see what needs
to be done and to respond intelligently and creatively to the challenge. Every other month,
Peter Spellman sends out a wonderful informative music newsletter
called
Music Biz Insight Above is an excerpt from the new Music Biz Insight
#28, reprinted with the kind permission of Mr. Spellman. For more
information,
please check out his website: www.mbsolutions.com Filtering content to promote the best music on a site has helped, but what happens when lightning strikes and you find a band that really has a shot to make it? For a price, localmusic.com can help you out. An information and promotion company that helps keep indie rock communities informed in twelve cites across the country, localmusic.com launched its Creative Marketing Solutions campaign to help labels and bands connect with the new, young demographic of music listeners.
Tutorials at streamingmedia.com MP4-SA is different from other audio file formats, like MP3 and RA (realplayer) and WAV, in a fundamental way: instead of describing the recorded audio data, it describes the music-making process and the instruments and effects and mixing console that were used, the notes played, and the slider and knob movements. It describes these things in such a precise way, that it's possible to perfectly recreate the audio by following the description. This method yields two major advantages. Files are extremely small compared to sizes of current audio formats (SA files will be around 3 kilobyte for a 1 minute interactive, interesting and complex performance!) and because the sound is rendered on the end-user's computer, the sound will be exactly the same wherever it's played. A feature that might be even more interesting than "just" minimizing audio data is the following: Because of the way Structured Audio is organized, it's possible to make the music <really> interactive, which will lead to things never heard of before. Suppose you want to create a musical performance as part of a video game, where the moods of the characters modulate the music, not just by fading in some new audio files, but by letting the music change itself while it's being played! This is possible with MP4-SA. SA lives within the MPEG-4 paradigm of "streaming" data and "decoding" processes. The Structured Audio toolset is not only a method of synthesis, but a streaming format appropriate for WWW-based (or any other channel) transmission of audio data. Any fully compliant "MPEG-4 decoder" must contain an implementation, in hardware, software, or both, of this music-synthesis language. It may be clear that MP4-SA is capable of giving audio on the web a whole new impulse. Realizing all these great possibilities. We (a group of composers, sounddesigners and software-developers) are researching and experimenting with MP4-SA for quite some time now. At the moment we
are intensifying our efforts. When web or multimedia based products need
streaming interactive audio but space or bandwidth are limited, MP4-SA
is the solution. Without the use of Napster (which the school banned last year), students and faculty will have access to collections of music across several genres, and will be able to read lyrics, display digital scores and even create their own compositions. The money will be
provided by a four-year grant from the Digital Libraries Initiative, which
receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. The proposed Directive aims to harmonize and strengthen laws governing civil damages in piracy cases. It will also deal with rules concerning the search and seizure of pirate produce and evidence. Unfortunately, the proposed Directive at this stage falls short of putting forward rules to harmonize the criminal penalties needed to deter piracy. The industry will continue to press on this issue. Counterfeiting and piracy increasingly involves organized crime groups operating across borders. This Directive is the cornerstone of a far-reaching action plan aimed at strengthening the fight against intellectual property theft in Europe that costs EU creative industries 4.5 billion Euros each year. In an important step forward, the Commission will investigate ways of regulating optical disc plants (producing CDs, CD-ROMs and DVDs) to ensure they only manufacture legitimate product in future. The creative sector has long campaigned for tighter regulation of optical disc plants, since much of pirate product currently flooding the market originates from ostensibly legitimate plants. The music industry applauded the key role played by the European Parliament in ensuring the EU gets effective tools to combat piracy. Mme Janelly Fourtou, rapporteur for the EC Green Paper on Counterfeiting and Piracy at the European Parliament, said: Piracy not only does severe damage to business interests but has a detrimental effect on consumers. Members of the Parliament were unequivocal about the need to fight piracy, so we fully support the ambitious and concrete measures outlined by the Commission." The December 13th announcement of a proposed Directive is part of the follow-up Communication to the European Commission's 1998 Green Paper on Piracy and Counterfeiting in the Single Market. Facts about piracy in the European union Physical recordings account for the bulk of the world music pirate market, comprising an estimated 1.9 billion discs and cassettes with a total 1999 value of 3.5 billion Euros. Annual sales of pirate music CDs alone now exceed 500 million units worldwide. More than 25 million pirate files are also available for trading on the Internet Legal music sales exceed illegal ones in no fewer than 19 countries. Eastern Europe and Latin America are the regions with the highest domestic piracy rates. Europe's software,
music and audiovisual sectors combined are estimated to lose some 4.5
billion Euros annually as a result of counterfeiting and piracy Governments
lose billions of Euros in lost tax revenues Large-scale criminal organizations
are increasingly involved in counterfeiting and piracy and use profits
to fund other illegal activities such drug trafficking, prostitution,
arms trading and terrorism Theft of intellectual property has cost approximately
a quarter of a million jobs in the entertainment and software industries
Counterfeiting and piracy is a disincentive to industries to invest in
the creation of new works and products and in developing new markets. Open Rights components
are targeted to include music, audio, video, and text content building
blocks and applications for electronic publishing, business to business,
and enterprise applications and services. Open Rights components from
Inter Trust will not include technology needed for the trusted DRM core. Let me explain. There are certain obligatory imperatives by which all corporations must operate. These imperatives are assumed, accepted, rarely articulated and color everything a corporation does. Now don't get me wrong. There ARE music people within corporate record labels - people who are truly turned on by music creation, recording and promotion. I know some of them. But when push comes to shove, all their actions must reflect the policies and procedures handed down from "corporate". Too much independence on their part and they will be handed a pink slip and shown the door. There are seven ruling imperatives corporations (including music corporations) must obey, and each imperative has a profound effect on how music and artists are treated, regarded and disposed of. Here they are: 1. THE PROFIT IMPERATIVE: Monetary profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions. Shareholders "own" corporations and they expect the value of their shares to increase, not decrease. Forget the little old lady that owns a few shares of stock. Most shares are owned by tremendously wealthy and thus politically influential individuals and most importantly by other corporations, many of which are investment banks. All are itchy for quarterly, measurable profits. "EBITA" (earnings before interest, taxes and amortization) controls everything. Senior corporate officers are notorious for wearing "ninety-day glasses". Three months ahead is as far as most CEOs can see. This myopia often infects the entire organization, as relentless pressure to perform over the short term radiates from the top. A factory may be closed rather than modernized and an artist dropped rather than developed because the tax write-off makes the next period look better. 2. THE GROWTH IMPERATIVE: This goes hand-in-hand with the profit imperative. Profit means growth, expansion of the talent pool, expansion of the master catalog. Corporations live or die by whether they can sustain growth. Music corporations must keep on signing new artists in order to use their vast infrastructures and justify their overhead expenses. Sometimes company growth doesn't happen fast enough to suit the ambitious, however, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all. What to do then? The power-hungry CEO's typical solution is to expand by acquiring another company. Growth by acquisition has been the modus operandi of the corporate music business since the 1970s. EMI is a case in point. By acquiring such hot labels as Virgin and Chrysalis and bringing its antiquated operations up to snuff, EMI for a while seemed headed to the top. But chairman Sir Colin Southgate also pressured his executives to maintain double-digit growth, first in good times, then in the face of a rapidly deteriorating market. They responded by pumping out quick-buck anthologies and slashing costs willy-nilly when they could have been building talent for the long haul. Managed for short-term results, EMI has literally consumed itself in pursuit of its numbers. The profit and growth imperatives are the most fundamental corporate drives; together they represent the corporation's instinct "to live." 3. COMPETITION AND AGGRESSION: Corporations place every person in management in fierce competition with each other. Anyone interested in a corporate career must hone his or her ability to seize the moment. This applies to gaining an edge over another company or over a colleague within the company. All divisions of major record companies are attempting to represent themselves as an indispensable component of the recording industry. The day-to-day work of dealing predominantly with one specific medium, whether the music, the image in the video, the radio media, or the press, tends to result in different staff assessing the potential of artists in different ways and developing their own agendas and goals rather than working towards a shared overall vision. As a label employee, you are expected to be part of a "team," but you also must be ready to climb over your own colleagues when an opportunity presents itself. This does not make for an environment conducive to artist development nor record sales. 4. AMORALITY: Not being human, corporations do not have altruistic goals. In fact, corporate executives praise "non emotionality" as a basis for "objective" decision-making. So decisions that may be antithetical to aesthetic goals or artistic integrity are made without misgivings. Corporations, however, seek to hide their amorality and attempt to ACT as if they were altruistic. Lately, for example, there has been a concerted effort by American industry to appear concerned with environmental cleanup, community arts or drug programs. Likewise, major labels are starting to once again toss around the phrase "long-term artist development" as an antidote to the perception they are shortsighted. But this can only be rhetorical in a corporate setting where quarterly results rule the environment. Product (and its creators) not bringing in the necessary numbers will continue to be dropped like a bad habit. Don't be deceived! It is a fair rule of thumb that corporations tend to advertise the very qualities they do not have in order to allay negative public perceptions. When corporations say "we care," it is almost always in response to the widespread perception that they do not have feelings or morals. 5. HIERARCHY: Corporate laws require that corporations be structured into classes of superiors and subordinates within a centralized pyramidal structure: chairman, directors, chief executive officer, VPs, division managers, and so on (based primarily on military models). Unlike the freedoms of an entrepreneurial business, large company decision-making must pass through layer upon layer of management. This makes the process of product development slow and ponderous (for example, from the time a band is signed it can be a full year or longer before their first record is finally released owing in part to this dense hierarchical management structure). Furthermore, high executive turnover and frequent management "purges" at large record companies can often delay or even derail a recording project indefinitely, leaving artists in the lurch. 6. QUANTIFICATION: Corporations require that subjective information be translated into objective form, i.e. numbers. The subjective or spiritual aspects of music, for example, cannot be translated, and so do not enter corporate equations. Music is evaluated only as "product." Some in the industry would prefer to treat music like other industries treat cars and refrigerators. But music cannot be treated as such. As the creative extensions of human spirit, music will always defy attempts at control. Indeed, just when the majors catch up with a "new" music trend they often find that the market has shifted and music lovers have moved on to something else. 7. HOMOGENIZATION: Corporations have a stake in all of us living our lives in a similar manner. The ultimate goal of corporate multinationals was expressed in a revealing quote by the president of Nabisco Corporation: "One world of homogeneous consumption. . . [I am] looking forward to the day when Arabs and Americans, Latinos and Scandinavians, will be munching Ritz crackers as enthusiastically as they already drink Coke or brush their teeth with Colgate." Corporations are structured and optimized for the "mass market" and so what they sell must appeal to the broadest audience possible. Their musical mainstay has been CHR (Contemporary Hit Radio or Top 40 Pop) - predictable, non-adventurous, formulaic. They have dominated the airwaves and circled the globe with this musical pablum. Incidentally, homogenization is one of the reasons the corporate music business (along with most other corporations) is in such crisis today. It is facing a rapidly segmenting marketplace where consumers have become unpredictable. It always depended on "The Next Big Thing" to flush its corporate ledgers. But the very concept of one artist who can unite a large pop audience and help shape and define it (ala Elvis, The Beatles, Springsteen) seems about as dead as the 45-rpm spindle. Next Big Thing? More like "Next Modest Thing That Might Appeal to a Portion of the Demographic". But while this is bad news for the corporate giants, it is good news for their indie counterparts. A number of indie labels specializing in "niche" music markets (hip hop, ambient, folk, Celtic, etc.) are grabbing market share almost daily and breaking open a lot of champagne. So in conclusion, let us remember that the Musical Industrial Complex must, by necessity, bow to corporate imperatives that will inevitably clash with art. It's nobody's fault; it's the nature of corporate cultures, and any artist desiring to get into bed with this culture should proceed with eyes wide open. Your partner could be your nemesis. by Peter Spellman
The largest merger in recording industry history occurred late last year when the Dutch-owned Polygram Label Group was bought by Seagram's of Canada for a whopping $10.6 billion. Already an owner of Universal Music (Geffen,Dreamworks, Interscope), the acquired Polygram cachet included the labels A & M, Island, Motown, and Mercury among others. As a result, the core record industry now boils down to five major conglomerates (BMG, EMI, SONY, WEA, and Universal Music Group), and that could be reduced to four if rumors of a buyout of EMI by BMG are substantiated. These five supply about 80% of all the music heard on the radio.The shifting of tectonic plates caused by giant mergers inevitably results in upheaval and dislocation. Record companies A&M and Geffen have been folded into Interscope Records, a successful former indie operation in its own right, responsible for the rap stars Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur, among others. Mercury and Motown (down from over 200 employees to 7) have virtually ceased to exist with any former autonomy gone. Numerous smaller labels are also on the chopping block on both coasts. When all is said and done Seagram will issue pinks slips to over 3,000 employees worldwide (including many middle managers and a number of executives) and let go of 300 artists by the end of this year. What people fear most is that what remaining diversity and originality there is in popular music will be snuffed out for the sake of making easy, unchallenging money-spinners: in other words, more Take That and Spice Girls clones. Serious artists, some say, have already found it difficult over the past decade or so to hold on to their integrity and resist the pressure to over-commercialize. Others feel that in its drive for efficiencies and global markets, the music business is drifting away from its homebase constituency of disaffected, affluent Western youth. Rock, they say, is endangered in corporate hands. But before we start cursing the music-biz execs and their evil bean-counting accountants, consider this: The Universal/Polygram merger could actually turn out to be a good thing for contemporary music. "The good news is that it'll be like 1952 all over again," commented Billboard editor Timothy White in the wake of the merger. "People will take their severance packages and start little labels, just like when Ahmet Ertgun started Atlantic Records with a bunch of artists nobody else wanted." Indeed, the indie
sector of the music business is its fastest rising star. Empowered
by
affordable recording technologies and a hyper The fact that Seagram's
Universal Music Group wants to sever ties with so many acts is a condemnation
of the industry's tendency to sign talent so indiscriminately. The statistics
on record sales are dismal. According to the Recording Industry Association
of America, 9 out of 10 new record releases fail to recoup their production
costs. Nine out of ten - that's a mortality rate that would easily sink
any other business. But because of the music's profit-to-cost ratios it's
been allowed to exist. One hit fills the coffers fast. Faced with this
tough reality, the music industry is now downsizing into a more compact,
cost-effective
version of its former obese self. Big Mac-sized marketing campaigns are
out (or, at least, not quite the priority they were) and "we-care-because-you-do" artist
development is coming back in as the music industry wakes up to the
fact that bands cannot live on hype alone. Perhaps the new Seagram
regime will set an Most are unaware
that Seagram chief Edgar Bronfman is an armchair songwriter who co-authored
Celine Dion's , "To Love You More." It's hard to imagine Time Warner chief
Gerald Levin or the head of Bertelsmann or Sony writing a song that would
be played on the radio. "The music business is now going to be the most
important business to us - which it's not to most of the other companies
that are running large entertainment businesses," said Bronfman to the
Los Angeles Times earlier this year. "Seagram has corporate management
that loves music, loves the music business and loves the creativity of
the music business. I think that's a good place for a music company to
be." We all hope so.
We invite you to visit these industry related websites:
Film Music Magazine http://www.filmmusicmag.com/index.html ASCAP http://www.ascap.com SESAC http://www.sesac.com The Film Music Network http://www.filmmusic.net The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) http://www.songwriters.org/new/home.htm The Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL) http://www.filmscore.org Professional Composers of America (PCA) http://www.procomposers.org The Music Industry Pages http://www.musicindustry.com Music Network USA http://www.mnusa.com Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) http://www.riaa.com Liquid Audio http://www.liquidaudio.com Real Audio http://www.real.com |
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Kevin Breit catalogue. Kevin tells the story: “We were both at a folk festival in Owen Sound and were asked to share a workshop. We were introduced, we shook hands, and we went on stage and started to play. No rehearsal, no set list, no plans. And it was magic!” That was in 2001, and the instant friendship the pair had struck resulted in the award-winning album “Jubilee.”
Neil Young Releases "Living With War" 
"Living With War" has already set fans and the media abuzz over the Internet due to its reflections on the Iraqi war and the turmoil in this country. It was written and recorded in two weeks with Young on electric guitar, vocals and harmonica, Chad Cromwell on drums, Rick Rosas on bass, and Tommy Bray on trumpet, along with a 100-member choir. One choir member, speaking to a British newspaper, said the recording session was "like being at a 12-hour peace rally." It is not the first time the 60-year-old Canadian has touched on current events in his songwriting. In 2002, Young released "Let's Roll," a tribute to the passengers who died taking down the hijackers on United Flight 93 over Pennsylvania on September 11, and in 1970 wrote and recorded with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young the song "Ohio," after four students were killed by the National Guard during a peace rally at Kent State University. 
HARMONY SHINES ON CSN CLASSICS
In
Hollywood: The website for Working Hollywood