All things musical

Archive for September 2014

Listen: Chelsea Jade - Nightswimmer

Dream pop savant Chelsea Jade (Watercolours, Teacups) has released a brand new single. With her usual blend of poetic lyricism and ethereal production, the track marks her first release under the new name of Chelsea Jade after performing as Watercolours in recent years. Listen/buy it via the Bandcamp widget below, and if you get a hankering to hear some of her back catalogue you can borrow the Teacups album Forest Fiction or the Watercolours EP Portals via Auckland Libraries.

Podcast: Anthony Metcalf from Glass Owls

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Anthony Metcalf from the band Glass Owls and formerly of the little known but critically acclaimed Howick podcast Hello and Welcome to the Internet stopped by the Auckland Central Library to talk.

Topics covered include his favourite flavour of ice cream, some anecdotes and thoughts about Waiuku and recording the Glass Owls album Out From the Darkness there, why Ben Affleck isn't going to be a good Batman and how Spoon is a great band with cool drums.

You can play the podcast either using the above web player, or right click this direct link to episode two and select 'save link as' to download it straight to your computer.

Watch: Tiny Ruins on A Takeaway Show

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Currently touring the world and winning hearts, Tiny Ruins did a performance for La Blogotheque's A Takeaway Show. Enjoy.

Watch: Miss June in session at 95bFM

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Auckland band Miss June have been making waves recently with their high energy live shows. If you haven't caught the punky four piece yet, then you can approximate that experience from the comfort of your laptop by watching their stunning recent In Session with 95bFM.

Blink announces alternative to APRA

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If you read Blink's e-book The Problem With Music in New Zealand & How To Fix It (covered in a post over here), you'll have heard his thoughts on the work that APRA does collecting songwriting royalties for New Zealand artists. Without going into detail, his argument is that the performing rights organisation perhaps doesn't do the most rigorous job of ensuring that their collected royalties are paid out to the appropriate songwriters. The e-book is well worth a read.

Now he's backed that up by announcing the planned launch of an APRA alternative called PROPS, which stands for Performance Royalty Open Payments system. One of APRA's roles is collecting royalties from live venues to then theoretically pay onwards to the appropriate registered songwriters. From the sounds of things, PROPS is designed to fill that role, but would pay bands twice the amount of money and within 7-14 days.

"In a few months I’ll have an outline of how PROPS works on my website and how anybody can employ the system for themselves. It is not meant to be a system to replace payments for background music at this point, only live performances. I doubt APRA would see this as legit, but, it would be very funny to see them complain about a system that does their job significantly better than they do. Music users shouldn’t pay APRA if they can show they can do a better job distributing the money themselves. I’ve been paying fees for years and believe in paying these fees, my beef is not about the idea of paying fees, it’s just I just wanna make sure they go to the right people."

[Via www.cheeseontoast.co.nz ]

Watch this space.