Dolly Parton isn’t the sort of artists I’d usually blog about.  However, one of country’s legends has gone it alone with her latest record rather than working through a record company. In part this has been because she had been dropped by her record label (as recorded here).  

If Dolly has been dropped by her label, you’d think that her record sales are pretty trivial, far from it this latest album has clocked up over 50,000 sales (details here) in the first couple of weeks of release and a top twenty sales ranking. 

This isn’t the first time such a decision has been made – just look at what happened to Wilco around the time of the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album. This begs the questions how do record companies determine which artists to drop and are record labels so burdened with costs or inability that they deem a 50,000 sales as not being sufficiently profitable enough?

  A story(here) that has been showing up on the web over the last couple of days is the surprising indication that the next Elvis Costello album to be released through Lost Highway wont be available on CD.  Given that I’ve yet to see a correction to this story, can only suggest that there is some truth in it, although the decision is certainly surprising.  I would have put Elvis Costello’s fanbase demographic (horrid music-business expression, but no other easy to express) in the area of those people who would still rather have something tangible in their hands and fall into the vinyl or CD generations.

It leaves me in a puzzling situation of how to get the album as someone who likes to have something tangible in my hands.  My local music shops have abandoned vinyl, and ordering vinyl over the ‘net has not been the best experience for me with a number of occasions of the sleeve being damaged and in one case they vinyl actually having been warped.

A change from All Music’s seemingly frequent blogging of American Idol they’ve actually written a brief artist spot light blog on Matthew Ryan here.  With Matthew’s new album coming out this can only help.

The FT (FT.com – article here) have an interesting interview with Tom Whalley the CEO of Warner Brothers Records.  Rather than blaming P2P etc for the problems the industry are experiencing he is highly critical of how the business is being run.  For example …

“One of the excuses people were making [for stealing music] was that there were not enough good songs on CDs. And they weren’t wrong,” he said. “What had happened was we took the single out of the marketplace because it wasn’t economically viable and you had to buy a full album whether you liked it or not.”

The argument that killing the single off has contributed to file sharing isn’t one I had considered. But the single is definitely being murdered. It used to be that you would be able to get a single and get several bonus tracks. Now its one extra track which is usually a remix or even cheaply the instrumental version.

Tom also is critical of the position that record companies are just trying to exploit their existing artists and not putting effort into A&R (diametrically opposite to EMI’s new boss who seems to think A&R are a bunch of overpaid slackers).  He also says in the article that the new 360 degree deals where the company’s cut in on touring profits can also be dangerous.  Keep the artists on the road, and they’re not in the studio creating new material for you to sell, and the dividend ration despite the piracy still has to favour recording.

ordered mine 🙂

On Jesse Malin in this week’s Uncut new letter which primarily focuses on Neil Young …

Coincidentally, one of the new records I’ve been playing quite a bit recently is On Your Sleeve by Jesse Malin, an album of cover versions of some of Jesse’s favourite songs. I’m not entirely sure the world needs another version of “Wonderful World”, but elsewhere there are affecting takes on Paul Simon’s “Me And Julio Down By the School Yard”, “Sway” by the Rolling Stones, The Hold Steady’s “You can Make Them Like You” and Neil’s “Looking For A Love”.
You can hear tracks from the album here: www.indian.co.uk/jessemalin/player/player.html

If you’re a fan of 80s electro pop such as Human League, Depeche Mode, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark then I can pass on a recommendation that a friend of mine made to me, Northern Kind’s 52°N (go here), they can also be found on myspace (here). Both their own site and myspace have tracks that can be listened to. Go check it out.

As previously blogged the Charlatans latest album is being made available as free download via the Xfm radio station.  The download is MP3 at 192kbps.  The download can be retrieved from here.  The album will also be released as a CD as normal.

It would seem that Nine Inch Nail’s experiment with a free album download and paid options is seriously paying off within days of the album being made available.  According to Trent Reznor, the $300 limited edition has sold out of its limited 2500 copies. and the album has already made $750,000.