the black keys

When did music become unimportant?

In last Sunday's Mad Men episode, "Lady Lazarus," the advertising agency's creative director, Don Draper, asked, "When did music become so important?" Draper's clueless about what's going on outside his Madison Avenue office window. The episode was set in the summer of 1966 when the culture revolved around music; in 2012 the Web is where the action is.

What went wrong with music? Some blame the record companies, believing they mismanaged themselves into a crisis, then again, maybe it was inevitable that our tech culture would move away from music. In the … Read more

Nicki Minaj dumps Twitter account to protest Web piracy

A decade after Metallica took on Napster, rapper Nicki Minaj has launched a silent protest against Web piracy.

"Like seriously, it's but so much a person can take," Minaj wrote Sunday on Twitter just prior to closing down her account, telling fans "Good f---ing bye," according to numerous reports.

The tantrum came after Minaj accused fan site NickiDaily.com of leaking several songs from her new album, "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded," online. Minaj, whose first album, "Pink Friday," was considered a major commercial success last year, risks inviting the wrath of … Read more

YouTube returns to rock out in Coachella this weekend

Get ready to rock.

Starting this afternoon, YouTube will be live-streaming the huge Coachella music festival, and that means you can tune in to watch three days of some of the best names in the music world.

Like last year, YouTube is providing three channels, meaning that at any given time, you can choose from artists playing on three different stages. Altogether, that means you'll be able to see more than 60 acts do their thing, including The Black Keys, Mazzy Star, Madness, Jimmy Cliff, Squeeze, Gotye, and many others.

Last year, I wrote that YouTube's Coachella live … Read more

Black Keys drummer: Musicians can't trust Sean Parker

Sean Parker is an enemy of music artists.

That's according to Patrick Carney, drummer of the rock band The Black Keys. Carney offered his opinion of Parker during an interview with radio station WGRD.

"He's an ass----," Carney told the station. "That guy has $2 billion that he made from figuring out ways to steal royalties from artists, and that's the bottom line. You can't really trust anybody like that."

Parker is an investor in Spotify and Facebook, but his connection to Spotify is presumably only one part of why Carney finds … Read more

The best-sounding music of 2010

I complain about bad recordings all the time, but there's lots of great-sounding music coming out. Here's a short list of the highlights from the past 12 months.

"Treme: Music From the HBO Original Series, Season 1"

Most soundtrack music is either old tunes or recorded in studios, but "Treme," HBO's series about New Orleans just a few months after Katrina, uses lots of live music recorded on the streets and in the city's clubs. The brass bands swing like crazy, and the funk grooves aren't too shabby. The sound feels … Read more