blog.shrub

bill silva management unhelpfully does not list their phone number or address on their web site, instead offering this lame excuse:

What are the Bill Silva Presents phone and fax numbers? What are the Bill Silva Presents mailing and physical addresses?
As far as the phone/fax numbers and our mailing or phisical addresses, we do not give out that information to the general public for privacy and security reasons. This policy is no different than a private citizen who chooses to have an “unlisted” phone number and address.

One of Bill’s clients, Raul Midon, is much more helpful, offering up the digits:

Bill Silva Management
8981 Sunset Blvd. #303
Los Angeles, CA 90069
phone 310/246-5292

The whois record for billsilvapresents.com turns up the same address with a slightly different phone number (310-246-5210). Likewise for billsilva.net (310-246-5220).

Update 2007-10: Aya from Bill Silva Presents writes that there new number is 310-651-3310.

Baby Got Back.

Reminds me of Nina Gordon’s cover of “Straight Outta Compton.”

**AA salaries:

RIAA:
President Cary Sherman: $1.13 million
CEO Mitch Bainwol: $908,848

The MPAA folks didn’t do too shabby either:
Jack Valenti: $1.4 million
Executive VP Simon Barsky $380,351
Executive VP William Murray $379,559

while the RIAA is pondering their RICO defense, i’d like to note they sued a dead woman a few months back:

The Associated Press reported that the RIAA identified Gertrude Walton as a prolific file sharer known as “smittenedkitten”. Accusing her of illegally trading music over the internet, the lawsuit was apparently filed more than a month after the 83-year-old woman died in December.

Her daughter, Robin Chianumba, also pointed out that Walton, who was the sole defendant in a federal lawsuit that claimed she’d shared more than 700 songs through P2P networks, hated computers and objected to having them in the house.

“[She] wouldn’t know how to turn on a computer,” Mrs Chianumba is reported to have told AP.

there are a bunch of ways to analyze and recommend music.

• shazam, which uses acoustic fingerprinting to recognize songs based on 15-second excerpts
• transpose’s goombah and the indy project, which use collaborative filtering to recommend music
• music plasma, an interactive flash application which illustrates (perceived) relationships between artists.
• hit song science, which predicts where or not a song will be a hit.

recently, the Wall Street Journal featured the music genome project, which paid a bunch of musicians to listen to thousands of songs and evaluate them on a bunch of objective criteria.

the bands hate the “copy controlled” pseudo-CDs as much as you do:

Now, in the most bizarre turn yet in the record industry’s piracy struggles, stars Dave Matthews Band, Foo Fighters and Switchfoot — and even Sony BMG, when the label gets complaints — are telling fans how they can beat the system.
…
A number of leading acts are using their Web sites to instruct fans on how to work around the technology.
…
Columbia Records act Switchfoot, whose latest album, “Nothing Is Sound,” is copy-protected — and debuted at No. 3 on The Billboard 200 last week — recently took copy-protection defiance one step further. Band guitarist Tim Foreman posted on a Sony Music-hosted fan site a link to the software program CDEX, which disables the technology. The post has since been removed.

“We were horrified when we first heard about the new copy-protection policy,” Foreman wrote in the September 14 post. “It is heartbreaking to see our blood, sweat and tears over the past two years blurred by the confusion and frustration surrounding new technology.”

Workaround: get a Mac. :)

Listen to People Look Around.

Oh yeah… Starbucks called a month ago too. We told them to take a hike. San Diego’s independent coffee shops are sponsoring us :)

Our friends at the Bonita News took a moment to suggest their local venue book newer, up-and-coming acts:

“I’d like to see more up-and-coming, rather than name acts that may or may not still have it,” he says. “Some of the newer people that Myra can count as a discovery.”

Floridians deserve good music too, not just the crap from Clear Channel.

When customers ask us why record companies have done various things (putting things out in one country but not others, pulling things out of print, playing games with pricing, etc), our stock answer has become “Because record companies are insane and evil.” The customers just tend to nod sagely.

— Joseph Zitt