2009 Summer Festival Updates

Time to check back in with the 2009 festival set. Lollapalooza pulled their usual B.S. this spring, putting tickets on sale about a month before announcing the initial artist line-up. They were generous enough to start tickets at $175, but since that bracket is now sold out, you can currently get them for $190. Still, that’s what tickets started at in 2008, so it’s not bad. Rumors have spoken of a decent line-up, and Tool might be one of the headliners (which I would enjoy). But other headliners might be Beastie Boys, The Killers, and Jane’s Addiction, which would be kind of pathetic in my opinion. Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction frontman, who helped start Lolla in the early ’90s) always has to stick his stupid neck in odd places because he thinks he owns the festival. Your day is way over, old man. It’s time to pass the torch.

Fans at Rothbury 2008

If the rumors hold, highlights will include Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend, the Decemberists, Metric, MSTRKRFT, and Tenacious D (fuck yeah!). But there’s something  a bit odd about the rumored line-up that I found. I recognize way too many artist names. Lollapalooza’s line-up is usually at least half total mystery, those attempted tastemakers that they are.

Other news: Pitchfork Music Festival 2009 is slowly filling in its artist line-up. The bands I’d go to see at this point would be The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, M83, and Grizzly Bear. Oh, and the Flaming Lips also got added as headliners on Sunday night, which is awesome. It was a humble (and smart) move on Pitchfork’s part, given that the Lips aren’t exactly the hippest band anymore. Hell, they’ve played pretty much every festival in the country by this point.

Friday night will feature sets by Yo La Tengo and three other bands, and the songs played that night will be picked by fans on the web beforehand. Tickets are $35 per day, $60 for Sat/Sun, or $75 for the whole shebang.

Rothbury hasn’t added any names to their artist line-up, and I can’t wait to see the final list. Tickets remain $250 for the 4-day festival. They did just extend their layaway plan for another week, if you were thinking of doing that. And that was nice of them, given that the economy sucks and nobody has cash falling out their pants. Meanwhile, All Good Festival keeps adding bands to their list — Galactic and Robert Randolph & the Family Band are among the most recent additions. All Good advanced tickets are still a sexy, affordable $129.

That’s all for now…(can you tell I’m exhausted and/or lacking my regular constant input of new music?)

Tags: all good festival, lollapalooza, pitchfork, rothbury

Pitchfork Furthers Its Own Demise

I visited the home page of Pitchfork Media today for my regular dose of music news, and something surprising happened. Instead of the regular page design, I found an enormous iPhone ad — at least 1000 pixel width — spanning the entirety of the page. And they completely redesigned and reorganized all their content. Where once there was an easy-to-digest space of news about concerts and album releases, there is now a jumbled mess. Another change: the address “pitchforkmedia.com” now automatically forwards to “pitchfork.com.” This was obviously a move to integrate all of their content, in order to include Pitchfork.tv, which debuted a few months ago.

The Pitchfork home page on 3/10/09

If you don’t already know my complicated feelings about Pitchfork, feel free to read my essay. Essentially I argued that Pitchfork had worn out their welcome as the new media boss of independent music, and I predicted that their influence and power would soon fail. I also claimed that, in addition to their strange album rating system (based on 100 points, when most publications use a 5- or 10-point system), the very design of the home page was instrumental in securing their power. What I mean is that the right things were featured in the right places, to make sure that the audience was looking exactly where P’fork wanted them to. At the very least, it was clean, efficient, and organized — and this appealed to the OCD-freak inside of me.

Even for those who aren’t borderline neurotic, I’m sure this was a vital factor. Most other music websites — even some of the plain old blogs — are really difficult to navigate. Look at Detour Magazine, for example. Detroit’s new-ish online music publication has straightened up their operation a bit, but it’s still no simple task to get around the site. They tried to organize it more like a blog, with a running list of articles down the center of the page. However, I know this is only about 25% of the content on the site (if not less), and the average viewer is going to shove off to a new site without bothering over the rest. But back to the story…

Pitchfork was once among the most powerful organizations in the music industry. That peaked around 2006. Now everything has changed. Now they’re just an ever-smaller piece of an ever-bigger and more complex puzzle. The methods available for people to find music, music news, and music opinions (i.e. – reviews and ratings) are growing exponentially. But more importantly, people are caring less and less about what professional music critics have to say. They’re relying more on word-of-electronic-mouth that comes via Web 2.0 technology: iTunes Genius, Pandora, Last.fm, etc, etc.

Of course I wouldn’t be making a fuss if I didn’t still depend on Pitchfork for my music news. Maybe this will help wean me, or force me to seek out a new source. Or this could just be the next instance in my recent trend of complaining about everything. Not that I have reason to anymore. I just got a job!

Tags: pitchfork