Many thanks to GMnext Plug In for supplying us with the four Rock on the Range 2-day passes. Winners were Ryan G, Jason L, and Chris D. Congrats! For all others who entered, we honestly wish we could give you all tickets, but we just don’t have the resources. Hopefully you can still make it there.

GMnext Plug In is a celebration of the 100+ year relationship between cars and music. From AM to FM, 8-track to cassette, compact disc to mp3, music is almost always a part of the driving experience. Plug In offers a contemporary spin on that relationship by going behind-the-scenes at some of the biggest music events of the year that will feature some of the hottest bands and artists in the world.

The host for Plug In is Kyle Gass from the band Tenacious D. Along with his partner Jack Black, Kyle has built Tenacious D into a rock superpower — in fact, they are the self-proclaimed “Greatest Rock Band in the World.” Kyle also assumes the role of Southern rocker Klip Calhoun in his other band, Trainwreck, which serves up its own brand of “pure wreck and roll.” He has appeared in several movies, including “Elf” and “Jacob’s Ladder,” as well as TV shows such as “Friends” and “The Daily Show.”

“I was approached by GM a little while back about working with them on Plug In, and it didn’t take long to see that this wasn’t just a good gig, it was a good fit,” explains Gass. “I understand the connection between music and driving — whether that’s Motörhead for city cruising or Deep Purple for a wide-open country road.”

Kyle’s first stop on the Plug In tour is May 17-18 at Rock on the Range in Columbus, Ohio. Kyle and his video crew will provide regular updates from the festival and is scheduled to interview bands including Papa Roach, Kid Rock, Disturbed, 10 Years, Red, Theory of a Deadman, Airbourne, Staind, Shinedown, Finger Eleven, STP, Flyleaf, and Alter Bridge.

Videos of the interviews and other reports by Kyle and his crew will be posted on PlugIn.GMnext.com, which also offers additional information on the festivals and other related stories. In addition, site visitors can post their own festival, band photos, and videos on the site.

**Your cell phone number is for contact purposes only, and will not be disclosed in any manner, and will be discarded once the tickets are transferred.

I recently became very addicted to imeem.com. If you’re not familiar with the site, it’s a social media service where users interact with each other by sharing content of all media types, including blogs, photos, audio, and video. The best part about it is that when you sign up, you can stream tons of full-length songs for free and you can even upload your own songs to your account and create playlists.

So after my eighth beer last night I came up with a great idea. Why don’t we create playlists of our favorite songs from bands from the past or present that aren’t that well-known and share them with each other. We’ll all be able to show off our incredible musical tastes and discover new music at the same time.

Setting up your imeem is easy. All you have to do is sign up here, create a new playlist and start adding songs or upload your own. I’ll start things off with one of my favorite bands of all time, The Nixons. You may remember them from their hit “Sister”, but they have alot of great songs. Check out my playlist below and get to postn’ your own!

Instructions on how to create your own playlist:

1. Log onto imeem.com
2. Browse to a song that you would like to add to your playlist by using the search function in the upper right-hand corner of the page.
3. Once you’ve found the song that you’d like to add click on the link that says “Playlist” directly below the music player
4. Choose “Create a new playlist” and choose a title for your list. Next click on “add song to playlist” and you’re done.
5. Repeat these steps to add multiple songs to your playlist.

Note: If you don’t sign up with imeem, many of the tracks will only be 30 second samples.

On May 17-18, 2008 is the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio. The show is almost sold out with only general admission stadium seats left (no field access). So if you don’t have tickets yet, you may want to get them now! Tickets are $99 plus service charges. The show features Stone Temple Pilots, Disturbed, Staind, Killswitch Engage, Serj Tankian, Shinedown, Finger Eleven, Filter, 10 Years, Red, Theory of a Deadman, Ashes Divide, Drive A, Airbourne, Kid Rock, 3 Doors Down, Seether, Papa Roach, Flyleaf, Alter Bridge, Sevendust, Default, Five Finger Death Punch, Black Tide, Drowning Pool, Bobaflex, and Rev Theory.

All that for just over $100!!! Think about it. Count up the number of bands you would want to see. Divide 100 by that number of bands. For me it’s about $4 per band. Some may be more, some less, but it’s probably worth it for about everybody. So what if you think you can’t afford it? Not to fear, taxpayers! It just so happens that Uncle Sam will be delivering a check to your mailbox (or direct deposit to your bank account) in the amount of up to $600 per individual, $1200 per married couple, and $300 for each child. When is that check coming? Conveniently, in May. Of course it would be more convenient now, but you get my picture. If you can tighten up the budget for this month, you’ll be getting more cash right about the time of the show. Just in time to stimulate that economy in Columbus.

So if you still can’t go, we’re going to try and help you out. We obviously can’t just go buying tickets for everybody, but we’re assessing just how we can help out by making the tickets cheaper for you, sponsoring free tickets, or randomly giving them away. We’ll figure that out. If you can afford the tickets now, get them before they sell out.

But we wanna know… who’s going? We’re going and we want to meet as many people as possible. We’re also offering carpools and whatnot. In the comments, if you’re going, we want to know. If you’re thinking of going, we want to know. If you need a ride, post that. If you have some extra seats and can offer a ride, post that. We’ll update this post as necessary. See you there!

Here’s who’s going and whether or not they can offer a ride. Those who need rides will be underlined.

Chris (Knoxville, TN) has one seat available.
Jay (Washington, DC) is giving Nick a ride, but still has two very uncomfortable seats in the extended cab of a pickup if you want to torture yourself.
Nick (Charleston, SC) is flying to Baltimore and getting picked up by Jay.
jackbauer24 (Phoenix, AZ) is flying into Columbus
geordy (Knoxville, TN) is driving up.

Let’s face it: terrestrial radio is going away. When exactly is anybody’s guess, but it certainly seems inevitable. Listening to radio on my commute to and from work, and while traveling to visit family, I’ve grown to despise the radio almost. I always heard the “radio sucks” comments and thought them myself, but I’ve always wondered what the specific reasons were.

Over the last few weeks I’ve jotted down several notes to myself as potential starting points for an article on the matter, and finally on a six-hour drive from Virginia to New York, I decided on the first subject to write about: repetitiveness. Not just repetitiveness of Linkin Park and Three Days Grace over and over (which is annoying too), but old songs from the 90s. I always thought Nirvana, Green Day, and Bush were horribly overplayed in my area (DC area), and always attributed it to just being my area. This last trip up the East Coast revealed that it wasn’t just Maryland and Virginia, it was much larger. How much larger would turn out to be a surprise.

This “study” is hardly scientific, but I feel it gets pretty close. First, I picked 10 cities across the US, and if I didn’t already know the big rock radio station there, I just Googled “city name new rock radio station”. The list I came up with was WWDC - Washington, DC; WXRK - New York, NY; KROQ - Los Angeles, CA; KDGE - Dallas, TX; WZZN - Chicago, IL; KBPI - Denver, CO; WYSP - Philadelphia, PA; KISW - Seattle, WA; WPLA - Jacksonville, FL; and WXZZ - Nashville, TN. After assembling this list of stations, I then took each station’s top 100 most played songs for the week of December 28th to January 3rd and compiled them into one long document, separated by station. In total, I had a list of 1,000 songs.

When I started going through the list, I was almost in shock, and I mean that honestly. I knew it was bad, but seeing my pen markings all over the pages gave a visual indicator of just how bad it really was. I started out by going through all 1,000 songs and circling each one that was more than five years old. For those I was unsure of or was close to five years, I looked it up online to make sure. The results? Well over HALF of the top-100 most-played songs from the last week were over five years old. On average, newer songs filled the top 25-35 spots, with the older songs dominating the higher numbers with new songs scattered about. A lot of those songs were over 10 years old, with of course several older than that.

What I also noticed going through and circling songs was certain names repeating over and over and over again. The number one most played artist? Nirvana. I knew Nirvana would be the most played of the older artists, but they won out overall as well. (Keep in mind that when I say “most played”, I mean number of songs in the stations’ top 100. For example, Linkin Park may only have two songs in rotation on a station, but those two songs are probably played 3:1 over any Nirvana tracks.) Nirvana accounted for 4.2% of the 100 most-played tracks. Interestingly, I was able to make a list of just 10 bands that accounted for over 25% of the list! These 10 bands (in order of most appearances) are Nirvana, Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Sublime, The Offspring, Bush, Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden. (For those in the list that did have music that came out in the past five years, those songs were not counted.)

Another interesting (or disturbing) thing I noticed was the number of oddball songs that made it as most-played.  Artists like the Violent Femmes, Harvey Danger, and The Verve.  It’s okay to play these one-hit-wonders every few months or something, but one of the 100 most-played?  For shame.  The Gorillaz and The Beastie Boys also ranked high, and are they even really rock?  Amy Winehouse?  I digress…

So what happened? Did radio get stuck in the 90s? Are they catering specifically to people in my age group that listened to these bands in high school and/or college? Or is it that the program managers are that age and can’t seem to realize that not everybody wants to hear these bands that often? Whatever it is, it’s a trend that certainly is leading to the demise of radio and ultimately the ability for new rock artists to make anything resembling a living. With over 50% of the most-played music on rock radio being older, and half of that being just 10 bands, where is the room for all the new artists? And when I say new artists, I mean the ones that are lucky enough to have a record deal already. That’s not even counting the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of rock bands that have yet to be signed. I could keep going on and on with this, because with the less than half that make up actual “new” or “modern” rock, you have competition amongst sub-genres like emo, metal, hard rock, melodic rock, hardcore, etc.

So what is the answer? I honestly don’t know. One thing is certain though, and that is that rock radio needs a major overhaul just to start with. The first step needs to be sweeping out some of the dust. I love(d) Nirvana and the like, and enjoy hearing them from time to time, but it just gets old. With satellite radio, iPods, and the like moving in on radio’s turf at full-speed, there may be nothing to save it at this point. Next time you hear an older song on the radio, consider calling up and saying something about it. Or send your station an email asking them to rethink the balance of old and new.

We have put in an interview request with the programming manager of one of the above-mentioned stations, so if he agrees to talk about it, we’ll get his perspective. Leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments. If you have a favorite or friendly DJ in your local area, call them up, ask them to read this, and then let us know their response and what they think.

Another year has gone by and it was another successful one here at the site. I’ve gone back and looked at all of our visitor data for the year and compiled them. Here’s a quick run down of some of the numbers.

• We averaged 75,052 unique visitors per month.
• The largest number of unique visitors in one day was September 24th, when we streamed the Hurt album (the alleged Meg White sex tape story was that day too, but I’d like to think it was the album stream).
• Almost half (47.74%) of our unique visitors for the year were referred by outside sources (websites & search engines).
  • And about half of those visited multiple times after the first visit.
• Most of our visitors (5.82%) visit the site between noon and 1pm eastern time. It’s only a slight most, obviously.
• Most of our visitors visit the site on a Tuesday (16.11%).
• 79.05% of visitors to the site are from the United States. Canada is second, followed by the United Kingdom and Germany.
  • During 2007, TuneLab Music had visitors from 170 different countries.
• 80.04% of our visitors have Cable/DSL, 10.52% with Corporate/T1 connections, and 6.93% had dial-up (2.51% unknown).
• 57.88% of visitors are using Internet Explorer, with 35.69% using Mozilla/Firefox.
  • Only 0.64% used mobile browsers.
• Over HALF of Internet Explorer users were using an old version (c’mon, if you must use IE, at least upgrade it to current).
• 92% of our visitors use Microsoft Windows (including one visitor using Windows 3.1), 6.76% have Apples, and 0.19% use Linux.
• We had 1,594 visits from the Apple iPhone, 692 visits from Playstation 3, 323 visits from Blackberrys, 241 visits from Playstation Portable, and 170 visits from Nintendo Wii.
• Of our referrers, 76.01% were other websites, 23.87% from search engines, and 0.12% were from email.
  • Of search engines, Google accounted for 80.58% of those referrers, with Yahoo at 16.76%, AOL at 1.08%, MSN at 1.1%, and 0.22% from AltaVista.
  • The most popular keywords searched to find TuneLabMusic.com were review, hinder, tunelab, music, new, album, sevendust, alpha, interview, lyrics, and blue.
• The most popular website referrers were antimusic.com, myspace.com, absolutepunk.net, fark.com, roadrunnerrecords.com, and wikipedia.org.
• The average visitor in 2007 stayed on the website approximately 2.5 minutes (if you’ve read this far, you probably exceeded that already).
• 54.02% of visitors only viewed one page, while 43.92% viewed between 2-5 pages.

So that’s it for 2007. Graphing out the data for ‘06 compared to ’07 revealed interesting results though. The lines followed almost the exact same path, except 2007 stayed an average of 15,000 visitors above ‘06 numbers. The trend for both years show a decline in visitors from March to April, with a 3-5% jump in May, a 3-5% drop into June, and then a 25% increase from June to October, with a 12% drop leading into November and December. The November and December slumps I’m sure are due to holidays, as I find myself visiting less as well. They go back up over the winter through March, and then April brings the average back down (beginning of spring? finals? rain?). The numbers jump up in May but then take a sharp decline at the beginning of summer (June) as everybody moves outdoors, but then sharply rise over the summer as folks seemingly get sick of going outside, or just get bored.

Our goal for 2008 (only dealing with visitor numbers, we have many more goals) is to break the 100,000 mark for average unique visitors/month. I know it seems lofty, but it is achievable. With our new, search-engine friendly site design, our core readers/contributors telling their friends (*ahem*, that’s where you come in), our continuation of key content like album streams, featured bands, etc., and the all-new features we’ll be rolling out this year, we feel we can beat the 100K mark.

Every week there is an article posted listing the previous week’s album sales. And every week, with the exception of a few, sales have been down. Billboard announced the best selling album and the highest grossing concert of 2007 on Friday, and guess what… those numbers are down as well! In 2006 according to Nielsen SoundScan 588.2 million albums were sold, that was down 4.9% from 2005. But digital track sales increased 65% from 2005 with 582 million songs sold and almost 33 million digital albums were sold. As of late October album sales for 2007 were down 14% with about 363 million sold. And once again digital sales are on the rise as are digital retailers with Amazon.com getting into the game this year.

With the majority of people choosing digital over hard copies many of the big retail chains such as Wal-Mart and Target are looking at reducing not only the space they give for CDs, but also releases from lesser known bands. Unfortunately it looks as if the CD is on its way out, and I hate it. Going to the record store and buying a CD has a personal touch to it. You get to drive around town trying to find that one CD and when you find it, you have the lyric booklet where you can read the bands Thank You’s and lyrics and a physical copy of the music to enjoy.

With digital singles and albums, there is nothing personal about it. You point and click and in a few minutes you have the album or song. Yes, it is convenient, especially for me because there is only one place to buy CDs where I live, with the exception of WalMart and I’m not fond of that place either. I f I can’t find the album I’m looking for here, I usually end up going to another town where most of the time I can find it.

Convenience is all people care about anymore and CDs have become an inconvenience. My only grip about CD’s is that annoying sticker on the top of the jewel case with the artist and album name. Get rid of that and I’ll be happy… just don’t get rid of the CD!

Album sales aren’t the only thing on the decline. Tour revenue also suffered this year. The Police have the rights to the top grossing tour for 2007 which brought in $212 million plus. The Rolling Stones held the title in 2006 which brought in $437 million in revenue. A $2.6 billion difference. Concert attendance was also down 19.2%. With many labels going after these “360” deals where they get a cut of the artists tour and merch income, this just another way the artists will get screwed.

Scott Weiland has had a handful of drug and DUI arrests since he was allegedly introduced to heroin in 1994 while STP was on tour with the Butthole Surfers, the latest going down last month. Although his introduction to the drug happened in ’94, it seemed to take its full effect in 1999 with the release of ‘No. 4’ and most visibly in the video for “Sour Girl”… remember the dancing teletubbies? Maybe it was noticeable before this, but it’s really when I first really noticed.

I’m not trying to judge him or anything, what he chooses to do is his thing and none of mine, or anyone else’s business. However, I can’t help but think Weiland could take a few notes from Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue fame. This guy is one of the rockers who defined excess. He was declared dead after an overdose in 1987, but was revived after a couple of adrenaline injections. Almost exactly one year later he overdosed again while on tour in London. His heroin addiction continued throughout the 1980’s before he and his Motley band-mates entered rehab in 1989 and publicly announcing his sobriety in 2004.

If Nikki Sixx can overcome his addictions and turn his life around, why can’t Weiland?

The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is at it again. In yet another lawsuit filed by the group against a couple in Arizona, they have now declared that copying a CD that you legally purchase to your computer for use on your iPod, etc. is piracy. While retarded as hell, they do bring up a good point. They claim that ripping the CD is “virtual” copyright infringement since one person ripping the CD can lead to millions of copies shared on various peer-to-peer services.

However… in a 2005 lawsuit the RIAA stated that it “is perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it to your computer, [and] put it onto your iPod.”

I’m sorry, but if I pay 15 bucks for a CD, with the exception of ripping it and putting it on peer-to-peer sites, I’m going to do whatever I want with it.

I wonder how much of the money that they get from these lawsuits actually goes to the bands which had their songs illegally downloaded. My guess… very little… if any at all.

Is it just me or is music and radio, especially radio, not what it used to be? In the mid/late 90’s I actually enjoyed listening to the radio. Bands like Eve 6 (I listened to “Inside Out” almost non-stop for 2 weeks), Semisonic, Creed, Everclear, The Wallflowers, Days of the New, Live, Bush, Smashing Pumpkins, Fastball, Tonic, Matchbox 20, Sponge, Vertical Horizon, Better Than Ezra and a long long list of other great bands were just getting started. It just seems like everything was more enjoyable then… when you could turn on MTV and actually hear music…rock music. Even through 2000-2003 there were a lot of great bands, which most people have never heard of, getting started… Socialburn, Stage, Greenwheel, Familiar 48, July for Kings, Mad at Gravity, Unwritten Law, Boxing Day and many more. ..

A few of the bands from that time are still around in one form or another, but it just doesn’t seem like the music has the same feeling to it. Maybe I’m just getting older and hearing it differently.

Radio today plays the same mainstream acts over and over and their idea of variety is mixing in music from the 70’s and 80’s. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with music from that time, but if I wanted to hear music that is 25+ years old I’d tune into the Classic Rock station. Why not play new up-and-coming bands? Bands like Deepfield, Stereoside, and Framing Hanley who don’t really have the push of a big named record label, but have great albums. Even Fuel who was huge a few years ago is not getting the airplay they once received despite having a great new album, ‘Angels and Devils’.

Good music is still being made, but labels are too involved in trying to figure out how to get people to buy CDs again and rock radio is too busy playing stuff by bands that haven’t released anything new in who knows how long to take notice. Example, 102.9 The Buzz, the new rock station in Nashville. Since 10am this morning they have played a total of 6 songs from bands that have released albums this year, or will release albums in 2008. Twenty-six songs played and only 6 of them from new artists… why? You visit their home page and you don’t see the logos of Three Days Grace, Seether, Sixx A.M. or Finger Eleven, all of which have singles in the top 10. You see Metallica, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses. Like I said before nothing wrong with those bands, I am a fan of them all… but what is wrong with playing new music?

As you can see, we’ve now started a blog here on TuneLab Music. There’s a lot of things we’ll be using it for, but it will mainly be short editorials and a sub-section of reviews. It will also be utilized to provide updates on the site itself and serve as a mini-forum of sorts to hear your ideas on site features and things you would like to see.

As far as editorials, some of you may have noticed little things here and there where I or somebody else from the staff said we were working on an editorial, and much time has passed. The reason for that is we want our actual editorials, reviews, and news to be of a professional journalistic nature. Because all of us do this in our ’spare’ time, we never seem to have the time to get full write-ups done and edited. The blog will allow us to write more freely, and still cover the main points of what the full op-ed would be. Reviews will mostly be short anecdotes of albums we’re listening to, new artists we find that we think readers would be interested in, and quick reviews of live shows.

Eventually we will also be looking to open this up to more and more users, and maybe add more sections to it depending on how readers respond to it.