The Hippodrome

I hate to judge, but sometimes you don’t need to look any further than the background. SignHere Online’s stars and robot font discouraged me quite a bit from checking their list of unsigned “stars,” but even once I did, I found little to write home about.

So, in the unsigned spirit, I propose a challenge. Anyone that can find a band on SignHere Online’s catalog worthy of Hippodrome featurehood will also get a feature about his or herself written up by yours truly. Email me by this time next week with all submissions, and I’ll duly note them.

And if you’re starved for music that doesn’t suck, just wait until you see our upcoming features. Check out Yukon and Mitn if you’re the type of person that flips to the end of mystery books. In the meantime, get searching!

Which one of those is not a band? No, not a trick question, it’s been crazy on my end so I apologize for the lack of updates. But I did have the chance to see two new awesome bands this weekend, which you should more than check out.

Butter Days hail from Brown University, and with a whopping one song up on their MySpace, they leave me aching for more. Either way, check it out, and check their show schedule as well. The Shade is without a MySpace, but does have this mp3 available, courtesy of Aural Wes. I was impressed with their attitude, and sheer rockability.

Hope that holds you over until Friday. I love you, really.

Perfect Timing This Morning Download
Gravel Download

You’ve probably heard the name Orba Squara by now, but if not, you’ve definitely heard “Perfect Timing This Morning” on that ubiquitous iPhone commercial. Davis has received more than a little attention – mentioned everywhere from NPR to Pitchfork, but when I found out how Davis did all this, I couldn’t pass up a chance to find out more. Davis’ licensing deal with Apple is nothing notable, but the fact that he made this meteoric rise to fame entirely without a record deal certainly is.

Even if Orba’s tunes aren’t completely your style, Davis’ mindset better be. I had the opportunity to ask Davis a few questions regarding his success via email. What I found was an inspiring testimony to making music for the enjoyment of it, and letting the commercial aspect fall into place afterward.

The Hippodrome: Can you give us a quick rundown of the progression from the recording process to the call from Apple regarding licensing?

Mitch Davis: It was really out of my hands after I recorded it. I let the music out into the world. I was fortunate enough to have it be noticed by people online who helped spread the music. I was fortunate enough to have a guy at Universal Music Publishing who liked it and saw potential in the music. Apple was looking for iPhone music at the
time, Universal thought my music would be a good fit and everything just came together.

The Hippodrome: You said “when I think about it, it does feel a little strange that all these people are now listening in on what was originally meant just for me.” Did you really have no intention of distributing your music commercially? Has this process changed your attitude at all regarding your music?

Davis: It is not that I never have any intention of distributing my music commercially in general… It is not “an attitude regarding my music”… but this particular album is very different stylistically from other music I had made in the past and was, at the time, very uncharacteristic for me. It was an album I really just made for myself because it was fun to make. I didn’t think about it too much beyond that. It is like if you were a “still life” painter and would just sit around during lunch doodling on napkins just because you enjoyed doodling on napkins… then when someone says “I really love that stuff you do on the napkins!” and you think to yourself “you mean my little coffee stained napkin doodles that I just do for fun?”

And while this album was so uncharacteristic of me when I wrote and recorded it, it has since become the music that I relate to the most and feel more personal towards than any other music I have made. I actually felt that way from the moment I made the record.

The Hippodrome: You are without a label, but clearly, enjoying commercial success and recognition. Do you have any advice for other artists who desire the same thing, or artists looking for financial support in general? Do you think your discovery by Apple was based on luck?

Davis: The only advice I can give is to do what you enjoy. You can’t really plan commercial success or recognition. If you make music in an attempt to follow a trend, you are already too late. If you make music you personally enjoy, you are already successful.

My “discovery” by Apple, just like everything else in music, all comes down to making the right music at the right time with the right person hearing it who happens to have a need for it at that exact moment. A moment earlier or later could completely change everything.

Your search for the perfect band t-shirt is over, p4k hopefuls. A friend tipped me off to Bygone Bureau’s latest installment of Indie T-Shirt that won’t sell. So even if you don’t think Win Butler is the new Jesus, or Andrew Bird doesn’t have much do with your sexuality, you can probably glean between 30 and 40 cred points by studying Bygone Bureau’s “snarky” independent content. In fact, 50 cred points says I see some of these shirts at the Go! Team show tonight.

Make sure to check out the first installment as well.

I recently received an email from a lady by the name of Benaz Hossain, who wrote to let me know about Jango, a music social networking site about to launch. After checking out the beta link that she sent along in his email, I was intrigued by the idea. In a nutshell, Jango is a Last.fm type custom radio site that utilizes a fairly impressive internal music catalog. This allows the user to listen to any artist on the site, and then build a social network of friends who are interested in the type of music they’ve been listening to.

This all sounds great until you realize that you’re limited to what Jango has online. More annoying than the available music is the fact that no unsigned artist has any chance of getting their own work on the site, because unless you’re already on Allmusic.com, which is unlikely for even the moderately well known artist, Jango doesn’t want to hear it.

As far as Jango’s launch catalog goes, it’s quite a bit less than impressive. I was able to find bands like The Microphones and Animal Collective, but nothing I hadn’t come across before. Jango seems to be a good idea realized poorly, and although I’ll be keeping tabs on it, I doubt it’ll be worth your while.