Listen to Early White Zombie Song ‘Scarecrow #2′ (Exclusive)

The track is from an upcoming collection of rarely heard songs from the band's New York City days

White Zombie, circa 1986. Photo: Scott Smith

The band White Zombie made a name for itself in the early and mid-1990s with heavy, horror-themed songs such as “Beavis and Butthead” favorite “Thunder Kiss ’65” and the hit single “More Human Than Human.” But before the band’s MTV salad days, White Zombie was a noise-rock group from New York City’s underground scene that pressed only a few hundred copies of its first few records in the mid- to late 1980s, leaving several songs out of print.

But on June 3, 39 early White Zombie tracks will be available, remastered by guitarist J. Yuenger, in a boxed set called “It Came From N.Y.C.“ that will include five LPs or three CDs, and a 108-page, photo-packed hardcover book that chronicles the band’s rise. The remastered version of the previously unissued song “Scarecrow #2” premieres today on Speakeasy.

Hick Hop Is Alive And Well In The Dirty South

Is Hick Hop here to stay or is just a passing genre that will tire quickly? Understanding how big both country music and hip hop are on a world wide scale, I can easily guesstimate that it will be around for a long time to come in one form or another. I doubt the genre will dissipate as fast as Horror Rap or numerous other micro genres simply due to the fact that it blends the flow of hip hop and an easy going country vibe so well. 

Does this make us a fan of the genre? Not in the least, but then again hip hop has never been our calling card. What is far more interesting overall though is music tastes of fans. With the amount of music available, many of us tend to have a vast array of choices into what we enjoy. Not a day goes by that metal, punk and country aren't blasting our stereo system and that is where our direction is as a label. 

Do yourself a favor and read upon the interesting article below about Average Joes's music output and the rise of Hick Hop. Like it or not, they have made a name for themselves. Now if the roots music folks would just realize that their time is go ready for explosion and give the fans what they want, damn great live shows!

Lenny Cooper is a big seller in the Hick Hop genre

Read original post on the Wall Street Journal

"From Georgia to Texas this weekend, the stars of a budding musical genre known as "hick-hop" will perform in swamp-like off-road-vehicle parks. Singing songs that fuse hip-hop with country music, the bands will celebrate the popular rural pastime of driving trucks, lawn mowers, golf carts and even jacked-up grocery carts—all through the mud.

Watch a clip of "Country Boy Fresh" by The Lacs. They represent a new genre of hip-hop, practiced by good old boys who rap about driving oversize pickups into mud and hunting for deer out of season. Video courtesy of Phive Starr Productions.

The music, anathema to country-music traditionalists because of its heavy drum and bass, doesn't get much airplay on major radio stations. But the all-ages mud-park shows, which feature dancers that shimmy around chain-link-fence poles cemented onto truck beds, can draw upward of 10,000 fans. They tend to spend freely on CDs and merchandise, from moonshine to Mason jars filled with the mud used in a band's music videos.

Three of the genre's top artists — Colt Ford, Lenny Cooper and the LACS (short for the Loud Ass Crackers)—have albums among the top 75 on Billboard's country music chart this week with 1,800 Wal-Mart WMT -0.27% stores around the country stocking their records. Average Joe's Entertainment, a Nashville, Tenn.-based independent record label that specializes in the emerging genre, has sold nearly 200,000 "Mud Digger" compilation albums featuring its various artists; the fourth "Mud Digger" album hit stores Tuesday.

The unlikely rise of this niche genre, despite its near-absence from radio, shows how radically the music industry's playbook for success has changed in recent years. Record sales have tanked nearly 60% since their peak in 2000, with the proliferation of outlets offering music free or at a nominal cost. So live performance and merchandise sales represent an increasingly large chunk of a typical band's income.

To maximize concert revenue, hick-hop artists are using some of the same technologies that have eroded record sales to ferret out paying fans. They're routing tours based on data from services like Songkick, TuneCore and Pandora that track where people are buying or listening to their music most frequently.

Big retailers like Wal-Mart have also become a way for artists to reach millions of listeners without radio or record-label deals. Wal-Mart, which accounts for about 10% of total music sales in the U.S., according to the market researcher NPD Group, has taken to buying music directly from musicians in recent years, selling millions of albums even as industrywide sales decline.

Colt Ford is the top of the food chain in Hick Hop

The increase in bands circumventing traditional channels has given rise to a number of quirky musical styles. Though hick-hop has been more commercially successful than most, Internet radio service Pandora counts 400 genres popular among its 70 million active users, from psychobilly—a fusion of rockabilly and punk—to trap, a hip-hop-influenced subset of electronic music.

Mud bogging has been a popular activity for decades, especially in the South, but the mud world's musical tradition is recent, with live-music stages sprouting up in at least 162 off-road-vehicle parks over the past five years. Fans typically pay about $40 a weekend to cook out with friends and play in the mud with a wide range of vehicles, from $100,000 trucks to homemade contraptions fashioned from tanks, lawn mowers, even king-size mattresses, all jacked up on giant tires forbidden on city streets.

The scantily dressed crowd includes grade-schoolers, teenagers driving their parents' farm equipment and professionals who burn thousands of dollars each week on truck repairs, only to demolish their rides again the next weekend in events like truck tug of war. Daisy Duke shorts, bikinis and anything camouflage are popular fashion choices; homemade moonshine and beer are on tap and truck brands tend to be American, as Colt Ford notes in his "Drivin' Around Song": "U.S.A., Chevrolet, Dodge and Ford, raising a little hell and praising the Lord."

The underground world even has its own magazines: Mud Life sells about 70,000 copies a year, thanks in part to its "Mud Girl of the Month" feature. The community's official after party is known as Club Mud, started by two friends who constructed a makeshift stage with speakers and lighting on a yard cart made for hauling hay. Now the pair throws weekly parties for up to 8,000 people from Missouri to Michigan.

The culture's unofficial soundtrack was born during the summer of 2008 after Colt Ford—a former pro golfer with a devoted Myspace following—decided to launch the record label Average Joe's with veteran hip-hop producer Shannon Houchins. The music featured catchy country hooks and traditional country instruments like fiddles and washboards, but Mr. Ford spoke the lyrics instead of singing them, focusing on rural themes like hunting, fishing and driving big trucks through mud. After releasing Mr. Ford's debut album on iTunes, Mr. Houchins got a call from the owner of an off-road vehicle park in South Carolina offering Mr. Ford $3,500 to play a show there. About 4,700 fans turned out, snapping up $10,000 worth of merchandise, as many fans had gotten so wet and muddy that they were happy to buy a fresh change of clothes.

Mr. Houchins, who helped artists like Bubba Sparxxx mix country and hip-hop in the past but had never before tried to hawk the final product, said he realized he'd found an untapped market. He began reaching out to scores of other off-road-vehicle parks. Since most weren't equipped to host concerts, he connected them to ticket printers, security staff and stage builders. The parks booked a string of mud-bog dates for Mr. Ford, and the LACS played as an opening act.

Thousands of fans jammed onto rural two-lane roads to see Mr. Ford and the LACS rap about the mud lifestyle, and they soon began seeking CDs in local stores. Mr. Ford's "No Trash in My Trailer" has lines like: "I'm mud boggin, camouflagen, a ballgame is what I'm watchen. I work hard, mow the yard, fish, hunt, knuckle scar, change oil, plow the soil, love a boat country boy." Mr. Ford has sold more than one million albums to date.

That year, Wal-Mart started getting calls from stores across the Southeast from customers complaining that mud-themed music was only available online, said Tiffany Couch, sales director of Select-O-Hits, a division of closely held Anderson Merchandisers that Wal-Mart hires to supply its 4,000 Supercenter stores with CDs. Cautiously, she said, they began stocking several hundred Wal-Mart stores in the region with the music, waiting to make sure it sold before expanding to other locations.

Wal-Mart has long been supportive of little-known community artists—especially in the country-music world, Ms. Couch said. The company sponsored a free concert series in its store parking lots in 1995, for example, that featured up-and-coming country acts such as the Smokin' Armadillos and the Moffats. But hick-hop's quick success came as a surprise. "It's atypical in country music to have achieved this level of success without radio being the main driver—this has been kind of an enigma," said Ms. Couch.

To be sure, Wal-Mart's power in the music industry is fast diminishing as demand for physical CDs shrinks. But country fans have been far more reluctant than others to go digital. Big-box retailers account for about 50% of country-music sales, compared with 25% of music sales in all genres, according to Nielsen Entertainment analyst Dave Bakula.

Wal-Mart has made a string of exclusive deals in recent years to release new works by aging superstars like the Eagles and Journey. For budding acts, the stores present a valuable opportunity to connect with millions of potential fans on a national scale.

Jason Lathrop, an air-conditioning contractor in Jacksonville, Fla., said he bought every album in Average Joe's catalog he could find because he spends most of his free time driving his souped-up Ford Excursion "out in the middle of a cow pasture somewhere," where the music has fast became ubiquitous.

To assure Wal-Mart about its prospects for selling more mud music outside the Southeast, Average Joe's last year showed the retailer "heat maps" drawn up by Pandora. The maps showed where Pandora users were listening to the new genre most frequently, landing the records in nearly half of Wal-Mart's Supercenters nationwide. Average Joe's also began using Pandora's heat maps to route artists' tours through unlikely areas with high fan concentrations, like Ohio, Indiana and the Pacific Northwest.

Pandora founder Tim Westergren said he started a pilot program over the past year and half which shares these maps with about 50 different groups. The company has finally amassed enough listeners so that bands can convert the data into significant concert ticket sales. More than 10,000 of the artists Pandora plays have now been listened to at least 250,000 times each, he said.

"It's the folks that can really make the live thing work that are going to thrive," said Mr. Westergren, adding that Average Joe's "has been way out in front in terms of understanding how valuable" the maps can be.

The LACS Clay 'Uncle Snap' Sharpe, left, and Brian 'Rooster' King.

The LACS have now sold nearly 200,000 albums and an additional 25,000 singles on Apple's iTunes store, despite hardly any play on radio. They will release their third album in August, as they quadruple their touring business.

Country rap dates back to at least the late '90s, and before that country legends like Johnny Cash used recitation instead of singing on some of their most popular tracks. But in the past, country rappers have struggled to sell records for lack of a defined audience. Though the two genres share the same roots and many of the same general themes—drinking, driving around and having a good time—their fusion has been controversial, says Adam Gussow, a Southern Studies professor at the University of Mississippi.

"Country and rap have achieved much of their contemporary popularity by configuring themselves in the national imagination as proudly radicalized genres: the voice of the unreconstructed Southern pastoral and the rural white-working class on the one hand, and the voice of inner-city frustration, gunplay and rump-shaking Vegas-style fantasy on the other," Mr. Gussow wrote in a 2010 essay in Southern Cultures journal.

But the new hick-hoppers have targeted a specific audience, taking more care than their predecessors to keep their language relatively family-friendly and the themes lighthearted and violence-free.

"We never killed nobody, so we can't rap about no gangster stuff," Mr. Sharpe told a half-baffled, half-riveted crowd at the Country Music Association's flagship music festival in Nashville last month, as the band used synthesizers and 808 drum machines to accompany their hit tunes like "Kickin' Up Mud." Lyrics reflected their lifestyle: "Everyday get stuck in a big mud hole/Just sit right there and watch the sun get low."

Hick-hop artists say the mud world is endlessly inspiring. Lenny Cooper, an artist better known as the "Mud Digger King," said that after he noticed scores of fans in Florida and Georgia installing homemade stripper poles in the back of their trucks, he wrote a song called "Rodeo," an ode to truck-bed strippers. He also wrote a song about a technique many of his mud-crazy fans used to center themselves: "Just somethin bout chillin out where the corn grows/I like to clear my mind down an old back road."

Mr. Houchins, of Average Joe's, said he has been receiving about 500 demo tapes a week from country rappers lately. "That tells me that we're creating a new genre," said Mr. Houchins. "But they haven't made a Grammy category for us yet.""

Samsung to Give Away 1 Million Copies of Jay-Z’s New Album, Say What?

Jay Z's new album went platinum before ever even going on sale.

Did you read that headline correctly? Yep, it's true and now that is going to be just another tactic as a well to help sell music. Prince has included a cd in the ticket price of one his tours to push huge sales, Radiohead famously allowed for fans to name their price on the album and now Jay Z has partnered up with Samsung to leverage his new album as a free download to their smartphone users. 

Gimmicks will always be a part of the advertising landscape but here is one thing that lasts, great music. For five weeks now, Carolina Still has been a featured album on Itunes. We aren't selling in the hundreds of thousands of copies nor have we moved more than 10,000 just yet, but real music fans are listening. No matter if you like Jay Z, Samsung or any of the bigger corporate entities involved in, take a play out of their strategy book and use it in your own way. 

Carolina Still, featured right up there on New & Noteworthy with quite the contemporaries

There is no safety net in rock n' roll nor are there any rules. Create your own future out of the vision you see as reality. Five years ago I would never have thought we would have gotten this far as an indie music label. Now I am looking forward to where we are in ten years when the great bands we get to work with have exploded onto the world market. As the second half of 2013 rolls around, we have some damn great albums yet to come!

 

Read the original article on The Wall Street Journal

"As the Miami Heat faced off against the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 of the NBA finals Sunday night, a curious TV ad aired near the end of the second quarter featuring rap star Jay-Z in a studio, riffing with a cast of characters including producer Rick Rubin and artist Pharrell Williams. At one point, a member of the posse is shown taking notes on a tablet device. More than two minutes into the three-minute video Samsung Electronics Co. 005930.SE -0.15%’s tagline flashes across the screen: “The Next Big Thing.”

The connection: Samsung has purchased 1 million copies of Jay-Z’s coming album, entitled “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” slated for release July 4, and plans to give them to Samsung Galaxy smartphone users for free – 72 hours ahead of the release. The users are to receive the music through an app they’ll receive later this month. (Recipients won’t be able to share it until the official release date.)

Samsung paid $5 apiece for the albums, according to a person familiar with the matter. It wasn’t immediately clear if Nielsen SoundScan will count Samsung’s purchases in its sales tallies.

The partnership could help Samsung compete with Apple Inc. AAPL -1.36%, which recently announced the launch of iTunes Radio – an online radio service bundled onto Apple devices that promises to offer listeners access to certain tracks before they’re available elsewhere.

For Jay-Z, the deal is a precious advertising opportunity and gives him $5 million in sales before the album is even released. The agreement signals the increasing importance of corporate sponsors to the music industry, which has seen sales tank over the past decade.

Jay-Z hinted at the partnership on Twitter two days ago with a photo of a Samsung smartphone displaying text telling fans to “tune in” to the game.

Neither Samsung nor Jay-Z could immediately be reached for comment."

Hellbound Glory Featured On The Wall Street Journal

What could be better than the business juggernaut of the Wall Street Journal recognizing that Hellbound Glory is the real deal and posted information about their upcoming tour with Kid Rock and Buckcherry? Well, we can't think of a better business outlet than this, for the simple fact of it speaks volumes about where the fans of Hellbound Glory truly reside. 

As this tour is about to embark, new fans of the band will start to emerge and Leroy, Rico and the rest of the fellas can start to build their world wide march to the top of the country music food chain. Help Support Real Country Music!

Get all things Hellbound Glory

Hellbound Glory tour announcement featured on The Wall Street Journal's Market Watch

Google Music Not Living Up To Expectations, Is Justin Timberlake The Saviour?

All the signs are pointing to another huge cash influx about to enter the music streaming business. Rumors are that Microsoft is sniffing around to what is possible, even after their failed attempt with Zune. Spotify is making waves with their streaming service and Myspace is claiming to have their numbers rising due to "significant" improvements to their music player. Not sure if Myspace realizes it or not, but their interface still is way too busy. If Myspace were to die off or completely, revamp their approach with a whole new influx of ideas and potentially a new name, maybe they could shed their old skin and start anew. Sorry Justin Timberlake, not even your amazing SNL appearances can save your investment in Myspace, unless it has a game changing overhaul.

Is Pandora a patsy for the major labels? What about Last.FM, Rdio and the litany of others who have provided streaming services? Do any of them have a solid presence or unique aspect which we as music fans crave?

In terms of streaming music, many huge players are entering the arena and looking to compete with Itunes after the strides created by Spotify. Some will create a decent presence, but soon every major entity within social media will have some sort of proprietary music player, especially Facebook. 

We honestly think this is the best thing for bands as a whole. Competition breeds a better system and forget your big box package stores for buying music anymore. Its all going to be digital or directly to fans from the bands.

Link to original article on CNET 

Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga on Saturday Night Live

"Three months after launching, Google Music hasn't lived up to expectations, CNET has learned. Google's managers have told counterparts at the labels that customer adoption and revenue are below what they expected, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the talks. 

Google Music has been live for barely a full quarter, so nobody is panicking. Google has yet to throw the full force of its marketing muscle behind the service, and managers have told the record companies that they are trying to correct certain issues. Still, the numbers are low enough for some in the music sector to be concerned, the sources said.

A Google representative declined to comment. 

Google Music was supposed to be a music powerhouse. As a companion service to Android-powered mobile devices, the service has a massive potential user base. At the time of Google Music's November launch, there were more than 200 million activated Android phones and tablets. 

If Google managed to convert just 10 percent of those device owners, it would mean 20 million customers. Google Music sells downloads, and also streams songs to users who store their music libraries on the company's servers. The service sells tracks from a host of indie labels as well as three of the four top major record companies. Google has yet to license tracks from Warner Music Group. 

Google campus in the bay area

Google managers have told label executives that the service will get a boost once Google implements its hardware strategy, the sources said. Google plans to start competing against Apple by building an array of consumer devices.

Two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google is building a wireless entertainment system that will stream music throughout the home. 

The troubled start for Google Music comes as the music sector shifts attention away from downloads and onto subscription services, such as Spotify, Rhapsody, and Rdio. These companies sell consumers access to huge pools of songs for a monthly fee. 

Handset manufacturers and network providers, such as Research In Motion, T-Mobile, Cricket, and MetroPCS have bolstered their music offerings. 

Just last week, CNET reported that Microsoft has held talks with some of the record companies about creating a new digital music store that would serve owners of the Xbox gaming console as well as buyers of an upcoming Windows-based phone. The parties have discussed the possibility of streaming music as well as selling downloads. 

Phones are important to the labels. They see a future where subscription services offer unlimited access to music and the fees are wrapped into phone bills. The thinking here is that this will make the consumer's buying experience much more painless. 

So is Google Music out of step with current music tastes? 

The record companies didn't think so when Google first approached them in 2010. The recording sector couldn't be happier that a company with Google's money and marketing might would be taking on iTunes. Because of Apple's domination of music sales, Apple has been able at times to dictate terms to the labels. 

Despite all the excitement surrounding subscription services, it remains to be seen whether these services are very profitable. 

The music industry is still too much in flux to say who the winners or losers are"