david byrne

David Byrne Launches Good News Site

- Adam Clare

David Byrne, artist extraordinaire, revealed his newest project to the world and I love it! Reasons to be Cheerful is a reaction to the bizarreness of 2017 and the craziness that 2018 has already witnessed. In an attempt to highlight the positivity in these turbulent times Reasons to be Cheerful sets out to remind people that there is always good in the world.

In his announcement post he writes “If it Works Copy it” and I agree!

What is Reasons To Be Cheerful?

I imagine, like a lot of you who look back over the past year, it seems like the world is going to Hell. I wake up in the morning, look at the paper, and go, “Oh no!” Often I’m depressed for half the day. It doesn’t matter how you voted on Brexit, the French elections or the U.S. election—many of us of all persuasions and party affiliations feel remarkably similar.

As a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news that reminded me, “Hey, there’s actually some positive stuff going on!” Almost all of these initiatives are local, they come from cities or small regions who have taken it upon themselves to try something that might offer a better alternative than what exits. Hope is often local. Change begins in communities.

Read more.
Thanks to Trevor!

Music Industry Broken, Musicians Not

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

from wiredMTV has declared the music industry broken and that is actually a good thing (unless you’re a recored executive). It is a hard time for musicians though as the industry catches up to this whole “interbookwebspacenetjournal.com” thing.

David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, has some advice for musicians so they can succeed in this new age:

I would personally advise artists to hold on to their publishing rights (well, as much of them as they can). Publishing royalties are how you get paid if someone covers, samples, or licenses your song for a movie or commercial. This, for a songwriter, is your pension plan.

Increasingly, it’s possible for artists to hold on to the copyrights for their recordings as well. This guarantees them another lucrative piece of the licensing pie and also gives them the right to exploit their work in mediums to be invented in the future — musical brain implants and the like.

No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that’s fine. I like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.” Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won’t be forced to choose.

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

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