matt sebastian (dot com)

In a sort of update to a post from last summer, this past week saw the Village Voice Pazz & Jop results go live, with TV on the Radio claiming the top spot for its striking third album, Dear Science. I’ve now voted in the poll for the past six years, although I have to confess, since becoming an editor, I don’t find myself doing a lot of writing anymore, let alone music criticism.

Still, I figure, once a critic, always a critic. Below is the list I submitted for this year’s poll, although within about a day of hitting the submit button, I remembered I’d forgotten to include The Kills‘ brilliant Midnight Boom, an album that should have ended up near the top.

And in the intervening weeks, I’ve also found myself enjoying Dead Confederate’s Wrecking Ball a whole lot more than I did on first blush. If I had a do-over, I’d put both records on the list. But I don’t.

So here’s how I voted.

I’m actually including the list below, because Village Voice, in addition to doing a lousy job of archiving its vast trove of music polls online, manages to mix up the order of my ballot every other year. And this year’s no exception.

1.) Glasvegas, Glasvegas
2.) The Black Keys, Attack and Release
3.) TV on the Radio, Dear Science
4.) The Gutter Twins, Saturnalia
5.) Everything Absent or Distorted, The Great Collapse
6.) The Cure, 4.13 Dream
7.) Kanye West, 808s & Heartbreak
8.) David Byrne and Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
9.) The Magnetic Fields, Distortion
10.) Spiritualized, Songs in A&E

My wife and friends no doubt are tired of hearing me bemoan the horrifying makeover that XM Satellite Radio received at the hands of Sirius Satellite Radio one day last November, as the “merged” companies sprung a combined lineup on unsuspecting subscribers to both services. It was bad enough that the joint company almost immediately reneged on promises of offering a la carte programming packages. Instead, subscribers to both services got essentially the same lineup, with a good deal of XM’s more eclectic and deeper-digging channels dumped in favor of their lesser Sirius counterparts.

For me, an XM subscriber since 2002, it was a real kick in the throat. Gone were XM’s beloved troika of alt-rock stations — Fred, Lucy and Ethel — replaced instead by Sirius stations so heavy on repetition that I heard U2′s “I Will Follow” twice within 20 minutes on First Wave — on the very morning of the switch, no less. Things didn’t get much better. While Fred was a revelatory mix of ’80s college rock, mixing semi-popular hits with lesser-known album cuts, rare B-sides and criminally overlooked bands like the House of Love and the Godfathers, Sirius’ First Wave, on first blush, was pretty much all well-known singles, all the time — over and over again. You can only stand hearing Depeche Mode’s “People are People” so many times in one day.

Last month, I was on the brink of canceling the subscriptions to our two XM radios. When I called in, I was offered a free month on each to stay. So I decided to give it a bit more time.  Then I dropped a note to SiriusXM vice president Jon Zellner, expressing my dismay over the merged lineup, and particularly the Fred/First Wave switch, since that station was one of the main reasons I pay for satellite radio.

Much to my surprise, Zellner responded within about a half hour, specifically addressing my complaints, and offering assurances that Sirius was dumping more songs into its playlists — presumably to pacify irritated XM subscribers. But he also made some very salient points about the nature of satellite radio:

“Something you may not know is the fact that XM subscribers like yourself who signed up in 2002 were even different than more recent XM converts who didn’t seek us out…they just bought a car but fell in love with the service. Fred was one of those channels that attracted very knowledgeable early alt fans like yourself but for every one of you, there were others who thought the music on Fred was just too weird. You may have noticed that Fred became more and more familiar in recent years and that was by design to cater to XM’s growing audience.”

Interesting point. The original premise of satellite radio was that it would offer an untold number of niche stations, unspooling so many different musical threads that it would pull in a sufficient number of listeners to make the service profitable — which, of course, is the Long Tail theory. That, however, didn’t work with satellite radio, which has never turned a profit. As Zellner writes, XM has spent the years since its launch in 2001 making itself less niche-based. Sirius always was modeled more on the repetition-heavy FM format, and relies more on overly chatty DJs; now the combined service continues to emphasize familiarity over discovery.

Still, it remains better than FM radio. And just as Zellner promised, the playlists on the Sirius stations are getting noticeably deeper, even if there’s still a bit too much repeptition. But gone are the days when I would listen to First Wave for a stretch and hear nothing but single after single, many of which were so mainstream they should be played on the ’80s “hits” channel, not the alternative station.

And then, driving home from work one night last week, I actually heard something completely unexpected on First Wave: a b-side. It was U2′s cover of “Everlasting Love,” a ’60s chestnut the band recorded for the flip side of “All I Want is You” in 1989.

Now that’s progress. First Wave’s still no Fred, but if the station’s programmers are starting to recognize that college-rock stations in the ’80s didn’t just play strings of radio hits by Duran Duran and the Police, then maybe they’re getting somewhere. Growing up in San Diego, for example, I vividly remember 91X playing — in pretty heavy rotation — b-sides like “Dangerous” (Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus”) or “Harold and Joe” (The Cure’s “Never Enough”).

I’m not confident satellite radio’s going to last, given both the plight of the carmakers in this troubled economy and the almost certain rise of mobile Web radio. But it seems like SiriusXM is listening to its customers (the company also recently reinstated some of the channels it dumped in November), and for now, that’s enough to keep me on board.

This week’s big news in the journalism world? The announcement that the Hearst Corp. is putting the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale, following the lead of my employer, the E.W. Scripps Co., which last month dropped the bombshell it may close the Rocky Mountain News if a buyer isn’t found by sometime this month.

But Steven Swartz, president of Hearst’s newspaper division, took it one step further than Scripps, essentially announcing the death of the newspaper’s print edition, according to the P-I’s story on the announcement:

“One thing is clear: At the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” Swartz told employees. “Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009. We have had to make a very tough decision.”

Now, I have real mixed feelings about what’s going on in Denver and Seattle, which are very similar situations, given that both papers are on the bottom end of a joint-operating agreement. Here in Denver, I’ve got friends and former colleagues working at the Rocky — some of whom have posted here — and, under pretty much any scenario that unfolds, many of them likely will lose their jobs. And that’s a terrible thing not just for those talented journalists, but also the population of metro-Denver, which will lose, either fully or partially, an absolutely invaluable source of local news.

That being said, someone needs to take the plunge. This year, some major newspaper is going to have to shut down its printing press, go online-only and begin the daunting task of figuring out a financial model to make newsgathering — real reporting, not just aggregation — survive post-paper.

And I’d love to to see the Rocky go first, in whatever form that might entail. It’d certainly be better, for Denver and journalism as a whole, to at least attempt a Web-only operation, rather than fold entirely. We can only hope Scripps, or a willing buyer, is ready to lead the way.

Today, finally, the wall-rattling debut album from Scottish quartet Glasvegas came out in the U.S., four months, to the week, since it hit shops in the U.K. — and download services worldwide. It’s an occasion I mark both because Glasvegas ranked as my No. 1 album of 2008, and because the old industry practice of delayed releases for different territories is so desperately antiquated these days.

I first heard the band shortly before the album’s release, having downloaded it from some leak blog I follow via RSS. I didn’t love it at first, but it grew on me, to the point — probably sometime in October — that I decided to buy it. So I hit Twist & Shout in Denver, and was shocked to find out the CD hadn’t yet been released in the U.S.  I didn’t know they still did that. Luckily, T&S had the import vinyl, so I snatched that up. (It sounds fantastic, by the way; I described it here as “heavy on fuzz and stomp, with sing-songy anthems soaked in reverb.”)

Frankly, I’d forgotten the album wasn’t out here until Monday, when a review copy of the CD landed in my mailbox at work. Turns out it was scheduled, at long last, for an American release today. Talk about missing the boat; Columbia Records, for whatever reason, opted not to capitalize on the Web buzz that accompanied Glasvegas’ leak and release last year, leaving American fans to buy it on iTunes — for those willing to spend money for a collection of tinny sounding 1′s and o’s — or seek out import copies. Or take the path of least resistance and download it illegally. It’s not like Glasvegas’ label made it easy for fans to buy the band’s CD… until now.

So, to mark the occasion — and because Plan A fell through at the last minute — I put the band on the cover of the newspaper tomorrow. Now if they’d just expand their tour itinerary beyond scattered coastal dates… (Edit: Spoke too soon; spring dates were announced this week, including an April 9 stop at Denver’s Bluebird Theater.)

There’s been a lot of chatter over the past week about Nielsen SoundScan’s annual year-end music sales figures , which, once again, portend doom and, well, more doom for the beleaguered record industry. In 2008, CD sales fell another 20 percent, while sales of digital albums and digital singles rose 32 percent and 27 percent, respectively. That doesn’t sound too bad — downloads are just replacing CD revenue, right? — until you look at the raw numbers. CD sales dropped by 87.9 million units last year. Even with 2008′s big spike, people still only downloaded 65.8 million albums total. And sure, more than 1 billion single tracks were downloaded from various online music sellers — but at 99 cents, or thereabouts, a pop, that’s pocket change to an industry that still sold 450.5 million CDs last year.

As the Associated Press reported this week:

The report continues a troubling trend for the recording industry, which has a harder time maintaining profits when consumers buy single songs instead of albums. “You can see the overall unit sales as a positive, but their model is really built on album sales and that just continues to decline,” said Silvio Pietroluongo, director of charts for Billboard magazine.

What’s most interesting, however, in the AP’s report is a little nugget buried at the end of the story:

Ironically, as digital downloads grew, vinyl album sales also climbed. In 2008, more vinyl albums were purchased (1.88 million) than any other year since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

Looking at the stats, sales of new vinyl albums increased 25 percent last year, up 380,000 units from 1.5 million total to 1.88 million. Numbers like that are still fairly insignificant in the scheme of things, but it’s a promising trend. Still, I can’t see vinyl ever moving beyond niche status, a plateau it may one day share with CDs after the music world finally, and inevitably, goes nearly all-digital.

What’s really interesting is to see what new records people are buying:

2008 TOP TEN VINYL ALBUMS
(12/31/2007 – 12/28/2008)

Title/Artist (Units Sold)
1. In Rainbows / Radiohead (25,800)
2. Abbey Road / The Beatles (16,500)
3. Chinese Democracy / Guns N’ Roses (13,600)
4. Funplex / The B-52′s (12,800)
5. Third / Portishead (12,300)
6. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea / Neutral Milk Hotel (10,200)
7. Dark Side of the Moon / Pink Floyd (10,200)
8. Fleet Foxes / Fleet Foxes (9,600)
9. Death Magnetic / Metallica (9,400)
10. O.K. Computer / Radiohead (9,300)

So what this tells us, apparently, is that the so-called vinyl resurgence likely is being spurred by two types of people: fans of classic (Fab Four, the Floyd) and hard rock (Metallica and GNR, with an impressive showing, considering that album was released just a month ago), and indie-loving hipsters (Radiohead, Fleet Foxes and — hello! — Neutral Milk Hotel). To further generalize, the former probably are hot on the nostalgia tip, while the latter… well, they’re hipsters being hip. And right now that means spinning records.

And then there’s the 12,800 people who inexplicably chose to buy a new B-52′s album on vinyl in 2008. Not sure what that’s called.

Gratuitous plug: For an excellent overview of why the music industry’s in such dire straits, check out Steve Knopper’s “Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age.” Reviewed here by yours truly, plus an interview with the author. Check it out.

Guess the best way to launch a new blog isn’t to spend your first month getting into the swing of posting… before abandoning the thing entirely for five months. Not that I wasn’t reminded, on an almost hourly basis, about this site’s existence through the stream of comment notifications cascading into my inbox. There’s got to be a faster way to delete 3,736 spam comments than going page-by-page. And without accidentally deleting the legit comments left on older posts. Oops.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was sort of sidetracked in late July when a new job landed in my lap, one that required supervising a newspaper and Web site redesign and content overhaul, the launch of annual back-to-school editions, a staffing reorganization and a move to new offices. All in the first few weeks.

Now that the dust has settled, and for want of any proper New Year’s resolutions, I figure it’s time to give this thing a reboot. What that means, I’m not entirely sure. Stay tuned. Or not.