Welcome to another amazing month of music from the incredible musicians that make up the Sonicbids.com community. We have chose a select group of amazing musicians that will be speaking directly to the Skope readers. As always we encourage readers to dig deeper and check out their EPK’s.
Phyllis Sinclair
www.sonicbids.com/PhyllisSinclair2
No Blitz
www.sonicbids.com/NoBlitz
Skope: What does it mean to be an A2W artist?
No Blitz: It’s always great to get positive feedback on your music. We are on Jango, Facebook, Purevolume, etc. and every fan we obtain is a small victory, but to be recognized by an established, distinguished magazine is a true honor. It’s even cooler that we are recognized as an A2W…it really represents the acknowledgement that we have potential.
Skope: What are you currently promoting the most via an album, tour, single etc?
No Blitz: We are actually currently in the studio recording a second album and are very excited about the first single “My Life”. The album follows the same concept as the debut ‘Give it Back’ in that it is very dynamic; everything from heavy rock songs to sincere acoustics to instrumentals make it a journey to listen to. I would even go as far as saying that the new album has even more extremes and some of these songs have been stuck in my head for close to a year.
Skope: Does it bother you when fans download your music without paying?
No Blitz: No. We do it. There is no way anyone could afford to build a music library that could satisfy a true music aficionado. We offer Free MP3 downloads wherever we can. Although the dream is to get paid enough to live on doing what you love (make music in our case), we feel that getting our music out there is more important than turning a quick buck. All we ask is that you tell your friends and play it loud in your car.
Skope: Name 1 artist or band that inspires you to play music more than and why?
No Blitz: It would be impossible for me not to say Foo Fighters. They have a huge impression on us and are living the dream as far as we are concerned. They have done some extremely cool stuff with the release of ‘Wasting Light’ like a live 3D concert to movie theaters across the country and playing garage shows at discrete locations. We even cover ‘Bridge Burning’ at shows that are time permitting…the crowds love it.
Skope: Will the music industry be more subscription based or will download sales lead the business model?
No Blitz: As in 10 CDs for a penny? I don’t think anyone will be falling for that again. I tend to be a fairly bursty acquirer of new music and most people don’t like recurring charges.
Skope: What is coming up for you & where you at online?
No Blitz: As I mentioned, the biggest thing going on is recording the new album. It’s going to be awesome if we even get close to materializing what is in my head. We are also playing a handful of local gigs to Arlington, VA and have some stuff lined up in Boston in late August. There are so many online sites it is actually proving hard to keep up with it. We are on Facebook, PureVolume, MySpace, Soundcloud, Reverbnation, Sonicbids, Jango, www.noblitz.com, Twitter, Taxi, and probably a few more that I don’t recall.
Lipstick and Cigarettes
www.sonicbids.com/LipstickandCigarettes
Skope: What does it mean to be an A2W artist?
LnC: We’re psyched! Getting a positive response to our music is so gratifying, especially when someone wants to share it with others. Being an A2W artist really means a lot to us, since we can reach more people and fill some empty space with our tunes!
Skope: What are you currently promoting the most via an album, tour, single etc?
LnC: Right now we’re pushing our self-titled EP available on iTunes and AmazonMP3. Our heads are burning with awesome new music, coming soon!!
Skope: Does it bother you when fans download your music without paying?
LnC: Nope. We have some live stuff posted for free, and you can purchase the EP through Amazon and iTunes, but if you can sponge a copy of our stuff off your friends, more power to ya. We just want people to enjoy the music.
Skope: Name 1 artist or band that inspires you to play music more than and why?
LnC: It’s not easy to narrow our inspirations to one artist, especially since our influences come from such unique decades. Let’s see…from the 80s, The Cars is probably our biggest influence. Chris’s vocal style is similar, and a lot of people really get into the vibe! Franz Ferdinand is one of our more significant influences from today. There are so many other bands we listen to, but these two are easier to pick out when you compare our stuff with what’s out there.
Skope: Will the music industry be more subscription based or will download sales lead the business model?
LnC: Download sales are really where things are headed, but if you’re a tiny bit old fashioned like us, we also like to have a CD in our hands. We like to have it all.
Skope: What is coming up for you & where you at online?
LnC: We’re looking at a fabulous Fall 2011, with new music and surprises for our fans. Come out and see us after your beachin’ vacations and tell us which of our new tunes you love most! We’ll be posting updates and reviews throughout the summer, so check in with us on Facebook.
reverbnation.com/lipstickandcigarettes
facebook.com/lipstickandcigarettes
lipstickandcigarettes.net
@lipsncigs
Seryn
www.sonicbids.com/serynsound
Skope: What are you currently promoting the most via an album, tour, single etc?
Seryn: We are still riding the wave of our debut album, This Is Where We Are, which released on January 25th, 2011, and touring it at much as we can. We toured the Midwest all of February, played regionally through March including SXSW, toured all of June up the West Coast, and just returned from a two week stint out to Atlanta and Tampa and every place in between. So promoting the album and our tours has been a big focus for us for the last six months.
Skope: Does it bother you when fans download your music without paying?
Seryn: In the grand scheme of things, we’d rather people have our music to listen to and share with others than to skip out on it all together, so downloading the album without paying isn’t necessarily a huge worry of ours. However, we do want our fans and the vast array of music listeners anywhere to recognize that musicians rely to a certain extent on their listeners support. Tours, recording, pressing albums, and the hopes of quitting our day jobs- none of those come free.
Skope: Name one artist or band that inspires you to play music more than and why?
Seryn: For pretty much all of Seryn, the band Sigur Ros has been very influential. Not entirely because of the style of music, but the demeanor of the way they treat their art is very commendable. Beyond what is recorded, the songs seem to exist in a higher form that strictly what you may hear on the album. Their film Heima demonstrates this well with them performing acoustic or alternative versions of their song that somehow captivate you just as much as the epic soundscapes of bowed electric guitar, strings, and drums. Watching them perform, they show a high respect to the songs the create and to the people who listen to it. We strive to hold a similar respect to our music, whether the songs are somber or celebratory.
Skope: Will the music industry be more subscription based or will download sales lead the business model?
Seryn: Maybe I’m biased since I read The Future of Music by David Kusek, which discusses a music business model headed that will be heavily subscription based, but I find myself in agreement with Kusek. Though it won’t happen without a nasty fight from the big heads of the industry, with the internet and increasing amount of music becoming available every day, music entertainment will be paid for much like we pay for cable television. A basic price opens the door to cable, but then you’ve got premiums and pay-per-view and “on-demand” options that we pay extra for. We already see it a lot with services like eMusic and Pandora, but ultimately I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Skope: What is coming up for you & where you at online?
Seryn: We are preparing for a tour up the East Coast to New York for the month of October, all the while we’ve got a lot of new material in the works in preparation for a sophomore album. You can find us at our website www.serynsound.com or for addition tour, contact, and press information check out www.spune.com/seryn.
Amanda Peterson
www.sonicbids.com/AmandaPeterson
Geronimo!
www.sonicbids.com/thegeronimoband
Skope: What does it mean to be an A2W artist?
Geronimo!: It’s rewarding to receive accolades from any publication for something you love and put a lot of time and energy into. We’re excited and glad to be named an A2W artist by Skope Magazine.
Skope: What are you currently promoting the most via an album, tour, single etc?
Geronimo!: In a way, all of the above. We’re just finishing up a cassette as a fun project that we hope will be become part of a free series of 4-track cassette recordings we will make and duplicate ourselves. We’re also finishing up our second studio full length album and booking a two-week tour for October out to the Northeastern US.
Skope: Does it bother you when fans download your music without paying?
Geronimo!: Not in the least. We actually urge them to do so. It gives our blood-thirsty team of lawyers something to do all day. Seriously though, we definitely want people to get our stuff for free. Our first studio full length album, “Fuzzy Dreams” is available for free download from our bandcamp site, thegeronimoband.bandcamp.com. We’ve found that that’s really the easiest way to get new people exposed to our music. Folks who might shy away from paying for an album by a band they don’t know are much more likely to download something for free and give it a try.
Skope: Name one artist or band that inspires you to play music more than others and why?
Geronimo!: Personally, from the get-go it was a band called Troubled Hubble from the Chicago area. They broke up in 2005 after being signed to the then-still-kicking Lookout Records. I got to know them a couple years before that and it really struck me that they were just some genuine, wonderful, hard-working dudes that were going after their dreams. I had played in bands before, but their unabashed “let’s go for it” attitude was just what I needed to be exposed to at that point in my life. I still keep in touch with some of them, in fact, their guitarist Josh Miller engineered, mixed, and produced our first album and is doing the same for our second. Anyway, I’d recommend anyone that’s never heard of Troubled Hubble to check them out.
Skope: Will the music industry be more subscription based or will download sales lead the business model?
Geronimo!: Trying to speculate about the future of the music industry seems like film-makers guessing about what future cars will look like. They never get it right. I’m still a little sour about not having flying cars by 2015 like Back to the Future 2 promised me. In all honesty, who knows where music purchasing tastes will go. If predicting these things were easy, we wouldn’t have seen major labels crumble due to downloading. Furthermore, in the next five to ten years some wonderful new options might show up that makes the models you mentioned obsolete. In the words of Doctor Emmett Brown, “you’re just not thinking fourth dimensionally.”
Skope: What is coming up for you & where you at online?
Geronimo!: We are thrilled to be putting out our first cassette. It’s really been a fun little project and we’ll be giving them out for free at our next Chicago show (August 17th at Subterranean). We recorded it live onto 4-track in our practice space and it’s awesomely raw and cool sounding, in my humble opinion. Beyond that, we’ve got that next studio LP coming out soonish and the two-week tour for October that I mentioned earlier. We’ve really pumped to hit the road again, it’s always fun. Last time out, our guitarist Kelly picked up and adopted a tiny kitten off the side of the road in rural West Texas. We had a week of tour left though, so we all got a lesson in how to live in a van with a kitten. I don’t recommend that lesson, haha. Online, you can catch us at these lovely URLs:
thegeronimoband.bandcamp.com
www.facebook.com/thegeronimoband
www.myspace.com/thegeronimoband
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BomKOqZ3Ic
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