I can’t be the only one who feels like album intro tracks are dumb in 2011. I’m no full-album hater — intro tracks were cool once upon a time when you had little choice but to sit through them, and when listening to music was an activity in and of itself (on your couch in front of your speakers with a friend and a doobie) — it’s just that they seem silly in the context of how music is consumed in modern times. This is especially true for unknown bands who send us albums for review, but even for well-established acts who’ve earned their right to be a little self-indulgent. Am I the only one who just hits “skip” right away so I don’t have to sit through a minute and a half of keyboard swells and bells that are supposed to evoke a feeling of anticipation for something epic? Apparently not; new Invisible Oranges scribe Doug Moore (also the vocalist of MS-approved NYC metallers Pyrrhon) wrote a little bit on the ridiculousness of intro tracks in the modern era in a greater piece about the advantages of digital music.

Metalheads are often first-class nerds. We enjoy sprawling, complex pieces of art. That’s probably why the album format is such a collective hobbyhorse for us.

Unfortunately, nerdy people are often self-indulgent people. It’s a rare metal album that doesn’t involve at least some unnecessary baggage. Witness intro tracks. Almost nobody likes them, but countless bands use them. Worlds Beyond the Veil by Mithras is one of the better death metal albums of the past decade. But it starts with a six-minute intro. In the vinyl days, I would’ve been stuck with that lame intro every time I wanted to listen to the album. Now I can skip it or delete it. Easy peasy.

Click to read more…

Charts are a dime a dozen and often don’t tell you much you already didn’t know. But every now and then one comes along that really puts things into perspective. This animated .gif shows the sales of various formats of music by year. You can see the shift from the LP era to tape cassettes to CD and so on and so forth. The narrative here is of course very familiar already, but it’s the way it’s presented that makes the difference. Commentary from Fastcodesign.com:

… somehow, just the simple fact of stringing all these pie charts together tells you about the nature of music-format innovation. Here, the industry’s change appears inevitable, and the only surprising thing about it is how long the CD enjoyed a period of utter and total dominance. The CD ruled for far longer than most formats — and with extremely high margins, due to cheap production costs — but it was always doomed to be overturned.

Put another way: If you were a music executive sitting in a presentation 10 years ago and you’d been presented this chart, would you have any doubt that your CD business was going to die? Moreover, wouldn’t you have seen that in a historical context, the invention of the CD was an effervescent bit of luck? This ugly, animated gif carries a force that you can’t summon in a static line chart.

You can’t look at this chart without thinking, “What next?” This chart doesn’t take into account that the very idea that all people need to own music to consume it is quickly becoming outdated. MP3s as a dominant format have been around for a decade now (more if you start counting years when Napster first emerged), so perhaps the next shift is right around the corner: all-you-can-eat streaming services like Spotify, MOG, Rdio. If you’re a record exec right now, do you see it coming? Whether you see it or not… it’s definitely coming.

-VN

Thanks: Justin Reich

You may recall that about a month ago I offered several hundred CDs from my personal collection and promo from 2010 (including CDs, DVDs, shirts, vinyl, and other assorted doo-dads) in exchange for creative barter from one lucky MS reader. I got hundreds of offers, most of them laughable but a few of them awfully tempting. But in the end it was a no-brainer; when MS reader Randon Bowerman of Odessa, TX stepped up and offered Bocephus, pictured above, a taxidermied duck shot by his own father, I knew I’d found my match.

Bocephus looks positively striking on the wall of the recently relocated Vince Division! The photo doesn’t do his wings justice, but they have brilliant blue highlights, and you can kinda see the green on his neck although it’s brighter in real life. Big ups to Random for doing a killer job packing him up safely for shipment to Brooklyn and granting Bocephus his dying wish of flying cross-country one last time; I hope you enjoy all those CDs, dude. Props are also in order to Shane Third of Havelock, NC who made a valient effort with a pretty cool offer, but in the end it just didn’t work out. Thanks to everyone else who entered; you’re still quite welcome to regale me with gifts of baked goods, joints and indentured servitude.

-VN

In case you missed it, I’m giving away a shitload of CDs. Probably 300 or 400 of them, mostly metal, from my personal collection and from 2010 promo.

All I want in return is something via creative barter; offer me something weird, something cool, something crazy, something I might find useful (or, conversely, completely useless). I do not want money, and I do not want other CDs.

So far I’ve gotten some pretty tantalizing offers… so this is your list chance to attempt to be the best! I will choose the winner at the end of this week. Send your offers to vince [at] metalsucks [dot] net with CD GIVEAWAY in the subject line and let me know what you’ve got!

-VN

Last week I announced I’m giving away a large portion of my CD collection as well as a shitload of promos we’ve received at the Mansion in 2010, and that I wanted to give them away to one of you all for creative barter… whatever random items or services you have that you think I might be interested in.

Well, unsurprisingly I got a shit-ton of offers… some great, some not so much. Here are some highlights:

• A bear mask made out of the face of a teddy bear, a wooden dragon statuette, and a jar of Nutella.
• Lots of folks offering me baked goods. Lots of folks.
• Guitars. Especially B.C. Rich Warlocks; apparently this was a popular guitar to buy, but not so much anymore. And one Gibson Melody Maker “with a missing headstock but it can be easily replaced, I’m sure.” (lolz at that last one!)
• Offers to tattoo my face / MetalSucks logo on various body parts. Creepy!
• Your shitty CDs in exchange for my good ones. The whole point is I’m trying to get rid of CDs, you ninnies!
• Offers to write a metal song about me / MetalSucks.
• Maria Brink’s blue dress
• A Vince Neilstein character written into a videogame.
• A potato
• An ear of corn
• Housecleaning / chauffeur / general bitch services.
• Lots of offers for your souls.
• Offers to stay at readers’ places when I’m next in city X.
• An offer to make me forget Metallica existed after the Black Album.
• etc etc etc etc etc!

There are some mighty fine offers, some of which I’ve listed above and some of which I haven’t. Nothing’s really struck my fancy yet as “wow I MUST have that!” but I’m definitely considering a few. So, keep ‘em coming! Send your offers to vince [at] metalsucks [dot] net with CD GIVEAWAY in the subject. I’ll choose the winner next week!

-VN

A little while back I wrote that I’d begun the process of thinning out my CD collection to the bare essentials; a month+ later that process is complete, and my collection is suddenly a couple hundred CDs (at least) lighter. I’ve still got a ton of CDs to my name, but at least when I move the Vince Divison of the Mansion next month I’ll have a couple less boxes to haul.

So what I’ve decided to do is to give these CDs away to one of you, our loyal readers, in perhaps the biggest single giveaway ever on MetalSucks.

But wait, there’s more! To sweeten the pot I’m also including all the promo CDs I’ve received this year from labels and publicists! There is some really good stuff in here, folks… in addition to a great collection of metal (and some non-metal) CDs spanning the past 2+ decades, there’s great CDs from 2010, DVDs, little tchotchkes, special editions, and so on and so forth. The photo you see above is the actual entire prize package!

All told, all of this stuff is probably worth well over $1,000. But, get this… I don’t want any money for it! I’m giving it all away!

Here’s what you have to do to win this massive collection: make me a creative offer – not involving money — that you think would tickle my fancy. It can literally be anything; a piece of artwork, an instrument, a service you think I’d find useful (i.e. “I’ll do your laundry for a year”), a lifetime supply of burger meat, a pound of weed… anything at all! No offer is too ridiculous! Let me hear it, and I just might go for it.

If you have something you think I’d like, email your offer to vince [at] metalsucks [dot] net with the subject line CD GIVEAWAY. In a couple of weeks I’ll choose my favorite, and we’ll get to talkin’ about how to do the exchange. Here’s to hoping you guys have some cool shit for me.

-VN

Event – “Under My Skin” (mp3)

Event – “Make Your Way” (mp3)

The great purge of 2010 has begun — of my CD collection, that is. I’m preparing to move once again, and although I’ve still got three months to think about it, the experience of having to pack up my entire CD collection into boxes, carry them down a flight of stairs, load them into a truck, drive said truck across town, then carry everything up two and half more flights of stairs (in addition to all of my other furniture)… the experience still sticks with me from two years ago when I last moved. I have a lot of CDs. It was fucking brutal, and it made me re-think why the fuck I still hold onto this archaic form of music storage device.

Click to read more…

In a well-written but typically sour-old-fart-ish rant about the audio quality of CDs vs. vinyl, industry pundit Bob Lefsetz made perhaps one of the best comparisons ever:

I felt the [CD]. But it wasn’t warm. It was a silicone tit, not the real thing. Real boobs sag. The girls think we hate this. Along with stretchmarks and that roll of fat around their middle. Whereas this makes girls real. They’re built with a higher percentage of body fat. They’re made to give birth, to nurture. Who’d want to sleep with a ten year old boy? A STARVING ten year old boy?

Click to read more…

We are beyond spoiled; every day tons of packages arrive at the gates of the MetalSucks Mansion full of CDs from superstar and local bands alike. On top of that, net-savvy publicists regularly send us links to download full albums well before their release date. Needless to say we don’t ever pay for music. I can’t speak for Axl, but I feel pretty out of touch with how people actually acquire music — physical or digital? buy or steal? what medium/method? So I figured we’d just ask ya’ll. Given, this is a website, so the results will probably be somewhat skewed — but you never know. Presumably some people actually still go to the store and buy CDs, ’cause record labels still make ‘em. So you tell us: how do you get your new music?

Moving the MetalSucks Mansion this past weekend, I got to thinking: now that I can store all of the music I have and could ever want on a device the size of a paperback book, do I really need so many CDs around? Because let me tell you, hauling heavy-as-fuck boxes of thousands of CDs (and books and records) up two flights of stairs in 90 degree, humid heat was NOT fun. In fact, it was borderline torture.

Which begs the question; do I really need to keep all of this shit around?

Click to read more…

The neverending feedback loop that is the decline of physical retail and the falling price of CDs has reached a new frenzy, with Walmart — the #1 chain for physical CD sales in the U.S. — announcing that most of its titles will now sell for less than $10, with some new releases going for as low as $5.

That sound you hear? The dying gasps of physical retail as we know it.

So what’s next? Will consumers a year or two down the line be willing to pay for recorded music at all? Will some kind of a la carte subscription service arise?

-VN

Variety reports that the 2007 holiday shopping season saw a precipitous drop in sales of recorded music albums. Sales for the 2007 holiday season (day after thanksgiving through Dec 23) were down 21% from 2006. Even a stellar week leading up to Christmas that saw sales rise a whopping 42% over the previous week couldn’t right the ship; when the week’s sales of 25.57 million are compared to the same week from ’06, they represent an 18% drop. Compound all this with the full year figures — CD sales down 14% to 18% according to various reports — and we’ve got a shitstorm on our hands.

This is it, my friends. If you want to own CDs that you don’t already have, now would be the time to go buy them. Come January major retailers and big box stores are going to cut CD shelf space dramatically in favor of products that actually, ya know, sell.

Here’s some Metallica to listen to while you chew on that. Enjoy.

Metallica – “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

-VN