Coachella Lineup Announced
This morning, after a long week of delays and speculation, promoters finally released the official lineup for the 2009 Coachella festival. The headliners for each night of the 3-day desert fest will be The Cure, The Killers and Paul McCartney, with the usual strong stable of supporting acts filling out each day. The list was supposed to go out earlier this week, but unexplained scheduling conflicts kept pushing back the highly anticipated announcement, leaving festival goers only a few hours to take it all in before tickets went on sale at noon. Festival lineup delays are starting to become a worrisome trend in for 2009, with the announcement of the Bonnaroo-affiliated fest Langerado getting pushed back late last year before announcing an underwhelming lineup. While Coachella seems to have fared significantly better, the lineup is oddly frontloaded with several potential headliners (Macca and Morrissey, in particular) stacked on the first night, leaving the appealing, yet relatively green Killers to top off what is traditionally the main event on Saturday.
Cold War Kids play Mercury Lounge
While never hitting the peaks of popularity that some of their blog-rock brethren have enjoyed over the same time period, the Cold War Kids have managed a steady rise to success over the years. They’ve paid their dues supporting larger acts along the way and have gained a respectable following beyond the fickle fans that gave them their initial boost. Despite booking themselves at the massive Terminal 5 later this spring, the Cali quartet made an appearance at the Mercury Lounge last Wednesday for a last minute gig while in town perform on Conan. The Kids, who are supporting their sophomore album that came out last fall, used the show as a warm-up of sorts before heading to Australia for a tour. They blasted through a quality hour of jams off their first two albums to the intimate and receptive crowd.
Muxtape Relaunches
This week saw the re-launch of Muxtape, the online mix tape simulator that was forced to shutter last summer for licensing issues. The concept of the site was simple, and is what led to its instant, albeit short-lived success. Users could upload their music and create mixtapes, then share the personalized links with whomever wanted to hear. Now. after being offline for 5 months, the site has re-emerged, but in a far more limited form. Rather than opening the service to anyone with an MP3 on their computer, it has transformed into a service for bands to host their own songs. The site is formatted to act as a minimalist Myspace, cutting music seekers to the chase without dealing with all the flash and nonsense the past-its-prime social networking site has devolved into. While Muxtape only has a dozen artists attached for their preview release, they’re good ones, with Of Montreal, Girl Talk and Amanda Palmer already set up. Muxtape faces a steep uphill battle trying to make any sort of inroads into the online music space, but by attempting to deal with the Artists directly, rather than the labels, they may fare better than some of the recent causalities.
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