Do consumers blame artist for overblown hype leaving them hopeless? Check out this column that discusses instant stars like CMJ acts Black Kids, Vampire Weekend aren’t given the chance to evolve into greater bands.

You can now stream Avenged Sevenfold’s new self-titled and self produced album in its entirety. The album will hit streets next Tuesday.

After listening to Coheed’s latest album, ‘No World For Tomorrow,’ we believe this could put them on the map. Coheed has always been slightly left of mainstream but this time they trimmed the fat and delivered well crafted choruses without abandoning the prog rock. The dreadful rock format needs a boost of creativity and Coheed could be part of the solution of getting consumers excited about rock again. Time will tell….

Radiohead is on the verge of signing a deal to release the CD version of the album in the US with ATO Records, which is headed by Coran Capshaw, Dave Matthews Band’s manager. Major labels including Warner Brothers, Columbia and Starbucks were engaged in a bidding war but the band decided to embrace the indie model. (NYT)

This Week Sales….

Springsteen (77k)
Kid Rock (77k)
Jimmy Eat World (62k)
Santana (56k)
Cobie Caillat (50k)
Foo Fighters (29k)
Thrice (27k)
J Lo (18k)
James Blunt (16k)
Paramore (14k)
Atreyu (5k)

Business Week is getting all text book on us with the column “Leaving Record Labels Behind” Musicians are looking for an alternative, Their managers may be the answer…They tell us to keep an eye on the relationship between a band and its management. Business Week cites Madonna and Radiohead as indicators of a possible future trend.

The Bottom Line: Lets stop the madness. Madonna is living in the old system but pretending to live in the new system. She is use to big cash advances and wont have it any other way. If Toys ‘R’ Us would have guaranteed Madonna a 200 million dollar advance we would be reading a press release the next day that may have looked liked this..

Who knows how my albums will be distributed in the future? That’s what’s exciting about this Toys ‘R’ Us deal…everything is possible. Toys ‘R’ Us has offered me a true partnership and after 25 years in the business, I feel that I deserve that.” – Madonna

Crimes that have crippled the music industry are now be taken serious by authories. Hundreds of illegal sites could be threatened with the ‘Global antipiracy treaty’ in works.

Global counterfeiting and piracy steal billions of dollars from workers, artists and entrepreneurs and the U.S. Government plans to strengthen the legal framework of intellectual property rights enforcement.

Now that the government has finally acknowledged this is a serious problem, the next step is to combat this global problem. Countries taking part in the negotiations include Canada, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Switzerland and the 27 member states of the European Union.

The new treaty is intended to complement the existing Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual-Property Rights — the so-called TRIPS agreement established by the World Trade Organization.

“It will not involve any changes to the TRIPS agreement,” the USTR said. “Rather, the goal is to set a new, higher benchmark for enforcement that countries can join on a voluntary basis.”

The Bottom Line: This is good news for anyone who is in the copyright industry. They may finally see the silver lining along the edge of the cloud.

Coheed & Cambria new album, No World for Tomorrow, hit the streets today.

Meese has signed to Atlantic Records, you can find them in KOARs New Music column.

The President of CD Baby talks about the failed relationship with SnoCap. Its a must read. CD Baby made a total of $1080 in the course of 8 months.

My Getaway will be performing 10/30 in NYC at the ANNEX at 7pm. The central Florida based pop punk band is the BMI Artist of the month for October. The band recorded with producer Marc McClusky (Powerspace, Hit The Lights, Ludo).

Comcast blocks some internet traffic: Comcast actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally. If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. Could this be the beginning of the end of file sharing?

British and Dutch police have shut down Oink the world’s biggest site of pirated pre-release albums. OiNK distributed albums weeks ahead of their official release date and had an estimated membership of 180,000.

This membership model was as creepy as the website name oink. People were only invited to become members if they could prove they had music to offer and had to keep posting tracks to maintain their membership.

Authorities found the site was operated by a 24-year-old man who lived near Middlesbrough in north-east England. He was arrested Tuesday. The site’s servers, based in Amsterdam which is the home of prostitution and drugs, were seized in raids last week.

Jeremy Banks, head of the IFPI’s Internet anti-piracy unit said “This was not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure. This was a worldwide network that got hold of music they did not own the rights to and posted it online.” (Reuters)

Ticket Prices skyrocketing: Do you remember when you called Ticketmaster hoping to get 7 tickets to you’re favorite concert? I wanted to purchase tickets for all of my friends to share the experience, hoping they would pay me back. I remember being up in arms when ticketmaster told me it was a 4 ticket maximum. Those days are done. Brokers are now sneaking around security measures and using AUTOMATED BOTS to purchase thousands tickets and selling them for insane prices. Tickets for Hannah Montana cost $36.00 at face-value and scalpers offered top seats for as high as $4,000. What is even more ridiculous is that the authorities are doing next to nothing to prevent this illegal trade. The technological trend is on a downward spiral, meaning its causing more harm than good.

CMJ 2007: KOAR always enjoys thrusting our ADD into high gear by hopping from club to club and party to party during the fall CMJ music conference. We get to catch 20 seconds of hundreds of bands. In most cases, 20 seconds is enough. I believe this quote from Idolator sums it up: 75% of the bands we saw this week couldn’t really write a song with a million-dollar recording contract to their heads–hardly a big surprise in the world of “indie” music–but some bands pulled off the atmospheric shtick better than others…..

Houston, TX based alternative rock band Thee Armada have signed to Foundation Records which is distributed by Universal. Their new record will be produced by Brian McTernan (Circa Survive, Thrice) and mixed by David Bendeth (Paramore). Legal rep is Ben McLane.

Free Can’t Satisfy the Thief: According to calculations by Los Angeles company Big Champagne, The new Radiohead album is being downloaded at a higher rate illegally than legally. On the day of the album’s “release,” 240,000 users illegally downloaded the album, and the following days averaged 100,000 more per, ultimately resulting in over 500,000 illegal downloads of a possibly free legal download. (RollingStone)