Not too many unsigned bands have the opportunity to perform in front mid sized crowds on a consistent basis. This isn’t the case for Matchmaker who have been playing to about 250+ crowds in Jersey and were on the main stage at Bamboozle and they recently performed the punk rock campout with MXPX. Matchmaker released their first album Lights, Camera, Re-Action, that consists of melodic choruses and punkish anthemic sing-a-longs. Several labels recently have been poking their nose around this 4 piece NJ native act. For more information contact Roy Lamanna (908)-601-8260. Check out the track Victory For A Smile.

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Radio is dead…yadda yadda. So let’s talk about the internet for a second, iTunes specifically. iTunes has become the new radio. And by ‘radio’ I don’t mean the place people turn to for new music, since radio hasn’t been that for over 10 years. By ‘radio’ I mean the place labels turn to for promoting new music and where they focus their money to give the illusion of popularity. It’s singles-focused like radio, and dominated by major labels like radio. Being #1 on iTunes is just as important and just as bull as being #1 on radio, although neither one in many cases translates into retail sales. You’d think a service where people are paying for the songs the jump to retail sales would be an obvious one, but that has yet to prove to be the case.

**send your demos and new music to KOAR. We want to hear your new music.

Business mogul Damon Dash, former head and co-founder of Roc-A-Fella Records, says he no longer has time for the music industry, and instead will focus on the fashion world and other enterprises.

“The music business isn’t so profitable, especially not hip-hop,â€? Dash recently told Contact Music. “I couldn’t buy what I wanted to buy. I’m talking cooks and drivers. I got into clothes to make money.â€? “The people in this business all think they’ve made it because they’re in charge of their little record labels. I’m like, this isn’t even my main source of income. I already did this business – and I made movies and I designed clothes and I got my own vodka and my own Swiss watch maker.

Damon Dash is known for his Roc-A-Fella/Rocawear venture with partners Jay-Z Kareem “Biggs� Burke. (Read full article)

You can thank the oil companies (price gouging) for killing the touring artists. Many artists are unable to tour due to the high gas prices. Brett Holman who manages the Allman Brothers has estimated that gas is costing the group at least $50,000 more this year than last year and at the end of the day it’s coming out of the band’s pocket. It cost’s Dashboard Confessional 90,000k to fuel up three tractor trailers and three buses. The cost will eventually be passed down to the consumer. (Rolling Stone)

We would like to retract our post that claimed Hawthorne Heights bragged about the #1 position on the top 200. It wasn’t them who created this “tacky” campaign around their release of “If You Were Only Lonely”. We forgot for one moment that Victory Records releases their records.

–EU court overturned the European Commission’s approval of the merger between the music units of Sony and Bertelsmann AG on Thursday, forcing the companies to request clearance for the deal again.

It was a bad week for record sales with no big releases. Johnny Cash entered the top 200 with sales of 88,336. Hmmmm….
Let’s pick on Hawthorne Heights who broke the rock n roll code by bragging about the possibility of entering the top 200 with the #1 position. Victory shipped 850K and they sold less than 400k. Learning lesson? Be humble and thankful for every record bought in today’s climate.

According to Coolfer Clive Davis signed fourth-place “American Idol” finisher Chris Doughtry. His record is due out by years end.

Nielsen Soundscan numbers for the first half of 2006 came out last week and much of the press focused on the upward slope of the digital sales curve and the downward slope of CD sales. Album sales went down from 282.6 million this time last year to 270.6 million for the midpoint of 2006, while downloaded tracks soared 77% to 281 million in the first 26 weeks of 2006.

The new Deftones album will be titled Saturday Night Wrist and will be out in October.

Goodbye Tomorrow, who features former Terminal frontman, Travis Bryant, has inked a deal with Equal Vision. (Decoy)

Quick: Name the biggest star in prime-time television.

Now: Name a star created by the Internet

I suggest you read “The Extinction of Mass Culture” by Senior Fortune writer Marc Gunther.

The advent of 300 channels and the Internet has fragmented audiences – and the explosion of choice has left us poorer.
According to Gunther TV’s biggest stars are Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, but they don’t appear in prime time and they’ve been around for years – before the 300-channel universe fragmented audiences and damaged broadcast TV’s hit-making machinery. The Internet is by nature a niche medium so it has not created any stars, and probably won’t.

All we have here is an infinite number of choices and a long trail of confusion. Can we expect less and less blockbusters? Absolutely