Newsletter March 2006

Every time we add something new, you'll see a linked guide to it here, with our archive of past Newsletters.

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There are just a few new site items this month. Most of the effort at the Stereo Society has been to make music and etch it on to shiny little disks. We have most of our tracks available for paid download, notably with iTunes, but CDs are still 95% of the record business. Don’t believe everything you read online. Online sales will only take off when all the sites are at least as user-friendly as iTunes (some of them are real interactive disasters) and when purchases are compatible and to the same standard.

And so to the new Shirts CD. Only The Dead Know Brooklyn will be their fourth, appearing over 25 years after their third. Mixing will be finished by the end of this week, and the CD will be available on the site for prerelease sales around mid-June. We post a new long biography of the band this month, tracing their progress from a classic Brooklyn neighborhood upbringing, early crashing around in search of identity, hitting the big time with EMI/Capitol and then succumbing to record biz shenanigans. The strengths that supported their early achievements have produced their reincarnation in an album which combines the strengths of their first two (the first, self-titled, and Streetlight Shine): raucous, powerful rock+roll with big vocals (all the seven members sing). More follows.

As you can see from our home page, we’re changing our audio focus. Now, all tracks are presented with large free sections, typically half the length of the cut, available for mp3 streaming and download. We will be standardizing on this format in future. At the same time, we offer the AAC format, with its m3a suffix, for download. This is the format used by iTunes, and the same sized file sounds better than an mp3. See our note on music playback at the Stereo Society for more explanation. Look soon for free download bundles of half-length mp3s of each track of an entire album.

And yet another release is looming. The New York dance community gave an enormously favorable reaction to advance versions of Thorne’s The Contessa’s Party. So we commissioned noted Latin house remixer Norty Cotto to remix Dancing With B. It will be serviced to clubs over the next couple of weeks, and will be available for sale shortly after. The vinyl 12” has Norty’s vocal and dub mixes, the CD (at 72 minutes) the full complement of mixes including three new remixes by Thorne in different styles.

Any party would be nothing without frivolity and glamour. So check out the series of elegant ladies spotted by the paparazzi at the Contessa’s party. While, of course, heeding the rules, without which any good party would descend into anarchy. There’s also the story of how the album was put together. It took long enough…