R.E.M. Go Viral, Radiohead Go Soft, The Cure Go To Bed

Today’s band spotlight goes to R.E.M. for their marketing efforts with Warner, to Radiohead for their live performance rig and to The Cure for having a bunch of other artists release an album of covers…

That’s R.E.M. In The Corner

After a brief and futile period of attempting to suppress or control the presence of music on the Internet, the major labels are now moving towards taking advantage of the opportunities it presents.

Ethan Kaplan is VP of Technology Warner Brothers Records, and works closely with R.E.M. on the promotion and marketing of their albums. He was heavily involved in the R.E.M in Dublin project last year, where the band rehearsed for their then forthcoming tour in front of a live audience in the Olympia Theatre. During these sessions, Stipe encouraged people to video from the stage, which led to R.E.M. having 7 of the top 100 YouTube videos for the week.

The band came up with a fairly extensive Web plan for Accelerate, which involved the creation of six separate websites. Amongst these is Ninetynights, an interactive media experience based on the band taking one photo/video per day during the course of recording the album. You can read more from Kaplan at Hypebot.

Radiohead Live Kontakt

Radiohead have been adding ever-more esoteric sounds to their live sets over the years, and for their latest tour they made the switch to software based sampling, in the form of Kontakt 3.

Johnny and Colin Greenwood perform using MIDI keyboards and floor controllers linked to an Apple Macbook Pro and several daisychained audio interfaces. The band’s technician, Russ Russell, provides a bit more detail on their setup over here.

Faith Repaid, Wish Granted

Fans of The Cure may want to check out Manimal Vinyl’s page where some tracks from the album of Cure cover songs Perfect as Cats can be heard.

The compliation features versions of classic Cure tunes by bands such as the Dandy Warhols and Bat for Lashes, although my favourite from those featured on the MySpace page is certainly Tara Busch‘s rendition of Let’s Go to Bed



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