Mike generously invited me to post links here to my recent appearances on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer. I was interviewed on the show this past Friday, 5 December, for a recurring segment they call "Who's on Top, and Who Should Be" -- a rundown of current Billboard chart activity along with other music picks. (As you can imagine, this sort of geekery is right up my alley.)
The Friday segment (heard via streaming audio here, or download it via iTunes) was my third appearance on the show and my longest yet (about 23 minutes), and we covered a lot of ground: from record sales on Black Friday, including the underperformance by Kanye West and Guns n' Roses, to how iTunes is upending the old methods for releasing pop singles and promoting albums.
One of the nice things about WNYC is they keep old shows up on their website seemingly forever. Since Ishbadiddle was inactive when I appeared on Soundcheck over the summer, here are links to my appearances back in August and September.
Those were fun: In August, the first time I went on the show, I was on vacation in Croatia, and they reached me by e-mail; I did the show live by phone from a soba in an Istrian hill town. (Surreal!) They invited me on to talk about an Idolator column I posted just before leaving on the trip, about the 50th anniversary of Billboard's Hot 100. A month later, they invited me back to talk about another column I'd done about the music industry's attempts to kill singles and force consumers to buy albums.
For a laugh: note that in the August and December appearances, the hosts keep pronouncing my name moh-LAHN-fee (with the "a" sounding like "Evian"), rather than the correct, more pedestrian muh-LAN-fee (with the "a" like "can"). I love how these public-radio folks keep wanting to make my name sound more highfalutin than it is!
| WNYC
