…and SNL alum Dan Aykroyd got all choked up, too. Here’s Grace, too.
Tragically Hip’s final concert to be broadcast live on CBC
The final concert of the Tragically Hip’s upcoming summer tour will be broadcast and streamed live on CBC.
The news comes after many frustrated Hip heads who couldn’t get tickets called on the public broadcaster to air the band’s final show. It’s set for the Rogers K-Rock Centre in the Hip’s hometown of Kingston, Ont., on Aug. 20, where the street in front of the arena is named after the band.
Tickets for the highly anticipated Man Machine Poem tour — announced after frontman Gord Downie revealed he has incurable brain cancer — sold out in seconds before popping up at dramatically inflated prices on resale sites like StubHub.
The Kingston show will begin at 8:30 p.m. ET, and will be broadcast and streamed — commercial free — on CBC Television, CBC Radio One, CBC Radio 2, cbcmusic.ca and CBC’s YouTube channels.
Peter Gabriel pays tribute to Muhammad Ali with new song, “I’m Amazing”
Peter Gabriel has released a new song inspired by Muhammad Ali. Gabriel says he wrote “I’m Amazing” a few years ago, and decided to release it in the wake of Ali’s death.
Peter explained the story behind the track in a short post on Facebook. “I wrote a song a few years back – ‘I’m Amazing,’ which was, in part, inspired by Muhammad Ali’s life and struggles,” Gabriel wrote. “At the time of his death, when so many people are celebrating his life and thinking about all he achieved, it seemed the right time to release it.”
Rainn Wilson Gets the $25,000 Weezer Experience
In a new satirical video from Funny or Die, actor Rainn Wilson gets “the Weezer Experience,” a bundle offered to fans who donated $25,000 to the band’s crowdfunding campaign for their new album. The promised bus trip to the Galapagos doesn’t go quite the way Wilson expected.
“You know what’s so crazy? Is your name is Rivers and my name is Rainn, and they’re both such watery names. I mean, it’s like, what’s next? We’re gonna meet some kid named Lakey Boy?”
Watch Fred Armisen Impersonate Any Southern Accent
Fred Armisen shows Jimmy Fallon his expert skill with impersonating the Beatles and Southern dialects he’s nailed down.
The Most Edited Wikipedia Articles Of The Last Decade
Wikipedia recently celebrated its 15th birthday. The online encylopaedia has grown to over 5 million entries and anybody can edit them. In fact, the English language version of the website has attracted around 808 million edits over the course of its lifespan.
George W. Bush is the most edited Wikipedia topic entry of all time with just under 46,000 edits. (Internal communications pages actually dominate Wikipedia’s list of the pages with the most revisions.) George W. Bush’s page is also the most edited entry in a single year, according to numbers obtained by 538, with people tweaking it 20,894 times in 2005. 2015′s most edited article was a little more obscure. “Geospatial summary of the High Peaks/Summits of the Juneau Icefield” grabbed top spot last year with 7,290 edits.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Double Trouble Drummer Chris Layton on the Ill-Fated Stevie Ray Vaughan-David Bowie Partnership
Double Trouble drummer Chris Layton talks about David Bowie’s partnership with Texas blues legend Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Vaughan and Double Trouble were the first ever unsigned act to play the festival and the band nearly exhausted nearly all its shoestring budget getting to Switzerland in the process. On the festival’s first night, the crowd, expecting an acoustic set, booed the band off the stage. It wasn’t the laidback set attendees were promised and they responded accordingly, but Vaughan’s guitar playing did catch the ear of one attendee: David Bowie.
Bowie sent an emissary to the band’s dressing room after the show requesting an audience at the bar frequented by festival performers.
“Oddly enough, Stevie spent just a couple of minutes talking to him, and then he got up and left and never really returned,” Layton says.
Bowie’s proposition to both Vaughan and the band was simple: Vaughan would play on his new record he was working on with Chic-alum Nile Rodgers, then Vaughan and Double Trouble would open up for him on the tour that would ensue – Bowie’s first tour in five years.
In the liner notes of a DVD of the Montreux set, Bowie wrote that he took his “courage in his hands” and asked him, but wasn’t expecting much:
“And as Stevie’s music was such hard core blues I expected and would have understood a polite ‘thanks, but no thanks.’ You can’t imagine how delighted I was when he accepted the offer on the spot and said he’d love to try out a new kind of record just for the experience. When I asked if touring could also be a possibility he again replied in the affirmative, ‘Hell, yeah,’ he said, ‘I tour real good.’”
We’re all glad we have music, but why – WHY – do we have music? That’s a different story.
Music is everywhere, but why? Why do we have it in the first place? What good does it do? Find out in exactly 412 seconds, or about the same length of time of the longest Ramones song.
Video: Everything you wanted to know about movie audio but couldn’t be heard over the noise
One of the most under-appreciated film-related jobs is sound production, and it can turn a movie from horrible to wonderful. This short video shows you how.
Pandora: We give up-and-comers more exposure than landing on radio
Pandora has released a little burst of data demonstrating that landing on a Pandora station gives an artist more exposure than landing on a terrestrial playlist — when the artist is up-and-coming but not there yet.
Here’s the data graphic; explanation follows below:
The mini-study compared number of spins for the #60 song on Pandora’s today’s Country playlist, compared to spins for the #60 spot on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart.
As the chart shows, there is a wider difference between #1 and #60 in terrestrial spins — there can be 50 to 100 times more for #1 than for #60. In the Pandora playlist, it’s about five times as many, so the #60 artist gets greater exposure.
The point is laid out like this: “Traditional country radio can be very powerful to a handful of stars while Pandora provides more opportunity for a larger number of country artists to get heard.” Glenn Peoples calls personalized online radio “democratic” in this regard.
The article continues with other case studies, where songs had identical or nearly identical rankings in the terrestrial and Pandora playlists. In those examples, the song got more spins in Pandora.
In all this research, Peoples used the total audience tracked by Nielsen for the terrestrial stations, presumably smoothing out the difference between radio’s one-to-many model, and Pandora’s one-to-one model of track spins.