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Ongoing History of New Music
The 100 Greatest Rock Moments of the Millennium So Far - Part 6: (50-41)
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Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon, Music included with Prime. If you're a boomer, a Gen Xer, or an early millennial, I'm sorry, but this is gonna hurt. If someone says 25 years ago now, they're referring to something that happened in the 1900s, not in the 21st century. I know, I know. Despite how it may feel, the 1990s weren't just 20 years ago. Neither were the 80s. If you're of a certain age, you know exactly what I'm talking about. There is this temporal disconnect here. This hurts, too. At some point, you're going to hear a kid talk about a song that came out in the late 1900s, which is really going to hurt. We're already a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and I really still find that very hard to process. On the other hand, for younger millennials, Gen Z kids, and Gen Alpha, the first 25 years of the 2000s is recent history. If that's you, you're still getting caught up. And if you're in those special years when you develop your musical awareness, you're probably a sponge for information. What did I miss? What happened? Where were all the good bands? And how did we get to where we are now? Whatever your perspective, this series of ongoing history episodes aims to help. This is part six of our look back at the 100 greatest moments in rock for the millennium so far. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Welcome again, I'm Alan Cross, and this program is a continuation of a countdown I put together of the 100 greatest moments in rock from the last 25 years. Again, this is my list and was created from my perspective. You may agree or disagree with my choices in ranking, but that's perfectly okay. At the very East, a top 100 list like this gives us a jumping off point when it comes to analyzing what the heck has happened with music since the clocks ticked over into 2000. Like I said, this is episode six, which means we'll cover things at events from numbers 50 to 41. Let's begin at number 50. I've put the release of the killer's Mr. Brightside. Now hear me out. This was the Killer's debut single and was based on a real event. Singer Brandon Flowers walked into a bar in his hometown of Las Vegas and saw an old girlfriend with a new guy. We've never learned her name, but she was inadvertently responsible for one of the most enduring singles of the century to this point. The song first came out on September 29, 2003 and would later appear on the Hot Fuss album. It didn't do all that great when it first came out, but when it was re released in 2004 it blew up worldwide, especially in the UK. It's the third biggest selling and streaming song of all time in the uk. Only Oasis and Ed Sheeran have done better. It is the longest charting single in the history of the British singles charts, spanning more than 408 weeks, somewhere in the ranking. That's nearly seven and a half years for a single. There was a streak of more than 15 years when it was constantly on the charts. It's been named Song of the Decade a couple of times. Some streaming services put it as the most streamed song in their library. It was the most streamed song on Spotify in the UK and Ireland in the 2000s and the single has sold millions. There were two videos, the official video, the one shot in color, which has been seen about 600 million times. Add in the other separate video postings of the song and we're up over a billion. So why is this song so popular? It's unclear. Could be because the Killers are a really popular touring act in the uk. Maybe because it gets played a lot at parties and sporting events and on tv. Maybe it's the ubiquity on the charts and streaming platforms which has given it unstoppable momentum. Mr. Brightside has made the Killers millions, and you gotta think that the woman who inspired it knows that she's behind the song, and you gotta wonder what she thinks. Now we've obviously heard the original a lot since 2003, so let's check out a demo instead. Mr. Brightside was one of the very first songs the bands wrote and recorded, and here's what it sounded like at the very beginning. A demo of Mr. Brightside from the Killers. That song went on to become one of the biggest rock songs of the millennium so far. And here's a wild fact. It never, ever, ever, ever reached number one on many of the major singles charts. Never at number 49. It's the horrible collapse of Radiohead's stage at Danceview park in Toronto. This happened on Saturday, June 16, 2012. It happened in the middle of a string of stage collapses around the world. The temporary stage had been constructed by a Toronto film called Optex. The math said that the structure should be able to hold 7,700kg, enough to hold all the gear and to allow for any slight momentum of that hanging equipment caused by wind, the plans were reviewed and approved by a certified engineer. Building permits were in place. As the stage took shape that Thursday, Friday and Saturday, it was inspected by another engineer who signed off on everything, effectively giving the show the go ahead. On the day of the show, everything else seemed to be fine, although things were running a little bit behind schedule. No big deal. The crew was bustling on, under and around the stage and above it, the weather was near perfect. Sunny, warm, calm. But at 4:00, about an hour before the gates were scheduled to open, and minutes before Radiohead was to start their sound check, suddenly and without any warning, the roof of this temporary stage came crashing down, first falling towards the front of the stage and then bringing down the entire top of the structure. Some of Radiohead's crew was on stage at the time. Scott Johnson, Phil Selway's drum tech, who had been with the band for about two years, was crushed by a video monitor that weighed almost 2,300kg. I'm reading here from the official report about the Ontario coroner, under cause of death, crushing injury of head and brain. Three other crew members were also hurt, one seriously. Everybody was obviously horrified. And the concert, of course, was canceled. What followed next was a comedy of errors, with inquests, lawsuits, court cases, delays, dismissals and more. It took until late 2020 to sort things out. I devote an entire episode to the Radiohead stage collapse with my other podcast, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. It is an insane and crazy story. If there is a silver lining to all this, it's that this tragedy set new safety standards for the construction of temporary stages for concerts. But in the end, many believe that justice was not properly served. The Radiohead stage collapse, number 49 on this list of the top 100 rock moments of the 2000s. Item 48 is the rise of bots when it comes to snatching up concert tickets. And this story begins with a guy named Ken Loson, who a company called Wise Guy. Yeah, Wiseguy specialized in scalping tickets. At first, they did it the old fashioned way, securing physical tickets through a variety of means and then selling those. But as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, ticketing increasingly became computerized and online. If Loson wanted his business to continue, he had to figure something out. In about 2001, he somehow hooked up with a teenage programming whiz in Bulgaria. And for the next 15 years, they built and refined a series of automated computer programs that would hit an online ticket Portal faster than any human ever could. And they called their programs Bots. Losin bots worked brilliantly, and Wiseguy made tens of millions of dollars scalping tickets, leaving millions of fans who wanted to buy tickets legitimately and at face value out in the cold. It's possible that he was the most successful concert ticket scalper in the history of this universe, thanks to his ever evolving bot technology. Wiseguy was eventually raided in 2009, and Loson was sentenced to some probationary time. Last I heard, his new business helps fans through the minefield involved in buying a concert ticket. But the damage is permanent. Ticket buying bots continue to get faster and better at evading whatever safeguards are put in place. They scrape prices, check on inventory, and sell and resell tickets at incredible speeds. And there are thousands of bots making thousands of transactions every second. They can whip through the purchasing procedure far, far faster than humans. Some will even list tickets for resale the nanosecond they get tickets in their cart. This explains why it's so hard for fans to legitimately get tickets. Remember the Taylor Swift ticket fiasco in November 2022? Not only did millions of fans simultaneously try to get tickets to 52 stadium shows, millions of bots did too. And guess who won? Yeah, the bots. A variety of laws have been passed in countries around the world to stop this, but bot technology keeps getting better and better and better. It's also estimated that bots are responsible for at least 40% of all the traffic going to a place like Ticketmaster. I've seen situations where 96% of the traffic to a site selling tickets to a hot show is made up of bots. And it's not just corporate ticket resellers that are doing this. A quick web search will find programs that you can buy for less than 100 bucks. You can get your own bot, or with a little python coding, you could build your own. In theory, buying a concert ticket should be easy, but thanks to bots, it's anything but. Now back to Ken Loson. His biggest score was U2's Vertigo Tour, where he managed to rack up a profit of $2.3 million by elbowing aside real humans with his bot 48. The introduction of concert ticket buying bots in 2001. For item 47, I've got the death of Lane Staley, the doom singer for Alice in Chains. He started shooting heroin in the early 1990s, and despite several attempts at rehab, nothing stuck. Kurt Cobain's death in 1994 scared him at first. But he soon went back to his old ways. When his girlfriend died of an overdose in 1996, he pretty much lost the will to live. His drug hell got worse and worse. He couldn't tour or record with Alice in Chains. He lived a hermetic existence in a condo, painting and playing video games and doing drugs. His arms became covered with sores and threatened to become gangrenous. His teeth rotted out. His weight fell to about 100 pounds because all he could keep down were protein drinks. On Thursday, April 4, 2002, former bandmate Mike Starr went for a visit. Mike was shocked at how bad Lane looked. Dude, you gotta call 911, he said. But Lane refused. The subject was dropped, and Mike eventually stormed out, angry and discouraged and sad, with Lane saying, not like this. Don't leave like this. It looks like he was the last guy to see lane alive. On April 17, 2002, Lane's mother went to the condo. She knocked on the door, stepping over a pile of mail outside the door that hadn't been picked up for, well, what looked like a couple of weeks. And no one answered. Same thing with a subsequent phone call. Then two days later, April 19, the accountants who looked after Lane's money contacted Alice in Chain's former manager, Susan Silver, saying that no money had been withdrawn from his bank account for two weeks. Lane's mom went back to the condo and heard Lane's usually quiet cat, Sadie, meowing a lot. And that's when she called 911. Cops responded, and when they broke in, they found Lane's body with drug paraphernalia scattered everywhere. The autopsy determined that he'd been dead for about two weeks, probably dying on Friday, April 5, the day after Mike Starr's visit. That's also the anniversary date of Kurt cobain's death in 1994. The death of Alice in Chain singer lane Staley, number 47 on the list of the biggest 100 moments in rock of the 21st century so far. Coming next, better sounding music, a high profile file sharing lawsuit, and a fundamental change to the way music is released. This is episode six of our look at the 100 greatest moments in rock in the 2000s so far. At number 46. It's a fundamental shift in the way music is released, or more specifically, the timing in which music is released. In the old days, a record came out whenever it came out. It might be a Wednesday or a Friday or a Monday, whatever. As the recorded music industry grew, this became chaotic because there was no way to ensure that all stores Everywhere got new inventory to sell at exactly the same time. Therefore, in the 1970s, on sale dates were codified. What day records went on sale depended on the country. In the uk, new records were shipped to stores over the weekend so they could be purchased first thing Monday morning. In Canada and the U.S. it was decided that Tuesday was best. Japan's day was Wednesday and Germany, Australia and nine other countries thought Friday was the best day for new music. Now this was fine. In the days of vinyl and CDs, there was very little threat in someone buying a physical copy in one country like say the UK on a Monday and exploiting that somehow before the record was available in North America the following day. Marketing and promotion plans weren't bothered by this at all. But when things got digital, that's when things got weird with piracy. If someone bought a record in the UK on Monday, they could simply rip it and distribute that music immediately around the globe, destroying any local embargoes around the world and thus hurting sales. In 2015, a decision was made to create Global Release Day, or as some people call it, New Music Friday. All new music would be available beginning at 12:01am local time. 45 countries signed on to this new plan, and as far as I know, only Japan is slightly different. To get a jump on international artists whose records come out on Friday, domestic Japanese artists released their music on Wednesdays. Kind of clever. The change to a global release day has streamlined things for record labels, record stores, streamers and fans. It's also made compiling charts easier. Chart companies worldwide now compile things using data from 12:01am Friday to 11:59pm the following Thursday. This is far more accurate than the olden days and stopped artists and labels from gaming the system by releasing a new record on an off day. You can blame Beyonce for that. She decided to mess things up with a surprise release of a self titled album on June 10, 2013, which was a Friday. So that gave her a head start on everyone else for Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, meaning her first week chart sales would be artificially bigger because more days were included in that chart week. Some people though, aren't happy with new music on Friday. Indie record stores liked the Monday or the Tuesday releases because that brought in traffic during the week when it was normally slow. But there's no going back now. New Music Friday is a thing for the foreseeable future. This album was released on the first New Music Friday, July 10, 2015. The comeback record by Veruca Salt called Ghost Notes. And this is laughing in the sugar bowl. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8. Nah nah nah nah. No way away. The debut of the coordinated global Release day. The first new music Friday through 45 countries. July 19, 2015. Number 46 on our list. Number 45 is related. It's a lawsuit brought by the Recording Industry association of America against one of the file sharing sites that contributed to piracy, the decline of record sales and prompting the establishment of a global release day. Limewire was a free peer to peer file sharing site that went online in May 2000. Like Namster, it was a super easy way to find music online and then download it illegally. Its creator was a guy named Mark Gorton. Limewire was so popular that one estimate says that in 2007 LimeWire was installed on one third of all the personal computers in existence. The year before the the IRA took its first legal action against LimeWire. That dragged on until 2010 when a judge found that Limewire and Gordon had in fact infringed on millions of copyrights and ordered Limewire to be shut down immediately. But then in 2011, the IRA and 13 record companies filed a lawsuit against Limewire and Jim Gordon. Forget this. US$75 trillion. At the time, 75 trillion US was more than the entire GDP of all of planet Earth. They got that number based on infringements involving just 11,000 songs. Nobody has that kind of money. Of course, there's not that kind of money on the planet. But Gorton did have to settle for 105 million. And LimeWire wasn't alone. Kazaa, another file sharing program, was sued and settled for $100 million. There was another big lawsuit against Grokster which had to pay out $50 million. But 75 trillion? Imagine being Marc Gorton and getting that call. I need to play something here. There are actually a couple of bands named Limewire. This one is from Toronto. And here's a 2020 song called Not Tracing an Outline of the Arc Overall picture Maintaining a Balance and Avoiding the mixture. Number 45 on our list of the top 100 rock moments of the millennium so far, the music industry lawsuit against LimeWire for $75 trillion. And that's a Toronto band called Limewire, no Relation and a song called Not Next at number 44 is the slow return of proper high quality, high fidelity music. If you are of a certain vintage, you probably spent a significant amount of money on stereo gear for your home and car. Starting in the early 1970s and going well into the 1990s, every music lover's dream was to have the loudest, clearest most accurate music reproduction available in their homes and in their cars. Big speakers, powerful amps, the best in turntables and tape players. When the CD came along in late 1982, minds were blown. Never had music sounded so realistic. Untold billions of dollars were spent by consumers in an attempt to hear the musical perfection promised by compact discs. And then we went backward. When MP3s first started appearing online in bulk in the late 1990s, they were amazing. First of all, with some free software, you could get pretty much whatever song you wanted in seconds for free. And with portable digital devices like the ipod, you could take thousands, tens of thousands of songs with you everywhere. Nothing skipped, nothing got damaged. Access was instantaneous. Yeah, mp3s and other file formats were compressed, meaning that up to 90% of the music was removed from the file that we hear. Using the principles of psychoacoustics, this meant the music really just didn't sound as good as what we got from a cd, a vinyl record, or even from FM radio. But that didn't matter because we wanted convenience, we wanted access. And we, well, the majority of us anyway, didn't care that the high fidelity the audio created by carefully recording, mixing and mastering music had been wrung out of these tiny music files. The thinking was, eh, sounds good enough. As a new generation of people, we're perfectly fine with listening to music on cheap headphones, bad earbuds, or even through the built in speakers of phones, tablets and laptops. This is the truth. For a good 15 years, maybe more, people around the world were cheating themselves by listening to substandard audio. We weren't hearing all the music in any given song, any given if it was formatted as an MP3. That, I'm happy to say, is changing. Record labels, digital storefronts, hardware manufacturers, and streaming platforms have been upping their game over the last decade or so. It began with the introduction of the concept of high resolution audio. Digital music files that were not compressed, did not have anything stripped out, and in fact contained more information than what we got from a cd. At first you needed some special expensive playback hardware, but now streamers like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal and a few others stream in high resolution. In late 2024, if you were listening to a song on Spotify and then pulled up the same song on Apple Music, the difference in audio quality was staggering to my ears anyway. Some phones can handle high res audio, but as I sit here, the iPhone does not. Part of the problem is that it relies on Bluetooth to connect to headphones, and the current Bluetooth standard just doesn't have enough bandwidth to accommodate all the data of, say, a high res FLAC file. That means that even if your phone did support something like flac, one of these lossless compression codecs, you'd need to physically connect your headphone to the lightning or USB port with a wire. Meanwhile, the vinyl revival has contributed to this. People who buy vinyl to actually play have invested in proper two channel stereo systems, just like we used to back in the day. They've given up convenience for the sound and give things time. We and by that I mean us music fans and record labels and artists and hardware manufacturers and streamers will slowly rediscover the glories of listening to music in proper high fidelity. If you need something to test out a new set of speakers, and believe me, I highly recommend that you go do this. It's just a glorious sort of way to spend an afternoon. Take along a CD copy of Tool's Fear Inoculum, turn up the volume, and if the speakers can handle it, buy them. That's a sample of the title track of Fear Inoculum, the exquisitely recorded 2019 album from Tool. It's really hard to appreciate the intricacies of that recording over the radio or on a podcast, but trust me, it's amazing. For item 43 on this list, I'm going to drop in A Rise in two Piece Bands in the old days, tradition said that a rock band must include at least three members, usually guitar, bass and drums, with one or more members doubling up on vocals. But thanks to new technology like samplers and pedals and guitar effects, it's been possible to bring that number down to just two. And when I say that, I mean that all the music on stage is performed by just two. Two people. The first two piece band I remember encountering was Suicide. They plied around New York City in the early 1970s, and their approach back then was really, really rare. And then a band from Kingston, Ontario called the Inbreds showed up starting at about, I think it was 1992. The next one I remember is Chicago's local H A few years later. But rock duos of this sort were still a rarity. That all began to change in the early 2000s because. Because that's when the White Stripes started hitting the big time. And interestingly enough, a lot of this new generation were Canadian Black Pistol Fire, Death from Above, 1979, Japan Droids, the Pak AD, USS Duotang, the Bluestones. But we also saw the appearance of 21 pilots, the black Keys, Dresden Dolls, the Kills, Sleepered Mods, the rayvionettes, and a load more. I find this new style fascinating largely because I love how two people can make such a racket on stage equal to that of a band that would have been once had to be much larger. Right. Royal Blood, England's Royal Blood, representing a new breed of two piece rock bands that has really flourished in the 21st century. Two more items to go on this episode. One involves a horrific fire at a gig and the other was the sudden death of one of alt rock's most popular people. This is part six of a run through the 100 most important things, people and events in rock so far this century. And at number 42 I have the Station nightclub fire. This happened on February 20, 2003. That's the night Great White was booked in to play the 450ish capacity club in West Warwick, Long Island. Something went terribly wrong with the pyro display that started their set. Some high powered sparklers ignited some flammable foam insulation on the walls and ceiling of the club. Within six minutes, the entire building was burning. Six minutes. 230 people were injured and 100 died, including great White guitarist Ty Longley and a local radio DJ who was emceeing the show. Here's audio from that night. You can hear the gerbs going off, followed by the band's reaction, the fire alarm and panic. There were criminal trials, civil lawsuits and much, much pain. One of the owners of the club was sent to jail and perhaps as much as $176 million was paid out in settlements to the victims and their families. The result of the disaster was increased insurance requirements and a long list of recommended and ordered safety protocols that have since gone into effect, not just in the US but around the world. If you've been to any kind of indoor show since February 20, 2003, chances are that you were safer than you were before that gig. Finally, number 41 on our list is the death of Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins on March 25, 2022, just before the band was supposed to headline a festival. This was a huge shock. Two decades earlier, Taylor had a big scare when he overdosed on heroin and ended up in a touch and go coma for about two weeks. That, as far as we know, turned Taylor around. No drugs, lots of physical activity, and his best buddy, Dave Grohl, wasn't about to lose him on his watch. He'd already been through that with Kurt. At around 7:40pm on that Friday night, a call went out from a four Seasons property in Bogota, Colombia. A guest was complaining of severe chest pains. By the time EMS responders arrived, it was too late. Taylor was dead. Officially, he died of complications involving an enlarged heart, something called cardiomegali. That in itself is not a disease. It's symptomatic of something else. Taylor and his doctors knew that his heart was extra big. 600 grams versus the normal 300. But it had been that way for years. And it was attributed to all the surfing and biking and of course, hard drumming that he'd been doing all his life. That's physical activity makes your heart bigger. Other than that, though, we know almost nothing about why Taylor Hawkins died. The news blackout imposed by the band and their management was airtight. We never even heard about a funeral. This, of course, brought out all the conspiracy trolls who pinned Taylor's death on everything from the COVID vaccine to an overdose of something. My sources, and they're pretty, pretty, pretty good, point to this being a congenital problem exacerbated by exhaustion. We also know that Taylor had been feeling a little rough in the months leading up to this South American tour, something that had also been attributed to exhaustion. His death took a serious toll on Dave and the Foo Fighters and the millions of fans around the world. Two tribute concerts were held, one at Wembley Stadium in London on September 3, and another in Los Angeles on September 27, 2022. Both featured an amazing array of guest stars honoring Taylor. And this. Well, I'll just listen. Let's recap part six of the top 100 moments in rock so far this millennium. At number 50, I've got the amazing and enduring appeal of Mr. Brightside by the Killers. Number 49 is the Radiohead stage collapse in Toronto in 2012. Then it's the rise of concert ticket buying bots. Something that we all hate at number 48. At 47, we looked at the death of Lane Staley, of Alice in Chains, the creation of new music. Friday, a common day around the world for releasing new albums, is at number 46. Then we have the $75 trillion lawsuit against LimeWire, the file sharing company. At number 45, 44 is the slow return of proper high fidelity music after a couple of decades of dominance by crappy sounding MP3s. I slotted the phenomenon of two piece bands. At 43, the deadly Station nightclub fire. At 42 and at 41, the sudden death of Taylor Hawkins. On episode seven, we'll look at Artificial Intelligence, the return of a major music festival, movies, a big reunion, a big breakup and battling a dangerous infectious disease. With a concert. If you missed the first five chapters of this series, they're all available as free podcasts. Download them anywhere you'd like. Meanwhile, you might also be interested in my other podcast, Crime and Mayhem in the Music Industry. If it has to do with true crime set in the world of music, I cover it. More information can always be found on my website, ajournalofmusicalthings.com and it comes with a free daily newsletter that you should get. We can meet up on any of the social media platforms and if you have any comments or questions, drop me a line through AllenAllencross CA. See you next time for part seven of the 100 Greatest Rock Moments of the Millennium so far. Technical productions by Rob Johnston I'm Alan Cross.
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Daniel Blanchard is no ordinary thief. His heists are ingenious. His escapes defy belief, and when he sees the dazzling diamond CC Star, he'll risk everything to steal it. His exploits set off an intercontinental manhunt. But how long can CC Star stay? Lucky for Daniel, I'm Seren Jones, and this is a most audacious heist. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.