Lady Gaga Sets Billboard Record!!!

Lady Gaga was played 10,859 times in one week setting a new Billboard record... Check that out HERE

Just an FYI that is: 1551 times a day, 64 times an hour, simultaneously overlapping somewhere in the country every 1.07 minutes for one week straight.

Some amazing numbers. Truly an unreal feat.

Before you read this next section, please understand that no one in the Model Stranger camp is diminishing Lady Gaga's achievements or raining on her parade.

On the same token no one was diminishing Sammy  Sosa and Mark McGwire's achievements either, until they started putting up unreal numbers.

Do Billboard charts put asterisks next to statistics when a music company is on steroids?

*(Clear Channel owns roughly 1,200 radio stations and about seventy percent of all live events that are promoted in the United States).

"Before the Music Dies" was a 2006 documentary that describes the commercialization of music and the involvement of Clear Channel and other key public figures in monopolizing on our airwaves/radio stations. In the end we are left with less and less capability to find new music on the radio. Believe or not, it gets worse (watch the movie, there's a trailer HERE).

When a fan of music only has 20 songs to choose from, the numbers will get stacked.

HOPE 

There's still hope. Believe it or not there are some great places to discover great and fresh music. And no, not "MySpace".

College Radio 

This still exists believe it or not. Radio 1190 out in Boulder, Colorado are as advanced and involved as any radio station. They even have a cool iPhone app! Model Stranger will be visiting them on paying them a visit during their forthcoming spring tour. Most college radio stations stream online, and you can listen to a handful of them straight out of your iTunes. Just click the radio icon in the sidebar (not the iTunes Store) to reveal the College Radio section. You can find College Radio stations in Chicago via this nifty list.

Online Radio

There's a massive database of online radio stations out there and it can be difficult to navigate.Google "online radio stations" or "free internet radio" and your eyes will fall out looking through all the options. For example, locally, Model Stranger have found airplay on Fearless Radio and are also paying close attention to the recently launched Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP). Branding themselves as "Chicago's Newest Community Radio Station".

Super Cool Awesome Streaming Sites

The Sixty One - A music adventure community where good music gets boosted up, and bad music disappears. Model Stranger is part of this one and are big fans of it. It's unreal the amount of unknown talent on this site.

Last.fm - Last.fm is a music service that learns what you love. Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It can connect you to other people who like what you like - and recommend songs from their music collections and yours too.

Pandora – The online streaming radio giant continues to grow, gaining new users in all genres and allowing any indie musician with a physical CD available on Amazon to be in their rotation. Not to mention their iPhone app that is still the most popular music app. The mainstream attention they've gotten recently is well deserved.

Activism

So if ClearChannel makes you want to punch something you might want to check out The Future of Music Coalition or Stop Big Media. More locally, Chicago Independent Media Center and Chicago Media Action act as watchdogs for "the little guy".

Where do you get YOUR new music? What sites or "under-discovered" artists are you into now?

Tell us at http://www.modelstranger.com !