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 !

A Quick Glance Back, Then Full Steam Ahead!!!

Ahhhh! 2010 has arrived. I cannot believe that 2009 is over. It was such a long year. A few months back we did a year in review and I would have never imagined (since most of it was unplanned and we planned on stopping) that things would have changed so much between September and December. New Rule - Never under any circumstances in your career say the word LAST. No LAST shows of 2009, no LAST line up changes.

Although unplanned, the show at the Metro with our friends Lucid Ground and Minus the Girl was a great night! Opening for Our Lady Peace with Tom and Aaron's band Bullet Called Life = really memorable evening. Growing up listening to those guys and being able to share a stage and taste their crowd was really awesome! Not a week later the Elbo Room asked us to play New Years Eve - It was the perfect way to end the year, and start the year - PLAYING MUSIC.

A LOOK AHEAD
Model Stranger has so much already lined up for 2010. With a new record (which we are tracking in the next few weeks) and a Spring tour being booked, I personally am looking forward to hitting the ground running . A majority of our shows this year will be on the road. Chicago is one of our favorite places to play but after putting in 28 days on the road last year, Model Stranger has a new addiction. We make so many fans and learn so much every time we hit the road. Why stay home for long?

In addition to the new record we will be releasing a whole bunch of new merch including some interesting tracks like early demos and outtakes from Reverieland and first renditions of new material being released on the new record. The record is scheduled to be released April 24th.

Thanks for reading! Photos from our show and some other important Model Stranger information below.

`Stephen Francis

PHOTOS FROM SOLD OUT CUBBY BEAR SHOW WITH OUR LADY PEACE
If you are on Facebook or MySpace click HERE to view them.
These photos were shot by the wonderfully talented Mike Hari and Christie LaMountain. Their names link to their websites. Check them out. Hire them.




OUR MUSIC FEATURED:
So a few months ago, some students from Flashpoint Academy contacted our manager Coate wanting to do a piece on him and Model Stranger for a TV Production class they were in. Coate obliged and brought the students up to our practice space to meet us one night. Impressed by their work and professionalism he later asked if they might be interested in doing some video work for him which eventually led to them wanting to be involved in filming us playing a live set. As it turned out, we had just picked up our December Metro and Cubby Bear shows (those link to photo albums of the shows by the way) so the students came out to film both sets for us in glorious HD. We haven't seen the footage yet, but we're quite excited.

Separately, a man named Tim Jahn reached out to Coate via Twitter to inquire about using our song "Sound The Sirens" as background music for a video he was doing for his website, Beyond The Pedway. On the site, Tim seeks to learn about the people behind Chicago's creative companies, what they do, and why they do it in Chicago. A song from a local Chicago band is featured in each video.

Tim sent us an email the other day letting us know he had just posted the video with our song, and much to our pleasant surprise, the company he profiled was none other than Flashpoint Academy!  You should watch the piece (we've posted it below...or for those of you reading on Facebook or MySpace HERE), not just because our music is featured, but because Flashpoint is a pretty fantastic establishment!



Please Help us Broaden Our Reach!!!

If everything (or anything) that you read above excites you, we want you to know that you play a large role in Model Stranger getting further down this path. For it is only through the constant support of families, friends, and fans that we have been able to accomplish what we have - and only with the continued support from you can we reach the goals we've set before us. You have all been WONDERFUL in offering all sorts support such as kinds words, attending our shows and just being there in general. As of now we have a few very specific ways you can help us out using the fantastic resources the Internet provides. Sound good? Okay!

Here's what we need:

FACEBOOK
Invite your own family, friends and coworkers to become a fan of us on Facebook. Follow up! Let them know why you like us and why you think they should know all about us as well. Listen to our tunes on the "MyBand" tab on our fan page or our personal profiles. This is important in helping us gain exposure on the site that we'll explain next!

REVERBNATION
This site might be the most useful tool out there for artists like ourselves! It has TONS of tools that allow us to not only create a cool profile but to help us promote. Of those tools are these nifty little thing called "widgets". We have a few of them on THIS SITE along the side bar (the music player, show schedule and fan collector, etc) and our current music player on our MySpace page is a ReverbNation widget. How these work is that they provide cool ways to share information about us very easily. For all of you with blogs it's incredibly easy to add them and ReverbNation tracks our reach. The more widgets we have posted in more places viewed by more unique people - the better for us (both in general and in the rankings on the site)! Below we've placed a very easy tool that you can take these widgets from and post them on your MySpace pages, blogs, websites, etc! If you're viewing this on Facebook or MySpace CLICK HERE to see the original post and what we're talking about.

Manager's Blog: Great Things From Our Past and Great Things For Our Future

Well,
Coate here, welcoming you to the very first Reverie update from the tour.

We hit Milwaukee's BBC Upper Level good and hard last night, though we found a few CDs and a camera bag missing by night's end. The joke's on the camera thief though because I had the actual camera on me at the time...unfortunately that means you still need to wait a few days until I can come across a charger for it and can post some of the video I have for you. Sad.

As I'm typing this we're somewhere in Iowa on our way to Des Moines. We have a show at Vaudeville Mews tomorrow night. We decided to head into town today and do some promotion work for the show and dig up some more information about the scene there for future reference.

Aside from letting you know what we're up to, I wanted to fill you in on an interesting conversation we were just having in the van, regarding Reverie's achievements so far this year, and in particular how amazing it was to be a part of something like I AM FEST. For anyone out there who's unfamiliar, Reverie cofounded The Chicago Noise Machine back in November 2008, as one of 9 bands who decided to create better unity in the local scene. Kevin was actually interviewed in a Paste Magazine article about it HERE.

After the overwhelming success of that (sold out) show, the group got even more ambitious and decided to produce I AM FEST which featured 25 bands on 2 stages plus 25+ visual artists and filmmakers as well and saw over 2800 people through the door.

The reason I bring all this up is because Stephen was actually just sitting in the back reading Martin Atkins' fantastic Tour:Smart book and brought up a segment about Jeffrey Swanson who created Gothicfest a while back. When asked by Atkins if the event was successful, Swanson replied, "A major success! We made history and did something that many industry people thought could never happen. There were over 1,000 attendees..." He also mentioned the event was a year in the making. In a later interview one of the filmmakers at the event described that 1,000 number as a bit inflated when considering the bands, crew and vendors made up about a third of it. However the event, was also considered a success by the filmmaker because SPIN Magazine did a write up on it and from there the event has blown up.

Looking at that, without meaning any disrespect to Swanson and the other organizers, the four of us - Stephen, Kevin, Brad and I - couldn't help but point out the numerous ways that I AM FEST was a far greater accomplishment - considering we put it together in a third of the time, with far more elements and people involved to take care of, and that we did it all completely by ourselves!

That got me reflecting on how exciting of a year it's been for my personal creative endeavors in the Chicago music scene, but moreso how exciting it is to be working with Reverie right now. Here we have a band who not only has had an amazing year themselves, playing a huge Metro show last August, putting together Chicago Noise Machine launch party and I AM FEST, playing the Taste of Chicago (video here) and Chicagoland Speedway NASCAR event a few weeks ago, all the while playing small weekend out of town shows across the midwest. Add in the tour we're currently on and any shows ahead of us in 2009 still, and I don't know about you, but I'm ready to be a part of what's next, eh?

All right, so it took me long enough to write this, we're in Des Moines. It's time to wake up Brad and I need to pee. More later!


`Coate

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