April 17, 2008

Music: LA Weekly Reveals Who Should Headline Coachella

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mojo-photo-yelle.jpgWow, somebody’s been brushing up their Excel skills: the LA Weekly has done some serious data entry work on the 128 acts playing next weekend’s Coachella festival, and they’ve come up with some pretty interesting charts ‘n’ graphs describing today’s musical trends. And I do love charts ‘n’ graphs.

Sure, the pie chart showing most bands are white and the bar graph proving most lead singers are male aren’t exactly surprises, and the fact that “most recent Pitchfork review” averages out to between 6.1 and 7.4 is probably due to the fact that every Pitchfork review is between 6.1 and 7.4. But ranking artists by their most-viewed YouTube clip isn’t such a far-fetched way to gauge popularity in this day and age, and the results are eyebrow-raising. Turns out, if internet video ruled the world, French techno would be, er, king: Justice and Yelle (pictured above) were #1 and #2, with over 7 million views for their most popular videos. Zut alors! They were followed by Kate Nash, Serj Tankian and Mark Ronson, none of whom are, in fact, headlining. Actual headliner Jack Johnson doesn’t show up on this list until #9, with about a third of Justice’s click-throughs. While I can understand Justice’s internet popularity, I’m most intrigued by Yelle’s sudden notoriety: the video getting all the love is the Tecktonik-style Tepr mix of “ACDG” that I posted as part of my France wrap-up back in December. You go, Yelle. After the jump, let’s watch that video again, pourquoi pas?

Yelle –”A Cause des Garçons” (Tepr remix)

Photo of Yelle used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user THEfunkyman.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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