1.
Album
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Album, is a collection of audio recordings issued as a single item on CD, record, audio tape, or another medium. Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, vinyl LPs are still issued, though in the 21st century album sales have mostly focused on compact disc and MP3 formats. The audio cassette was a format used from the late 1970s through to the 1990s alongside vinyl, an album may be recorded in a recording studio, in a concert venue, at home, in the field, or a mix of places. Recording may take a few hours to years to complete, usually in several takes with different parts recorded separately. Recordings that are done in one take without overdubbing are termed live, the majority of studio recordings contain an abundance of editing, sound effects, voice adjustments, etc. With modern recording technology, musicians can be recorded in separate rooms or at times while listening to the other parts using headphones. Album covers and liner notes are used, and sometimes additional information is provided, such as analysis of the recording, historically, the term album was applied to a collection of various items housed in a book format. In musical usage the word was used for collections of pieces of printed music from the early nineteenth century. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, the LP record, or 33 1⁄3 rpm microgroove vinyl record, is a gramophone record format introduced by Columbia Records in 1948. It was adopted by the industry as a standard format for the album. Apart from relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound capability, the term album had been carried forward from the early nineteenth century when it had been used for collections of short pieces of music. Later, collections of related 78rpm records were bundled in book-like albums, as part of a trend of shifting sales in the music industry, some commenters have declared that the early 21st century experienced the death of the album. Sometimes shorter albums are referred to as mini-albums or EPs, Albums such as Tubular Bells, Amarok, Hergest Ridge by Mike Oldfield, and Yess Close to the Edge, include fewer than four tracks. There are no rules against artists such as Pinhead Gunpowder referring to their own releases under thirty minutes as albums. These are known as box sets, material is stored on an album in sections termed tracks, normally 11 or 12 tracks. A music track is a song or instrumental recording. The term is associated with popular music where separate tracks are known as album tracks. When vinyl records were the medium for audio recordings a track could be identified visually from the grooves
2.
Marian Gold
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Hartwig Schierbaum, better known by his stage name Marian Gold, is the lead singer of the German synthpop group Alphaville, and has also recorded as a solo artist. In 1982, he joined Lloyd and Frank Mertens in the band Forever Young and he sang lead vocals on Alphavilles 1980s pop singles, including Forever Young, Big in Japan, Sounds Like a Melody, and Dance with Me. Since the early 1990s, Gold has taken Alphaville from a project to a successful live act and has established the bands website. Golds first solo album, So Long Celeste, was released in 1992, included on the album were cover versions of The Shape of Things to Come and One Step Behind You. A second solo album, United, followed in 1996, in the late 1980s Gold lived in Münster with his then wife Amy Magill. Gold states that he has six children by four different mothers, the oldest child was born in 1998 and the youngest in 2013. Moonbase - Official Alphaville Web Site Marian Gold at the Internet Movie Database Marian Gold at AllMusic
3.
Synth-pop
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Synth-pop is a subgenre of new wave music that first became prominent in the late 1970s and features the synthesizer as the dominant musical instrument. It was prefigured in the 1960s and early 1970s by the use of synthesizers in progressive rock, electronic, art rock, disco, and particularly the Krautrock of bands like Kraftwerk. It arose as a genre in Japan and the United Kingdom in the post-punk era as part of the new wave movement of the late-1970s to the mid-1980s. In Japan, Yellow Magic Orchestras success opened the way for bands such as P-Model, Plastics. The development of polyphonic synthesizers, the definition of MIDI. This, its adoption by the acts from the New Romantic movement, together with the rise of MTV. Synth-pop is sometimes deployed interchangeably with electropop, but electropop may also denote a variant of synth-pop that places emphasis on a harder. In the late 1980s duos such as Erasure and Pet Shop Boys adopted a style that was successful on the US dance-charts. Some artists and bands were criticised for gender bending, Synth-pop was defined by its primary use of synthesizers, drum machines and sequencers, sometimes using them to replace all other instruments. Borthwick and Moy have described the genre as diverse but, many synth-pop musicians had limited musical skills, relying on the technology to produce or reproduce the music. The result was often minimalist, with grooves that were woven together from simple repeated riffs often with no harmonic progression to speak of. Early synth-pop has been described as eerie, sterile, and vaguely menacing, using droning electronics with little change in inflection, common lyrical themes of synth-pop songs were isolation, urban anomie, and feelings of being emotionally cold and hollow. Synthesizers were increasingly used to imitate the conventional and clichéd sound of orchestras, thin, treble-dominant, synthesized melodies and simple drum programmes gave way to thick, and compressed production, and a more conventional drum sound. Lyrics were generally optimistic, dealing with more traditional subject matter for pop music such as romance, escapism. According to music writer Simon Reynolds, the hallmark of 1980s synth-pop was its emotional, at times operatic singers such as Marc Almond, Alison Moyet and Annie Lennox. Because synthesizers removed the need for groups of musicians, these singers were often part of a duo where their partner played all the instrumentation. Later synth-pop saw a shift to a style influenced by other genres. Electronic musical synthesizers that could be used practically in a recording studio became available in the mid-1960s, the portable Minimoog, which allowed much easier use, particularly in live performance was widely adopted by progressive rock musicians such as Richard Wright of Pink Floyd and Rick Wakeman of Yes
4.
Warner Music Group
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Warner Music Group is an American multinational entertainment and record label conglomerate headquartered in New York City. With a multibillion-dollar annual turnover, WMG employs in excess of 3,500 people and has operations in more than 50 countries throughout the world, the company owns and operates some of the largest and most successful record labels in the world, including its flagship labels Warner Bros. WMG also owns Warner/Chappell Music, one of the worlds largest music publishers, the film company had no record label division at the time and one of its contracted actors, Tab Hunter, scored a hit song for Dot Records, which was a division of rival Paramount Pictures. In order to prevent any repetition of its actors recording for rival companies, in 1963, Warner purchased Reprise Records, which had been founded by Frank Sinatra three years earlier so that he could have more creative control over his recordings. With the Reprise acquisition, Warner gained the services of Mo Ostin, the Canadian unit was opened in 1967 as Warner Reprise Canada Ltd, now called Warner Music Canada Co. After Warner Bros. was sold to Seven Arts Productions in 1967, it purchased Atlantic Records, founded in 1947 and WMGs oldest label and this acquisition brought Neil Young into the company fold, initially as a member of Buffalo Springfield. The Geffen catalogue, now owned by Universal Music Group, represents Youngs only major recordings not under WMG ownership, in 1969, two years after being purchased by Seven Arts, the Warner Bros. -Seven Arts company was sold to the Kinney National Company. Kinney combined the operations of all of its labels. An earlier attempt by Warner Bros. Records to create a distribution arm in 1958 didnt materialize. So in 1969, Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman approached Atlantics Jerry Wexler with the idea of setting up a joint distribution network for Warner, Elektra, an experimental branch was established in Southern California as a possible prototype for an expanded operation. Atlantic, its subsidiary Atco Records, and its affiliate Stax Records paved the way for Warners rise to industry prominence, the purchase brought in Atlantics lucrative back-catalogue, which included classic recordings by Ray Charles, the Drifters, the Coasters, and many more. But the sale led to Stax leaving the Atlantic fold because the new Warner owners insisted on keeping the rights to Stax recordings and it was soon apparent in 1969 that Atlantic/Atco president Ahmet Ertegün viewed Warner/Reprise president Mike Maitland as godlike. Maitland believed that, as vice-president in charge of the Warner Bros, in retrospect Ertegün clearly feared that Maitland would ultimately have more power than him and so he moved rapidly to secure his own position and remove Maitland. Following the takeover, Warners music group briefly adopted the umbrella name Kinney Music, erteguns campaign against Maitland began in earnest that summer. Atlantic had agreed to help Warner Bros. in its efforts to establish its labels overseas, Mike Maitland complained bitterly to Kinney executive Ted Ashley, but to no avail – by this time Ertegun was poised to make his move against Maitland. As he had with Hyman, Ertegun urged Steve Ross to extend Mo Ostin and Joe Smiths contracts, in response, Ertegun broadly hinted that Maitlands days were numbered and that he, Ertegun, was about to take over the recording division. Unlike the Warner/Reprise executives, Atlantics execs the Ertegun brothers and Wexler owned stock in Kinney, on Sunday January 25, Ted Ashley went to Maitlands house to tell him he had been dismissed, and Maitland declined the offer of a job at the movie studio. One week later, Mo Ostin was named as the new President of Warner Bros, Records, with Joe Smith as his Executive Vice-President
5.
Discogs
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Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and crowdsourced database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs. com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc. and are located in Portland, Oregon, US. While the site lists releases in all genres and on all formats, it is known as the largest online database of electronic music releases. Discogs currently contains over 8 million releases, by nearly 4 and he was inspired by the success of community-built sites such as Slashdot, eBay, and Open Directory Project, and decided to use this model for a music discography database. The sites original goal was to build the most comprehensive database of music, organized around the artists, labels. In 2003 the Discogs system was rewritten, and in January 2004 it began to support other genres. Since then, it has expanded to include rock and jazz in January 2005 and funk/soul, Latin, in January 2006 blues and non-music were added. On 30 June 2004, Discogs published a report, which included information about the number of its contributors and this report claimed that Discogs had 15,788 contributors and 260,789 releases. On 20 July 2007 a new system for sellers was introduced on the site called Market Price History. However, at the beginning of 2008, the Market Price History was also free of charge for all users. In late 2014, the company released two new beta websites, gearogs lets users add and track music equipment like synths, drum machines, and other electronic music making equipment. At the start of 2015, the company began another beta project — Bibliogs, users can submit information about their books, physical or electronic, different versions and editions, and also connect different credits to these books. 21,000 books were submitted by the end of 2016, the project remains in its beta phase. The license has since changed to a public domain one. Prior to the advent of this license and API, Discogs data was only accessible via the Discogs web sites HTML interface and was intended to be viewed only using web browsers, the HTML interface remains the only authorized way to modify Discogs data. On 7 June 2011 version 2 of the API was released, notable in this release was that a license key was no longer required, the default response was changed from XML to JSON, and the 5000 queries per day limit was removed. On 1 November 2011 a major update to version 2 of the API was released and this new release dropped support for XML, data is always returned in JSON format, however the monthly data dumps of new data are only provided in XML format. Additionally the Premium API service was dropped, on 24 June 2014 Discogs deprecated their XML API in lieu of a JSON-formatted API
6.
Alphaville (band)
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Alphaville is a German synthpop/new wave band which gained popularity in the 1980s. The founding members were lead singer Marian Gold, Bernhard Lloyd, the band was at first named Forever Young before being changed to Alphaville. They achieved chart success with the singles Big in Japan, Jet Set, Dance With Me, Alphaville formed in early 1982, when Marian Gold and Bernhard Lloyd met at the music project Nelson Community. Many months later, Frank Mertens joined the project, together the three wrote Forever Young and recorded their first demo of the same name. In 1984, the newly renamed Alphaville released their single, Big in Japan. In autumn 1984, they released their album, Forever Young, produced by Colin Pearson, Wolfgang Loos. Despite its success, Frank Mertens left the band that year and was replaced in January 1985 by Ricky Echolette, Forever Young on the surface, is a hopeful song celebrating the virtues of youth, but a closer listen reveals a fear of aging and death. The song was written during the Cold War, where the singer is hoping for the best, Big in Japan was Alphavilles biggest hit, topping the charts in Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, Venezuela, and the US Billboard Dance Chart. The single also reached the Top Five in Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Ireland and it became the groups only Top 20 single in the UK, peaking at No.8. Big In Japan tells about a couple of lovers trying to get off Heroin and they both imagine how great it would be to love without the drug, no steal, no clients, no ice age in the pupil, real emotions, true worlds. Even today Berlin Zoo station is an important meeting place for junkies, the bands next two singles, Sounds Like a Melody and Forever Young, were also both European Top 5 successes, although the former track failed to make an impression on the American charts. Branigans version, though promoted on stickers adorning the album, remained an album cut in the US and she performed the song as an encore at nearly every concert she performed, until her death in 2004. The Alphaville version was released a third time in the US in 1988, to promote Alphaville, The Singles Collection,65, their highest charting single on the Billboard Hot 100. International re-releases of Alphavilles Forever Young followed in 1989,1993,1996,1999,2001,2005 and 2009, several covers have been recorded featuring male or female vocalists often erroneously attributed to be Alphavilles Marian Gold or Laura Branigan. It reached the Top 30 in Austria, Italy and in the US Club Play chart, the albums second single was Universal Daddy. For their third single, the band released Jerusalem in Germany only, while they went with Sensations for Austria, France, the Netherlands, the final single from Afternoons in Utopia was Red Rose, in 1987. The LP was followed up in 1989 with The Breathtaking Blue, including the acclaimed singles Romeos, the album was released as a CD+G, including black & white stills with original lyrics and German translation. As an alternative to individual videos, the band enlisted nine directors, among them Godfrey Reggio
