Perhaps you have seen that in addition to the T-shirts, hoodies, posters, and brass boat necklaces (?) found in their online merch section, Sigur Ros has introduced their "Vardeldur candle" for the princely sum of $23.50. The site describes its scent thusly:

The smoky, slightly briny smell of a flotsam campfire on a distant black beach under a wan midnight sun. And, most recently, the smell of Sigur Ros's studio, while they go about the quasi-mystical business of making the magic happen. Specially developed to the band's olfactory specifications, this candle burns for 35 evocative hours of "instant Iceland, or something like that.

Much to our delight, upon perusing the merch sections of a few other artists' websites we discovered that they, too, had candles for sale.

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The CEO of Showclix—the ticketing company that handled yesterday's ticketing process for the Museum of Modern Art's eight-night series of Kraftwerk shows, during which quite a few people got stuck in waiting rooms and took to Twitter to describe their sell-out-rage in detail—has posted an open letter to those people who feel they were let down by his company. "Ultimately, we failed many of you," wrote Joshua Dziabiak, who while noting that there were no actual outages also said that one of the company's queuing servers "bubbled-up under the heavy load and caused frequent timeouts."

It's worth pointing out that, according to the letter, tickets to the eight shows sold out in approximately one hour; in the era of large venues being sold out in minutes thanks to people bum-rushing Ticketmaster.com, that timespan seems almost camp-out-at-Tower-era slow—especially for a series of shows that could only sell tickets to "approximately 1.20%" of the "tens and tens of thousands of people" exasperatedly tweeting and hitting refresh. The full text below.

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via TonsofTickets.com

Apparently some scalpers out there didn't get stuck in the ShowClix waiting room and got through to get Kraftwerk tickets... and now the $25-a-pop passes have been marked way, way up. Ah, capitalism. You do have to wonder just what, exactly, the $6,750 in "service fees" might be going, though... [via ILX / Previously]

Kraftwerk

The machines will always get you in the end.

In an effort to "keep up," I follow a lot of New York-based music fans on Twitter. Which means that whenever tickets go on sale for an important show, whether at a venue large or small—Pulp at Radio City Music Hall, LCD Soundsystem at MSG, today's release of tickets for April's series of Kraftwerk shows at the Museum of Modern Art—I hear a pronounced hue and cry from those people who were sold out of the shows for whatever reason, be it an inconveniently scheduled meeting, a browser failure, or a third-party ticketing site that just couldn't handle the onslaught of requests from ravenous fans. Having studied this phenomenon up close (too close!) for months now, and in anticipation of a lot of people being shut out of those Kraftwerk shows, I present a tweaked version of the Kübler-Ross model—the five stages of grief one experiences when, despite having top-flight technology and disposable income (and maybe even connections), one gets sold out of a show s/he really, really wanted to attend. Clip it out, save it for later, pass it to your friends who are going on Tweet rampages.

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Many tried but few succeeded when, at 11:58 a.m. or 11:59 a.m., we all started frantically hitting our refresh buttons, typing Captchas in as fast as we could, and generally doing everything in our power to get into tonight's "private" Kanye West show at the Bowery Ballroom. None of it worked, so we all settled for complaining bitterly about it on Twitter. All of us, that is, except one man, Myles Tanzer, intern to our sister blog, Runnin' Scared. He somehow got tickets. And so, in between pummeling him with our fists, we decided to ask him about it. And yes, it took two of us (it's not easy to hold Rob back when he gets it in his head to murder someone):

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When we last chatted with vital local music blogger Patrick Duffy about his nearly five-year-old enterprise Pop Tarts Suck Toasted, it had just been unceremoniously vaporized by Blogspot in the great blog purge of February 2010. So he switched URLs and pressed on. Unfortunately, as of this week, that new site is now slightly NSFW, and leads to one hell of a Google-search result.

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5,561,000 million, to be exact. That gives the Black Eyed Peas #1 and #4 ("Boom Boom Pow," 5,298,000) on the all time digital sales list--which has been around since July of 2003--reports Billboard. For context, there were roughly 252,908,000 internet users in America, total, circa 2009. Though it's probably safe to assume that Europeans did a lot of the work in this case. [Billboard, via L Mag]

Now, leaving aside the semantics of the "Free ____" meme, let's just review here for a second. Back in November, word of a scheduled appearance by the young Island Def Jam signee and Usher protégé Justin Bieber at Long Island's Roosevelt Field Mall resulted in a stampede that shattered the arm of one chaperone and drew blood from several others. First the cops threatened to arrest Bieber; then they settled for arresting Island Def Jam Senior Vice President James Roppo for the legally baffling crime of failing to announce on his Twitter account that the signing had been cancelled. Next up to face those same charges? Scott "Scooter" Braun, Bieber's manager, who allegedly waited nearly two hours to warn fans off via Twitter and is now facing up to a year on charges of reckless endangerment. Hence: #FreeScooter, currently tearing up the accounts of Twittering teenagers all across this country.

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"It's quite likely that many music bloggers can never be sure that a DMCA takedown notice won't arrive someday," notes this earnest, detailed cheat sheet for those unnerved by the recent deep-sixing of big-shot music blogs like Pop Tarts Suck Toasted. Indeed, the takeaway seems to be a) it's pretty much impossible to post tracks 100 percent legally, b) your hosting service is unlikely to much exert itself protecting you legally, c) there's a general "three-strikes" rule for industry complaints, though not always, and a "strike" can linger unknowingly for years and years, and d) are you sure you still want to do this? Though look on the bright side: Pop Tarts has bounced back just fine.

Well, that was fun while it lasted. Sometime this morning, the Rolling Stone website disappeared from the Internet, leaving only a goofy placeholder page and the catcalls of thousands of people who were all too ready to believe that the dinosauric old-media mag had either a), let its domain name lapse (embarrassing!) or b), folded entirely (schadenfreude!). Which would've been a weird way to make the announcement. But anyway! It was just a "technical problem," according to a Wenner Media spokesman, who called the vanishing of his website a "glitch." But geez were we ready to believe it was more than that.

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