The Vimeo Festival + Awards are a chance for your work to be seen by the best in the business. Each category will be overseen by three judges, including ... Read More

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development ... Read More

Stephen Fry has posted a lovely reminiscence on the TIME website, which looks back on his early days playing with a Mac computer back in 1984. Fry and author ... Read More

The music world has lost one of its most influential, eccentric and (at times) maddening figures. Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren passed away on April 8, and he ... Read More

Everyone hates an exclusive club, unless they’re asked to join or can somehow force themselves in. For a long time, the Internet has operated in direct opposition to such ... Read More

A couple of weeks ago we were pondering Apple’s lack of presence in the streaming music market on Culture Now. With companies like Spotify and MOG snagging listeners and ... Read More

Recently I was corresponding with an editor of the Cool Hunting website, and, as is my wont these days, I was trying to promote my new book ... Read More

Anyone browsing the U.K. arm of MTV’s website may find themselves raising an eyebrow when they see this page. Yes, MTV is using its considerable weight to bolster ... Read More

Any music fan outside a handful of European countries has faced a familiar frustration when browsing certain websites during 2009. The streaming music website Spotify has popped up everywhere, ... Read More

Craft services, otherwise known to newcomers to the business as, “Wow! Look at that huge table of snacks!” is, well, a huge table of snacks, originally designed to feed, ... Read More

We’ve been blogging about the annual CMJ Music Marathon on Culture Now for the last few weeks, which featured performances from some of the best up-and-coming artists around the ... Read More

There are two sides to the annual CMJ Music Marathon, which exerts a vice-like grip on the music industry in New York in October. At night, there are fallen-down-drunk ... Read More

I went to a lunch the other day hosted by a very high-up-there studio executive who works with a lot of writers. It was a small lunch, and I ... Read More

I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day. And he suddenly looked up from his Cobb salad. “Oh, here’s something I forgot to tell you,” ... Read More

Sons and fathers are central to Cormac McCarthy’s novels. So much so you could say most of his books are about what means to be a man - and ... Read More

The notion that those of us who work in creative fields must constantly “invent” something completely new and different, and that we must do it from scratch, can be ... Read More

The storied history of the annual CMJ Music Festival in New York City includes many legendary performances and panels. Who can forget Factory Records head honcho Tony Wilson and ... Read More

In Hollywood, written – that is to say, legally binding – contracts are thought of as vulgar. In fact, just asking for a written contract is apt to bring ... Read More

The annual summit held by the Future of Music Coalition occurred in Washington D.C. this past week, allowing a number of music industry figureheads to get together to discuss ... Read More

For the past year or so I haven’t had what you might call an assistant, on the basis that my life isn’t really so complicated that I need assistance. ... Read More

In the beginning

Detroit

The earliest Kraftwerk records weren't exactly made in a void - Kraftwerk and Kraftwerk 2 bear some obvious rock hallmarks that depreciated significantly as their career unfolded. ... Read More

I’m in Brazil at a design conference called MOB (Melhor do Design Brasilerio) – I just made the keynote address: “Design in the Post Industial Era.” Among other things, ... Read More

The alternative music scene has often looked to the past for inspiration. In the ‘80s, the Jesus & Mary Chain and Echo and the Bunnymen respectively paid tribute to ... Read More

For normal people (and for the purposes of this discussion the phrase “normal people” refers to people who do not work in the entertainment industry), summertime is holiday season. ... Read More

There’s an old rule in business that says you shouldn’t have a meeting unless you’ve got a clear idea of what the meeting is supposed to accomplish. There’s no ... Read More

Delving into the past of Lalo Schifrin - after finding out that he’d written the theme to Mannix, surely the best cop show theme of its time - I ... Read More

It’s been a long time since anyone instinctively turned on their TV set for a music video fix. Waiting patiently in the hope that something good might appear has ... Read More

The music world has ushered in some radical innovations this decade. The preeminence of iTunes, the iPod, and MP3 files has caused us to fundamentally alter the way we ... Read More

A few years ago I was working on a show and we had, as a guest actor, an older guy. This guy was a comedy legend, of sorts – ... Read More

Seems to be a bit of an outbreak of cannibalism in Australia. In films, that is. I know of at least two films recently produced that have as their ... Read More

In 2007, a series of concerts took place across the world under the Live Earth banner. The aim of the shows was to alert people to the damage being ... Read More

Sometimes it’s awfully hard in this business to know exactly why someone is calling you. Which is odd, because there are really only two choices: they want to give ... Read More

In 1996, Fatboy Slim released his single “Everybody Needs a 303,” and the genre that would become known as Big Beat was born. The song paid tribute to the ... Read More

Hundreds of used copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame are freely available at knockdown prices on Amazon and EBay. It’s not surprising; journalists were flooded with copies of the ... Read More

I spent a lot of time last week in the offices of various executives at some of the large television networks, pitching my idea for a new television series.

Every ... Read More

I just finished reading a story about a terrorist event that causes total failure of all communications and other technologies that employ digital circuits. Anything digital that was in ... Read More

So video didn’t kill the radio star after all. For a while back there, it even seemed like the two mediums were happy to co-exist. Radio proved to be ... Read More

Very few people know about the so-called “Balibo Five”, let alone about the existence of East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country, and how it suffered under Indonesian control. ... Read More

Radiohead’s manager, Brian Message, appears to be on a mission to restructure the music industry. His ideas on how music should be presented and sold have already caused a ... Read More

Most music fans have shelled out hard earned cash for a band T-shirt at some point. Sometimes, a simple band logo will suffice. At others, a tour T-shirt with ... Read More

I once asked Tom Waits if he felt fatherhood had affected his songwriting in any way. "Well," he said, pausing to consider the full weight of the question, "it's ... Read More

With MySpace caught up in a downward spiral, the question of where new bands should go to promote their wares online is currently a major issue in the music ... Read More

From couch-surfing the Lower East Side to lamenting the construction of The Cross Bronx Expressway, Arthur Nersesian, author of The Fuck Up, is about as New York as they ... Read More

At few years back the Byron Bay Writers Festival I was invited to speak on a travel panel called ‘Evocative Images from Around the World’. We were asked to ... Read More

It’s funny how one thing becomes a designer’s signature. Oxo Good Grips seemed like a small project when we started working on it at Smart. My Dad Read Viemeister ... Read More

Are consumers still aware of the singles and albums that currently stand atop the Billboard singles and album charts? Like many other countries in the world, Billboard welcomed legal ... Read More

OK, so this is my first blog ever (shouldn’t I be Twittering? Aren’t blogs passé? See, I’m already too old for this!) But it turns out, I’m not too old ... Read More

Someone crawled in his ear. Poor Robert, what a pain it was. He could feel the man as he moved slowly into his head: a junkie who-would-just-not-shut-the-fuck-up. The stranger's ... Read More

Michael Jackson’s sad passing occurred less than 24 hours ago at time of writing, but we all know how this one went down. Speedy gossip website TMZ, who have ... Read More

This story has proved harder to write than I imagined. As if there were an emerging and fading voice in my head I couldn't quite tune into, and am ... Read More