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CMU Planner – w/c 29 Oct 2012

By | Published on Monday 29 October 2012

Mercury Prize

A round up of music and music business events happening in the next seven days…

Mercury Prize. The Mercury Prize will be handed out to one lucky winner this Thursday. Who could it be? I reckon Richard Hawley should win for recognition of his work with The Longpigs. They really were a great band and didn’t get enough recognition back in the day. I know the Mercury is supposed to be for a specific album, but come on, it’s not like Elbow actually won it for ‘The Seldom Seen Kid’, is it? Sometimes they have to give it to someone who should have had it ages ago. Oh, and Hawley’s ‘Standing At The Sky’s Edge’ album is actually pretty good too, which is just a bonus.

MOBOs. Following the Mercury, the MOBO Awards will take place in Liverpool this coming Saturday. Leading the nominations is Emeli Sandé with five nods, followed by Labrinth, Plan B and Rita Ora with four each, and Ed Sheeran with three. AlunaGeorge are up for Best Newcomer too – we’d quite like to see them win that.

AIM Independent Music Awards. Before the Mercury and MOBOs there’s another awards ceremony this week. This very evening, in fact. The AIM Independent Music Awards will be honouring artists and labels in the indie sector for the second year. If you missed our interviews with nominated indie label bosses over the last two weeks, you can catch up with them all right here.

Kickstarter UK launch. Kickstarter will go live in the UK this Wednesday, and creatives or entrepreneurs looking for financial support for new projects can register with the service now. Previously non-US based individuals wanting to use the crowd-sourcing website needed a partner or company based in America, but now us Brits can use the service without that extra hassle. Could you be the next Amanda Palmer? Maybe you could.

Grooveshark launching artist profiles. This Thursday, Grooveshark will launch its new artist profiles, which aim to get musicians on board by allowing them to collect cash donations via micropayments service Flattr. It will be interesting to see whether any artists embrace that new element of Grooveshark. The introduction of the monetised artist profiles is presumably part of the controversial digital firm’s bid to present itself as a champion of artists, despite its various legal disputes with the ‘big bad major music companies’.

New releases. It’s less than two months until Christmas now, a fact marked by the release of Cee Lo Green‘s Christmas album, which you can purchase from today. If you fancy something a little less festive, try the new album from Ital Tek, or even the new mini-album from Lowell. Singles-wise, you can get the first of a new series from My Chemical Romance featuring tracks from an album they shelved because they thought it was rubbish, plus new shortform releases from The Joy Formidable, LCMDF and Brian McFadden.

Gigs. The number of gigs and tours happening at the moment is still ridiculous, amongst the artists playing one-off shows or kicking off tours this week are Jack White, Tinchy Stryder, Alt-J, Robyn, The Joy Formidable, DOOM, Efterklang, Dry The River, Spiritualized, Four Tet, Kate Nash, Polica, Maximo Park, Here We Go Magic, Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster, Twin Shadow, Tame Impala, Opossom, Two Gallants, How To Dress Well, Halls and Ratking.



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