Last week’s “The Player’s Spot” TV show featured Kathleen Hoye, who is married to Shaun Johnson, former President of the Louisville Music Industry Alliance (LMIA). During a break in the show, I took a couple of minutes to ask Johnson what was happening with LMIA, from which I hear nothing. He said that he wasn’t involved any longer, in part because of the birth of his daughter (he needed to make a living) and in part because he had come to realize that, while LMIA had many paid-up members, few, if any of them were actually willing to do any of the work that is required of a not-for-profit organization. As a consequence, he said that the last year he was active in the organization, he was involved with and primarily responsible for some 200+ events, which wore him out. He resigned but was later reelected without running because no one else would run for the position. He said he didn’t know what was currently happening with LMIA in any case. (He’s still listed as the President on the LMIA website.)

The LMIA website, which is updated from time-to-time, is at www.lmiacentral.com

For those of you who notice that various rightists, including the odious female attack dog Ann Coulter, have ads on the LMN site, please note that those ads come via the Goolge Adsense systems, which we subscribe to. We do not solicit nor endorse these advertisements and, truth to tell, we should go check to see if they can be eliminated. In the meantime, at the risk of hurting our own revenue stream, don’t click on them if they are offensive.

–PMM

Update: Okay, we’ll begin eliminating those ads as they appear.

Louisville’s answer to Interchange Village, a.k.a. 4th Street Live!, is piling on the Derby bandwagon with a series of free, (mostly) live music shows May 2-5, the most notable being Collective Soul on May 2 and The Velcro Pygmies on May 3. Don’t bother checking the 4th Street Live! website for more info - it’s not there, at least as of April 30 at 11 a.m. I found the info in the noted entertainment publication Business First,which called the series a “marathon of parties, concerts and celebrity sightings,” evidence that BF needs some staff retraining on the dangers of PR regurgitation.

–PMM

Rumors are circulating that Wal-Mart is telling the major labels that unless CDs sales improve, the largest retailer in the world could reduce shelf space devoted to CDs by as much as 20% and replace them with DVDs and video games. The big-box retailers account for 65% of CD sales. Digitalmusicnews.com has the details.

Thinking about going to Pimlico Racetrack in August 4 and 5 for the 2007 Virgin Festival? The complete lineup is been announced and is posted here.

MacRumors.com reports that Apple sent out a notice to its iTunes partners that “that they would soon be able to offer DRM-free music and DRM-free music videos to customers through iTunes.”

The new, unrestricted format appears to be open to any publisher who is interested. Read more on the matter here.

A post at hypebot.com speculates that Live Nation (the former arena management arm of Clear Channel that operates The Louisville Palace) has bought music merchandiser Trunk, which makes the company “a major gatekeeper in the two arenas of the music industry that provide artists with the most revenue - touring and merchandise sales.” From there, the step to being a record company is short. Read the whole post here.

If this is Sunday, then the Courier-Journal will run Andrew Adler’s column about one or more of the groups supoorted by the Fund For the Arts. This week, he details the financial problems of the Louisville Youth Choir, which currently has a debt of some $70,000.

Adler also profiles Jason Weinberger, the newly appointed associate conductor of the Louisville Orchestra.

In case you missed yesterday’s C-J, J. L. Puckett reviewed Patty Smith’s new CD. For a counter-opinion, take a look at Lefsetz‘ piece on New Releases

— PMM

After a good night’s sleep, I feel up to composing a few words to post. I didn’t have one yesterday because I hit the bag about 1:30 a.m. and got up at 6:45 a.m. to walk the dogs. I was pretty much brain-fried all day. That was after two days of essentially the same hours: Wednesday night was a jam session until 1 a.m., Thursday was a TV shoot and discussion afterward until 1:15 a.m. Poor, poor pitiful me.

The Friday night action was more fun, though. First, I spent a couple of hours watching Flamenco dancing by the Flamenco Louisville troupe at the Mellwood Arts & Entertainment Center (and got a new Harmonica Red CD), then I drove downtown to the BBC-Theatre Square to catch Arnett Hollow, which had been touted to me by my friend Brian White. AH is a five-piece: banjo, guitar, fiddle, double bass and full drum kit, which makes it sorta bluegrass but not really. Drums are verboten in bluegrass, ya know.

The opening act, a trio calling themselves DL, had some excellent guitar-based originals and were pretty impressive themselves, but Arnett Hollow - and particularly the leader, Chris Rodahaffer - put them in the shade. Rodahaffer, quite simply, is the fastest flat-picker I ever saw, and I’ve seen a bunch of them. Besides that, he can write songs. The admission included a new eponymous CD, which will get reviewed shortly, so I won’t write much more, except this: both Brian and I are pickers and we agreed that we either had to practice a whole lot more or quit the instrument altogether.

— PMM

Over at the C-J, J. L. Puckett’s Friday Sound Effects column is on Dick Sisto’s new CD, Soul Searching

— PMM