Happy #TBT. In light of the fact U2 is going to tour 1987's The Joshua Tree in honor of the album's 30th anniversary, we thought we'd share this oldie-but-goodie post from Jim: The Album is Dead. Long Live the Album. The album is dead. I agree with many observers who say that the future of a collection of songs packaged up as a single commercial product pressed onto plastic or even encoded into MP3s with the expectations of significant sales is a thing...

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What do you call something, even if it’s good, that you’ve seen over and over again? Boring. What do you call something so new and different that it doesn’t make any sense to you? Weird. Most live entertainment content falls in between those poles, of course, but as a creator, curator or marketer of stuff in your venue, which is better? Which should you go for if what you’re trying to do is build your audience? Here’s the formula that works best:...

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Last night at the Oscars, Bobby Lopez's "Let It Go" from Frozen was up against some stiff competition in the category of Best Original Song: U2 singing "Ordinary Love" from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Pharrell Williams' "Happy" from Despicable Me 2 and Karen O's "The Moon Song" from Spike Jonze's Her. Not only did Lopez and his wife, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, take home the honor, but Lopez, 39, is the first Filipino American to win an Academy Award and the youngest...

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