Getty Once upon a time, music fans had to actually pay for all their music, a phenomenon that peaked in the 1990s. The explosion of alt-rock left major labels awash in cash and on the hunt for "the next Nirvana." A ton of terrible music was released in the process, much of which sold by the bucket load thanks to the labels tendency to bury ...

Sub Pop Ben Gibbard has made it pretty clear that he and producer Jimmy Tamborello, a.k.a. DNTL, have no intentions of making a follow up to their much beloved one-off collaboration as the Postal Service. "There are no plans to make a second record," Gibbard told Spinner in a recent interview. "I can't say that enough." It turns out ...

Vanessa Heins Hannah Georgas sits sprawled in a booth in the upstairs of Toronto's Rivoli club, sick as dog. "It's the worse timing," she tells Spinner. "But what can you do?" Georgas isn't kidding. With her self-titled sophomore album barely a week old, and an ensuing tour looming, it's hard to imagine a more inconvenient time for the ...

How to Dress Well Facebook Pop music is riddled with artists who use the form to excise their inner demons. So while many have accused (and praised) Tom Krell for ripping R&B apart at the seams with the sonic presentation of his How to Dress Well project, his latest album, Total Loss, continues to push emotional boundaries in the most ...

Astrid Stawiarz, Getty It's no picnic working as a solo artist -- for starters, if something goes wrong you've got no one to blame but yourself. The many pitfalls of the solo frontman are something weighing heavy on Ben Gibbard as he readies his first solo album, Former Lives for release. "One of the fatal flaws of anyone who's trying ...

You Say Party Facebook "We're not a punk band anymore," Stephen O'Shea, bass player in Vancouver party-rockers You Say Party tells Spinner. "It used to be, 'You Say Party are a dance-punk band with 4/4 beats and really loud drums.' Now it's four friends who are all songwriters who really care about each other." The band's new MO is ...

Dustin Rabin Billy Talent are a walking contradiction. Punks with gold and platinum records; aggressive rockers with regular radio play; socially conscious musicians with a fan base that includes teenage girls with Twitter accounts dedicated to their love for lead singer Ben Kowalewicz. But no matter how you frame them, the Toronto quartet ...