Just one of those neat things… You know how when you hear a song you love so often that it just resonates with you, and it doesn’t surprise you when it pops up other places?
I’m working on an article in the office, and I can hear Lori watching Men in Trees from the living room. [...]

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With not a whole lot of rumor or speculation, the fate of the American Idol Songwriter contest for 2008 was up in the air until this week, when officials reopened the contest site to the public.
By all accounts, this year’s contest is just like last year’s contest. Key points:

You have just under ten [...]

Are we so transparent about marketing these days that it’s okay for NBC to just slap a box on their pages that blatantly says, “CROSS PROMOTE?”

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Ann Powers writes longingly of the “wave of Eva-mania” in the late 1990s, and I remember it well. So it surprised her and others when American Idol contestant David Archuleta won compliments from the panel for his “original” cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
It’s a peculiar thing about music that you internalize the first time you [...]

While a whole lot of hype is building around The Search for the Next Great American Band, a report from the Fox upfront casts some light on another project that will be interesting to musicians. Nashville is from the same production team as MTV’s Laguna Beach, and it’s going to follow some young musicians through [...]

How many ways can you possibly pitch a talent competition to a television executive? According to the producers of America’s Hot Musician, a series airing on the Oxygen Network this spring, FremantleMedia and 19Entertainment are just copying the idea they came up with a few years ago.
The thing is, there have been plenty of [...]

American Idol’s producers have already told us how they’re going to spending the fall looking for “The Next Great American Band.”
What they didn’t tell us was just how bizarre this contest is shaping up to be.
According to this report from MeeVee, there will be the customary audition rounds, followed by competition among ten semi-finalists and [...]

19 Entertainment wants us to stay glued to our screens all summer as they search for the Next Great American Band. Looks like the Idol format, but with bands instead of solo performers. The biggest questions I have right now… Will they be coming to my town? Will they help me party it down? More [...]

Our discussion about your entries into American Idol’s songwriting contest rolls on. For newcomers, we’ve been splitting comments into new threads every 100 comments or so to keep our server from melting. Beyond that, there’s a lot of fun, positive discussion going on between some industry veterans and some newbie songwriters about everything from whether [...]

The discussion among American Idol Songwriter entrants is still going strong. We have opened up a new thread just about every day to accommodate the comments without bogging down the server or creating huge page downloads. If you’re new to our site, welcome!
Later this week, I hope to pull together a list of links to [...]