Coming soon from VIP Ignite for the musicians and songwriters ready to begin What if the story you’ve been living is the song you’ve been…
Posts published in “Music”
There is something about a red carpet in Hollywood that makes time feel different. A few steps become a milestone. At the private screening of the Blind Boys of Alabama documentary at the Chinese Theatre, executive producer Sir Michael Fomkin marked the end of one long road and the beginning of another.
For decades, new music technology meant a new instrument. AI may be different: it is participating in composition, identity, rights, fan interaction and performance at once. Timbaland's Stage Zero is one early answer — and VIP Ignite Live could become the stage where the rest gets tested in public.
From James Brown in 1965 to Lil Wayne in 2008, one address in North Miami and one name from New York account for an implausible share of the American songbook. A documentary in development — executive produced by Sir Michael Fomkin and VIP Ignite Live with Abundance Studios — sets out to tell how.
Eric Clapton came to Criteria in 1970 to make a quiet record under a name nobody knew. Then he went to a benefit show on August 26, Duane Allman saw him in the crowd and stopped playing mid-solo, and the two of them went back to the studio until sunrise.
He had been gone five years and was not sure anyone still wanted him. So John Lennon booked The Hit Factory under his accountant's name, hired a band that wasn't told whose record it was, and made Double Fantasy in secret on West 48th Street.
In 1974 the Bee Gees were finished. Then Robert Stigwood sent them to a rented house in Golden Beach and a studio on 149th Street — and a bad road surface on the Julia Tuttle Causeway gave them a rhythm. How Criteria Studios rebuilt the biggest band of 1978.
It started in 1969 as one room rented by a New York songwriter. Half a century later the name sat on a building in North Miami where Layla, Hotel California and the Bee Gees' 1978 were made. The history of The Hit Factory — and of Criteria, the studio it bought.
The world’s most influential K-pop group will not submit its music for the 2027 Grammy Awards, challenging an industry that has spent years trying to…
By: Sir Michael Fomkin I’ve spent twenty years in this industry watching talent walk through doors. I’ve sat in casting rooms, watched performers take their…