"Say everything's great, everything is fine." - Rocketship.

Geoff Farina has pulled the plug on Karate, sadly, according to Pfork. Mark For Robots eulogizes the now late-lamented Karate here. We turned onto Karate with their first single, which was released as Chris Newmyer's first record for his label, Self Starter Foundation (later home to Haywood). When the single came into WESU we played it because of Chris, but the music hooked us. We saw the band for the first time at Wes in 1997 before the big trip to Europe. At the time the band was a quartet, and they were just huge, blowing the doors off of WestCo Cafe. We blew the last shot of our roll of film taking a pic of H-Dawg from Accounts Receivable, so unfortunately we have no shots of the show. Mark For Robots encourages you to go out and buy a Karate record -- we'd encourage you to dig up the first two in particular.

Scroll below Pfork's Karate item for the sketchy details of Jandek's first ever tour. Or at least first ever announced series of dates, of which there are three. His recent, first-ever performance in Glasgow was a shocking occurrence. It is sad to think that shock will wear off, but we think it can be sustained through at least three dates. So there.

Coolfer points to this post at CDBaby from Friday that discusses the breakdown of who gets what for a sale of a digital song through Itunes. Looks like for every $.99 download, Itunes keeps $.29. If CDBaby is inbetween your band and Itunes, they take 9%, or 6.3 cents. CDBaby claims this is the best, which we take to mean lowest fee, in the industry.

We imagine Elliot Spitzer is the kind of guy who is disliked by more people than he is liked. But we think he is the man for taking on the big music conglomerates. Honestly, we don't think we would care that the entire business is run on graft and hookers if it hadn't had such an impact on commercial radio. Anyway, the New York AG was expected to announce a settlement wrested from Sony BMG that imposes fines (reportedly a piddling $10M) and aims to stop the flow of payola from the label group to radio stations. Similar settlements are said to be forthcoming with the other label conglomerates. Way to go, Ell-dog. Here's coverage from this morning, before the settlement was officially disclosed.

SPECIAL REQUEST: Anybody out there have a copy of the Rocketship "Hey, Hey, Girl" single on Bus Stop? Pretty, pretty please?

That is all.