VIA PRESS RELEASE | In his directorial debut filmmaker Tyler Q Rosen offers a revealing and inspiring documentary about how a man and his guitar can be the beginning of change for an entire nation, one person at a time.
Doin’ My Drugs is a profound and personal look at the extraordinary life of musician Thomas Muchimba Buttenschøn as he uses music in an effort to wipe out AIDS in his native Zambia and beyond. Born in Zambia in 1985 to a Zambian mother and Danish father, Buttenschøn was diagnosed HIV positive as an infant. After emigrating to Denmark with his family for treatment, Thomas lost both of his parents to AIDs at the age of nine and became deathly ill himself at 13. Upon regaining his health after beginning antiretroviral (ARV) treatment, he threw himself into music, and at 20, became a Danish pop star.
After marrying and fathering two sons, Thomas reconnected with family in Zambia, and was shocked to discover that the country remains trapped in a senseless HIV/AIDS epidemic. While he is able to live a full and healthy life with the virus, a staggering 13% of Zambians who are infected with HIV remain untreated because of the social stigma attached to the virus, and the resulting reluctance to get tested, despite the availability of free treatment from their government. Determined to make a difference, Thomas has dedicated his life to using his music and his own story to raise awareness about HIV and treatment in Zambia. Teaming with an extraordinary group of Zambian musicians, Thomas embarks on a crusade to wipe HIV and AIDS in Zambia, and throughout Africa.
The film is executive produced by longtime HIV/AIDS activist Jake Glaser of The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. EGPAF seeks to end global pediatric HIV/AIDS through prevention and treatment programs, research, and advocacy. Released by Freestyle Digital Media, the film distribution division of Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios.
Madison, WI | Strictly Discs in Wisconsin, in a Pandemic: New COVID-19 Closures Are ‘Getting Closer.’ In an “eventful week,” store owner Angie Roloff deals with a family tragedy, exploding coronavirus cases and the threat of new closures. In October 1988, Angie Roloff and her husband Ron opened Strictly Discs in Madison, Wisconsin, after Ron left a career in the biomedical research field to pursue his love of music full time. Nearly 31 years later, the couple made the difficult decision to shutter in-store operations due to COVID-19, roughly a week before Gov. Tony Evers forced a mandatory shutdown of all non-essential businesses. Now that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has overturned Evers’ stay-at-home order — ruling it “unlawful” and “unenforceable” — the Roloffs and their employees have 
AU | Why are vinyl records making a huge comeback? Just when we roll our eyes at the fact that kids these days only listen to Spotify, we see news that the sales of vinyl records surpassed that of CD. Wait, what? Are we back in the 60s? Are vinyl records really back from the dead? Well first of all, vinyl never really died. It decreased in sales when CD became famous in the late 80s but there were still a bunch of people who are vinyl freaks. Vinyl sales dropped fast but it continually increased in sales years after, peaking in 2006 and it never stopped going up since then. Years later, here we are. The Recording Industry Association of America, LP vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first six months of 2020, whereas CDs have only brought in $129.9 million. This is the first time since 1986 that vinyl has outsold CDs. Today, you don’t have to be a hotshot musician in order to release vinyl because one great benefit of the internet is that you can also find ways to lessen the risk of financial loss. Nowadays, you can make as few as 50 units and just sell it on your website or even do pre-order (they buy before you press vinyl) so you are sure every vinyl you press will get sold. Although vinyl is still relatively expensive to make, there are many tricks and tips for a 
Memphis, TN | With Patreon & an Online Variety Show, Goner Records Adapts to the Pandemic: Record stores have been hit hard by the age of quarantine, and in the case of Goner Records, which is also a label and festival promoter, the effect has been tripled. And yet their many innovations, from a “telethon” for Record Store Day, to Goner TV (which debuted in July), to this year’s virtual Gonerfest, reveal their willingness to innovate in order to accommodate the new normal. Now they’ve embraced another approach to both surviving and staying connected with fans and customers, one that is more typically associated with artists: Patreon. I spoke with co-owner Zac Ives to learn more about the reasons behind their latest move, and what kinds of offerings patrons can expect. “…the positive thing about this is, it really allows people to have a more direct impact on things that they care about. And so that’s what this turned into. If you like what we’re doing, there’s a way for you to directly impact our ability to keep doing these things. And at the same time, it lets us be creative with 
Elvis Costello on Turning His 1979 Tour De Force, ‘Armed Forces,’ Into 2020’s Splashiest Boxed Set: In a Variety bonus Q&A, Costello revisits how Bowie and ABBA influenced him four decades ago, why he’s cool with the super-deluxe “Forces” coming out via vinyl, streaming and downloads but not on CD… and drops a new performance of the classic “Party Girl.” Very few music boxed sets aspire beyond being gussied up digital repositories to becoming actual physical pieces of pop art. But opening up the new vinyl set from Elvis Costello, “The Complete Armed Forces,” feels like getting several Christmas mornings all at once, with a suitable-for-fondling nine records, seven paperbacks and various other ephemera intended to bring back the color explosions of 1979 as well as invoke other visual styles from the pulp-fiction ‘50s to the present. At the center of the “super-deluxe” set, enveloped in elaborate, Barney Bubbles-designed origami packaging, is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s fairly undisputed masterpieces, “Armed Forces,” a semi-concept record that reinvented Costello’s style three albums into his career and made “emotional fascism” sound like great, 
The legendary Tower Records returns as online store: The iconic chain closed all its non-Japanese stores in 2006. The legendary Tower Records chain has made a comeback as an online store. The chain has been out of action for over a decade, closing all its non-Japanese stores in 2006 after filing bankruptcy. A new Tower Records website is already up and running, with vinyl, CDs, merchandise and an online version of their Tower Pulse! magazine on sale now. As Deadline report, the 
Asheville, NC | Citizen Vinyl: Put Another Record On: Session Bar & Café is my beat, but you can feel a different kind of beat pulses throughout the entire building at Citizen Vinyl. …They’ve come at the business of vinyl from a lot of different directions: the retail record shop, recording studio, their ability to make vinyl masters, as well as large and short album runs, and the rooftop, which may be used for intimate live performances. With the record press installed and running on the main floor, you’ll be able to watch it do its magic through large interior windows while you have lunch, sip a latte, or meet with friends 
Austin, TX | Austin Record Stores Move the Needle on In-Person Shopping: You may now commence thumbing through the stacks again (provided you follow the new safety rules). Before last Saturday, I hadn’t set foot in a record store in seven months. The last time I’d gone that long, my favorite musical artist was the children’s singer Raffi. Still, my weekend trip to Waterloo Records felt normal – even considering I got scanned with a forehead thermometer upon entry, the checkout clerk was behind Plexiglas, and the shop’s used new arrivals section had been relocated to spread out customers. In those crates, I mined an LP from the Sixties vocal group the Exciters, then journeyed over to the international section and scored a copy of Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti, a collection of field recordings of possession rituals captured in the Forties and Fifties. I didn’t know I needed that record until I flipped upon it in a rack…Owner John Kunz believes the slow, scaled reopening of Austin’s record retailers speaks to them “trying to be part of solution, not part of the problem in terms of the spread.” Still, he says 
Sleevenote is a high-res music player designed for album art: Tom Vek, recording artist, wants to sell you a music player. One that he’s designed himself. Sleevenote is designed to respect your favorite albums, from cover to tracklist, as a work of art in their own right. It’s pretty much all-screen, a 6.2-inch square picture frame that lets you interact with music the way we used to. Select a record, read through its (digital) booklet and select tracks by touching their name on the back cover. It’s designed to recapture the vibe you had when getting a CD, or vinyl record, ready to play for the first time. “I was doing the artwork for [2011’s Leisure Seizure] and it dawned on me that not everyone buying it was going to see it,” Vek told Engadget. Knowing that the work he was putting in to creating the album-as-a-package was likely to go to waste upset him greatly. “I’d been resistant to the iPod,” said Vek, “because it wasn’t a good replacement for the visual side of CDs.” For many cover design is an art form in and of itself, with many covers 
