Lauren Zettler is sharing the wonder and mystique of touring through a blog for her current mini-tour.  And by wonder and mystique, I mean financial reality and pictures of life on the road.  Definitely worth reading.

From her twitter:

Looking for female vocalist to sing backups/harmonies in my band! Interested? please email me at hannah.georgas@gmail.com

From Jane Vain’s myspace blog:

Whoa!!!!!!!!! We just finished tracking the album!!! It’s really exciting! Now just the final mix, the mastering and the pressing and then BAM!! Release is on the horizon. ps: We are coming to Ottawa and Toronto at the end of August! xo

Ok, so although I love the results of putting together Ladies On The Charts, I do not love my current process for compiling them.  It’s way too much work.  I also do not love the amount of space they take up on the front page.

Due to this, Ladies On The Charts will be taking a hiatus.  It will return once I have automated some of the results-compiling work and found a place to put the updates other than the front page.

Due to visiting family and other real-life distractions, last week’s Ladies On The Charts update will be combined with this week’s, and they’ll both appear Friday.  There may not be a lot of other posts until then, either.  Unless, of course, you join Ladysound and post stuff yourself.

The Polaris Music Prize short list was announced Tuesday.  It’s mostly white anglophone boys.  There are some groups with women in them, but there are no groups with only women and no female solo artists.  So instead of paying attention to the short list, I’m going to do a series of profiles of the female solo artists from the long list.  All four of them!  My goal is to have posts on all of them before the gala in September.

NxEW is also asking people to vote for the best album by a Canadian artist in the past year, but they’re asking their readers, rather than a collection of music critics and writers and such.  They’ve narrowed their list down to a top twenty, and they have four female solo artists still on it—Jill Barber, Laura Barrett, Julie Doiron and Jenn Grant.  Their (pseudo) top forty also had Cœur De Pirate, Kyrie Kristmanson, and Olenka and the Autumn Lovers.  So here’s the question: why do you think there’s such a discrepency in the number of female artists on the two lists?  Are fans a better source for artists who haven’t got a lot of publicity yet?  Or are fans more accepting than critics of female artists?  Maybe the difference seen here is just a fluke?  Tell me what you think in the comments.

So I’ve been falling a teensy bit behind with the whole charts thing, but here’s the update that ought to have gone up last Thursday.

With regards to the problem I mentioned with the R3-30, I took a look at it, and for several weeks I had been counting an artist as co-ed that I should have been counting as male.  This is fixed in this week’s count and history chart, but the past posts have been left as they are (at least for now).

So here’s the count: on the R3-30, two songs by women, twelve by mixed-gender groups, and sixteen by men; on the top half of the Billboard Hot 100, fourteen songs by women, six by mixed-gender groups, and thirty by men; and on the top 50 on Neilsen’s SoundScan Hits Chart, thirteen songs by women, six by mixed-gender groups, and thirty-one by men.

And now here’s the history of how, historically, the charts have looked in the recent past.

R3-30

Billboard

Neilsen

Before I announce the contest results, I’ll announce the correct answer to the contest question: Pony Up! was the first artist to be counted in this thing that is both (a) entirely female and (b) not a solo artist.  That is, Pony Up! is the first (and so far only) all-female group to appear on any of these three charts since mid-May.

And now, the news you’ve been waiting for: you didn’t win the contest.  Neither did anyone else, because no one entered.  All is not lost; I will send a randomly-chosen CD from the Ladysound prize pool to the first person to comment on this post.  C’mon, some of these CDs look pretty good.

Borders.com’s current free download is All The Same To Me, off of Anya Marina’s latest album.  I have no idea how often they change the free download, so if you want it, you should get it now.

The Pack A.D. got together with R3TV to create the video for Blackout.  The resulting video is a lot of fun, plus also it’s all behind-the-scenes-y for CBC.

Edit: I nearly forgot to mention that The Pack A.D. are on tour!  You should go see them.

www.char2d2.com has finally launched.  It is one of the nicest artist websites I have ever seen.  No, really.  Go look.

(Totally unrelated: There is still time to enter the Ladysound contest)