In just two short days, David Banner will be performing at Knitting Factory in NYC on Friday, July 18th at 8:30 PM for one of those special MySpace Release Shows you’ve always wanted to go to. His new album, modestly-titled “The Greatest Story Ever Told”, was released yesterday. From the press release:

Putting Jackson, Mississippi, on the map, David Banner is more than simply a musical artist and actor. Having spent his days since Hurricane Katrina helping out in philanthropic efforts to rebuild the region, David Banner is now ready to properly follow up his widely-received 2005 album “Certified” with a set of fiery tracks synonymous with his name. Featuring guest shots from the likes of Lil Wayne, Akon, Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg and Chamillionaire, “The Greatest Story Ever Told” is a piece of social commentary expressing Banner’s passionate viewpoints, his recent experiences, and the type of heartache he’s endured over the past few years.

Maino will be opening. Early wristband pick-up for the performance will begin at 7 p.m. on July 17 on a first come, first served basis. And now, for some fun facts about David Banner:
Real name: Levell Crump
Age: 35
He’s pretty much done everything from acting to music production to rapping to modeling and owning a record label. Much of his recent time has been donated to the region affected by Hurricane Katrina. He takes his stage name “David Banner” from the lead character in the 70’s and 80’s cartoon “The Incredible Hulk”.

With the announcement that iTunes has become the #1 retailer of music in the USA and MySpace announcing its own online music store, the fact that anybody wants to buy Snocap is bewildering. But as announced earlier today, Imeem just bought the struggling digital music service company.

From Billboard:

Imeem itself is a customer of the service, using Snocap to identify tracks uploaded to the Imeem service by users to ensure content owners have allowed the full streaming of their music, as well as manage the ad-share revenue payments back to the appropriate label and artist each time a registered song is played via Imeem. Other customers include MySpace, which uses Snocap’s MyStores widget to let independent and unsigned artists sell individual tracks to fans via MySpace profiles.

Snocap has been struggling over the past year and was actively seeking a buyer. Although the registry contains more than 7 million tracks from all major labels, few services use the database and those that do are relatively minor in comparison to the market-leading iTunes music store. The once-hyped Mashboxx P2P service was supposed to be Snocap’s coming out party three years ago, but that service never launch, and likely never will.

The MyStores widget, meanwhile, never caught fire with the robust MySpace artist community. Many artists complained Snocap charged excessive per-track fees, which led to high-priced downloads to fans and leaving little left for the artist.

I mean, Snocap looked kinda cool on paper (or on screen, rather) — little independent bands could host a widget directly on their MySpace and fans could buy MP3s…but the service was only free to bands for the first year, and Snocap took a healthy percent of the sales, and I’m pretty the bands were obligated to stay on for another two years and pay Snocap for the privilege of gouging them…that’s why I never signed up for that shit. I call BULLSHIT on the Snocap model. Now it’s in Imeem’s court. Lemme know how that works out for ya…