It used to be that Kiss had an army, Grateful Dead aficionados were Deadheads and, sometime later, fans of Insane Clown Posse were known as Juggalos. Everyone else who liked a band was just a fan.

Now everybody’s fanbase has a name, for which we can probably blame Clay Aiken and his “Claymates.” Justin Bieber fans are Beliebers, Lady Gaga has her little monsters, Rihanna for some reason dubbed her fans a navy, Nicki Minaj calls hers “barbz” and Katy Perry fans, I learned this morning, are known as KatyCats.

Nah, nothing here for the terrorists to complain about.

First, there’s no question that touring is a money-losing proposition for many, if not most, bands, particularly the ones whose members must take time away from other jobs to hit the road. Touring is not, as she notes, the answer to everything. And while Johnston is also correct in noting that bands making multiple visits to the same city tend to saturate the market, that’s not really the whole story. She writes, “Sometimes getting to those markets that aren’t saturated with your live show and are thus likely to pay for tickets once the demand has been met in markets you’ve already visited, is way too costly.” Sometimes, yes, particularly in the context of her example, Halifax. But the rockist implications of touring aside, there’s a major-marketist angle to consider, too: Namely, there are plenty of easy-to-reach smaller markets, too.

Way too many small bands focus too heavily on the major-market hipster circuit: on the East Coast, they play Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and maybe Portland, Maine, or someplace in North Carolina or Atlanta. On the West Coast, it’s Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and maybe San Diego. In between, they hit Chicago, Denver, Austin, maybe Detroit, maybe Cleveland. Fair enough: those are the big cities, where small bands are the most likely to find a supportive crowd. But how many bands have built a lasting career out of only playing the same 10 cities? Never venturing beyond those bubbles makes it that much harder to build an audience that may someday grow large enough so that touring is profitable.

Just in New England, for example, bands can stop in Burlington, New Haven, Northampton or Providence, and there are plenty of towns in western New York, each of which is a short drive from the others and from the various major markets. It’s true that hitting the smaller markets after saturating the bigger markets doesn’t make the economics of touring any easier, at least in the short-run, but it is ultimately in a band’s best interest to branch out instead of playing yet another show in Brooklyn.

You can (and should) prepare as best you can, but you never really know how an interview is going to go, and that holds especially true for veteran musicians who have done countless phoners and heard the same questions countless times. It’s always a pleasant surprise, then, when they’re engaged, thoughtful and funny. Eric Burdon was all three when I talked to him yesterday about his new collaboration with the Cincinnati garage-rock band the Greenhornes.

Burdon and the Greenhornes recorded a four-song EP in less than two days, and Rolling Stone today is premiering the first song, “Black Dog.” It’s a gritty blues-rocker that calls to mind Burdon’s time fronting the Animals in the 1960s. The song, he told me, was inspired by back pain and Winston Churchill.

Photo by Stephanie Colgan

When I first wrote about Minneapolis band Communist Daughter for Listen, Dammit, back in 2010, I made a mean-spirited comment about former Son Volt member Dave Boquist, who contributed to Communist Daughter’s breathtaking debut, “Soundtrack to the End.” It didn’t take long for singer Johnny Solomon to send me an e-mail saying he didn’t appreciate it the crack about Boquist. He was right that it was a cheap shot, so I changed it, which resulted in an email exchange that culminated in Solomon offering to answer a few interview questions, some of which were about his apparent newfound sobriety.

But he wasn’t yet sober, he told me two years later when we finally connected on this story for Spinner, and some of those questions must have seemed unanswerable at the time. This time around, he’s been clean for a year and a half, and he was thoughtful, honest and a tad wry in talking about the band, its new EP “Lions & Lambs,” and what the future may hold.

Photo by Jim Goodrich

There was a heavy emphasis on local angles during the last few years of my tenure at the Hartford Courant, but there was one I never had a chance to mention: California alt-country band Beachwood Sparks recorded its self-titled 2000 debut in Hartford with producer Michael Deming (Pernice Brothers, Jim White, etc.).

Although the group broke up a couple years later, few breakups are permanent anymore, and Beachwood Sparks last month released “The Tarnished Gold,” its first album of new material in a decade.

Singer Chris Gunst talked to me for Spinner about getting the band back together, writing new songs and the bands influences, and influence. Check it out here.

In the wake of considerable screw-ups by CNN and Fox News Thursday in misreporting the substance of the Supreme Court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act, author, journalism professor and media blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote a blog post titled “The scoop is dead and deserves to be.”

Not so fast.

Jarvis’ reasoning:

The real lesson here is that the scoop is and always has been a dangerous act of journalistic narcissism. Did it truly matter if one outlet “broke” the same information that other outlets — and the world of the internet — knew a second before another? Or was it indeed worse when those outlets got it wrong because they were hasty and stupid? They were still seduced by the scoop, which has no value in media that operates at the speed of the link.

Jarvis is exactly right with his point that being the first to report universally available information has scant value in the digital age — especially if you get it wrong. But Jarvis errs in using too broad a definition of what, in fact, constitutes a scoop, a term that is not interchangeable with “breaking news.”

Scoops are often breaking news, but not all breaking news is the result of a scoop. Watergate, for example, was a scoop: Through dogged reporting, The Washington Post broke the story of the cover-up behind the break-in. The My Lai massacre story was a scoop: Seymour Hersh dug into reports that U.S. troops had killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, and broke the story via The Associated Press wire. Abu Ghraib was a scoop: CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and Hersh (again, this time for The New Yorker) fleshed out reports that U.S. soldiers had abused prisoners in their custody at the prison in Iraq, and broke the story.

Those are scoops: tracking down sources, sifting through documents and data, digging up facts and reporting exclusive stories. Announcing news everyone knows is coming nine seconds before your competitors isn’t a scoop.

Semantics? Maybe, but journalists work in words, and their meanings matter.

The Sun Parade is just one of the bands from western Massachusetts that Paste magazine overlooked.

Paste magazine recently launched its 50 States Project, which seeks to compile lists of worthy bands in every state in the country, an ambitious and laudable undertaking. Their Massachusetts list, though, is disappointing.

All 10 of the bands writer Katie King chose are from the greater Boston area, which ignores a wealth of musical talent on the other side of the I-95 loop around the Hub. Here, then, for her next list, are five western Mass. bands to consider, even without factoring in all the local indie-rock luminaries (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Frank Black), the supremely talented Erin McKeown or the dismaying surfeit of turgid metal:

1. Winterpills. The Northampton-area group plays elegant folk-pop songs that unfold slowly around around hushed vocal harmonies and impressionistic lyrics. The band this year released its fourth, and best, LP, the gorgeous “All My Lovely Goners.” Bonus: Guitarist Dennis Crommett, bassist Brian Akey and drummer Dave Hower play together in another band, Spanish for Hitchhiking.

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2. The Sun Parade. Also from Northampton, the core duo of Chris Jennings and Jefferson Lewis just released “Yossis,” a full-length debut of rootsy rock songs.

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3. Bobby. Comprising graduates of Bennington College in Vermont and Hampshire College in Amherst, members of Bobby settled in Montague, Mass., to make experimental music laced with elements of psychedelia, avant-folk and dreamy, reverb-soaked pop. The band released a self-titled debut in 2011 on Paritsan Records.

4. Zebu! Speaking of experimental, the duo Zebu!, founded at Hampshire College in 2003, describes its music as “improvisational surf noise punk that defies the logic of rational musical creation.” Bonus: singer, etc., Ted Lee runs Feeding Tube, the best, weirdest record store in western Massachusetts.

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5. Rusty Belle. A trio from Amherst that describes itself as “roots-rock junk-folk,” Rusty Belle plays understated, whispery songs that slip right into your soul and linger there.

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Other acts worth hearing: Haunt (though leader Matthew Hebert has apparently moved to Austin), Jamie Kent (who in 2010 planted his latest CD in every Starbucks location in Manhattan), Henning Ohlenbusch (whose latest, “Henning Goes to the Movies,” features nine songs based on movies) or any of Matt Silberstein’s various projects, from the Salvation Alley String Band to Trucks.

Have other suggestions? Add them in the comments!

Members of Russian band Pussy Riot were arrested in Moscow after an anti-Putin “punk prayer.”

While traveling recently I came across this New York Times piece by Jessica Bruder on the op-ed page of the International Herald Tribune, extolling the subversionary merits of punk rock and lamenting that “you won’t hear it in the U.S. and the U.K., the countries where punk was born.”

Bollocks.

Bruder trots out a list of various places where politically minded punks have been detained, arrested or have fled, then clumsily contrasts the dangers of playing punk in Moscow, Tehran or Myanmar, with New York, where art has clearly rolled over for commerce because CBGB became a high-end clothing boutique.

“While punk’s heirs around the world continue to defy autocrats, risking their freedom to stand against social injustice and economic polarization, it’s been many years since British and American punk had that kind of raw influence,” Bruder writes.

But that’s a false equivalency.

While it absolutely takes an incredible amount of courage to rebel with punk against the oppressive social and political order of places like Tehran, it’s an open question just what kind of “raw influence” those autocrat-defying punks actually have. Who’s listening? Apart from the ominous interest of paranoid government functionaries, it’s not at all clear what kind of reach these bands have. In part, that’s because theirs is necessarily an underground rebellion, over which hangs the very real threat of brutal reprisal. Such reprisals have never been part of the picture in the U.S. or Britain, where punks haven’t had to risk their freedom to speak out. While that certainly ratchets up the stakes for, say, jailed Moscow band Pussy Riot, it’s a mistake to assume, as Bruder does, that “punk’s moral force grows with government suppression.”

It’s also a mistake to assume that America lacks for “real punk” with the power to “rattle the windows in, say, the White House,” or to think that Bruce Springsteen is the only American musician addressing contemporary crises in a meaningful way. (For what it’s worth, Springsteen’s stature makes him far more likely than most punk bands to rattle White House windows, unless Chelsea Clinton went through a Ramones phase).

American punks have been highly visible in the Occupy movements: Anti-Flag is among the acts that performed at Occupy Wall Street last fall, which led in short course to the band’s new album, “The General Strike.” Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello hosted an Occupy SXSW show in March at South by Southwest in Austin. Rapper Boots Riley, Morello’s bandmate in Street Sweeper Social Club, has been active in organizing Occupy actions in his native Oakland. Even Green Day — as mainstream as punk gets — took a political turn on its “American Idiot” and “21st Century Breakdown” albums.

There’s certainly a role for punk rock in helping to subvert repressive regimes abroad, but it’s short-sighted at best of Bruder to conclude that punk is a spent force here at home, when so much evidence points to the contrary and with so much yet to do.

Sometimes you’re blessed with an interview subject who’s smart, lucid and funny. Cory Branan was all three when I talked to him earlier this month for Spinner about his new album, “Mutt.” As he explains, the title is also a description of the music: there’s a little bit of a lot of things, from folk and country to blues and rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s Branan’s first new album in six years, a delay that afforded him time to write a backlog of nearly 100 songs. That, he said, is a blessing and a curse.

“I could never do a record without putting a lot of new stuff on it,” Branan said. “That’s my hangup: I hate all my songs except for the last one I wrote, or maybe the one I’m working on.”

Read the interview here, and listen to “Mutt” here.

YouTube is so littered with live clips and special video performances that it’s sometimes to tough to tell whether a band has any “official” music videos, like the ones that MTV used to play. Joy Kills Sorrow didn’t, until this week.

The Boston acoustic band tapped the production team String & Shutter (aka Liam Hurly and Sam Kassirer, members of Josh Ritter’s band) to make a lovely, whimsical video for their song “Jason.” It’s Joy Kills Sorrow’s first official video, which premiered on RollingStone.com. Singer Emma Beaton told me that because Kassirer had produced Joy Kills Sorrow’s 2011 album “This Unknown Science,” “we already knew Sam, loved working with him, etc.”

You can see why.