Today's Pick

American rock band Linkin Park was among the first artists to respond to the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti last month, heading up a charity album, "Download to Donate for Haiti," within a week. Now the rock giants are giving you an intimate look at the creation of their song to help Haiti, and released a special new video for "Not Alone," the previously unreleased song they gave to the compilation. It's a stark, mostly black-and-white clip that switches between images of the immense destruction in Haiti, some of them fairly graphic, and footage of Linkin Park recording "Not Alone" in a studio. The stunning video features studio performance footage interspersed with stark images of the Haitian devastation. The clip is being premiered exclusively at www.myspacemusic.com beginning today.
The new song "Not Alone" is currently playing on AOL Radio's New Alternative First station, is an unfinished demo from 2007's 'Minutes to Midnight,' with vocals recorded by Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington just over the weekend to complete the track and released On January 19.
"Download to Donate for Haiti" is a compilation album and a star-studded recovery effort by Music for Relief, a non-profit organization established by Linkin Park in 2005, following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, to help victims of natural disasters to help prevent such disasters. The special album provides fans with the opportunity to download a collection of exclusive songs along with many other unreleased by their favorite artists, such as All American Rejects, Hoobastank, Alanis Morisette, Slash, Enrique Iglesias, Peter Gabriel and more, and then donate funds on a purely voluntary basis. Each download is a donation. Fans can download the unreleased songs at www.musicforrelief.org and via the websites of each participating artist.
One of the most unique aspects of "Download To Donate For Haiti" is its community element. On musicforrelief.org, songs are downloaded via an embeddable widget and fans are encouraged to embed the widget on their own social network pages to help spread the word. "We ask that everyone donate, but if all you can afford is to spread the word, embed the widget, share it on Facebook, Twitter, whatever, then that'll be good enough," says Linkin Park vocalist Mike Shinoda. "It all helps."
Linkin Park are currently in the studio recording the long awaited fourth album, which will be released in 2010, with the aim for it to be "genre-busting."