Search Results for: october

Bianca Jagger has been evicted from her rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment after several years of quarreling with her landlord over claims of toxic mold and questions about her residency, her lawyer said. After a recent appeals court ruling against her, Jagger knew the eviction was coming. She found out from a neighbor’s phone call that a sheriff had arrived Wednesday to move her possessions to storage, lawyer Daniel Bryson said. “This is an absolute travesty,” he said. A lawyer for landlord Katz Park Avenue Corp. didn’t immediately return a telephone call early Thursday. Lawyers for the 62-year-old Jagger, who was… Read more »

Michael Jackson is on deadline. A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Wednesday issued a court order giving the reclusive entertainer 25 days to turn over financial information to a law firm that previously won a $256,000 judgment against him in July. Should Jackson balk at turning over the records requested by the firm of Ayscough & Marar, he instead has the option of making good on his unpaid legal fees. Jackson engaged the firm during his 2005 child-molestation trial to perform such tasks as obtaining court orders to block information from being publicly released and delaying discovery in several… Read more »

Hoping to broaden its relevance to the music industry in the face of increasing competition from other social networking sites, MySpace will roll out a suite of services and initiatives as part of what company officials are calling MySpace Music 2.0. But a new policy at Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s biggest record company, limiting full-song streaming on the site illustrates the challenges ahead. The first hint of MySpace’s music effort is Transmissions: The site features video of participating artists in the MySpace studios, performing select songs and conducting interviews, both of which MySpace has the exclusive rights to… Read more »

The drummer for The Police apologized to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet for comments decried as derogatory by the government and invited her to attend Wednesday’s concert in Santiago. Stewart Copeland, whose rock band is on the South American leg of a reunion tour, told Chile’s Mercurio newspaper in an interview published in October: “Look, the future President of Argentina would be good for one beer; yours (would be good) for four.” While it was not clear what Copeland meant with the comments, many Chileans took them to mean he found their first woman president, Bachelet, less attractive than Argentine president-elect… Read more »

The Grinch might be stealing Christmas from music retailers, but thanks to Josh Groban and Oprah, there’s still some singing in Whoville. For the sales week kicked off by Super Tuesday–the release date before Thanksgiving when record labels typically schedule their big guns–the figures were abnormally bad, with only one Top 10 bow and a seven-week-old album topping the charts. Still, that album, Groban’s Noël, can thank last week’s performance on The Oprah Winfrey Show for driving it past Alicia Keys and into the number one spot. Noël crowned the Billboard 200 by selling 405,000 copies for the week ended… Read more »

Yahoo! Inc. and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit may shut down their Web radio services after being hit with a 38 percent increase in royalties to air music. “We’re not going to stay in the business if cost is more than we make long term,” Ian Rogers, general manager at Yahoo’s music unit, said in an interview. Yahoo and AOL stopped directing users to their radio sites after SoundExchange, the Washington-based group representing artists and record labels, began collecting the higher fees in July. Those royalties may stifle the growth of Internet radio, which increased listeners 39 percent in the… Read more »

Kevin DuBrow, lead singer of the popular 1980s U.S. heavy metal band Quiet Riot, has been found dead from unknown causes at his home in Las Vegas, authorities said on Monday. The body of DuBrow, 52, was discovered on Sunday afternoon, a spokeswoman for the Clark County Coroner’s Office said. An autopsy conducted on Monday was inconclusive and more forensic tests were scheduled to establish a cause of death, she said. Police confirmed that DuBrow’s body was found at his home after they were summoned by friends and neighbors who could not find the rocker. A Las Vegas police spokeswoman… Read more »

Nick Haley took just 30 minutes to pluck the Brazilian band CSS from obscurity and hurl it into the national spotlight. In September, Haley paired the band’s dance-pop song “Music is My Hot, Hot Sex” with his 30-second amateur video, displaying the capabilities of Apple’s new iPod Touch. The video ends with the lyrics, “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” “I was like, ‘This song is too perfect,’ ” said Haley, 18, by phone from the University of Leeds in England, where he studies politics. “It’s punchy, loud, fast and naughty.” Marketers at Apple headquarters in Cupertino… Read more »

Linda Stein, the onetime co-manager of Ramones, was found dead October 30 in her Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan. Stein, 62, who was once married to famous Sire Records head/Warner Bros. vice-president Seymour Stein, was found dead in her kitchen. In recent times, Stein was well-known in show business circles as a realtor for high-profile and celebrity clients, including Billy Joel, Calvin Klein, and Bruce Willis. Stein died from blunt-force trauma to the head. Police are treating the death as murder, and are continuing investigations. They say there were no signs of forced entry to her Fifth Avenue apartment.