Search Results for: october

Washington – A year after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, all the excitement surrounding indecent content this year seems to be taking place in Washington, D.C. Among recent developments: The House is considering indecency legislation that would authorize $500,000 fines for broadcast licensees and performers, as well as license revocation hearings for repeat violators. The bill easily passed the Energy and Commerce Committee Feb. 8 and now goes to the floor for almost certain approval. Phil Lombardo, joint board chairman of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, is charging the Federal Communications Commission with inconsistent and discriminatory indecency… Read more »

Los Angeles – Rocker Peter Frampton is planning to record a track with Pearl Jam for his upcoming album of instrumentals, he said on Wednesday. In an interview with former Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones on his Los Angeles-based radio show, Jonesy’s Jukebox, Frampton said he planned to fly up to Seattle the following day to reunite with the band. They previously met up when Pearl Jam was in Ohio last October, to play a date on the Vote for Change tour. Frampton now lives near his wife’s hometown of Cincinnati, and described himself as the only Democrat in the… Read more »

Tokyo – Sony Corp. reported Thursday a 55 percent rise in earnings for the October-December quarter on home entertainment revenue from “Spider-Man 2,” although its core electronics sector was battered by sluggish sales and price declines. The Tokyo-based electronics and entertainment giant said its group net profit for the fiscal third quarter totaled 143.8 billion yen ($1.4 billion), up from 92.6 billion yen a year earlier. Sales for the quarter dipped 7.5 percent to 2.15 trillion yen ($20.9 billion) from 2.32 trillion yen. Sony’s profits got a lift from improved results at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, its mobile phone unit,… Read more »

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Now selling at a rate of more than a million downloads per day, Apple Computer Inc. said Monday customers have purchased a total more than 250 million songs from its online iTunes Music Store. The store, now available in 15 countries, is selling 1.25 million songs per day, which puts the annual run rate of almost half a billion songs per year, Apple said. Apple helped invigorate the market for legal music downloads when it launched the iTunes store in April 2003, but its robust sales continues to far outpace rival services. The success is due… Read more »

CANNES, France – The theme song isn’t quite “Happy Days are Here Again,” but almost. Music industry veterans, after several years of worrying about how illegal Internet downloads could threaten their business, are humming a decidedly upbeat tune these days. While questions remain about how to best deliver hits by U2 or arias by Luciano Pavarotti to music fans, one of the industry’s top conferences opened Saturday in this Riviera resort amid new signs that online downloads could become a moneymaker after all. The optimism at the Midem conference is a sharp turnaround from a year earlier, before music publishers… Read more »

Legally challenged rocker Courtney Love can put “parent” back on the list of things she sometimes does-right up there with “sing” and “act.” A judge ruled Monday that Love could regain custody of her 12-year-old daughter, Frances Bean, whose father is the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. “Frances has been returned to [Love] after a judge indicated satisfaction in Ms. Love’s efforts to turn around her life and found it was in the best interests of mother and daughter to be reunited,” Love’s attorney, Howard Weitzman, said in a statement. Frances has not been in Love’s care since her mother’s… Read more »

The Black Crowes will flock together once more, hitting a New York stage for a five-night run. The stoner Southern-rock band have been on “hiatus” since January 2002 and haven’t played a show together since the previous October – and while the band, media and fans have all submitted to the word “hiatus,” everybody knows the Crowes were really broken up, so this little get-together is a pretty big deal. Currently the plan is to take these few shows on and see how it all goes – if the Robinson brothers pull an Oasis and spend the whole time bickering… Read more »

Today at noon, the popular modern rock station WHFS 99.1, founded in the 1960s and owned by Infinity Broadcasting, was reformatted to become “El Zol.” The new station features salsa, merengue, bacchata, Caribbean and Central American dance music in a Spanish-language format. “This is the first top 10 market that we’ve done this in,” said Karen Mateo, director of communications at Infinity. “We’re looking to expand into this marketplace and this is the first station that we’ve done this with.” El Zol is targeted at the growing population of Spanish-speaking residents in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, almost 10 percent… Read more »

New York – A woman who says she is a former girlfriend of KISS rocker Gene Simmons is suing him for slander, saying the bass guitarist made her sound like a “sex-addicted nymphomaniac” during a “rockumentary” on VH-1 television. Georgeann Walsh Ward, 53, of Chester, N.Y., says in court papers that a photo of her appeared 11 times during the report on KISS, shown on the network several times in July and August, while Simmons claimed to have had sexual encounters with 4,600 women. In the documentary, “When KISS Ruled The World,” Simmons commented that “there wasn’t a girl that… Read more »

New York – Digital music sales notched a third consecutive record-breaking week in the period ended Jan. 2, thanks to the ripple effect from a Christmas-inspired sales surge of MP3 players and download gift cards. Digital track volume spiked by 1.6 million transactions last week, making a seven-day total of 6.7 million downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The jump marks an all-time high for download sales in a single week, breaking the benchmark of 5.04 million in the week ending Dec. 26. This marks the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot Digital Tracks chart that download sales… Read more »