Friday night’s episode of “The Tonight Show” was Conan O’Brien’s final one after only seven months behind the desk. Tom Hanks, Steve Carell, and Will Ferrell are just a few of the stars who showed up to bid farewell to the late-night host.
Not much rattles Apple. Disciplined and focused, the company lavishes attention on its own elegant products and rarely deigns to discuss rivals. Yet here was Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer and designated stand-in for ailing CEO Steve Jobs, erupting during an earnings call in late January at the mere mention of a pip-squeak competitor. The pest in question was Palm, the fallen pioneer of handheld digital organizers, which two weeks earlier had unveiled a new smartphone, the Palm Pre, to rave reviews. Not only did the Pre have features the iPhone couldn’t match – snazzy multitasking, universal search, a… Read more »
List of winners at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards Album of the Year: ” Raising Sand” Robert Plant and Alison Krauss ; T Bone Burnett producer; Mike Piersante, engineer/mixer; Gavin Lurssen, mastering engineer (Rounder) Rap Album: ” Tha Carter III” Lil Wayne (Cash Money/Universal Motown) Male Pop Vocal Performance : “Say,” John Mayer ; track from “Continuum” (Columbia) Record of the Year: “Please Read The Letter,” Robert Plant and Alison Krauss; T Bone Burnett, producer; Mike Piersante, engineer/mixer; track from “Raising Sand” (Rounder) New Artist: Adele Rock Album: “Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends,” Coldplay (Capitol) Pop… Read more »
Last month the music industry and Apple, long uneasy partners, seemed a picture of harmony when they agreed on new terms for pricing on iTunes, Apple’s online music store. Behind the scenes, however, the relationship remains as tense and antagonistic as ever. The announcement on Jan. 6 seemed to signal a rapprochement between the music industry and its biggest distributor: record companies gave up their demand for copyright protection (called digital rights management) and Apple allowed flexible pricing, so the labels could charge more for new or popular tracks. But according to one music industry executive involved in the negotiations,… Read more »
Gotta hand it to Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz and company: The hardworking, blue-collar Midwestern pop-punkers-with-an-emo-attitude have gotten ever savvier and, dare I say, more mature with their songwriting and song-arranging. Consequently, “Folie a Deux,” (French for “madness shared by two”) may be one of the year’s most surprising albums. A tactfully produced (Neil Avron/Pharell Williams) affair that steers the Chicago-area band more toward the pop mainstream without sacrificing Fall Out Boy’s anthemic brashness, the band’s fifth album represents the zenith of its seven-year career. Some tracks — “I Don’t Care” with its “Spirit in the Sky” guitars and the zippy… Read more »
One of the first responders to a fiery South Carolina plane crash said Wednesday that a pair of musicians escaped the flaming wreckage by sliding down the wing. “They said the plane went down. They didn’t say how or if they knew,” said Lt. Jason Shumpert of the South Congaree Police Department. “Once it went down, they were able to slide down the wing of the plane, and they jumped on each other to put fires on each other out and rolled around on the ground.” Shumpert said he didn’t know until later that the two badly burned men were… Read more »
Hours after performing for thousands of South Carolina college students, former Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and celebrity DJ AM were critically injured in a fiery Learjet crash that killed four people, authorities said Saturday. Officials said the plane carrying six people was departing shortly before midnight Friday when air traffic controllers reporting seeing sparks. The plane hurtled off the end of a runway and crashed through antennas and a fence. It came to rest on an embankment across a five-lane highway and was engulfed in flames, said Debbie Hersman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. Barker and DJ… Read more »
When Hartmut Ostrowski was an up-and-comer in Bertelsmann’s printing and services division in the 1990s, his bosses were discouraged from speaking at meetings of the top executives. In the glamorous world of Bertelsmann, a global media empire with music, television, and publishing properties – Germany’s answer to Time Warner – services were viewed as strictly a backstage function. Now, with Mr. Ostrowski at the helm of Bertelsmann, the stagehands are striding into the spotlight. Two weeks ago, he named Markus Dohle, a 39-year-old German who runs the company’s printing operations, as chief executive of Random House, the world’s largest consumer… Read more »
As I write this, iTunes ranks as the 2nd largest seller of music in the U.S. — only Wal-Mart’s physical stores sell more. Digital revenue is real, and there is a lot of it being earned. Sales from iTunes alone can provide a band enough revenue to achieve true financial success. Don’t take my word for it, just look at some of the sales by the following unsigned artists utilizing the Net for both digital distribution and marketing: Kelly sold over 500,000 songs in five months, Eric Hutchinson sold 120,000 songs in three weeks, The Medic Droid sold over 25,000… Read more »
Michael Roberts: For all of the articles that have been written about you guys, very few of them have very much biographical information. It’s as if you were born at Columbia when you were twenty. So I thought I’d try getting some actual facts. Where are you from originally? Ezra Koenig: Well, originally, I was born in New York. My parents lived on the Upper West Side. But I have no memory of living here, because I almost totally grew up in Northern New Jersey, in the suburbs of New York. MR: Tell me about your parents. What jobs did… Read more »
