Search Results for: good terms

Relationships in the entertainment world can be famously fraught. And few are more so these days than the one between Steve Jobs and Universal Music chief Doug Morris. You may recall that Morris recently refused to re-up a multi-year contract to put his company’s music on Apple’s iTunes Music Store. That’s because Jobs wouldn’t ease his stringent terms, which limit how record companies can market their music. Now, Morris is going on the offensive. The world’s most powerful music executive aims to join forces with other record companies to launch an industry-owned subscription service. BusinessWeek has learned that Morris has… Read more »

During her Tuesday night performance in Orlando, Florida, Beyoncé took a rather epic header down a flight of stairs – a tumble, of course, captured on camera by several fans in attendance.To her credit, not only did B press on with the show, she later joked about the fall, telling the audience that it “hurt so bad” and imploring, “Don’t put [the footage] on YouTube.” Of course, those in the audience did the exact opposite, and by the following morning, several different clips of her spill were among the “Most Watched” and “Most Discussed” on the site. Given Beyoncé’s plea,… Read more »

Scottish rockers the Fratellis have turned down a deal to record the official song for soccer star David Beckham’s first match as an L.A. Galaxy player. The “Flathead” stars were asked to re-record the Beatles classic “Hello Goodbye” for the July event, but turned it down fearing they would “lose their credibility.” Frontman Jon Fratelli says, “We were like, ‘No f**king way.’ It would have got us noticed, of course, but we’d have lost our self-respect. “We’ve turned down a huge list of ridiculous things like that. We’re not a bunch of traveling salesmen. If we don’t get successful on… Read more »

To the Academy Is …, the name “Santi” means many things, none of which make very much sense. “Adam [Siska], our bass player, had this enemy in high school whose last name was Santiago, but everyone called him Santi, and he had associates called, like, Panti, Canti and Fruscianti or something,” drummer Andy “the Butcher” Mrotek explained. “Adam always hated the name Santi, so to annoy him, we all started saying it instead of ‘thank you’ or ‘cheers’ or anything. So it started out as this incredibly stupid thing, the kind of stupid thing you do in a band on… Read more »

Independent record labels behind artists like The White Stripes, Deep Purple and Arctic Monkeys announced a global deal Saturday to pool access to their catalogs, seeking to grab a bigger share of online music sales from the major record companies. Indies and their trade groups from more than a dozen countries signed up to Merlin, a nonprofit licensing agency that will cut deals on their behalf with download sites under the terms of the agreement unveiled at Midem, a music industry gathering in the French Riviera town of Cannes. Smaller record companies with just a handful of successful artists fear… Read more »

It’s New Year’s Eve in New York and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is headlining the buzziest indie rock bill in town. The eclectic quintet — which has risen to notoriety for selling more than 110,000 copies of its 2005 debut album in the United States without the help of a record label — has plenty to celebrate. The band is using the show at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom to preview a half-dozen tracks from its self-released sophomore set, “Some Loud Thunder,” due January 30. CYHSY’s most rabid fans don’t need much of an introduction to some of the new material.… Read more »

One sunny afternoon not long ago, Dick Copaken sat in a booth at Daniel, one of those hushed, exclusive restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where the waiters glide spectrally fro table to table. He was wearing a starched button-down shirt and a blue blazer. Every strand of his thinning hair was in place, and he spoke calmly and slowly, his large pink Charlie Brow head bobbing along evenly as he did. Copaken spent many years as a partner at the white-shoe Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, and he has a lawyer’s gravitas. One of his bes friends calls… Read more »

OAKLAND, Calif. – Music retailers are turning to high-tech firms that combine computer analysis with the art of listening to come up with new music suggestions for consumers based on what they already like. In a computer-crammed space at Savage Beast Technologies, divergent melodies seep softly from headphones worn by young men and women who listen to music with the intensity of submarine sonar operators. Their job is to discern and define attributes in tunes by artists as diverse as teen diva Hilary Duff and jazz legend Miles Davis. The listeners classify hundreds of characteristics about each song, including beat,… Read more »

Los Angeles – Rob Thomas jokes that his label, Melisma/Atlantic, is seeing a different side of him as it prepares for the launch of his solo debut, “… Something to Be.” In the multiplatinum group Matchbox Twenty, drummer Paul Doucette was the “bad cop. I was good cop,” Thomas says. “Now I’m good cop and bad cop. A lot of people who thought I was easygoing, pot-smoking Rob don’t think that anymore. Now they see I’m not so easy.” Fans of Matchbox Twenty will also hear a different side of Thomas on the album, which ranges from familiar Matchbox Twenty… Read more »

It’s officially ok for me to start dating Hilary Duff. In case you haven’t heard, she’s a college girl now, cramming in a few online classes in her free time through the Harvard Extension School. Unfortunately, when she made this announcement on her Web site a month ago, she chose to omit the word “Extension” and in doing so implied that she went to the “real” Harvard. And let me tell you, the Harvard kids were wicked pissed. Within days, the editorial staff of “The Crimson,” Harvard’s school newspaper, published an “Oh no you didn’t, girl” editorial calling Duff a… Read more »