Search Results for: Bad Company

LOS ANGELES – U.S. album sales, which include CDs and digital albums, fell 4.9 percent in 2006 as an increasing number of consumers preferred to download individual songs from the Web, Nielsen SoundScan said on Thursday. While data from the music tracking company showed overall music unit sales rose 19.4 percent last year due to digital downloads, the growth momentum of that category also disappointed some market watchers. “Not only did year-end 2006 digital sales fall short of our expectations, more concerning is the deceleration in growth during the fourth quarter,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research, wrote in… 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 »

Baltimore – If you find yourself surrounded by 40,000 fans, 40 bands, three stages and 85 degrees, you’ve apparently waded chest-deep into the summer concert season. For years, folks east of the Mississippi have welcomed the start of that season at the HFStival, now staged in Baltimore after thriving for 15 years as a Washington, D.C., staple. Quite a bit’s changed since WHFS-FM started ushering in the arrival of summer – most notably the station itself, which disappeared from the dial earlier this year. It has since resurfaced as an online entity and also takes over Baltimore’s Live 105.7 on… 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 »

Even though it came out in Australia a year ago, the self-titled debut by the Dissociatives just hit U.S. record stores last week. The duo features former angsty teenage frontman Daniel Johns of Silverchair and dance-music maven Paul Mac – but the result isn’t what you might think. “Because of Paul’s background and my background, a lot of people expected it to be a dance-rock collaboration, which we’re trying desperately to dispel,” Johns said. “We’re not really fans of that genre.” Instead, they set out to make the perfect pop record. “Some people jokingly referred to it as a ‘happy… Read more »

PARK CITY, Utah – Deciding to shelve an album is never easy, but it helps when writing another one only takes a month. “I wrote a record and I didn’t like it so much,” Dashboard Confessional singer Chris Carrabba said recently. “It didn’t feel like the right songs for where I’m at in my life right now, so I started again about four weeks ago. Now I’ve got another one and I like it a lot – I can talk about these stories truthfully for the next two years. I didn’t think the last batch would mean something to me… Read more »

Not only does Usher win, like, every single award at every single awards show, he’s also sold almost eight million(!) copies of his disc Confessions – easily sliding him into first place among the year’s top sellers. While the top slot on the Brit list was only won by about 500 sales, Usher dwarfed his competition, with #2 going to Norah Jones, who sold just under half as many copies of her latest effort, Feels Like Home. Eminem’s Encore made an impressive entrance at #3, not bad considering it only hit the streets in November, while Usher and Norah have… Read more »

2004 may go down in history as the year of the runaway breast. Yes, there was Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash, but don’t forget Tara Reid’s absent-minded red carpet dress-drop or the uproar over a sexy “Desperate Housewives” promo for Monday Night Football. Add in Colin Farrell’s missing manhood from the movie “A Home at the End of the World” and the curtailed puppet sex in “Team America: World Police,” and this was the year of nudity both seen and imagined. MOST INFAMOUS WARDROBE MALFUNCTION: Janet is disqualified because nobody believes it was an accident. So the prize goes to… Read more »

New York – Dreams of world domination must be hard for MTV executives to avoid when they host a party at the Kremlin, with a Russian diva and Queen dueting on “We Will Rock You” and Russian soldiers performing a hip-hop dance routine. MTV Networks will reach a milestone in February when the turn of a switch starts an MTV outlet in Africa, the company’s 100th channel worldwide and first based on that continent. Most of its American audience is probably unaware of the extent to which MTV and its sister networks have blanketed the world in an aggressive expansion… Read more »

Nashville – Billed as the Best of Both Worlds, the ill-fated co-headlining tour by Jay-Z and R. Kelly ended up with two worlds colliding. The tour’s implosion – at least as a co-headlining attraction – puts a damper on what could have been one of the year’s top-grossing R&B music outings, with a gross potential of about $30 million. Jay-Z is continuing without Kelly under the banner of Jay-Z & Friends. With such marquee artists as Mary J. Blige and P. Diddy in tow, the tour could still be a big winner. But few would argue that Best of Both… Read more »