Search Results for: Bad Company

Music company EMI Group PLC, home of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Coldplay, said it is merging its Capitol and Virgin labels in the United States to form the Capitol Music Group. The move continues a reorganization at EMI, which earlier this month announced the departure of two top executives and warned investors that full-year sales will be far below expectations. Jason Flom will lead Capitol Music Group as chairman and chief executive, EMI said in a statement Thursday. Flom joined EMI as chief executive of Virgin Records America in November 2005. “The music business shows exciting growth potential,… Read more »

Around the time Brett Gurewitz was launching Epitaph Records in 1981, his father was lecturing him to take guitar lessons. The Bad Religion guitarist and punk-rock entrepreneur never sat down for courses with a guitar instructor, although he did go to school to learn to be a recording engineer. However, no amount of schooling could have prepared Gurewitz for the next 25 years of his life. Epitaph Records brought a new era of punk rock to the masses in 1994 when the Offspring’s “Smash” turned into one of the biggest rock records of the decade. The success of the label’s… Read more »

A new bill introduced in the US Senate this week would force satellite, digital, and Internet radio providers (but not over-the-air radio) to implement measures designed to restrict the ability of listeners to record audio from the services. Called the “Platform Equality and Remedies for Rights Holders in Music Act” (PERFORM), the bill is sponsored by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Joseph Biden (D-DE), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). If the name of the bill sounds familiar, it should. The bill was originally introduced in April 2006 with the support of the RIAA. It died in committee, but the… Read more »

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 »