Search Results for: plan b entertainment

American rap-rock band Linkin Park has received the government’s permission to perform next month in Malaysia – but it won’t be allowed to scream, jump around or wear shorts onstage. The Ministry of Culture and Arts said Wednesday it has approved plans for the band to hold a concert on Oct. 15 at a 50,000-seat stadium in this conservative, predominantly Muslim Southeast Asian country. “The government believes the performance will provide an alternative type of entertainment in Malaysia,” the ministry said, while warning that the rock stars must abide by a strict code of “artist performance ethics.” “Male artists must… Read more »

French telecommunications and entertainment conglomerate Vivendi Universal reported a narrower loss for the first half of the year and its chairman said he hopes to complete the planned sale of its U.S. entertainment assets to General Electric Co.’s NBC division in the second half of next year. Vivendi reported Wednesday it lost €632 million ($723 million) in the January-June period in contrast to a loss of €12.31 billion in the first half of 2002. The company has been selling assets to trim its staggering debt. Vivendi’s operating profit dropped 27 percent in the first half to €1.68 billion ($1.92 billion)… Read more »

Making a case for hard music, stadium tours in general and Metallica’s own status as a headliner, Summer Sanitarium 2003 goes down as a winner, taking in $46.4 million and drawing 683,472 headbangers to 19 dates. The tour reaffirms the box-office clout of Metallica, which is currently in the planning stages of an extensive headlining tour next year, tentatively set to begin in March. Metallica last toured in 2000, taking in $40.5 million from only 20 shows. About a dozen of those concerts were Summer Sanitarium dates, featuring Kid Rock, Korn and others. This year’s Summer Sanitarium lineup featured Limp… Read more »

The week the music industry brought suit against 261 users of Internet file-sharing services, Donald L. McCabe was in St. Louis to talk about a different form of digital copying. Mr. McCabe, a Rutgers University professor, has made a career of studying the cheating of American high school and college students. His most recent study found that cheating was spreading almost like file-sharing. Of more than 18,000 students surveyed, 38 percent said they had lifted material from the Internet for use in papers in the last year. More striking to Mr. McCabe, 44 percent said they considered this sampling no… Read more »

Summer touring partners Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera each saw their latest solo albums reach the triple-platinum plateau in August. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified Timberlake’s “Justified” (Jive) and Aguilera’s “Stripped” (RCA) for U.S. shipments of 3 million copies. Both albums debuted and peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. The artists recently wrapped their co-headlining Justified & Stripped U.S. summer tour and now have set their sights on Europe. Aguilera will begin her own two-month tour there Sept. 12 in Greece with Japanese and Australian dates to follow. Timberlake will tour the region beginning Nov.… Read more »

Universal Music Group’s strategy of lowering its CD prices is good news for music fans, but some traditional music retailers on Thursday worried the move may damage their business. A day after Universal announced a cut on the wholesale price of most of its CDs and an end to advertising discounts, retailers large and small began assessing how the new pricing plan would affect them. Large retailers such as Borders, BestBuy, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Amazon.com generally reserved judgment Thursday on the change, although several noted it could be an effective consumer lure. Several of them declined to discuss how… Read more »

Vivendi Universal’s (V) Universal Music Group plans to sharply lower the consumer cost for compact discs, in an effort to bring customers back into retail stores and boost music sales. The move comes as the music industry grapples with a continuing decline in retail sales in the face of rampant piracy and other problems. In a press release Wednesday, Universal Music said it will reduce wholesale prices and implement a $12.98 manufacturer suggested retail price on virtually all of its top-line CDs in the U.S. The plan will eliminate MSRPs of as much as $18.98, and the company believes retailers… Read more »

U.S. television network NBC won Vivendi Universal’s marathon show-business auction on Tuesday with a proposed merger to create a new entertainment industry giant worth more than $40 billion. NBC, a unit of General Electric Co., clinched exclusive negotiating rights to finalize a deal that would give it a major film studio, more cable channels and theme parks to vault the No. 1 U.S. broadcast network closer to the ranks of such global titans as Walt Disney Co. and Viacom Inc. If the deal is completed, the new company, to be called NBC-Universal, would include Vivendi’s Universal Pictures, the Hollywood studio… Read more »

Hollywood will win the war against illegal downloading but the battlefield will be littered with casualties, including the DVD and CD formats as physical means of distributing video and audio, according to a Forrester Research study released Tuesday. The study predicts that in five years, CDs and DVDs will start to go the way of the vinyl LP as 33% of music sales and 19% of home video revenue shifts to streaming and downloading. Part of that stems from the continued proliferation of illegal file trading, which has caused an estimated $700 million of lost CD sales since 1999. But… Read more »

The Jagermeister Fall Music Tour is coming, and heavy metal icons, Slayer, will lead the assault! Produced and promoted by Clear Channel Entertainment, the tour will let loose on October 8th in Minneapolis, MN and finish up in Los Angeles on November 29th. Slayer’s recent release of their live DVD, War at the Warfield (American Recordings/UME), debuted at #3 on the Billboard charts in its first week. Their highly anticipated box set, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse (American Recordings/UME), due out on November 18, 2003, commemorates Slayer’s 20th anniversary as the undisputed thrash/punk/metal kings and will include classic Slayer tracks taken… Read more »