Search Results for: Bad Company

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 »

Maybe honesty really is the best policy… for placing high on a Billboard chart. The unabashedly sincere Dashboard Confessional’s third studio album, A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar, will come in at #2 on next week’s Billboard albums chart. Sales of more than 122,000 copies affords the follow-up to 2001’s The Places You Have Come to Fear Most a first runner-up slot, right behind Alan Jackson’s Greatest Hits Volume II. The most popular country singer of the last decade after Garth Brooks sold more than 328,000 copies of his third best-of set, according to SoundScan, to place above… Read more »

Parents, roommates – even grandparents – are being targeted in the music industry’s new campaign to track computer users who share songs over the Internet, bringing the threat of expensive lawsuits to more than college kids. “Within five minutes, if I can get hold of her, this will come to an end,” said Gordon Pate of Dana Point, California, when told by The Associated Press that a federal subpeona had been issued over his daughter’s music downloads. The subpoena required the family’s Internet provider to hand over Pate’s name and address to lawyers for the recording industry. Pate, 67, confirmed… Read more »

Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong is turning to Charles Manson for salvation, and he’s bringing Kelly Osbourne and members of Blink-182, Green Day and AFI along for the ride. When he finishes this year’s Vans Warped Tour, Armstrong will put the finishing touches on the upcoming stop-motion animated film “Live Freaky! Die Freaky!” in which Manson surfaces in a post-apocalyptic wasteland to guide a group of survivors who are desperately searching for a spiritual leader. Armstrong is producing the film for his Hellcat Pictures company. The movie was written and directed by John Roecker, an independent filmmaker in Los Angeles who… Read more »

The punk world is abuzz: Boston’s infamous hardcore Celts the Dropkick Murphys’ latest album Blackout (the second since letting their numbers swell to oh, seven) is the deciding factor: does it manage to successfully blend old school punk rock anger with their leaning trend towards… folk? “It certainly has,” reassures frontman Al Barr. “It went unbelievably well. A lot of people thought we’d be too busy putting out fires inside the band with that many people, but this album was really collaborative. The same core of people did the majority of writing and I’ve been starting to get more involved… Read more »

The music industry may have begun to figure out how to sell digital downloads, but making money from them is another story. As the 99 cent digital singles model begins to take root across the industry through services like Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store, Liquid Audio, Rhapsody and a host of others set to bow for the PC this fall, industry executives and artist representatives are questioning whether the pricing model makes sense financially. With all parties involved angling for nickels and dimes in the average download sale, labels, artists and service providers all agree on at least one thing:… Read more »

Ticket sales are down, and big tours are scaling back to smaller venues. It looks to be a long, hot summer for the touring industry. On the cusp of the industry’s peak period, a number of high-profile tours and festivals have already hit snags, among them highly touted outings from Mariah Carey, the Field Day Music Festival, Lollapalooza, and Beck and Dashboard Confessional. Faced with a crowded tour market combined with high ticket prices, permit hassles, a sluggish economy and poor buzz, these tours and a handful of others have either had to scale back the size of the venues… Read more »

In late April, Madonna gave a rare in-store concert before 400 fans to plug her new American Life album. Outside the event, which took place at Tower Records in New York’s Greenwich Village, another 2,000-plus fans thronged. For years, Tower has harnessed such star power to burnish its credentials as a purveyor of hipness. “It was the buzz around town,” boasts store manager David Montes of the Madonna love-in. But the splashy appearance obscured a harsh backstage truth: Tower Records is in such deep trouble that its parent, privately held MTS Inc. in West Sacramento, has put the company on… Read more »

They don’t have a record deal. They don’t have a music publishing deal. But they are on their way to having a hit single with “Set Me Free” off “The Hulk” soundtrack. Collectively, they’ve sold 70 million albums worldwide. Velvet Revolver’s lineup is stocked with the bad boys of rock supergroups, including Guns N’ Roses vets Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, David Kushner of Suicidal Tendencies and former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. Thursday night, they play their first official show – a free, fans-only, short set after an international news conference – at the El Rey in… Read more »

These days, try putting on a CD by your favorite rapper without hearing an endless series of plugs for Burberry, Air Force Ones, Alizé, Maybach, you name it. But are hip-hop’s ubiquitous product mentions just about artists chronicling their high-rollin’ lifestyles, or have the forces of marketing worked their way into your favorite rapper’s tunes? What’s next, a hit track written about Hummers paid for by the car’s manufacturer? Well, maybe. “Unless someone is paying me a billion dollars or offering equity, we don’t play that,” Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash said of writing products into a song on request.… Read more »