Search Results for: Bad Company

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 »

The long-rumored restructuring at Sony Music is expected to take a hefty bite out of the record giant’s sales staff, with some form of combination of sales forces at flagship Sony labels Epic and Columbia to be part of the deal, sources close to the company said. Exact figures are still being worked out, but the sales cuts will likely be well into the dozens when the smoke clears. Recent reports put the total number of expected layoffs around 1,000 staffers – though Sony insiders insist that number is high. Sales cuts would follow a general trend in the industry… Read more »

Rap mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, one of contemporary music’s most successful entrepreneurs, has signed a distribution deal with Vivendi Universal’s Universal Records rather than sell the Bad Boy label he says is worth $100 million, the partners said on Thursday. The three-year deal leaves Universal paying marketing and promotion costs and giving Combs an undisclosed upfront fee, which analysts saw as a way for the producer of such hit acts as Faith Evans and the late Notorious B.I.G. to get the backing of the biggest record maker without selling his own company in a down market. Terms of the… Read more »

Michael Jackson said Thursday he felt betrayed by a “terrible and unfair” TV documentary about his life, in which the King of Pop revealed he sometimes lets children sleep in his bed. In a statement issued Thursday by his London representative, Jackson said British journalist Martin Bashir broke the trust placed in him, and added he felt “more betrayed than perhaps ever before.” Bashir spent eight months making the 90-minute program, which was to be shown in the United States at 8 p.m. EST Thursday on ABC’s “20/20.” “I trusted Martin Bashir to come into my life and that of… Read more »

Sixty years after his birth, one of the most important artists ever to emerge from Seattle is – at least officially – almost invisible here. There’s no Jimi Hendrix Boulevard, no Hendrix Arena, no Hendrix Elementary School. The only thing the city has done to recognize the man many consider the world’s greatest guitar player is to give him a rock – in the African Savanna exhibit at the Woodland Park Zoo. Biographer Charles Cross of Seattle, who has spent years researching Hendrix for an upcoming book, called the oversight “almost criminal.” “The Seattle city government has never given any… Read more »

‘Tis the season for holiday radio shows. As much a tradition as eggnog, mistletoe and broken resolutions, December always brings a bumper crop of all-star shows in which bands give back to their fans (and the radio stations that play their music) by jetting around the country and serving up short hit-heavy sets. The month of December will be especially star-packed for those living near Indianapolis, San Diego or Philadelphia. If you love Good Charlotte, Coldplay, Destiny’s Child and Queens of the Stone Age, you might want to cash in some frequent flyer miles, because those bands are among a… Read more »

Veteran record executive Clive Davis, whose ouster from Bertelsmann AG’s Arista caused an uproar two years ago, returned to the fold on Tuesday by selling his half of J Records to the company and taking the helm of a combined label group. As Bertelsmann’s music group, BMG, focuses on cutting costs during a prolonged industry downturn, the group said on Tuesday it would buy the 50 percent of Davis’ J Records it did not already own for undisclosed terms and combine it with its legendary RCA Records, home to stars like Christina Aguilera. Davis – pushed out in a management… Read more »

Does hip-hop speak to Pepsi’s “new generation”? Well, it depends on who you ask. Last week, Fox News Channel’s conservative ranter Bill O’Reilly denounced the soda giant for choosing Ludacris to appear in Pepsi ads, calling him a “thug rapper” who “espouses violence, intoxication, and degrading conduct toward women.” Just one day later, Pepsi announced that it was dropping Luda as its spokesperson and apologizing to anyone who was offended by its association with him. This move came despite Pepsi’s own research which had found that teens ranked the soda’s hip-hop spokesperson as popular as any celebrity associated with the… Read more »