This week: Lucifer, Supergirl, Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics, Marvel’s Runaways, Lethal Weapon, The Flash, Will & Grace, Blackish, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Chicago Med, Kevin (Probably) Saves the World, Riverdale, The Big Bang Theory, The Crown, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Outlander
TV stations across the U.S. started cutting their analog signals Friday morning, ending a 60-year run for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service. The Federal Communications Commission put 4,000 operators on standby for calls from confused viewers, and set up demonstration centers in several cities. Volunteer groups and local government agencies were helping elderly viewers set up digital converter boxes that keep older TVs functioning. Any set hooked up to cable or a satellite dish is unaffected. “When you’re alone like me, that’s my partner,” Patricia Bruchalski, 82, said about her TV.… Read more »
These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort… Read more »
Rap musicians and top record label executives defended the hip-hop business Tuesday, telling lawmakers it is wrong to single out the genre for congressional reprobation. Lavell Crump, who goes by the name David Banner, told the house consumer protection subcommittee that picking on rap unfairly singles out the black community. “When it comes down to it, it’s just a song,” Crump said. “Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of California, but in his movies he killed half of Cambodia and he went to Mars and blew up Mars . . . but that’s OK because he’s a white man and he’s an… Read more »
It has finally come to this: labels are simply giving their music away. A new Web site named SpiralFrog.com allows visitors – with label approval – to download music free of charge. It launched Monday in the U.S. and Canada after a beta-testing period. The fine site features more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos, and promises hundreds of thousands more soon. It makes money through advertising, rather than by the 99-cent downloads popularized by Apple’s iTunes. The service, founded by Joe Mohen, pays record companies part of its advertising revenue. Thus far, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, the… Read more »
Some of the world’s biggest names in music were all about Saving Our Selves this weekend. SOS, of course, referring to the campaign being touted Saturday across the globe at the seven-continent, 24-hour Live Earth concert extravaganza, a worldwide shout-out to individuals, political leaders, corporations and every other entity capable of helping put a stop to the environmental scourge that is global warming. In a partnership with Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and other U.S.-based and international organizations, Live 8 executive producer Kevin Wall put together a bill that included the Police, Madonna, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica,… Read more »
With freedom comes responsibility. While fans and some critics cheered iTunes’ Friday roll-out of iTunes Plus – which offers songs from the EMI catalog sans digital rights management but at a premium price – you can bet that Apple wouldn’t give up DRM without getting something in return, and that something is information about you. Just days after the new downloads became available on iTunes, tech bloggers began furiously jumping on what seemed like a security system that embeds the customer’s name and Apple I.D./e-mail address in the purchased tracks. While Apple deferred comment on the matter, experts downplayed the… Read more »
Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying — out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target’s ad circular. How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site — or whether Nickelback gets no mention? Apple has jettisoned… Read more »
Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl flash lasted less than three seconds, but the impact continues to ripple through Viacom, the media giant that broadcast the game. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, right-wing radio commentators and outraged citizens are calling for stricter decency standards – and the artists and executives who make a living from edgy music, performances and videos are in retreat. MTV in particular, which produced the Super Bowl halftime show, is in the midst of a wide-scale re-evaluation of its musical, news and dramatic content. Within a week of the game, MTV – no stranger to criticism, most recently… Read more »
Pop legend Michael Jackson on Monday slammed a new bill that seeks prison time for file-swappers, arguing that music fans are the ones who drive the success of the music industry. “I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail,” Jackson said in response to legislation introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday by John Conyers (D.-Mich.) and Howard Berman (D.-Calif.) that would make illegal file swapping a felony. The Authors, Consumer and Computer Owners Protection and Security Act of 2003… Read more »
