Search Results for: mest

San Francisco – America’s students are back to school, but it seems they have yet to learn their lesson about file sharing. Despite the efforts of digital music services, record company litigation, “spoofing” technology and legitimate offerings at various universities, illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer networks has risen since college students returned to their high-speed Internet connections this fall. According to Los Angeles-based P2P market research firm BigChampagne, the back-to-school months coincided with the typical spike of usage on file-swapping networks, with average simultaneous peak users totaling 5.7 million in the United States in October, edging up from 5.4 million… Read more »

What fresh hell hath the Internet wrought this week? Why, it’s another letter from Britney Spears. Fresh off a Fiji honeymoon with hubby Kevin Federline, the pop tart posted a sequel to her “letter of truth”, discussing everything from taking a time-out from her musical career, her desire to become a mommy, her enrollment in art classes and how she can’t wait to start decorating her new digs. “I’m just getting back from my honeymoon and it was absolutely breathtaking,” Spears gushes as the letter begins. “This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.” In the latest dispatch,… Read more »

Los Angeles – Will it be a blue Christmas in the music business? The first eight months of 2004 were a romp, when labels and retailers were measuring their progress against the soft numbers from the first two trimesters of 2003. The question looming then was how numbers would hold up when we got to September, which was the point last year when same-week increases bloomed for the first time in almost three years. The answer so far? Not so great. Even with collective sales of this week’s top 10 on the Billboard 200 outweighing that from the comparable week… Read more »

BURBANK, Calif. – Warner Bros. Pictures has announced plans for a special nationwide sneak preview of “The Polar Express” on Saturday, November 6 at 4:00 p.m. The picture will preview in approximately 500 venues and in specially selected IMAX houses in IMAX 3D. The announcement was made today by Dan Fellman, President, Domestic Distribution, Warner Bros. Pictures. The highly anticipated film stars two-time Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks and is directed by Academy Award-winner Robert Zemeckis. Combining classic storytelling with cutting-edge filmmaking, “The Polar Express” debuts performance capture, a highly advanced version of motion-capture technology developed and tailored to meet Zemeckis’… Read more »

How much would you pay for “The Ultimate Britney Experience?” The bidding starts at $5,000. Boston’s Onyx Hotel, official hotel of Spears’ Onyx Hotel Tour, is holding an online auction for “The Ultimate Britney Experience.” The proceeds from the auction will go to the Britney Spears Foundation, which donates money to underprivileged children. The deadline for bidding is June 11. The winner of the auction and his or her guest will meet Spears backstage at her June 23 Boston show. The lucky fans will also receive two round-trip domestic airline tickets to Boston from anywhere in the United States, two… Read more »

When speaking this month to a representative from Soundscan, the company that provides much of the data for the Billboard Top 200 Chart, I learned things that would contradict reported statements by the RIAA. Mainly that US labels have had a significant reduction in sales over the past three years. Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, responded personally, put his rebuttals on the record and in the process exposed intriguing insight into the way the RIAA calculates “losses.” Soundscan is a service owned by Nielsen, the company that computes TV ratings. Soundscan uses the barcodes on CDs to register sales… Read more »

Online music company MusicNet and digital video services company Cflix on Tuesday launched a digital music service for colleges and universities, with their first agreement a two-month pilot at Yale. MusicNet said it will power a service called Ctrax that will provide low-priced music downloads at up to 20 U.S. universities in the fall of this year. Ctrax is being offered by Cflix, which delivers educational and entertainment video-on-demand services to universities. Ctrax will offer more than 700,000 songs from MusicNet’s library and features customized for each school. The files will be stored locally at each school, making downloads faster.… Read more »

Fans at a Puddle of Mudd show in Toledo, Ohio, got a lot less than they bargained for Sunday night when frontman Wes Scantlin cut the band’s set short, announced he was too wasted to play and eventually found himself in police custody facing a disorderly conduct charge. Those in attendance said that a scant four songs into the band’s performance at Headliners club Scantlin’s bandmates walked off the stage, leaving a stumbling, hostile Scantlin alone. According to concertgoers, Scantlin was, by his own admission to the crowd, “too f–ed up” to perform. Still, he remained onstage for half an… Read more »

Access to the new, improved and perfectly legitimate version of the Napster file-sharing software was given to students at Penn State University this semester as a way to show them that downloading music doesn’t have to run afoul of copyright laws. More than 17,000 students living in on-campus residence halls were offered access Napster 2.0’s premium service, which allows for unlimited streaming and tethered downloading (playback on only one machine) of the more than 500,000 songs comprising the Napster library. Should they want to burn a downloaded song, it would cost them about 99 cents, the industry standard for a… Read more »

Platinum rockers Simple Plan are ringing in the new year by celebrating the rise of their debut album No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls ascent into the Billboard Top 40. The band’s album officially charted at #35 this week on the Billboard Top 200, marking the band’s highest charting position of their entire career. Since the release of their album in March 2002, Simple Plan is considered by many to be one of the biggest artist development stories in recent history. No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls first entered the Billboard Top 200 57 weeks ago and has continued to move up… Read more »