Search Results for: folk

She’s got a friend. James Taylor said he will give a California woman a brand new music player loaded with his songs to replace the one she said she had to give up to a taxi driver when her credit card was declined after a trip to the airport last month. Natalie Lenhart, 20, said officers at John F. Kennedy International Airport made her give the $140 iPod nano to the driver as payment for the $49 ride from Manhattan on Dec. 8. The driver said he’d return her iPod for the fare. Lenhart’s red iPod was loaded with oldies,… Read more »

The Zune, Microsoft’s portable music player that attempted to wrestle away some of Apple’s digital music dominance, may be ready to “throw in the towel.” The Financial Times spoke to Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who said the company might discontinue the device after it failed to achieve a fraction of the popularity the iPod has attained. Instead, Bill Gates and co. will focus on developing a “general purpose” device, kind of like an iPhone or that Blackberry we see so many commercials for. The Zune arrived with high hopes in November 2006, boasting Wi-Fi capability and FM radio –… Read more »

The industry gets upset when anyone calls this a “tax” so I’ll use the “voluntary license” term, even though tax is much more accurate. A true voluntary license wouldn’t require everyone having a certain provider to opt-in, but that’s exactly what this plan would require. In fact, as the slides indicate, eventually it would basically require all ISPs to “opt-in” forcing all of their members to “opt-in.” Suddenly, everyone has to pay. That’s not a voluntary license. It’s a tax. However, even if we step back and pretend it’s really a voluntary license, and even if we grant the premise… Read more »

Start the countdown clock on MTV’s countdown era: “Total Request Live” will soon shut down after 10 years on the air. The music video show will conclude in a two-hour special on a Saturday afternoon in November, Dave Sirulnick, executive producer of “TRL,” said Monday. He stressed that the show wasn’t ending for good, but felt now was the right time to give it a break after an unprecedented run on the cable music channel. “We want to close this era of `TRL’ in a big celebratory way, and 10 is a great number,” Sirulnick said. “And 10 is the… Read more »

Think of it as mixtapes made by famous people. The North Carolina-based indie record label Merge is launching a limited-edition series of CDs curated by famous folks like Saturday Night Live’s Amy Poehler, David Byrne, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, novelist Jonathan Lethem and others. The 14 discs of SCORE! Merge Records: The First 20 Years will feature music from the label’s catalog and begin rolling out through 2009. The subscription-only series will also benefit causes chosen by the celebs. The label has released music from Bright Eye’s Conor Oberst, Arcade FIre, the Magnetic Fields, Superchunk, Zooey Deschanel’s duo She & Him… Read more »

It was better late than never for Prince. The Purple One may have showed up at emerging singer Janelle Monáe’s show last night at L.A.’s Viper Room, but he didn’t arrive until an hour after she was done. So instead of coming into the club, Prince held court in his car. Janelle joined him for a little chitchat in the backseat. Slow down with your dirty assumptions. I’ve been assured it’s completely platonic between the two… Prince appears to have taken a shine to the young, funky, Atlanta-based singer and recently reached out to her to offer career advice, according… Read more »

The red carpet swiftly turned into a red river, but we knew it would take more than a soggy strip of flooring material to put a damper on the MuchMusic Video Awards. An early-evening deluge timed perfectly to truncate the annual, big pre-show build-up to last night’s MMVAs ceremony at Much headquarters on Queen West nevertheless added a new urgency to the usual hysteria that splays around Queen and John at this time of year. There was a real sense of brewing terror in the air on the carpet while everyone who’d gathered outside the old CHUM-City building — the… Read more »

Mötley Crüe has kick-started legal action against another former manager. The “Shout at the Devil” purveyors have filed a lawsuit against Burt Stein and his companies B Entertainment and Gold Mountain Entertainment, alleging the companies screwed the band out of large sums of money by putting the manager’s interests ahead of the Crüe. The suit, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, claims Stein, who also represents one of the individual bandmembers, “stalled and obstructed” talks Mötley Crüe had with various music-industry folk about recording a new album and hitting the road in 2008. Among the other allegations, Stein also… Read more »

As the recorded music business seemingly careens toward oblivion, John Hiatt is standing on the sidelines having a good laugh. It’s not as if the singer-songwriter has been unscathed by the industry’s decade-long capitulation to piracy. Each of his last three albums sold 30,000 copies less than the one before. His last release, 2005’s “Master of Disaster,” moved 78,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But as he sagely pointed out during a recent breakfast, “I think I’m not the only one. I think we’re doing OK.” That very day his 18th album, “Same Old Man” (New… Read more »

Harp magazine, which folded last month, is at least the third music magazine to cease publishing in 2008, joining alt-country title No Depression and indie rock mag Resonance in the dead pool. For a certain section of the indie world focused on a more mature, college-educated demographic, the loss of Harp and No Depression hit especially hard. “Those two outlets really spoke to our consumer,” says John Biondolillo, general manager at Dave Matthews’ ATO Records, which handles such critical darlings as singer/songwriters Patty Griffin and David Gray. Josh Wittman, group marketing director at Redeye Distribution and Yep Roc Records, home… Read more »