Search Results for: 2007

Kings of Leon will be among the headliners of this year’s Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals, Billboard Magazine is reporting. Depeche Mode the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction are also playing Lollapalooza, which takes place in Chicago’s Grant Park Aug. 7-9, the Chicago Tribune reports and Billboard’s sources confirm. Both events are produced by Austin, Texas-based C3 Productions. The full Lollapalooza lineup announcement is expected in April. Among the known top headliners for this year’s Lollapalooza, Kings of Leon are the only band that wasn’t around when the event debuted in 1991 as a traveling, multi-city festival. The Nashville-based… Read more »

Last week’s news that Virgin Megastores in New York’s Union Square and San Francisco were closing was evidently the tip of a very sharp iceberg. Billboard reports today that the multi-media chain’s only three remaining stores in Denver, Orlando and Los Angeles will also be shuttered by this summer. In a move that almost predicated the closures of the Virgin chain, Virgin Entertainment Group North America was acquired by a pair of real estate companies in 2007, Vornado and Related Cos., mostly because those companies were interested in Virgin’s prime locations. The music stores were paying well below-market value per-square-foot… Read more »

One night in the late 1990s, Conan O’Brien was hanging out in a Detroit bowling alley after shooting a remote segment with Ted Nugent (”I rode around in the woods with him, we had a guitar duel and then fired guns,” he recalls). “I have this vague memory of these really cool kids coming over and hanging out with us,” he says. “I knew nothing about them or what they did.” A few years later, O’Brien learned he had met Jack and Meg White that day when he popped into a Saturday Night Live rehearsal to check out the White… Read more »

The lead singer of Australian rock band INXS J.D. Fortune, who was picked to replace the late Michael Hutchence in a contest on a reality TV show, said he has been fired without warning from the band. Fortune, 35, a Canadian rock singer was living out of his car when he won the CBS network’s 2005 reality TV series “Rock Star:INXS.” He became the frontman for the six-man band, taking the place of 37-year-old Hutchence who was found dead in a Sydney hotel room in November 1997 with a coroner ruling he had committed suicide. With Fortune, INXS released the… Read more »

A group that collects royalties for music artists and recording companies has agreed to reduce rates for thousands of commercial radio stations that also play songs over the Internet.   Internet radio station operators had complained that rates originally set by the federal Copyright Royalty Board in 2007 could essentially force them to shut down. The new deal lowers those rates by about 16 percent in 2009 and 2010. The stations will now pay $1.50 for every song heard by 1,000 listeners in 2009, rising to $2.50 per 1,000 listeners in 2015. The agreement between the National Assn. of Broadcasters… Read more »

Christopher Hicks has been appointed Executive Vice President, Def Jam Recordings, it was announced today by Antonio “L.A.” Reid, Chairman, Island Def Jam Music Group.   In his new position, Mr. Hicks will assume overall responsibility for the acquisition and develop ­ment of new talent, overseeing producers and guiding the creative vision and brand recognition of the legendary Def Jam label as it celebrates its 25th year anniversary in 2009.   Mr. Hicks will report directly to Mr. Reid, and to Steve Bartels,   President & COO, Island Def Jam Music Group, on operational matters.   Mr. Hicks will be… Read more »

It’s early January, and occasional downpours drench thousands of fans as they file into Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium for Sound & Speed, an annual event featuring country stars and NASCAR drivers. Camo-clad devotees and their children, some dressed in miniature racing suits, line up for an autograph and a picture. The event is the perfect mix for those who consider autographs from Dierks Bentley and Dale Earnhardt Jr to be treasured booty. NASCAR fans and country music fans are eager to rub elbows with drivers and artists alike, something both circuits are eager to take advantage of. The 2009 race season… Read more »

Google  entered the radio advertising business with grand ambitions three years ago. On Thursday, those ambitions fizzled. Google said it was ending its radio project, Google Audio Ads, because it had failed to live up to expectations. Up to 40 people are expected to lose their jobs. It was the second time in two months that Google had killed a program meant to expand its advertising business offline, suggesting that the appeal of Google’s automated model for selling ads may be far more limited than the company once hoped. The company had planned to revolutionize the way radio ads were… Read more »

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke. Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment. She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by. “I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort… Read more »

Amazon.com Inc., pushing further into the digital distribution of books, unveiled a thinner and faster version of its Kindle electronic-book reader but raised controversy among publishers and others with a new text-reading feature. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos displays the Kindle 2 e-book reader at an event Monday. “Our vision is every book ever printed in any language all available in 60 seconds,” said Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos at a Monday press conference in a New York library. The Seattle company also said it has a new work by best-selling novelist Stephen King, called “Ur,” which will be available exclusively… Read more »