Search Results for: 2007

Who said you can never go home again? For Dublin-born singer-guitarist Dave King of Irish-American punk rockers Flogging Molly, all it took was a little help from his eventual wife and bandmate, violinist Bridget Regan. “When I heard Bridget playing the fiddle it brought out a lot of feelings in me,” King said through a bright and friendly Irish brogue during a recent phone interview with “I wanted to take that feeling and go back home – not physically of course. It just seemed to all fall together for me.” A lilting mix of traditional Celtic sounds – fiddle, banjo,… Read more »

Multi-platinum Island Records group Fall Out Boy kicks off the new year with “****LIVE IN PHOENIX,” their first long-form CD+DVD two-disc package, set to arrive in stores on April 1st.   The core of the program will be their full-length Honda Civic Tour concert of June 2007 from the Cricket Pavilion in Phoenix, with all 22 songs contained on both the CD and DVD layers. In addition, the DVD layer will include all 8 of Fall Out Boy’s Island Records video clips in chronological order — from their debut single “Sugar, We’re Going Down” (MTV2 Award winner for 2005), “Dance,… Read more »

XM Satellite Radio is partnering with Apple to make XM’s programming available on iPods, according to CEO Nate Davis, who revealed their cooperation while discussing the company’s fourth-quarter results last week. Although Davis said he “wouldn’t call it a strategic relationship,” XM began podcasting content in December, and two XM podcasts are already listed in iTunes’ top 10 podcasts. XM is now working with Apple to make XM content accessible via iTunes. This new distribution plan is part of a broader push to promote XM and recruit subscribers via online channels, at the expense of broadcast and physical retail, which… Read more »

Amid ongoing competitive pressure from Facebook, MySpace is taking its latest shot at entering the music business as other social networking peers, such as Last.fm and imeem, are making big audience gains with ad-supported music offerings. According to sources, MySpace is planning a service that would combine free ad-supported music listening with paid MP3 downloads and music subscriptions. MySpace parent company News Corp. has approached the major labels about forming a joint-venture music site, similar to its partnership with the major Hollywood studios for video site hulu.com. The new service would be operated by MySpace and seemingly be positioned to… Read more »

When rapper Flo Rida set a digital sales record with his single “Low,” which moved 470,000 copies the first week of January despite not being available on an album, it was emblematic of an intriguing trend. Digital hip-hop song sales are at an all-time high, but in terms of digital album commerce, hip-hop is lagging behind other genres. In 2007, of 500.4 million albums sold industry-wide, 10 percent were sold digitally. In comparison, of the 41.7 million rap albums sold, only 7 percent (2.9 million) of those were digital. So far this year (through the week ending February 17), according… Read more »

Mike Smith, the lead singer of the 1960s British band the Dave Clark Five, died on Thursday of pneumonia at an English hospital, his U.S. agent said. Smith, 64, was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday morning with a chest infection resulting from complications of a 2003 spinal cord injury that had left him paralyzed from the waist down, his New York agent, Margo Lewis, said in a statement. His death at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, north of London, came just two weeks before the Dave Clark Five — one of the leading bands of the 1960s “British invasion” — was… Read more »

A judge says she is troubled that rapper Ja Rule has posted thousands of dollars in bonds for two co-defendants in a gun possession case and she wants them to come up with their own bail packages. State Supreme Court Justice Micki Scherer expressed her concern Wednesday at the indictment arraignment of Ja Rule, Dennis Cherry and Mohamed Gamal on gun possession charges. All pleaded not guilty. The judge said the Ja Rule, whose real name is Jeffrey Atkins, “has put himself in the position of perhaps controlling the outcome of the case. I think the potential for it is… Read more »

Apple Inc.’s online iTunes music store is now the number-two music retailer in the U.S. behind Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as measured by unit volume, market researcher NPD Group said Tuesday.NPD said that iTunes moved into second place due to the amount of music it sold during 2007, which was based on a 12-track CD equivalency for song downloads. The market researcher began tracking music sold stateside during the middle of 2006. In the fourth quarter of that year, Best Buy Co. took second place behind Wal-Mart, while Target Corp. took third place and Apple’s iTunes store fourth place, NPD analyst… Read more »

Given the radical image changes that Panic! At The Disco has undergone in the past year, it’s hard not to read the lyrics to its new album’s opening song as a pre-emptive strike against critics. “Oh, how it’s been so long/we’re so sorry we’ve been gone/we were busy writing songs/for you,” bassist Jon Walker sings, by way of apology for the two-and-a-half-year lag between 2005’s “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out” and the new “Pretty. Odd.,” due March 25 via Fueled by Ramen/Atlantic. Then, he launches into lines meant to comfort fans who have no doubt noticed that their favorite… Read more »

More than a dozen recording artists, including the estates of Count Basie and Benny Goodman, sued Universal Music on Friday, saying they had been cheated out of more than $6 million in royalties since 1998. The artists, many of whom signed with recording companies that were later bought by Universal, sued the world’s largest music label for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty in a lawsuit filed in New York State Court. In a statement, Universal, which is owned by the French company Vivendi, denied the allegations. “We believe that these claims are baseless, and we are confident… Read more »