Search Results for: Alan Day

Country star Shania Twain didn’t get her wish when she won three prizes at the 32nd annual Juno Awards, Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys, over the weekend. After winning the Country Recording of the Year nod at the untelevised ceremony in Ottawa on Saturday, she had said she would prefer not to win anything at the next day’s televised event because she wanted to concentrate on her role as host. Alas, she ended up nabbing the Artist of the Year and Fan Choice Awards the next day. “I’m here to host the show and perform,” Twain said Saturday at a… Read more »

Foo Fighters frontman/rock drummer extraordinaire Dave Grohl is showing up everywhere – his latest gig is as the drummer on the new Killing Joke album, Billboard reports in the April 12 issue. The project, which will be out in June on Sony worldwide, is tentatively titled “Axis of Evil.” Produced by Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, the album is the veteran U.K. rock act’s first since 1996’s “Democracy.” It turns out that Grohl is a huge Killing Joke fan; he met the group’s leader, Jaz Coleman, in New Zealand recently and agreed to play on the album. They recorded the… Read more »

Nearly 7,000 music industry representatives and more than 1,000 bands are descending on Austin this week for the 17th annual South by Southwest Music Conference and Festival. Even for a place that calls itself the “Live Music Capitol of the World,” the planes, buses and vans arriving full of shaggy-haired men and tattooed women carrying guitars and drums adds a new dimension to the city. The musicians and industry representatives have come for four days of industry panels, discussions and trade shows. To balance out the shop talk, the festival features four intense nights of live music with 1,000 acts… Read more »

The music of pop-jazz chanteuse Norah Jones garnered seven Grammy awards Sunday night, catapulting her past crowd favorite Bruce Springsteen and his three awards for the Sept. 11-inspired “The Rising.” As unknown as Springsteen was acclaimed before the last year, Jones won four individual Grammys while her producer, engineers and the writer of her hit “Don’t Know Why” were honored as well. “I never ever thought that the music I made would become popular music, so this is amazing,” Jones said as she picked up an award for best pop vocal album. She also won for best female pop vocal,… Read more »

Multiple Grammy nominee Avril Lavigne picked up six nominations Wednesday for the Junos, Canada’s music awards, including new artist and album of the year for her hit debut release “Let Go.” Shania Twain, who will host the April 6 ceremony at the Corel Center in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, received five mentions, including album (“Up!”) and artist of the year. Four nominations each went to Celine Dion, Our Lady Peace and Remy Shand. Dion is squaring off against Alanis Morissette, Twain, Shand and Daniel Belanger for artist of the year. Our Lady Peace is vying for group of the… Read more »

A top music executive said on Saturday that telecommunications companies and Internet service providers (ISPs) will be asked to pay up for giving their customers access to free song-swapping sites. The music industry is in a tailspin with global sales of CDs expected to fall six percent in 2003, its fourth consecutive annual decline. A major culprit, industry watchers say, is online piracy. Now, the industry wants to hit the problem at its source – Internet service providers. “We will hold ISPs more accountable,” said Hillary Rosen, chairman and CEO the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), in her keynote… Read more »

Instead of visiting a bounty on any single artist, the nominations announced Tuesday for the 45th Annual Grammy Awards were sprinkled around in an unusually equitable manner-eight musicians tied for the most nominations with sounds as diverse the elegiac rock of Bruce Springsteen, the gossamer, jazzy blends of newcomer Norah Jones and the whipsaw rhymes of Eminem. In year’s past, a glut of nominations would push as single artist such as Lauryn Hill or Carlos Santana above the fold, but this year the flattened field presented more subtle story lines amid the sprawl of 104 categories. Among those themes: The… Read more »

In more bad news for the music industry, album sales declined for the second straight year in 2002, down 10.7 percent from the previous year. Nielsen SoundScan reported this week that 2002 album sales fell from 763 million in 2001 to 681 million. Overall music sales in 2001 had been down 5 percent – the first decline since SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991. Hilary Rosen, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, blamed the decline mainly on illegal downloading of music off the Internet. “There’s no question that the availability of free music on the… Read more »

Hip-hop phenomenon Eminem trounced all comers in 2002 and tentatively claimed top album of the year honors after selling more than 7.4 million copies of “The Eminem Show” (Interscope/Shady) in the U.S., according to figures released Thursday by Nielsen SoundScan. The album’s performance defied a sharply downward trend in the industry as a whole, as CD album sales tumbled by 9% to 624.2 million for the year through Dec. 22. In fact, Slim Shady beat his nearest rival, Universal Music Group label mate Nelly by more than 2.6 million discs. Nelly’s “Nellyville” (Universal) shifted just under 4.8 million albums and… Read more »

A man who racked up nearly $33,000 on credit cards while using Will Smith’s identity can forget about any independence days for the next three years. Carlos Lomax of Duquesne, who pleaded guilty in September to one count of using unauthorized credit cards, was sentenced Thursday to 37 months in federal prison. Assistant U.S. Attorney Margaret Picking said Lomax, 42, opened 14 bogus credit accounts at Pittsburgh-area stores as Willard C. Smith, the full name of the actor-rapper who’s starred in movies including “Independence Day,” without Smith’s authorization. All the accounts used Lomax’s home address, where authorities in January found… Read more »