Search Results for: Disney

Every day, the roughly one million people who visit the iTunes Store home page are presented with several dozen albums, TV shows and movie downloads to consider buying — out of the four million such goods the Apple site offers. This prime promotion is analogous to a CD being displayed at the checkout stands of all 940 Best Buy stores or featured on the front page of Target’s ad circular. How do bands get these boosts? Who decides whether Arcade Fire is plugged at the top of the iTunes site — or whether Nickelback gets no mention? Apple has jettisoned… Read more »

At the Jonas Brothers’ family home in New Jersey, a wooden sign over the bathroom door reads “Patience is a virtue.” It’s a lesson the Brothers are lucky to have learned. Though the pop-punk boy band is riding high at iTunes and Radio Disney on the strength of “Year 3000,” the brothers have taken an unexpectedly circuitous route to success. The Jonas Brothers — Nick, 14, Joe, 17, and Kevin, 19 — were born as a band in 2005, when incoming Columbia Records president Steve Greenberg was handed a stack of CDs by Columbia artists with whom he wasn’t familiar.… Read more »

When Fall Out Boy released their third full-length album, From Under the Cork Tree, no one realized just how well the LP would do. It ended up being one of the surprise breakout hits of 2005 and sold more than 2.5 million copies in the U.S. alone – making for much less surprising first-week sales totals for the band’s follow-up effort, Infinity on High. With close to 260,000 copies flying off record store shelves last week, FOB’s Infinity on High has earned the Chicago rockers a career first: a #1 debut on Billboard ‘s albums chart – a debut one… Read more »

Beyonce’s “Irreplaceable” led the Billboard Hot 100 singles charts for an eighth consecutive week Thursday, but barely edged the new single from Fall Out Boy. The pop punk band’s “This Ain’t a Scene, It’s An Arms Race” debuted at No. 2 thanks to 162,000 digital downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan. This is the highest bow for a band since radio-only titles joined the chart in December 1998. The last group to start as well or better was Aerosmith, who debuted at No. 1 under prior Hot 100 rules with “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” in September 1998. In… Read more »

A minor career change for the guitar legend Rolling Stones legend Keith Richards will make an appearance in the next Pirates of the Caribbean flick, the franchise’s producer has revealed. Richards famed rock and roll persona was famously the inspiration for Johnny Depp’s Academy Award-nominated role as Captain Jack Sparrow in the two previous films, and will make a cameo appearance at Sparrow’s father, it is rumoured, for the third outing. Hollywood heavyweight Jerry Bruckheimer confirmed the 63-year-old rocker would be appearing in the latest outing at the ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: World’s End’ during a Walt Disney Corporation press… Read more »

Continuing the sample of pre-show news, there’s word that Viacom has signed on with Apple to offer feature-length movies on the iTunes Store. Viacom, which is the parent company of CBS and Paramount Studios, joins Disney on the iTunes Store. Steve Jobs is expected to announce the addition to the iTunes Store lineup today. The deal will see Viacom only offering catalog titles (that is, movies that have been on DVD for some time), and should thus be seen as a cautious entry into the Apple fray. To date, Apple has sold most catalog movies for $9.99, compared to $14.99… Read more »

High School Musical officially graduated at the top of its class. The surprise monster hit soundtrack accompaniment to the Disney Channel’s tween song-and-dance fest, finished as 2006’s chart valedictorian, selling more than 3.7 million copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released Thursday. In the SoundScan era, the only other soundtracks to finish atop the yearend chart were The Bodyguard in 1993 and Titanic in 1998. Remarkably, High School Musical debuted on the charts way down at number 143 in January 2006. The disc increased its position each week, eventually hitting the top spot on two nonconsecutive weeks in March. It… Read more »

LOS ANGELES – U.S. album sales, which include CDs and digital albums, fell 4.9 percent in 2006 as an increasing number of consumers preferred to download individual songs from the Web, Nielsen SoundScan said on Thursday. While data from the music tracking company showed overall music unit sales rose 19.4 percent last year due to digital downloads, the growth momentum of that category also disappointed some market watchers. “Not only did year-end 2006 digital sales fall short of our expectations, more concerning is the deceleration in growth during the fourth quarter,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research, wrote in… Read more »

With members of Yellowcard spending the last few months scattered across the country – in New York, California and Florida – what better place to reconvene than sunny Orlando, Florida? After all, it is the nation’s favorite vacation destination. “Yeah, we didn’t really come down here for vacation,” guitarist Ben Harper laughed. “We’re playing a couple of shows at [Disney World’s] Grad Nite, and we figured here was as good a place as any to finish up the saga [of] writing our new album.” Since January, frontman Ryan Key and bassist Pete Mosely have been living in New York, writing… Read more »