Search Results for: decade

With a nod and a wink to their big-tongued logo, the Rolling Stones kicked off their “Licks” tour on Tuesday night in front of 16,000 roaring fans who lapped up every minute of it. Four decades after the Stones first took their blues-steeped soul to the stage, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and the rest of the band launched what may be their most ambitious tour yet with a two-hour show at Boston’s Fleet Center. “There’s nothing so exciting as starting an American tour on the first night,” the 59-year-old Jagger told the audience. “And there’s nothing so exciting as starting… Read more »

As the Rolling Stones kickoff their “Licks” world tour in Boston this week, patience is finally paying off for fans who were driven out of their heads over the years by the woeful state of the band’s back catalog of 1960s albums. Key works have long been unavailable on CD, while the albums that are available sounded awful: not surprising since the product on the shelves was transferred to CD back in 1986 when the technology was still in its infancy. But satisfaction has arrived with the recent ABKCO Records release of 22 remastered albums, the fruits of a 10-year… Read more »

Axl Rose brought Guns N’ Roses back to the MTV Video Music Awards Thursday night for the first time in 10 years, but the frontman indicated that the wait for a new album from the band will continue. Click here for the complete 2002 MTV VMA Winners List. “You’ll see [the album], but I don’t know if ‘soon’ is the word,” Rose explained to MTV News immediately after unveiling the current GN’R lineup to an American television audience for the first time. “It will come out, and we’ll do some more recording and start the American leg of the tour,”… Read more »

A lawsuit against Ozzy & Sharon Osbourne may have been dismissed, but the former bandmembers who filed the case say it will go on. Bob Daisley, bassist and songwriter on the first two Osbourne solo albums (1980’s Blizzard Of Ozz and 1981’s Diary Of A Madman), released this statement concerning the court’s decision: “Obviously, this is a disappointing ruling, but it’s not over yet. This case has merit-Lee and I have been struggling for two decades just to receive the correct royalties and credit that’s due us-and we are confident that we will prevail in the end.” For some 20… Read more »

Bruce Springsteen kept a firm grip on the top spot on the album charts for the second straight week, despite a 55% slide in sales. “Rising” (Columbia), Springsteen’s first disc of new material since 1995, sold just under 239,000 units, according to numbers released Wednesday by Nielsen SoundScan. The Jersey-born rock legend recently launched a U.S. tour to support the release, backed for the first time in a decade by the E Street Band. The Boss was followed in the rankings by a trio of Universal Music Group hip-hop stars. Nelly rebounded one spot to second with “Nellyville” (Universal), selling… Read more »

Phish, the jam-happy foursome that attracted legions of touring neo-hippie fans to their concerts, is returning to the stage after a two-year hiatus. The group announced Wednesday that it will play Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Eve. That will be followed by a three-date set in Hampton, Va., starting Jan. 2. More concerts are expected to be announced later. Phish formed in Vermont in the early ’80s and labored in relative obscurity for nearly a decade, slowly building a core audience with its near-constant tours, epic shows and long, experimental jams that melded every type of music, from bluegrass… Read more »

Bruce Springsteen grabbed the top of the U.S. pop charts Wednesday with the debut of his somber, Sept. 11-influenced album, “The Rising,” the first all-new recording with his E Street Band since 1984. The critically hailed LP sold about 525,000 copies in its first week in stores, Springsteen’s best album debut in at least a decade, his publicists said as the veteran rocker and his band prepared to launch a world tour at the Continental Airlines Arena in his native New Jersey. Springsteen’s publicity firm, Shore Fire Media, said “The Rising,” released July 30, also was expected to open at… Read more »

A clash with shareholders cost Thomas Middelhoff his job at the helm of media giant Bertelsmann – even though the company made money while rivals like AOL Time Warner and Vivendi ran into trouble. Not even one of the deals of the decade – reaping billions from selling a stake in AOL Europe at the height of the Internet bubble – could save Middelhoff from the same fate as Vivendi’s former chief Jean-Marie Messier and Robert Pittman, ousted as head of AOL Time Warner’s AOL division in a management shakeup. Bertelsmann said Sunday that Middelhoff was leaving due to “differing… Read more »

The first commercial radio station to cybercast its over-the-air playlist is among the first to fall victim to newly imposed royalty rates for online broadcasts. KPIG stopped streaming music online Thursday, ending a near seven-year run on the Internet. According to its own estimates, the small-scale station would have been forced to pay $24,000 in back royalties (or approximately $3,000 per month) from this year alone on an arm of the station that generates little or no revenue on its own. It was purely for the benefit of those who were interested in hearing it. Based in Freedom, California, KPIG’s… Read more »

If music Webcasting – the streaming of music over the Internet instead of through radio receivers – makes it through the present decade, it will be no thanks to the federal bureaucracy. A much-dreaded ruling out of Washington, D.C., last month could mean the end of small Webcasters and the crippling of large ones. Webcasting has been under the shadow of this impending ruling since October 1998, when the Digital Millennium Copyright Act declared that Webcasters should pay performance royalties. Now the damage is clear: The government has set the rate. Performance royalties are payments to the owners of copyrighted… Read more »