Search Results for: decade

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 »

Rock ‘n’ roll has turned music fans into rebels. Not only are they pirating tunes on the Internet rather than paying upwards of $20 for a compact disc, they are also increasingly reluctant to fork out for costly concert tickets. A survey of the North American concert industry by trade publication Pollstar showed the top 50 acts sold a combined 10.6 million tickets in the first half of the year, down about three percent from the year-ago period (10.9 million tickets) and off 18 percent from 2000 (12.9 million tickets). The average ticket price for those top 50 tours rose… Read more »

Pelle Almqvist never could understand the connection between loud guitars and being miserable. You’re up on a stage jumping around, making a loud noise with women adoringly gazing at you. What’s not to like? “It’s just such a naturally exciting and fun thing,” said Almqvist, lead singer of the Swedish rock band the Hives. Acts like the Hives, White Stripes, the Strokes and the Vines are leading a new vanguard with a raw, adrenalized sound best described as garage rock. And after a decade dominated by dense, morose grunge or the angry rants of Limp Bizkit and its sound-alikes, rock… Read more »

The rock world’s top 20 female icons are celebrated in a photographic exhibition opening at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery Monday. The exhibition, “She Bop,” was inspired by former music journalist Lucy O’Brien’s book “She Bop II: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul.” Exhibits range from rocker Chrissie Hynde to soul diva Dusty Springfield and disco queen Madonna ( news – web sites). “Female artists haven’t been given the recognition that they’ve deserved and I felt there was a whole history of women to be written to chart how big a part women have played in popular… Read more »

They get mocked as the Strolling Bones but the Rolling Stones don’t give a damn – they are still rocking just as hard as they did 40 years ago on Day One. That was July 12, 1962 when the founder members launched into a chorus of “Kansas City” at London’s Marquee Club. Their fee for the night was 25 pounds. Now, four decades on, the elder statesmen of rock are ready to “Start Me Up” all over again with a round-the-world tour that will put yet more millions in their coffers. The Dinosaurs of Rock are in no danger of… Read more »