Search Results for: decade

Los Angeles – Welcome to the best sales week of this still-young 2005. Contributing to this buoyant frame are historic chart accomplishments by Tina Turner, the fastest start for the 10-year-old “Grammy Nominees” line of releases and, nestled between those two albums, a not-too-motley week for Motley Crue. Album volume for the week stands at 11.4 million, and 6.9 million of those units sold were current titles. Both figures are high-water marks for the year. The volume of digital tracks, which slipped to less than 5 million last week for the first time since the week ending Dec. 19, is… Read more »

Forget the stage, it’s been almost a decade since Jerry Cantrell, Sean Kinney and Mike Inez – a.k.a. 75 percent of ’90s grunge icons Alice in Chains – have even been in the same room. Sure, they’ve jammed with each other in various permutations since Alice last played a show together (a 1996 taping of MTV’s “Unplugged”), but never all three together. So when they announced that they’d be taking the stage again this month, it had to be for a good reason. “We all saw what happened with the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. It was such an overwhelming tragedy,”… Read more »

In the grand scheme of things – or in the recording industry, for that matter – six years isn’t exactly a long time. But for the guys in Thrice, who just marked their sixth year as a band, the occasion meant only one thing: time for the career retrospective! So they’re releasing “If We Could Only See Us Now,” a DVD spanning their just-a-little-longer-than-half-a-decade-long career. It might seem like a bit of overkill for a band that just two years ago was still releasing albums on tiny indie labels, but lead singer Dustin Kensrue sees it a little differently. “We… Read more »

Tripoli – An American rock band hoping to be the first Western group to play in Libya since Muammar Gaddafi came to power 35 years ago could not perform because of an administrative glitch, government officials said on Saturday. The Heavenly States, a little-known group based in Oakland, California, had arrived in Libya on Feb. 1 to play three concerts, including one in the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna. Government officials said there had been a problem with the group’s visa. “They came with a tourist visa,” an official said by way of explaining the failure to grant them permission… Read more »

What do you do if you’ve been touring the world for the past decade and, at 25, you’re having what amounts to your first midlife crisis? If you are coming off a very public breakup with your longtime movie-star girlfriend? If you are headline news at home, but just another face in the crowd in your adopted hometown of New York? If you’re Ben Lee, you write an album of existential pop songs and call it Awake Is the New Sleep (February 22) and enjoy how you’ve turned heartbreak and the search for life’s big answers into the strongest album… Read more »

“Backstreet Men” doesn’t really have the same ring, but make no mistake, the Backstreet Boys are coming back more mature on their first album in five years. The group, which hasn’t released a collection of new music since 2000’s Black & Blue, just wrapped sessions for the as-yet-untitled album, which might surprise people expecting the same pop sound of old, according to member Howie Dorough. “We’ve been working on it for more than a year now, but it really started taking shape and changing over the past six months,” Dorough said. “It’s going in a more pop/rock direction, kind of… Read more »

SAYREVILLE, New Jersey – This small Jersey ‘burb is pretty far removed from Banda Aceh or Phuket (and even though it’s Jon Bon Jovi’s hometown, it’s pretty far removed from Manhattan, too). But on Wednesday night, Sayreville played host to the first in a series of benefit shows dubbed the Concerts for Tsunami Relief. It was a big show for an even bigger cause. The concert – co-sponsored by Linkin Park’s Music for Relief charity and New York radio giant K-Rock – was held at the Starland Ballroom, a very un-ballroom-like venue just off of Sayreville’s winding Jernee Mill Road,… Read more »

Los Angeles – In a dismal year for the touring industry, with ticket prices soaring and seats going unsold, music fans in North America partied like it was 1989 as Prince and Madonna topped the concert box office. According to freshly tabulated estimates provided by concert trade publication Pollstar, Prince sold $87.4 million in tickets in 2004, while Madonna earned $79.5 million. Prince also worked a bit harder for his payday, playing 96 shows, compared with 39 for Madonna. Canadian pop singer Celine Dion actually topped Madonna by about $900,000, but her haul came exclusively from 154 dates performed at… Read more »

The North American touring business is breathing a sigh of relief as the curtain drops on what many call the industry’s worst year in a decade. The final Billboard Boxscore tally shows the industry finishing with a microscopic increase in gross ticket sales of 0.2% in 2004. But that does not tell the full story of a year in which profitable shows were hard to find and promoters scrambled to fill seats, especially in an oversaturated summer season. As promoters lick their wounds, the big question facing the industry is whether the flat performance of 2004 was a blip on… Read more »

Madonna has reinvented herself once again, this time as the top touring act of 2004. The singer’s Re-Invention Tour was the year’s biggest grosser, according to Billboard Boxscore, taking in $125 million through September and scoring 55 sellouts out of 56 shows. The elaborate concerts averaged $2.23 million each night. Another ’80s icon, Prince, came in second place, with one of his most successful tours in more than a decade. Playing to more people than any other artist (almost 1.5 million), Prince’s Musicology tour grossed $90.2 million. Country star Shania Twain was third, playing to almost 950,000 fans and grossing… Read more »