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NEW YORK – An evening with Hinder is like hanging out with a bunch of frat boys. Only most frat boys don’t have tour buses. Most have pledges – not roadies, managers, security guards and publicists – and sorority girls, not strippers, as their dates. Plus, most frat parties eventually end. But Hinder’s party is showing no sign of winding down. “Lips of an Angel,” their power ballad about infidelity, is a huge hit. Extreme Behavior, their debut album, has topped a million sales and was the 10th best-selling CD of 2006 . And at one point, the band was… Read more »

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire – Fellow marchers in The Black Parade : If you are like me, after being blown away last fall by the astounding musical achievement that is My Chemical Romance’s latest album, you thought to yourself, ‘How are they ever gonna do this live?’ The record – art rock meets glam rock meets punk, with a dash of vaudeville – is chock-full of death and hospitals and cancer and soldiers and scary teenagers, and it begs for an over-the-top live show. At long last, the boys have delivered. After months of teasing us with holiday radio sets and… Read more »

Ruben Studdard is telling kids in Alabama not to be like him. The “American Idol” winner, who is a spokesman for the Scale Back Alabama weight-loss campaign, spent Tuesday taking a fitness message to schools in hopes of helping Alabama shed its weighty reputation. “I don’t want y’all to be like me. I don’t want y’all to get to college and stop working out and forget all the things you have to do to be healthy,” Studdard, 28, told students at Montgomery’s Capitol Heights Junior High School. “I want y’all to continue working out for the rest of your life… Read more »

Less than 24 hours after checking into her second rehabilitation clinic in a week, Britney Spears has left the facility. According to a source close to the singer, Spears left the Promises Malibu Alcohol and Drug Rehab Treatment Facility in Malibu, California, at 8 a.m. P.T. on Wednesday (February 21). Last week, Spears briefly visited the Crossroads Centre, a treatment facility on the Caribbean island of Antigua, only to leave less than a day later. This time, her family and manager intervened, and announced yesterday that Spears had voluntarily entered rehab . “We ask that the media respect her privacy… Read more »

Last week, Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High usurped Norah Jones’ Not Too Late – the previous week’s #1 – as the nation’s top-selling LP, relegating the jazzy songstress to the chart’s #2 position and scoring the Chicago rockers the first chart-crowning debut of their careers. This week, Jones returned the favor. With nearly 211,000 copies of Not Too Late sold during the album’s third week of release, Jones reclaims Billboard‘s coveted throne, leaving Fall Out Boy in the proverbial dust. Sales of Infinity on High dipped by more than 50 percent, dropping FOB to the chart’s #5 slot with… Read more »

Formerly affiliated with Sony BMG, New York-based Octone Records is shifting to the Universal Music Group and will be re-branded A&M/Octone. The new label’s first release will be the follow-up to Maroon 5’s debut album, “Songs About Jane,” which has sold 4.3 million units in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. A release date has not yet been announced, although it is expected to be in May. Guitarist James Valentine said during an online chat last Friday with fan club members that the project is titled “It Won’t Be Soon Before Long” and that the first single will be… Read more »

Struggling music company EMI Group PLC, beset by profit warnings and an accounting scandal in Brazil, was thrown a potential lifeline Tuesday with a possible new takeover bid by former suitor Warner Music Group. A tie-up would bring a badly needed infusion of top U.S. artists including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to London-based EMI – whose Beatles remix album has dropped off Billboard’s top 40 and whose great hope for cross-Atlantic appeal, Robbie Williams, has drawn more publicity for rehab than music. EMI confirmed Tuesday it had been approached by Warner, but that it has received no… Read more »

On seasons four and five of “American Idol,” when the semifinals featured 24 singers, one-third of them were teenagers – eight each season. When this season’s semifinalists were named on Wednesday, only three of the 24 were in their teens: 17-year-old Sanjaya Malakar, 17-year-old Jordin Sparks and 19-year-old Stephanie Edwards. The numbers prompt the question: Is “Idol” growing up? Since raising the age limit to 28 for season four, singers approaching 30 have dominated the show, from Taylor Hicks, Chris Daughtry and Elliott Yamin to Bo Bice, Constantine Maroulis and Nadia Turner. And in season six, eight of the remaining… Read more »

Ten years ago, as the Internet began to mushroom in popularity and emerging technologies enabled consumers to make nearly perfect copies of digital content, the recording industry embarked on a two-pronged strategy in response to the changing business environment. First, it emphasized copy-control technologies, often referred to as digital rights management (DRM), that many in the industry believed would allow it re-assert control over music copying. Second, it lobbied the Canadian government for a private copying levy to compensate for the music copying that it could not control. While the industry’s approach proved successful on the legal front — the… Read more »

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the… Read more »