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While most acts go on the road in support of new albums, several Def Jam Records artists will launch a tour next month behind the release of a new video game. Hosted by Method Man, the Def Jam Vendetta tour will encompass concert performances by Capone-N-Noreaga (CNN), Keith Murray, and Joe Budden, as well as a gaming contest where players will go head-to-head on the recently released “Def Jam Vendetta” video game. The tour will kick off May 10 in Milwaukee and visit more than 20 cities through early June. In each market, Murray, CNN, and Budden, as well as… Read more »

Just days after trying to turn the tables on illicit song-swappers by flooding the Net with bogus tracks from her American Life, Madonna was on the receiving end of some computerized comeuppance this weekend. An unknown assailant hacked into Madonna’s official site, www.madonna.com, on Saturday and posted the real MP3s of every song from American Life, which is due in stores Tuesday. Last week, the Material One and label Warner Bros. Records tried to thwart would-be pirates by issuing dummy song files to sites like KaZaA and Morpheus. The files appeared to be leaked tracks from American Life, but when… Read more »

“Headstrong,” Trapt’s first single from its self-titled debut, continues to move up the Alternative and Active Rock Radio & Records chart. The song moves up one spot to Number Four on the Alternative chart, and the song reached Number Two last week on the Active Rock chart. Guitarist Simon Ormandy said the song started off to be a proverbial “middle finger” to the law, but it evolved into a tune about the band sticking to its guns in the music industry. “We were a little younger,” Ormandy said. “Myself as well as [vocalist/guitarist] Chris [Brown] were having some troubles with… Read more »

Apple Computer Inc. is readying to launch an online service that will cut straight to the core of digital music distribution, winning the praise of some record executives who see it is as a weapon against online piracy. Music executives who have seen Apple’s upcoming service said it is simple to use, offers single songs from a deep catalog and – unlike Kazaa and the other pirate services that have picked up where the now-defunct Napster left off – it pays royalties to the troubled record industry. Apple’s new service will feature songs from all five major record labels, link… Read more »

The woman who locked horns with Sharon Osbourne in a Los Angeles restaurant last week has fired back with her own version of how the scrap happened. Renee Tab, a talent agent whose war of words with the metal matriarch escalated to violence at the Japanese restaurant Koi, claims Osbourne spat on and kicked her and made threatening and ethnic remarks. Osbourne “started screaming racial slurs,” Tab’s lawyer, Najila Brent, told New York’s Daily News. She called the Iranian-born Tab a “Persian carpet cleaner” and threatened to “send someone to slash [her] face and break [her] leg,” according to the… Read more »

Godsmack takes over the Billboard 200 with a No. 1 debut for “Faceless,” and leads the charge of seven top-20 entries on the album chart. The Universal album sold 269,000 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan, giving the band its best debut week on the chart. The total is easily enough to end the two-week reign of Linkin Park’s “Meteora” (Warner Bros.), which falls to No. 2 on a 30% sales decline to sales of 186,000 copies. “Faceless” is Godsmack’s third major label album and its entry bests the opening position of its last set, “Awake.” That release… Read more »

Like Steven Segal in 1991, Sharon Osbourne is out for justice. But unlike Gino Felino, the character portrayed by the karate champ turned actor, she’s not looking to settle the dispute that took place in a West Hollywood, California, restaurant last week with martial arts. Neither is she taking the matter to a court of law. Rather, she’s about to bring the case before the court of public opinion. Osbourne is set to appear on the television show “Celebrity Justice” Tuesday (April 15), according to a network spokesperson, to tell her version of how an altercation with a talent agent… Read more »

Demurely clad in a simple yellow T-shirt and black bondage pants, Avril Lavigne didn’t need to frolic about in choreographed routines to impress her minions. A simple rock show, devoid of flash and fancy moves, demonstrated her back-to-basics intentions, and the audience, composed mostly of straight-haired teenage girls at their very first concert (with chaperones, of course), responded like it was watching the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964. “I touched her hand, the one with the blue wristband!” gushed Madison, 10, from Toronto. It wasn’t the last time she and the dozens like her rushed down the… Read more »

In a pairing that would alter the architecture of the music business, Apple Computer Inc. is in talks with Vivendi Universal to buy Universal Music Group, the world’s largest record company, for as much as $6 billion, sources said. Such a seemingly unlikely combination would instantly make technology guru Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and chief executive, the most powerful player in the record industry. Universal, which reaps about $6 billion in sales annually from artists such as 50 Cent, Shania Twain, U2 and Luciano Pavarotti, would be controlled by a maverick who revolutionized the computer market and coined the mantra… Read more »

Foo Fighters frontman/rock drummer extraordinaire Dave Grohl is showing up everywhere – his latest gig is as the drummer on the new Killing Joke album, Billboard reports in the April 12 issue. The project, which will be out in June on Sony worldwide, is tentatively titled “Axis of Evil.” Produced by Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, the album is the veteran U.K. rock act’s first since 1996’s “Democracy.” It turns out that Grohl is a huge Killing Joke fan; he met the group’s leader, Jaz Coleman, in New Zealand recently and agreed to play on the album. They recorded the… Read more »