Search Results for: no cure

Anyone hoping that the music industry’s infatuation with youth was just a passing fad got a big wake-up call when 21-year-old Lance Bass announced he was opening a management company last year. A member of pop group ‘NSYNC, Bass sent a message to all of the jaded industryites who refused to take young superstars seriously: they’re here, they’re hot, and they ain’t going away. That Bass’ first client would be 16-year-old country singer Meredith Edwards (she turned 17 in early March) therefore seemed somehow appropriate. Bass obviously knows something about launching teen acts; as for entering the world of Nashville,… Read more »

In the latest attempt to link music and school violence, the songs of California pop-metal band Linkin Park are being implicated in Monday’s Santee, Calif., shooting, in which 15-year-old Charles “Andy” Williams opened fire on his Santana High schoolmates, killing two and wounding 13. A friend of Williams’ appearing on NBC’s Today show said that Williams was a fan of the band and that he was influenced by three songs on the band’s Hybrid Theory album: “One Step Closer,” “Papercut,” and “In the End.” Linkin Park released a one-sentence statement about the shooting via its publicist. It reads, “Like everyone… Read more »

Music giants Sony and Vivendi Universal are to form a company called Duet, which will offer a rival service to Napster. According to BBC news, the two labels, who have on their rosta artists including Elton John, Ricky Martin and Jennifer Lopez, will allow users to get access to music for a subscription fee in a secure environment. Speaking to French newspaper La Tribune, Vivendi’s Jean-Marie Messier said: “In Duet, we have something to start with and no one can imagine launching online music without the world’s number one and number two companies…we hope to licence 50% of the world’s… Read more »

Napster, the wildly popular online song-swap service, Tuesday offered to pay $1 billion over five years to the recording industry to end a bitter lawsuit that threatens its survival. Napster officials, outlining a strategy they hope will keep their company alive in the face of a threatened legal injunction, said they were willing to pay $150 million per year in licensing fees to major record companies and $50 million per year in fees to independent labels and artists. “We updated on short notice everyone in the music industry,” Andreas Schmidt, president and chief executive of the e-commerce group at German… Read more »

On Monday (February 12), the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the wildly popular song-swap service Napster to stop its millions of users from trading copyrighted material. Calling the decision a major victory, recording industry officials and legal experts said the ruling by a three-judge panel could destroy Napster as a free song-swapping service. Napster, a company formed around a computer program developed by a teenage college dropout, was gloomy. “Napster is not shut down, but under this decision it could be. We are very disappointed in this ruling by the three judge panel and will seek appellate review,”… Read more »