Search Results for: pop will eat itself

The last time Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs took on major recording companies, he refused to budge on his 99-cent price for a song on iTunes. As a new round of talks ramp up this month, however, Jobs has opened the door to higher prices – as long as music companies let Apple Inc. sell their songs without technology designed to stop unauthorized copying. Jobs contends that would “tear down the walls” by allowing consumers to play music they buy at Apple’s iTunes store on any digital music player, not just the company’s iPods. Although most of the major labels… Read more »

Now that the three young women in Candy Hill, a glossy rap and R&B trio, have signed a record contract, they are hoping for stardom. On the schedule: shooting a music video and visiting radio stations to talk up their music. But the women do not have a CD to promote. Universal/Republic Records, their label, signed Candy Hill to record two songs, not a complete album. “If we get two songs out, we get a shot,” said Vatana Shaw, 20, who formed the trio four years ago, “Only true fans are buying full albums. Most people don’t really do that… 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 »

Around the time Brett Gurewitz was launching Epitaph Records in 1981, his father was lecturing him to take guitar lessons. The Bad Religion guitarist and punk-rock entrepreneur never sat down for courses with a guitar instructor, although he did go to school to learn to be a recording engineer. However, no amount of schooling could have prepared Gurewitz for the next 25 years of his life. Epitaph Records brought a new era of punk rock to the masses in 1994 when the Offspring’s “Smash” turned into one of the biggest rock records of the decade. The success of the label’s… Read more »

It’s New Year’s Eve in New York and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is headlining the buzziest indie rock bill in town. The eclectic quintet — which has risen to notoriety for selling more than 110,000 copies of its 2005 debut album in the United States without the help of a record label — has plenty to celebrate. The band is using the show at Manhattan’s Hammerstein Ballroom to preview a half-dozen tracks from its self-released sophomore set, “Some Loud Thunder,” due January 30. CYHSY’s most rabid fans don’t need much of an introduction to some of the new material.… Read more »

OAKLAND, Calif. – Music retailers are turning to high-tech firms that combine computer analysis with the art of listening to come up with new music suggestions for consumers based on what they already like. In a computer-crammed space at Savage Beast Technologies, divergent melodies seep softly from headphones worn by young men and women who listen to music with the intensity of submarine sonar operators. Their job is to discern and define attributes in tunes by artists as diverse as teen diva Hilary Duff and jazz legend Miles Davis. The listeners classify hundreds of characteristics about each song, including beat,… Read more »

Claiming that their free-speech rights had been violated, Mötley Crüe filed suit against NBC, the network that banned the group for dropping the F-bomb on a live New Year’s Eve broadcast of “The Tonight Show.” “This ban constitutes governmentally pressured censorship and violates the law the same as if the government itself had ordered the censorship,” read the suit, filed in Los Angeles federal court on Tuesday. Claiming the ban was a result of an attempt by the network to pacify the government in light of its crackdown on indecency, the band says in the suit that the action has… Read more »

Baltimore – If you find yourself surrounded by 40,000 fans, 40 bands, three stages and 85 degrees, you’ve apparently waded chest-deep into the summer concert season. For years, folks east of the Mississippi have welcomed the start of that season at the HFStival, now staged in Baltimore after thriving for 15 years as a Washington, D.C., staple. Quite a bit’s changed since WHFS-FM started ushering in the arrival of summer – most notably the station itself, which disappeared from the dial earlier this year. It has since resurfaced as an online entity and also takes over Baltimore’s Live 105.7 on… Read more »

New York, NY – The rowdy “ghetto rock” of Virgin Records band El Pus is spreading into the mainstream quickly from its strong and enthusiastic foothold in the early-adopting college market. In June, July and August, the band will take its electric, uncontainable blend of raw punk and hip-hop noise on the road coast-to-coast with the massive ten-stage 2005 edition of Van’s Warped Tour. In a recent New York Times Arts and Leisure “Playlist” feature, El Pus was credited with the rehabilitation of rock/hip-hop fusion in their Virgin debut album, “Hoodlum Rock: Vol. 1.” The Times notice praised El Pus… Read more »