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There wasn’t a Thursday fan alive who wasn’t floored by last month’s announcement that the New Jersey emo innovators will be working with Victory Records on a retrospective CD/DVD package that, as a press release noted, will “tell Thursday’s 10-year-career story from the beginning to the present.” After all, Thursday’s 2002 split from Victory – which issued the band’s landmark 2001 LP, Full Collapse – was the very definition of cantankerous. Mud was flung from both sides when the band joined Island Records, and lawyers were eventually called in to clean up the mess.At the time of the band’s break… Read more »

There has been a lot of attention recently surrounding royalty rates for internet broadcasters. Let’s have a look. As a webcaster, artist, and owner of WebcastersUnite.net I would like to address some of the statements being made by SoundExchange. Lets first look at the recent claims SoundExchange has made about reaching out to small webcasters. My organization currently has 358 registered internet radio stations. SoundExchange has not “reach out ” to me, nor any other small organization of webcasters that I am aware of. I believe this to be rhetoric in an effort to make them look like the good… Read more »

Los Angeles – Academia’s loss is heavy metal’s gain. Ian Kilmister, a.k.a. Lemmy, the frontman for Grammy-winning English rock trio Motorhead, could have made a stimulating history professor, sharing his begrudging admiration for Goering and disdain for “bastards” like Hitler and Roosevelt with eager students. Instead, the 59-year-old achieved cult fame with generations of headbangers by singing and writing furious anthems like “Killed By Death” and “Orgasmatron.” But he remains fascinated by World War II and he spends his money collecting Nazi memorabilia, which is piled high in his two-bedroom apartment off the Sunset Strip. “I was born in ’45,… Read more »

Classic-rock fan George Petersen doesn’t need another copy of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” or Cream’s “Disraeli Gears.” He has spent the past four decades buying and re-buying his favorite music in a succession of new formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassette, compact disc, Super Audio CD, DVD-Audio. Enough is enough. The basement is full. “We as consumers have been trained by the music industry to go out and buy a new piece of plastic every few years,” said the 51-year-old Petersen, editorial director of Mix, a San Francisco-based magazine that covers professional sound recording. “Why do we keep buying… Read more »

Washington – Most musicians and artists say the Internet has helped them make more money from their work despite online file-trading services that allow users to copy songs and other material for free, according to a study released on Sunday. Recording labels and movie studios have hired phalanxes of lawyers to pursue “peer to peer” networks like Kazaa, and have sued thousands of individuals who distribute copyrighted material through such networks. But most of the artists surveyed by the nonprofit Pew Internet and American Life Project said online file sharing did not concern them much. Artists were split on the… Read more »

New York – Jerry Wexler is the classic record business guy. For more than three decades, Wexler, as co-owner of Atlantic Records and later senior VP at Warner Bros. Records, signed and worked with scores of vocalists and instrumentalists, and produced some of the greatest rock and soul records ever made. Now 86 and long retired, Wexler is still applauded as an insightful producer, crafty deal-maker and promoter, divining rod of hit songs and occasional writer of songs and liner notes. “He is one of my greatest heroes,” Sire Records founder Seymour Stein says. “Jerry is a consummate record man… Read more »

Las Vegas – On November 6, 2004, YANNI will tape his first TV special in seven years, and his first ever in America, from the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. The TV special will be filmed live from the opening performance of his upcoming YANNI LIVE 2004/5 World Tour. His last three television specials were recorded in spectacular overseas locations at the Acropolis in Greece, the Taj Mahal in India, The Forbidden City in China and at London’s legendary Royal Albert Hall. The show will be a 16-camera production shot on High Definition and will include a… Read more »

John Hall, a former Democratic county legislator in upstate New York, co-wrote the song and recorded it with his band Orleans in 1976. He complained Friday morning about the campaign’s use of the song at the president’s events. The cheery pop tune opened and ended a Bush campaign rally in New Hampshire Friday, then was to have vanished from the political playlist. “Out of deference to Mr. Hall’s views, the song will no longer be played,” Bush campaign spokeswoman Nicolle Devenish said. She said the song had been included in a catalog of music that the campaign’s licensing company used… Read more »

Fresh from his Broadway debut, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs is heading back to MTV. Only this time, the hip-hop impresario plans to get political. In a new show tentatively called “Project Change,” Combs hopes to grill President Bush and likely Democratic nominee John Kerry. Combs told the New York Post he’ll scout the streets of Harlem, Brooklyn and Detroit for “real people” to ask the questions. “The people who usually ask the candidates questions are screened, and I’m going to use real people off the streets to get their questions out there,” Combs told the paper. “I’m going to make… Read more »

When speaking this month to a representative from Soundscan, the company that provides much of the data for the Billboard Top 200 Chart, I learned things that would contradict reported statements by the RIAA. Mainly that US labels have had a significant reduction in sales over the past three years. Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, responded personally, put his rebuttals on the record and in the process exposed intriguing insight into the way the RIAA calculates “losses.” Soundscan is a service owned by Nielsen, the company that computes TV ratings. Soundscan uses the barcodes on CDs to register sales… Read more »